Opening the Vault: Juan Gonzalez

Over a year ago Sports Illustrated posted their entire archives for free online. At the time I wrote about how fantastic this was for sports history nerds like myself, who could spend hours a day at work or in class reading articles about Mark Fidrych or Magic Johnson or Olympic heroes at the height of their glory or fallen stars like Dwight Gooden or Mike Tyson at their lowest. Little did I know how much time I would actually waste on this site. I've read articles ranging from an interesting profile on Michael Jordan after his first retirement to recaps of the 1991 NHL playoff semifinals. I became such a shut-in while reading these articles that in order to quell any suspicion about my disappearance I dressed a gorilla in human clothing and trained it to go out in my place to any social events that came up. Of course this plan backfired as my friends, family and girlfriend all preferred the more stimulating conversations, improved manners and decrease in feces throwing that my trained gorilla provided over my company. Now that same gorilla is my boss and dating my ex. How embarrassing. Anyways my time in the S.I. Vault reached it's nadir the other day when I found myself neglecting my duties at work for a chance to read an article grading the Major League Baseball free agent class of 1977. I had never heard of Wayne Garland before reading that article but I felt compelled to read a five page story dealing with his various struggles after signing the first large contract ever handed out to a free agent pitcher. This constant need to read S.I. articles had spiraled out of control into my worst obsession since I maxed out all my credit cards in college buying Precious Moments figurines from Hallmark.
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Just so something positive can come out of my addiction to the S.I. Vault I thought I would post this article about Juan Gonzalez's disastrous season with the Detroit Tigers. I wrote one of these last summer about Matt Millen with the idea of making this a weekly feature on this site and here it is over a year later and I'm only posting my second one, which sounds about right for me. Once again I'm not going to be critical of Tom Verducci's writing, because 1: Verducci is one of the best writer's covering baseball today and 2: my writing is terrible and I'm barely literate so I have no room to speak. Instead I'm just going to focus on the parts of this article that are funny or painful now that we can look back on them with some historical perspective. This was a rather long article so I've only excerpted parts of it and if you want to read the whole thing go here.

One of the finer features of the home clubhouse in Comerica Park, the Detroit Tigers' new stadium, is a huge TV in the center of the team's clubhouse. The unit faces the right side of the room, and it inspired envy among a few of the Tigers with lockers on the left side when they checked out their new digs on the eve of their April 11 home opener. One of those players quickly calmed the others by noting that the left-side residents had an expensive addition of their own who would undoubtedly help them attain oversized-appliance parity: outfielder Juan Gonzalez. "Is Juan on our side?" said one of the left-side guys. "Then we'll have a TV of our own tomorrow."

Little did these players know that they dodged a bullet, because in Juan Gonzalez's media guide biography from the 2000 season it says his favorite T.V. shows were "Suddenly Susan" and "Caroline in the City." Speaking of "Caroline in the City", which is a sentence I never thought I would say or write, I have kind of a funny story about that show as it is directly involved in one of the only fistfights I've ever been in during my life since I retired from the Kumite after defeating Chong Li for the World Title in Martial Arts. Anyways, during my freshman year at State my room mate Mike, who I've talked about frequently on this site, stayed up until all hours watching whatever crap was on the television. This was back before I became the caustic, cynical and lazy person I am today so I was taking all morning and early afternoon classes and actually cared enough about my grades to read all the materials and attend all the lectures and take a copious amount of notes. Exams were coming up and my stress level was reaching an all time high. Mike of course could care less about how he did on exams as long as his GPA was high enough not to get kicked out of school, so he stayed up until ungodly hours watching whatever crappy movie or tv show was playing on TV. Since we lived in a cramped dorm room my loft bed was literally on top of the television so there was no way for me to avoid the sounds of the tv. Things started to get tense the night before when he stayed up until 4 AM watching "Enemy Mine" a terrible 80's sci-fi flick about a human and alien stranded on a deserted planet and the friendship they forge even though the two are at war with each other. I let this slide but the next day I was tired as hell and had an exam the following morning. I went and laid down in my loft and Mike started watching tv, namely an episode of "Caroline in the City" where Dill is trying to learn how to rollerblade. Without warning I sprung out of my loft bed and pulled the cord for the tv out of the wall. Mike got up and shoved me in the back and I picked up a case of Capri Suns (my weapon of choice that year) and started swinging it around my head. After this skirmish went on for about 10 minutes, our neighbors next door started banging on the wall so we stopped. I went to bed, he plugged the tv back in and we never mentioned the incident again because it was easily the most embarrassing fight either one of us had ever been in.

