RIP Grimm--the little series that could

Television can be divided into winners and losers, shows that are renewed and shows that are cancelled.  Come to think of it, life can be divided into winners and losers too.  In most cases shows starts off strong, run for a few seasons, then limp to the inevitable end (except for The Simpsons).  Or, they don’t catch on and are off the air in 13 (or fewer) weeks and never of again (except for Firefly).

One outlier is the late, relatively unlamented NBC series Grimm, which ended its run after five full seasons and half of a sixth.  The show never caught fire, or created a huge fanbase, or acquired critical acclaim (its two Emmy nominations were for stunt coordination). But it survived, reaching the famous 100-episode threshold, which is not nothing in the cutthroat world of network television.  Its departure leaves a Grimm-sized hole in NBC’s Friday line-up.

The show, created by David Greenawalt and Jim Kouf, began with the tail wind created by Greenawalt’s work as a producer on both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. Like Buffy, it was about a not-so-lone champion who fought mystical beasties that existed right under the noses of an oblivious society.  Like Buffy, its hero developed a cadre of friends and colleagues, some of whom were frankly more interesting than the lead character. But unlike Buffy, the central mythology never quite gelled.

In my opinion, the central problem with Grimm was not giving the audience a reason to care about the main character, Portland police detective Nick Burkhardt (David Giuntoli).  Speaking as a huge fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the audience cared about her DEEPLY.  Not just whether she’d survive her battle with evil; we cared if she’d have a nice date to her prom, that she’d get into a good college, that she’d stop sleeping with pretty boys who either dumped her or were in an evil government military organization.  The creators of Grimm just assumed we’d care about Burkhardt because he was the star, he was sort of good-looking, and was a cop.

The premise behind Grimm was that there was a society of fairy tale creatures in the world that were called Wessen (one endearing yet annoying aspect of the show was that all the words describing the mythology were Germanic in origin, making them difficult to spell or pronounce).  Wessen looked human, but could “woge” into creatures that looked half-human, half-animalistic.  Some had magic powers, some were evil, some were just hungry and ate humans, and some were just refrigerator repairmen.

Burkhardt was the last in the hereditary line of Grimms, who protected humanity from Wessen, but Burkhardt put a modern twist on the job—instead of killing ALL Wessen, he instituted a policy of only killing Wessen who threatened people or other Wessen.  Luckily for him, he was a homicide detective in Portland, where most of the murders seemed to have some Wessen link.

Grimm did an excellent job of filling out its “Scooby Gang” including Nick’s detective partner Hank and a Wessen named Monroe who was a Blutbad (when he woged he turned into a fierce wolf-like creature).  Eventually the team included Nick’s fiancée Juliette, a police sergeant with the unfortunate name of Drew Wu, and Monroe’s finacee, who woged into an adorable fox-like Wessen.  Complicating matters was the fact that Nick’s boss was a Zauberbiest who was a member of the royal family that were the hereditary rulers over some aspects of Wessen society.

Like The X-Files and Buffy, Grimm juggled “monster of the week” plots with an expanding mythology about how evil elements of Wessen society was organizing to possibly declare was on humans.

Nick was a bland character, and his relationship with Juliette was one of those typical TV pairings where the couple is deeply in love because they are both in their mid-20’s, good looking, and the script requires it.  When Juliette got amnesia (that plot device never gets old), all she could remember about meeting Nick was that she thought he was cute. They had nothing in common, shared no hobbies, and it was easy to forget she was a veterinarian because it was seldom mentioned unless it somehow was required by that week’s plot.

What amused me the most about Grimm was that they never got the opening credits quite right.  The kept tinkering with them until they finally gave up around season four or five.  They still were terrible, but they stopped changing.

What distinguished Grimm was the imaginative way it re-worked old fairy tales into modern morality tales.  The supporting cast was excellent as well. The standout was Silas weir Mitchell as Monroe, a schleppy human that could transform into a fearsome Wessen, yet was a vegetarian who repaired antique clocks.  His relationship with Rosealie (Bree Turner) had all the warmth Nick and Juliette’s romance lacked. Russell Hornsby as Nick’s partner Hank always provided strong support that suggested he was underused by the writers.  Sasha Roiz was suitably charismatic and mysterious as Nick’s boss, Captain Renard, and Reggie Lee provided Xander-like comic relief as Officer Wu.

