Llamas have awesome antibodies.
No, really. Something about their X and Y properties do something something that assist scientists in attacking viruses that once worked against influenza and something else. And I somehow kept reading through this New York Times report yesterday, right up until they started comparing llamas to sharks and which one was more 'cuddly,' after which I checked out.
So hey, how was your Wednesday? Or was it even Wednesday?
Whatever. Won't be much longer now. Can't be. Not with all the current momentum in this coronavirus crisis, recklessly or safely, headed hard toward opening civilization back up. I'd predicted all along that people wouldn't wait -- and that some, in fact, couldn't wait -- and here we are. It's all around us, a little more each day.
Sports will follow, too, of course. They might even lead, given their outsized importance in our culture. A big part of the battle ahead will be overcoming bad optics, or sights that just feel wrong even if the reality is that they aren't. Sports can be huge for that. The first time fans witness Sidney Crosby lined up across from an opposing center, nose to nose, I'll bet most everyone cringes. But not as much the second time. Or the third. And by the final horn, it'll have been just another hockey game.
Man, bring that on. Bring it all on. Full-bore.
Because, you know, I had another series of thoughts yesterday, immediately after immersing myself in studying these fellas ...
[caption id="attachment_985557" align="aligncenter" width="640"]
Lllamas, in Belgium. - GETTY[/caption]
... and that's that we just might have a pretty nice summer and fall around here. At least in the sporting context. Eventually.
So that's where I took this, spirits raised, hopes high, with three wholly optimistic outlooks for each of our three teams in 2020:
STEELERS
• They could win it all.
Why this is so hard for some to accept, I don't understand, but that won't stop me from acknowledging, loud and long, that this is a Super Bowl contender.
A favorite?
Nope. Not with the Ravens in the same division and with the Chiefs in the same conference.
But a contender?
Abso-bleeping-lutely!
The NFL's most dynamic defense will return with one significant loss, Javon Hargrave, but also the promise of two sky's-the-ceiling younger players, Minkah Fitzpatrick and Devin Bush, being that much better. Particularly Bush, who'll be entering the traditionally vital second season.
Show me the hole. Show me the offense they can't stop. And don't say Baltimore or Kansas City. There's no quarterback this group can't smoke out, not by ground, not by the air.
All that's missing on the overall roster, I'll posit, is an average offense. And yeah, I mean average as in barely mediocre.
For all the grief Mason Rudolph's getting locally, he went 5-3 as a starting quarterback with that defense. 'Duck' Hodges went 3-3, for crying out loud, fresh from the Samford Bulldogs. And we're seriously fussing over what a future first-ballot Canton inductee will do?
• Ben Roethlisberger will excel.
He sure as hell won't be average or mediocre. Last time we saw Ben suit up for all 16 games -- you know, way back in 2018 -- all he did was throw for a career-high 5,129 yards, a career-high 34 touchdowns and a 96.5 passer rating that was his third-best in the past decade.
Sure, Antonio Brown was on the receiving end of roughly 20 percent of those passes and 15 of those 34 touchdowns. But let's not dismiss that Ben will have more weapons in 2020 than he had that season -- with the addition of Eric Ebron and two-tight-end sets, notably -- and that he'll be able to distribute as he sees fit, without worrying about hissy fits and battered water-coolers.
Oh, and he'll be healthy. As in healthier than in 2018.
Elbow injuries, even elbow surgeries, are routine, per anyone anywhere in sports medicine. And for however long it takes Ben to build back up arm strength, the side benefit to all this time off is that, as he's acknowledged himself this spring, the rest of his body has had its first chance to fully heal in his entire NFL career. Athletes will tell you, especially as they age, that a typical offseason just isn't enough. Not for the major stuff, the lingering stuff.
Just wait.
• T.J. Watt will stay put.
No contract situation in Pittsburgh will loom larger than the Steelers signing the league's top defensive player to a long-term extension. And though that doesn't have to occur until 2021, and though they're already pressed against the cap with still another safety to find in free agency, there's a part of me that can't help but wonder if Watt wouldn't represent an exception.
And a wonderful exception, at that.
Look at it this way: Watt wants to stay. He's told me that in passionate ways that go way beyond the standard quote. Kevin Colbert and Mike Tomlin continue to speak now about how they'd like to keep Bud Dupree 'a Steeler for life,' so imagine how many additional degrees are required to summarize that sentiment regarding Watt. Now, factor in that the coronavirus pause will impact revenues across sports, including the NFL even without a shutdown or rescheduling, and the salary cap across the league's going to nosedive in the next year or two.
Figuring it out yet?
Wrap and tackle.
PENGUINS
• They could win it all.
This seems more readily accepted, maybe because local hockey fandom isn't nearly as cynical as the football fandom. (Oh, don't deny that, Nation.) But it's true all the same, and arguably that much more likely.
I'd never have envisioned this entering the 2019-20 NHL season, but that very first October trip, that 14-goal barrage through St. Paul and Winnipeg despite missing a quarter of the roster, made me a believer on the spot. Forced by injury into a 'demanding' way to play, as Kris Letang worded it for me that night in Manitoba, they not only embraced Mike Sullivan's championship style of play but also executed it at a level that had opponents freaked out for months. And it wasn't until they wore down from those demands that they drifted back to normalcy.