He must not be interested in a big-screen TV because another one has yet to appear in the clubhouse. But the Tigers are perfectly willing to make Gonzalez the highest-paid player in the game by a margin of more than 25% over what the Dodgers are paying righthander Kevin Brown, who is getting $15 million per year. Detroit offered Gonzalez $151.5 million over eight years shortly after the Nov. 2 trade with Texas, according to a source familiar with the proposal.

Let's play a terrifying game of What If? What If Juan Gonzalez didn't have an agent who must have been certifiably insane. What If Juan Gone's agent had acted like any normal rational agent would have and after waking up from passing out after receiving such a mind-blowingly large contract offer immediately said, "YES! YES! YES! He'll sign immediately! Where can I meet you? How soon do you want to do this? I'll draw the contract up right now! No takesie backsies!" Now I'm not sure how this contract would've worked. I'm assuming it would've kicked in like an extension after the 2000 season, which means the Tigers would've been paying Juan Gone at least $18,875,000 last season and that's assuming the offer wasn't backloaded. Now Juan rebounded and did have a couple of nice seasons after he left Detroit but he hasn't played an inning in the majors since he played exactly one inning back in 2005. That would've been the single most disastrous contract in Major League history. If Gonzalez signs that deal it would've crippled the franchise for the entire decade. No Dombrowski, no Pudge, no Maggs, no Leyland, no World Series run in '06, just a bloated payroll being weighed down by the contract of an oft-injured, useless and washed up old slugger. Even acquiring and playing Edgar Renteria wasn't as damaging as this contract would've been. That's the scariest thought I've had since my dream the other night that Matt Millen had been hired to run the Lions again and he hired a coaching staff that was the cast of the Puppetmaster movies.

General manager Randy Smith gambled on Nov. 2 that Gonzalez was the marquee player who would be the foundation of the franchise's revival and help sell tickets that go for as much as $75 at the Copa. Smith traded pitchers Justin Thompson and Francisco Cordero, outfielder Gabe Kapler, infielder Frank Catalanotto, catcher Bill Haselman and minor league pitcher Alan Webb for Gonzalez and two spare parts, catcher Greg Zaun and pitcher Danny Patterson.

What a bunch of crap for both teams. I remember when this trade went down I was excited to have a two-time MVP on the team but was wary with the way the Tigers had completely gutted their system to make it happen. Thompson was the centerpiece at the time but ended up suffering a major arm injury and was never the same pitcher after that. Kapler was a hot prospect at the time but seemed more concerned with modeling than playing baseball. I still remember when he played for the Tigers he would come up to the music "Whatta Man", preen in the batter's box and then strike out on three straight pitches. Catalanotto pieced together a solid career as a platoon utilityman and Patterson gave the Tigers a few solid relief seasons before succumbing to an arm injury himself. Cordero probably had the best career of anybody after this trade as he became a top line closer for the Rangers and has made a few All-Star teams in his career. The Rangers also managed to flip him to the Brewers for half a season of Carlos Lee and Nelson Cruz, the latter of which has blossomed into an All-Star outfield slugger. In the long view this trade turned out pretty good for the Rangers due to the fact that they are still benefiting from the deal in the form of the production they are getting from Nelson Cruz. However if you break it down on the players traded in the original transaction and what they provided their respective clubs it turns out to just be kind of a "meh" trade.

There are those in the Tigers organization, however, who wonder why the deal was made in the first place. Peter Bragan Jr., general manager of their Double A affiliate in Jacksonville recently told the Detroit Free Press, "Did those boys up there have a brain spasm or something? They told us as far back as two years ago that their plan with the new stadium was to build the team around higher-caliber pitchers because they pushed the fences back.... Then they acquire a righthanded slugger in Gonzalez. That seems kind of strange."

