Hard on the heels of Chicago White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen's profanity-laced tirade Tuesday night comes one from Seattle Mariners manager John McLaren, who said Wednesday night that he's "tired of bleeping losing."
"All right, we're gonna do this a little bit different, say a couple things, that's it," McLaren said at the start of his postgame press conference in Seattle following the M's 5-4 loss to the Los Angeles Angels, completing a three-game sweep. He then calmly, considering what he was saying, said the following.
First, a warning: This column is reproducing McLaren's swear words, rather than bleeping them out as with Wednesday's Guillen rant. That's to signify the moral decay that's clearly gripped our country in the hours since Guillen's tirade.
"We're playing our ass off every day and got nothing to show for it," he said. "I'm tired of fucking losing, I'm tired of getting my ass beat, and so are those guys. We gotta change this fucking shit around and get after it. And only we can do it.
"The fans are pissed off and I'm pissed off and the players are pissed off. And that's the way it is. There's no fucking easy way out of this, can't feel sorry for ourselves, we gotta fucking buckle it up and get after it. I'm tired of goddamn losing. It's fucking every night, we bust our ass. It's gotta be a total team fucking effort, turn this thing around, and that's it."
And that's it. It was evidently tirade day at Safeco Field, with team president Chuck Armstrong giving the coaching staff what for earlier in the day. He "berated" them, is how the Associated Press put it.
And there's a lot to swear and berate about. The Mariners have lost four straight, 12 out of 15, 26 out of 35 -- I could go on here. They're 21-39. They're already 15 and a half games out in the American League West, and they have a one-game lead over the Colorado Rockies in the only race they're still in, the one for worst record in baseball.
In short, they're terrible. Which actually makes sense because they have a lot of lousy players. They got lucky and won 88 games last year, despite scoring and allowing runs at a rate that meant they should have won about 79. They stood pat, got a year older, added Erik Bedard and -- they're probably not as bad as they seem right now, but they're really bad.
More than one local writer used the word "contrived" to describe McLaren's rant. It looked more like a planned exercise in firing up the lads than like a genuine emotional explosion.
There's a belief among some baseball people that a well-placed tirade can turn a losing team around. The Mariners play their next six games in Boston and Toronto, so good luck with that.
In other Mariners news, the team is under fire for asking two women to stop kissing in the stands at a game last week. An usher asked the women to stop, saying another woman in the section had complained on behalf of her children. That's not in dispute, but there's disagreement over exactly what the women were doing.
One of them, Sirbrina Guerrero, has been making the media rounds saying she and her friend were merely eating garlic fries and giving each other pecks on the lips, but a Mariners spokeswoman, while reiterating the team's anti-discrimination policy, told the AP that the team is investigating the incident. The spokeswoman said the usher was responding to complaints that the women were "making out" and "groping," which isn't allowed for heterosexual couples either, though local gay activists say the enforcement isn't as strict for straights.
Guerrero has showbiz aspirations and was a contestant on an MTV reality show called "A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila." So it's not out of the question she's hoping to milk the situation into a few minutes of greater fame. It's also not out of the question the usher was overzealous in enforcing the public display of affection policy in a way he wouldn't have been had Guerrero been kissing a boy.
Either way, anything to divert attention from the calamity on the field.
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