Grimm was never a ratings blockbuster, but expectations were lower on Friday nights, and it did well enough to make it to 123 episodes.  I’ll miss it, but frankly I am not clamoring for any follow-up TV movies to find out what happens next in the impending Wessen/Human conflict.  Six seasons and 123 episodes is a good run for any TV show.

No tying in baseball

Major League Baseball is coming off its greatest, and one of the highest rated, World series of all time, with the Chicago Cubs breaking a century old curse and winning a title despite being down 3 games to 1 to the surprising (and almost equally cursed) Cleveland Indians. NFL ratings were down last season, and NBA ratings are suffering from players “resting” and the fact that there are only two interesting teams in the league.  And, for the fiftieth year in a row since soccer was predicted to become America’s national pastime, soccer is not the national pastime.  So everything’s coming up baseball.

But you can’t get ahead by standing still, and baseball is looking at the next great crisis to face the sport.  The relative paucity of African-American players? The seeming inability for a pitcher to pitch for six innings a game and not require Tommy John surgery? The retirement of Vin Scully? No, the next great crisis for baseball is the tie game.

Football and hockey accept ties, albeit grudgingly. Basketball doesn’t, but given the nature of the game repeated tie scores after overtime periods are unlikely.  Soccer without ties would be like the 4^th of July without hot dogs.  Only baseball insists on preventing ties even if it means playing for twice as long as the game was originally scheduled for.  Traditionalists revel in this, but maybe it is time to reconsider.

Let’s first look at the most obvious point, player safety.  MLB, like other sports (I’m looking at you, football), trots out player safety as a reason to justify anything it wants to do.  But because of baseball’s ironclad rule against a player re-entering a game once he has been pulled, there are some legitimate concerns.  Bullpen pitchers can be asked to throw more pitches than they are comfortable with.  Position players can be put in to pitch, which can result in injury (Jose Canseco missed part of the 1993 season because he pitched, and he wasn’t throwing Nolan Ryan type heat). And heaven help the team whose catcher either has to play for 15 innings, or is taken out and then the back-up catcher suffers an injury.   Fatigue causes injuries, and playing in the 16^th inning at 1:15 AM sounds fatiguing.

There are some other, more subtle problems with the “no ties” policy.  For example, if the game being played into the 15^th inning is on a getaway day, teams may have to fly out of a city at an ungodly hour, and arrive at their net city about the time players should be waking up, not going to bed.  Some cities have established curfews to prevent games from disturbing neighborhoods (of course I am talking old school stadiums in inner cities, not modern parks out in the sticks), resulting in uneven rules being applied.

But the argument that resonated with me was, who is watching these games?  Baseball is for the fans, but if you look at tape of any 16-inning marathon that started at 7:05 PM local time you’ll notice the stands are mostly empty, filled only by a handful of die-hards who presumably have no job or school to go to the next morning.

One thing that I always felt truly differentiated baseball and football—to the betterment of both—was that baseball had rainouts but football was played no matter the weather.  Watching a game played in adverse conditions just made it better, but baseball was such a nuanced sport that if it couldn’t be played right, then it shouldn’t be played at all.  Playing after midnight after 12 or more innings isn’t conducive to playing baseball right.

Not that I am endorsing the idiotic idea proposed and implemented in some minor leagues that extra innings in tie games start with a man on base. Not only is it a gross distortion of the game, but it does nothing to address breaking the tie.  Yes, it gives the first tam up a greater chance of scoring, but then it gives the second team up the same greater chance of scoring, accomplishing nothing.  Truly moronic.

I am not a fan of distorting baseball to end ties the way other sports do.  Soccer and hockey have adopted gimmicks like shootouts and playing three-on-three in overtime.  The next thing will be basketball ties being broken by free throw shooting contests.  Baseball should be played as it was meant to be played, down to the bitter end.

But maybe that bitter end should, on rare occasions, be a tie. After three extra innings, declare the game over and avoid an unlucky 13^th inning.  Managers could manage their pitching expectations better, fans in ballparks would know (approximately) when the end was coming, and teams could adjust their strategies to a finite time horizon.  Not that many games go past 12 innings, and maybe there would be fewer ties if teams knew it was going to end before there was a 13^th.