This is a perfect indictment of the Randy Smith era. The fact that the general manager of the Double-A affiliate openly questioned the moves the general manager of the major league team in a major publication is unbelievable. This would be like the whitetrash assistant manager of a local Arby's going on the record in Forbes magazine with criticism of the company's decision to give away Roastburgers for free on Wednesday afternoons. The funny thing here is that the Double-A manager is right and was probably eminently more qualified to run the Tigers than Randy Smith was. I remember after it became obvious that Juan Gone was going to leave after the season, the Tigers made a bunch of noise about going out and acquiring Mike Mussina and another pitcher (Kevin Appier maybe?) with the money they had offered to Gonzalez with the idea they would assemble the great pitching and defense required to win at the expansive Copa. Of course both Mussina and Appier laughed in the Tigers faces and took big money to sign with the Yankees and Mets respectively and the Tigers were left holding their cash and making their hundredth trade with the Astros to acquire Chris Holt and drudging up Willie Blair's corpse for another abbreviated go-around. Ugh. I hate Randy Smith. He almost single handily ruined my interest in baseball. It's funny that he was viewed as some sort of general manager prodigy when he was first hired, and then turned into a disaster of such epic proportions that, if not for Matt Millen's reign of terror, he would have been viewed as the worst general manager in Detroit's sports history. This would be like if Mozart had been billed as a musical genius wunderkind and then ended up only playing keyboards in a Flock of Seagulls tribute band.

If you were to cast someone to play Rangers manager Johnny Oates in a movie, you'd choose an actor such as Wilford Brimley, someone with a grandfatherly manner and a twinkle in his eye. Oates says... "He's not a bad guy. He is sensitive and moody. Any little thing could set him off and ruin his day, and you weren't going to get anything out of him that day. But he's not a bad guy."

I know I promised not to be critical of Verducci's writing but it's just lazy to say the actor most likely to portray Oates in a movie is the guy whose most famous for being the Quaker Oats spokesman. My last name is Stout, so this would be like saying the actor most likely to play me in a movie would be Fatty Arbuckle while ignoring the fact that in real life I look like some kind of mutant cross between DJ Qualls and Sandra Bernhard.

"Juan will not play if he's not 100 percent," says Melvin. "He has so much pride, he doesn't want to go out there if it means he can't run full speed to first base. Because that means the fans might boo him. He is a prideful person. He's not a bad guy."

I'm pretty sure that if one person has to preface a statement about your character by saying "He's not a bad guy, but..." It means you are a pretty bad guy. However if multiple people, including nearly every person you've had a working relationship with over the previous decade has to preface what they say about you with, "He's not a bad guy, but..." then you might be the worst human being since Ivan the Terrible or at least Stalin.

That tag—he's not a bad guy—gets thrown at Gonzalez more than breaking balls a foot off the plate. He grew up in a drug-infested barrio in Puerto Rico, the same streets that claimed the life of an older half-brother, Puma, a heroin addict, in 1994. One brother dies of an overdose, another never so much as puts a cigarette to his lips and becomes such a Puerto Rican icon that shopkeepers build shrines to him behind their counters. "When you walk with him in Alto de Cuba," Smith says of Gonzalez's barrio, "it is like walking with a god."

Wow, being motivated by the death of a heroin addicted older brother named Puma. That sounds almost to badass to be true. It seems more like the backstory to a television drama about a motivated and serious young Puerto Rican undercover cop, who shoots first and asks questions later, plays fast and loose and blurs the line between following police procedure and stopping at nothing to get his man, all while butting heads with his straight-laced, by the book partner and hard assed sergeant who is always threatening to pull him off the case. Damn, for a minute there I thought I had an original idea for a television but I just realized that I just described pretty much every police drama going back to the Andy Griffith Show episode where town drunk Otis is coerced by Colombian drug lords into smuggling little balloons filled with cocaine into Mayberry for distribution. After getting drunk and ending up in the town's drunk tank one of the ballons burst inside Otis' stomach sending him into a murderous coke induced rage where he strangled town deputy Harry Fife to death before he could be subdued. Harry's brother Barney took over his deceased brother's position and posed as a bumbling and comically inept town deputy while coldly and methodically killing off the men he saw as responsible for his brother's tragic death. How could I forget such a landmark series.

Gonzalez reached the big leagues at 19 and won a home run title at 22. He spoke almost no English, so in 1992 the Rangers hired Luis Mayoral, a respected Latin American journalist and baseball executive, as a kind of guidance counselor for Gonzalez and his Puerto Rican teammates, catcher Ivan Rodriguez and outfielder Ruben Sierra.

Until this paragraph I never realized that so many former Rangers stars essentially ended their careers as productive players in Detroit, and this list doesn't even include Dean Palmer. I guess what I'm saying is I can't wait for 2020 when a past their prime Josh Hamilton, Ian Kinsler or Michael Young are slowly fading away while wearing the Olde English D.

...A few weeks later Gonzalez refused to dress for the Hall of Fame exhibition game because the uniform pants the Rangers brought for him were too large. Of the All-Star voting, he says, "The system is wrong. Any player who plays every day, works hard and puts up numbers like I do should be starting the All-Star Game. Players and managers should vote for the starting players." About the exhibition in Cooperstown, Gonzalez says, "I couldn't play because my right wrist was sore. The pants they gave me were size 40. I wear 34. They were clown pants."

I actually love this idea. The way the Tigers played from 1995-2005 was the equivalent of watching a group of drunk Shriner clowns mimic a baseball game. The idea of Juan Encarnacion kicking a ball around in right field while wearing some oversized green and purple polka dot pants while Roger Cedeno comes running over to help before slipping on a banana peel and Bobby Higginson is stuck in left field with his head up some horses ass kicking his legs around in a comical fashion while circus music plays in the background would've been a humorous way to watch some painful Tigers defense. I think it should be a written rule in baseball that the worst team from the previous year has to play the following season dressed like clowns. Attendance at Nationals games would go through the roof. They could even get a donkey to play left field. Hang on, my head is exploding with ideas right now.

Smith wasn't bothered by either incident. The Tigers G.M. had been badgering Melvin about a trade for Gonzalez since last June. Melvin kept telling Smith he didn't have the nerve to trade Gonzalez with the team still in a pennant race. The Rangers eventually lost to the Yankees in the Division Series. At the World Series, Melvin bumped into Gonzalez's agent, Jim Bronner. Knowing that Gonzalez's contract ran out after the 2000 season, Melvin asked, "Would Juan consider a deal similar to what Larry Walker [six years, $75 million] took from the Rockies?" "I don't think we can do that," Bronner said.

So now we find out that Juan Gonzalez turned down two contract proposals in the matter of months that were worth tens of millions of dollars more than he would make over the remainder of his career. I'm assuming his agent never represented anybody of note again and in fact I wouldn't be surprised if his body turned up in some lake in Puerto Rico. I wonder if he was this bad at negotiating in other areas of the law. "Ok so I got you out of your speeding ticket, but in order to get the prosecutor to drop it I had to agree to have you plea to a third offense D.U.I. Now you'll lose your license for life and you may end up serving a year in jail but at least you won't have to pay the $120 fine. Now I think this is a really generous offer but if you want to hold out and see if I can get him to agree to give you a vehicular manslaughter charge just let me know."

When the Tigers made their $151.5 million offer to Gonzalez, they also invited him to Detroit for an introductory news conference. Who knows, Smith thought, maybe he'll even sign the contract when he steps off the plane. Except Gonzalez didn't show.

Wow, as much as I hate Randy Smith for single handily trying to ruin my interest in baseball as a child reading this paragraph actually made me feel a little sorry for him. As a single man who lives with a cat and whose idea of an exciting Friday night is working on a cross stitch and watching old VHS copies of the Frugal Gourmet I know a thing or two about being stood up. I've asked out girls who never called me back, called me Allan when I was out with them, came up with fake illnesses to get out of seeing me again or just plain didn't show up. But that's mostly because I drive around in a windowless conversion van with "Sex Wagon" spray painted on the side and rope, duct tape and bags of lye in the back and my idea of a romantic first date mostly involves them picking up the tab after eating out at a gas station Rally's, so my bad luck with girls is more than deserved. However I think if I were taking someone out for the purpose of giving them a check for 151 million dollars they would at least show up regardless of how creepy my car was or how low on the shit totem pole of gas station fast food garbage I tried to feed them.

In his seven full big league seasons (not including the strike-shortened 1994 and '95 seasons), Gonzalez has averaged 41 home runs and 127 RBIs while batting .298. "I don't care if he's high-maintenance," says Detroit third baseman Dean Palmer, who played with Gonzalez in Texas. "When you produce like he does, it doesn't matter. I'm sick of hearing him take crap. The bottom line is the guy drives in 140 runs year in and year out and works as hard as any player in baseball. That's what counts."