There might be some provision for making up tie games if the affected the post-season, or maybe not allow ties until the expanded rosters in September.  But playing games until the tie is broken just leads to the situation lampooned in WP Kinsella’s novel The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, which was about a cursed baseball game that went on for months.  Maybe for over 100 years baseball played without a time limit, but maybe that time has come to an end.

I predict the Cubs win

One of my favorite quotes, from Damon Runyon, sums up why I think most sports-related prognostication is silly.  Runyon said, “Remember, the race is not always to the swiftest, nor the battle to the strongest, but that’s the way to bet.”

You want to predict who will win the NBA championship? At the start of this season, saying anything other than Warriors or Cavaliers would have been either stupid or partisan fandom.  Who will win March Madness? Sure, you can choose a “Cinderella,” but the two teams playing in the championship game are both #1 seeds.  The winner of next year’s Super Bowl will probably not be the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and I’d be willing to put some money on that.

So, who will win the 2017 World Series?  Excuse me if I go for the obvious and answer that it will be the Chicago Cubs. In any year, the winner of last year’s championship is usually the favored team, even if repeating championships is rare (in 90 years only one National League team has managed to repeat, the 1975-76 Big Red Machine).  But this year is different, in that the Cubs should be favored for reasons other than shear inertia.

The Cubs underperformed last year. Yes, they won 103 games, which is very impressive.  However, they performed like a team that should have won 110, which is one of the four or five greatest performances ever.  The discrepancy is based on a new-fangled stat called clusterluck, which looks at how a team’s statistics translated to wins in previous years.  Say a team gets 9 hits in a game; how many runs would you expect them to score?  If all the hits were in one inning, then six or seven, maybe 8.  If the hits were spread out one per inning, the answer is zero.  Looking back over how teams grouped their hits in the past 130 years of baseball we can say that given how the Cubs hot, they should have won an additional 7 games, but they were unlucky.

Add to this that manager Joe Maddon might have deflated those stats (in a good way, not like Tom Brady) by easing up as his team clinched the NL Central Division and locked up home field advantage in the playoffs.  The Cubs started off incredibly hot, then cooled off in the second half of the season.  Maybe if they, like the 2016 Warriors, wanted to set the record for most wins they would have, but at what price for the post season?

Then there is the fact that the team’s offense is powered by incredibly young players on their way up.  The Cubs position players were the 5^th youngest in the league, most under 27 years old.  This means that unlike older players with diminishing skills, their hitting prowess will only improve.  In the case of Kris Bryant, that should terrify National League pitchers.

The only every-day player the Cubs lost was their lead-off hitter, Dexter Fowler, who departed to the hated Cardinals.  On the other hand, they lost Kyle Schwarber early in April and didn’t get him back until the World Series, so barring another injury he’ll be there for the entire season.  They lost Alroldis Chapman, but he was only there for part of the season.  Thanks to Maddon’s over-use in the post-season Chapman nearly blew Game 7 of the Series, and closers are overrated anyway.

The one source of concern is the starting rotation, which is not a collection of youngsters like the offense and have been atypically free of injury the last two years.  Maybe they are overdue for some elbow trouble, but these days what staff isn’t one Tommy John injury away from just missing the post-season?

When some talking heads on ESPN were making predictions the other day, the first one picked the Cubs.  The second one said, “Well, yeah, they should be good, but they could have injuries so I’m picking the Dodgers.”  First off, why is he assuming the Dodgers will be more free of injuries than the Cubs?  What if Clayton Kershaw goes down for the entire season and not just a couple of months like last season?  Any team can be laid low by injuries, and if anything, the Cubs’ relative youth puts the odds in the Cubs’ favor, not another team’s.

Add to all this the genius of Joe Maddon, who did a masterful job of riding the front runners last year and is the perfect manager to keep the Cubs from complacency.

This is not to say the Cubs are a lock; FiveThirtyEight has them the favorite to win the World Series at only 14%.  The post-season is notoriously fickle, and as great as the Cubs were last year, they dodged a couple of close calls in October.  But anyone predicting any team other than the Cubs winning the 2017 World Series is whistling in a graveyard.

If all goes as expected, the Cubs should handily win the NY Central again and make a strong run to repeat.  108 years ago, the Cubs won back-to-back titles, then had a century long dry spell.  If you want to put some money on the 2017 World Series, the Cubs are the way to bet.