Well, according to baseball-reference.com, Nostradamus Palmer's bold prediction of 140 rbi for Juan Gone was only short by 73. Juan's final line that year .289/.337/.505 with 29 homeruns and 67 rbi, which was hands down the worst season of his career up to this point. Since Palmer was so off-base on this prediction it makes me feel more secure that his prediction that the world will come to an end in 2012 and that I will die after being eaten alive by a grizzly bear in the ensuing chaos won't come true.

Says Smith, "If you invest the money on a star player, you want a guy who's as dedicated to the game as this guy. He doesn't want much. He wants to play, work out, go home, and do it again tomorrow."

Did Smith even talk to Melvin or Oates or anybody in baseball before he traded for Juan Gone? Because about five paragraphs up both Melvin and Oates talk about how he refuses to play unless everything surrounding him is absolutley perfect, including the size of his pants. By all accounts Juan was famous for being one of the most mercurial prima donna sluggers to play in baseball since Mercuilus McPrimadonna starred for the Boston Bees in 1938. Gonzalez would keep this reputation up for the remainder of his career until it eventually forced him out of the game. He was famous before his season with the Royals for training with a shirt on that said "162", for the number of games he was going to play in. He ended up playing 33. The next season he signed a one year deal with the Indians and had all of one at bat before straining his hamstring and sitting out the rest of the season. That's how Juan's career finished. That doesn't sound like someone who wants to play, work out and go home, it just looks like someone who will work just hard enough for someone to cut him a check, a work ethic that I'm trying my hardest to get named "the Beefshower method."

After dinner Gonzalez and his friends piled into his white Mercedes and headed for his downtown apartment. He drove the car through empty streets wet from a cold rain, past the silhouettes of abandoned and crumbling buildings. In such spots the utter darkness of Detroit is as complete and foreboding as Europe during the war.

It wouldn't be an article about Detroit without an unnecessary shot at how run down Detroit is. I'm surprised Verducci, whose writing I generally like just didn't go the whole nine yards when mentioning Detroit cliches and say something like, "As we drove back through downtown Detroit, past a group of fat fans holding up Tigers pennants and dancing around a burning police car, drug dealing prostitutes, sewer dwelling cannibals and a series of bombed out buildings that appeared to be straight from 1945 Dresden, I know longer wondered what it would be like to live in a Mad-Max style post apocalyptic world, where lawlessness prevailed and the streets were patrolled by a homo-erotic punk rock biker gang in search of gasoline because I was already in a place that was much worse."

The future Gonzalez said he didn't worry about now seems as murky as the air that night. Six months of courtship, and the Tigers still don't know if he will stay.

He won't

In a more hopeful moment, before Gonzalez had experienced the vastness of Comerica Park and the ineptitude of his new team, the Tigers printed pocket-sized informational brochures about the shiny new ballpark, with a smiling Gonzalez on the cover. The tag line below the photograph resonates with unintended irony: YOU'LL LOVE PLAYING HERE.

He didn't

Opening The Vault Part I: Matt Millen

A couple of months ago I wrote that Sports Illustrated had put their entire archives online for free at SI.com. This was fantastic news for all the shut-in sports history buffs who would rather spend their Friday nights reading twenty-three year old articles about Dwight Gooden and Todd Marinovich instead of doing something frightening like talk to girls or leave my cat Scrambles at home by herself for more then an hour. Actually this isn't true. I don't want to play into the tired yet popular notion that all bloggers are basement dwelling losers who are afraid of human contact (In all honesty I don't see what's so great about human contact. Like the other day I was riding the bus and had no less than ten guys "accidentally" poked me with their boners. I know I'm a handsome man and people always tell me I look like James Spader in Stargate but I don't deserve that kind of treatment? It's not like I'm a woman).

Anyways in an effort to give full disclosure I thought I would get rid of the cloak of anonymity on this website and reveal my true identity. The name beefshower is an alias. I am really the spirit of Swami Vivekananda and whenever I get bored of travelling through India spreading the enlightening philosophies of the Hindu religion to the pure of heart I take some time out to blog about what's happening with sports in Detroit and breathlessly jack it to Paramore videos. Now that that's out of the way I thought I would put all those hours I've wasted going through SI's archives to good use by wasting even more time writing about those articles so that you the reader could waste your time reading my opinions of events that happened months, years even decades ago. It's a beautiful cycle really. Kind of like the circle of life only with a slower and more painful death.

I'm not going to be critical of the actual writing because my own writing sucks shit but rather I'm going to focus on the things that are funny or painful now that we look back on them with some historical perspective. I was thinking about writing something on the Tigers but they are so terrible and depressing right now that I couldn't think of anything to say that wouldn't end up with me in tears or cursing a lot...or both. Instead I'm going to focus on this dandy that Peter King wrote during the summer of 2001 shortly after the Lions hired a man who would become famous for being worse at his job then anybody else is at their job anywhere in the country. Even worse then the guy at McDonalds on Woodward that gave me the Fish Filet value meal when I clearly ordered the ten piece McNugget meal. Seriously who requests barbecue sauce with a fish sandwich. Assholes. Anyways this isn't about the dumbass at McDonalds but for those of you who haven't figured it out yet and need me to spell out everything for them I'm talking about Matt Millen.

Matt Millen stood, soaking wet, outside the 226-year-old stone house he owns in eastern Pennsylvania. It was late May. A steady rain was falling on the 150-acre estate, and that made Millen happy. The rain was feeding his wife's endless flower beds and filling the property's cistern....

I know I said I wouldn't be critical of the writing because for the most part the writing in Sports Illustrated is top-notch but I'm going to nit-pick here. King goes on for nearly four paragraphs about some old cistern on Millen's property. Way to know your audience Mr. King. Although if any Quakers passing by from the 19th century happened by a news stand and picked up this issue hoping to find the latest in cistern news and advances in irrigation they would be in luck. Maybe later in the article he'll wite about James Polk's dealings with the British during the Oregon Territory dispute or maybe he'll provide the most humane method to kill an elderly relative suffering from typhoid fever. I consider myself a football fan as well as a pretty intelligent guy, as my rejection letter from the Everest Institute would indicate, and I had no idea what a cistern was until I looked it up on Wikipedia. Anyways if you want to read the rest of this cistern talk feel free to go to the article and read it. I'll just be sitting here waiting impatiently for you to return.

Millen recently began another rocky renovation project. This one, the reconstruction of the Detroit Lions, promises to be tougher than relining a 200-year-old cistern. The Lions last won an NFL title in 1957 and have won only one playoff game in the 44 years since. The previous regime tried to narrow the talent gap between Detroit and the league's elite by throwing huge money at players with slightly-above-average talent at best—running back James Stewart, quarterback Charlie Batch, defensive tackle James Jones, for example—thus creating major salary-cap problems for the new administration.

Mercifully thats the last of the cistern talk. At least Millen stopped the embarrassing habit of throwing large amounts of money at slightly above average talent. Instead he seems to have taken the radical approach of throwing big cash at old, washed up and way below average free agents such as Todd Lyght, Fernando Bryant, Damien Woody, Kenoy Kennedy, Marcus Pollard, Bill Schroeder, etc. I would continue to list the free agent busts but this post is already going to be about a million words long so I don't want to add another few thousand words by just naming names.

When Lions owner William Clay Ford handed the CEO and president job to Millen last Jan. 9, the hiring marked the first time since the AFL-NFL merger in 1970 that the day-to-day operations of a team had been turned over to someone with no coaching, scouting or front-office experience. Millen played linebacker in the NFL for 12 seasons—with the Raiders (in Oakland and L.A.), the San Francisco 49ers and the Washington Redskins—and won four Super Bowl rings, but for the past nine years his association with the game has been limited to working as a broadcaster for CBS and Fox.

Transcript of Millen interview:

Ford: "Matt, you will be in charge of a team that is moving into a wonderful state of the art stadium in downtown Detroit. You will be in charge of ridding the franchise of a culture of losing that has permeated the team following a half century of sucking shit through a straw. You will be in charge of evaluating current players and handing out tens of millions of dollars in contracts a year to free agents. You will also have to spend countless hours scouting college talent in an attempt to land high impact first round picks as well as starters and positional depth in the later rounds. You will be in charge of assembling a roster with a payroll in excess of $100 million with players from diverse backgrounds. You will also have to hire a coaching staff that will develop these players and try to get the absolute most out of their ability, while also holding players accountable for their behavior on and off the field. You will also need to surround yourself with front office employees who will help you run an efficient workplace environment and assist you in handling the day to day business operations and decisions that are associated with running a multi-million dollar entity. What kind of experience do you have in this field?"

MM: "None"

Ford: "None. Why the hell should I hire you then?"

MM: "Because I was a slightly above average linebacker on three Super Bowl teams, all of which were supremely talented and brilliantly coached and could have won world titles without my contribution. I was pretty good at tackling people. That's about it."

Ford: "Wow. You're hired. Hell I'll even let you work out of your home. I heard you have a lovely cistern there."

"Matt came to see me at my home in Florida, and after 10 minutes with him I was charged up," Ford recalls about a late December meeting. "He convinced me there's little difference between our team and the great teams."

Ford went on to add, "He also revealed that he had evidence that my grandfather Henry Ford stole his idea for the automobile from a Jewish co-worker named Lowenstein while the two were employed at the Edison Illuminating Company. Grandpappy lured him over for lunch and Grandma Clara poisoned him with an arsenic laced bagel. Before disposing of the body Grandpa used the sack of gold tied around Lowensteins neck to start the Ford Motor Company and the Lowenstein Quadricycle became what is known today as the Model T. Matt also had pictures of my boy Billy fellating the Princeton lacrosse team during his time there."

This quote doesn't actually appear in the article but it should have because it would finally shed light on how Millen has been able to keep his job despite a 31-81 record as a G.M. Also legally I should point out this is all parody and that in all honesty Henry Ford is one of my favorite historical icons. Anybody who had their own secret police is a certifiable badass.

Hardly the executive type, Millen showed up for his introductory news conference wearing a wrinkled, seven-year-old blue blazer, sneakers that had belonged to Redskins linebacker LaVar Arrington and a tie borrowed from broadcast partner Dick Stockton.

I might be wrong on this but I'm pretty sure the NFL is the most profitable business entity in all of professional sports. According to Forbes the Detroit Lions alone are worth 870 million dollars, which is more than the entire GDP of Zimbabwe. An NFL team could presumably hire some of the most intelligent and accomplished businessmen in the country to run their franchise but instead the Lions hired a man that doesnt even own a fucking tie. Although I probably shouldn't criticize somebody for their wardrobe or lack there of since I just pulled off the rare trifecta of wearing the same suit to my high school, college and law school graduation. But at least I was switching up my ties.

His office decor is best characterized by a pair of framed Three Stooges pictures that hang on the wall. He rides a Harley to work. In Millen's world every day is casual Friday, his typical attire being polo shirt, jeans, sneakers and a ball cap that reads DO IT ONCE—DO IT RIGHT. When Mike Holmgren, the Seattle Seahawks' executive vice president and coach, saw Millen scouting on the Michigan campus in March, he quipped, "Team president, CEO, general manager—and he looks like a schmo." Even the 43-year-old Millen admits, "I am an experiment."

So the first thing Millen does when he gets hired is throw some Three Stooges posters up on the wall? If I went to Midas to get my brakes fixed and I looked into the managers office and saw some Three Stooges posters on the wall I would just leave. Maybe that says more about me then it does Millen. Maybe this exposes me as some pretentious comedy snob who only finds stuff funny if they are shrouded in several levels of irony and who reads Steve Martin's autobiography while hi-lighting passages that discuss different comedic philosophies, but I just don't think the Three Stooges are funny. No, I'm really not that snobby because if I were I wouldn't rate Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure as one of the funniest movies I've ever seen but there is something about the Three Stooges that drives me nuts and now is not the time or place to explain why because I don't even know the reasons myself. I'm sorry.

Secondly I wouldn't hire a guy to run an NFL team that wore a hat with a cheesy slogan like "Do It Once - Do It Right" on it. Maybe if I were hiring a coach for a high school girls softball team I would allow it. Then he could print up sweatshirts that said things like "Hard Work Beats Talent When Talent Doesn't Work Hard." with cutesy girl nicknames like Short Stuf and half numbers on the back. On the other hand I don't think I would hire Millen to even run a high school girl's team. Not because he's so inept but because with his kind of moustache he looks like the kind of guy who would be the lead story on the 11 o'clock news after getting fired because he bought some chubby girls on the team wine coolers in exchange for them massaging his thighs in the dugout.

Finally if Mike Holmgren who looks more like an obese walrus than most obese walruses do says that some guy is a slob it might be time to re-evaluate things.

Millen's initial personnel moves were uninspiring. After firing coach Gary Moeller, Millen replaced him with Marty Mornhinweg, who had previously labored as an assistant deep in the shadows of Holmgren in Green Bay and Steve Mariucci in San Francisco. Millen loves Mornhinweg's football mind, his variation of the West Coast offense and his ability to deal with change in this era of extensive player movement. Millen impressed no one with his veteran free-agent pickups—(Brendan) Stai, cornerback Todd Lyght, tight end Pete Mitchell, utility back Amp Lee and backup quarterback Jim Harbaugh. On the other hand, the combined 2001 cap value of those five players ($3.95 million) is about the same as what the Lions would have had to pay next season to retain free-agent guard Jeff Hartings, who signed with the Pittsburgh Steelers. "We'll plug Stai in for Hartings," says Millen, "and not lose much."

Wrong. Hartings went on to be a two time All-Pro with the Steelers and helped them win a Super Bowl during his final season. His ability to play both center and guard at a high level helped the Steelers have one of the most consistently good rushing offenses this decade. Brendan Stai sucked ass-barf for one season in Detroit before he was traded to the Redskins for a draft pick that was probably wasted on a lineman who sucked equally as bad, such as Kelly Butler or someone. I like this line of thinking by Millen though and I wonder if he applies in it other real life situations. For example if he went to a car dealer with the intention of buying a new Mercedes and the dealer said something like, "Sure that Mercedes is nice but for the same price I can sell you seven 1985 Mercury Topazes and you really wouldnt be losing that much in performance." would he take that deal? I'm leaning towards yes.

As for Hasselbeck, a source close to the Seahawks' front office says Millen tried to acquire him before the April 21 draft in a three-way deal that would have sent a high draft choice from Detroit to Jacksonville, with Jaguars quarterback Mark Brunell going to Seattle and Hasselbeck, whom the Seahawks had gotten from the Packers in March, moving to the Lions. "How can I make this work?" Millen asked the Seahawks, according to the source. "I want Matt Hasselbeck." Holmgren, though, would not part with his former Green Bay protégé, and Detroit will stick with the cap-heavy and injury-prone Batch.

There is no way this paragraph is true because that deal actually makes sense. I wonder if Millen and the Lions fortunes would have been different had they traded for Hasselbeck or if the Lions aura of suckitude and overwhelming history of shitty quarterbacking would have ruined Hasselbeck's career. It's a pretty amazing What-if? scenario. Well, not really. I'm so pessimistic about the Lions that I honestly believe that if Hasselbeck had ended up playing in Detroit his career would have been ruined. I bet Hasselbeck wakes up screaming at night after having a recurring nightmare where he has to repeatedly check down to Aveion Cason as Dominic Raiola helplessly flails his short little T-Rex arms at a blitzing Lance Briggs.

Millen consulted confidant and former Michigan coach Bo Schembechler, who'd recruited Millen as a Pennsylvania all-state linebacker. (Millen signed with Penn State.)

Bo Schembechler was a great football coach but I wouldn't take advice from him on how to be a good executive. I loved the guy and he was a legend in Ann Arbor but his season as Tigers President was an unmitigated disaster. Dude fired Ernie Harwell for Chrissakes.

Millen will have to hope he hits the lottery with the draft and free agent signings. He saved the Lions another $2.5 million on this year's cap by persuading Jones and linebacker Allen Aldridge to take substantial pay cuts.

This paragraph isnt really that important other than the fact that I don't think Allen Aldridge ever actually existed. I've been a Lions fan my whole life and have been going to games for the past 15 years or so and I have no fucking clue who Allen Aldridge is. Though somehow he was making enough money to take a million dollar plus paycut. God I hate the Lions.

The Lions have a long-term question at quarterback: Can Batch stay healthy and become a consistent and accurate passer?

No. Also the Lions still have a long term question at quarterback for going on the fiftieth season. Is Erik Kramer available b/c he's still the best quarterback the Lions have had in my lifetime.

Strolling his property, Millen acknowledged the obstacles he faces, but he was undaunted. "Look at that house," he said. "In its day it was a great house, probably the finest in the area. But it fell out of repair and had to be rebuilt. Same with the Lions. Champs of the league long ago, but the franchise fell down. We need to bring it back to greatness. That's the only reason I'm in this."

Well if the Lions were an old house and Millen's been in charge of the renovations for the past seven years the house is a disaster. What he's done to the Lions would be the equivalent of driving a bulldozer through the side of the house, setting the ruins on fire, using the fire to light a big fat cigar and then pissing all over the flames to put them out while all the while Mr. Ford claps his hand gleefully and pays Millen with giant sacks of money with dollar signs on them.