Well, guess who's not worn down anymore.
As with the Steelers in the AFC, the Penguins won't be anyone's favorite in the East. Not with the Lightning and Bruins in the same conference, not to mention the uneasily dormant Capitals. But they'll register the same level of abso-bleeping-lutely on the contention front.
In large part because ...
• Jake Guentzel, people.
This was a contending roster without Guentzel, at least to get through a couple rounds. I'd been openly skeptical about going much further unless his shoulder would somehow heal slightly ahead of schedule and, within that, that he'd be able to withstand peak physical contact in return during, say, a conference final.
But now?
Adding a 40-goal sniper/playmaker/grinder who makes the planet's best player better almost as much as vice versa?
Yeah, now it's a different discussion altogether.
And in addition to loading up the top line with Jason Zucker, as well as the solidifying effect on Evgeni Malkin's line with Bryan Rust and Patrick Marleau, it creates unreal depth that, if Sullivan were penciling his Game 1 lineup right now, he might scratch Conor Sheary, Nick Bjugstad, Evan Rodrigues, Chad Ruhwedel and Juuso Riikola. Say what one will about any of those five, but all five belong in the NHL, and all five could be needed to contribute along the way.
(No, Sullivan's not scratching Dominik Simon. Stop that at once.)
• Goaltending cream will rise.
Similar to the Steelers' situation with Watt, though not of the same scope, no personnel matter looms larger for the Penguins than what to do with Matt Murray. He'll be a restricted free agent after the upcoming playoffs, so he won't be lost. But between that status and the Seattle expansion draft next summer, Jim Rutherford will have to decide sooner rather than later where to commit, to Murray or Tristan Jarry.
Remember what happened the last time the Penguins went into a playoff with that scenario?
Yep. Competition helped create that. No matter how anyone felt it should've played out, competition was a variable.
That's here now. It's nowhere near as emotional as that one was -- Marc-Andre Fleury'd been here a long time and was devastated upon losing the net in Ottawa -- but Murray vs. Jarry became a very real thing this past winter. And even though Murray's a lock to start Game 1, he's not a lock to finish Round 1, a situation that definitely didn't exist the previous winter.
And no, wiseacre, I'm not going to omit the other team in town from all this warm and fuzzy ...
PIRATES
• You're going to be so, so wrong.
Clip and save. I couldn't care less. You'll see.
See, here's how things work in the Pittsburgh baseball scene: The bulk of the offseason is spent pouting over payroll, and that holds true whether it's at $100 million like four years ago, or whether it's half that, as it stands now. Doesn't matter. Everything's payroll, payroll, payroll, along with something about Bob Nutting and his henchmen shoving wheelbarrows of silver up the hill to Seven Springs.
By the time an actual pitch is thrown, the script's been set. If the team fares well, it's luck. If the team's lousy, everyone claims they didn't care in the first place.
It's sooooooo boring. The most monotonous, repetitive dialogue in our city. And worse, most of the people engaged in that dialogue couldn't spot Bryan Reynolds out of a police lineup.
Here's what the people who pay attention will acknowledge: The Pirates were damned competitive in 2019, until a wave of injuries to starting pitchers caught up with the eventual, expected climb down from the bats. And the one thing that team didn't have, thanks to the miserable minor-league system wrecked by Neal Huntington and Kyle Stark, was depth. So when one Dovydas Neverauskas after another rode across I-70 to get bombed, one of the ugliest collapses in franchise history ensued.
News flash: This is basically the same team, minus Starling Marte and Felipe Vazquez, except that Reynolds and Kevin Newman will be a year older, Cole Tucker and Ke'Bryan Hayes will be a year closer, Gregory Polanco is finally back to full health, and the pitchers are already positively aglow about their new coach, Oscar Marin, while barely masking a collective view that Ray Searage was killing them. And it's not like those pitchers, particularly the starters, lack talent or pedigree.
It was routine through the spring to read or hear people predicting 100 losses. It's always been insane. And ignorant of reality.
Again, you'll see.
• Who needs depth?
News flash II: This season won't be 162 games. It might be 100, it might be 80, depending on the recency of a given report. But it won't set a stage anything like the one that crushed the Pirates in 2019.
Derek Shelton isn't ready to write his first lineup any more than Ben Cherington's ready to set his first roster, and that's in large part due to lingering outside uncertainty. As this is being typed, no one yet knows how many players will be permitted to participate, or even what'll constitute an active roster, since there almost surely won't be any minor leagues. The latest word is that 30 players could be considered active, with as many as 50 at their organizational disposal.
Well, I'm not as wild about the Pirates' 22-25 on the roster as I'd be about any team's 22-25. But in a weird kind of way, I'm liking this 25-30 concept. Because if these new rules allow Tucker, Hayes and a couple of the system's other rare quality prospects to hang around Pittsburgh, that's a much more attractive option -- now and for the future -- than another Summer of Clay Holmes.
Picture, for example, flame-throwing relief prospect Blake Cederlind, who was flooring everyone down in Bradenton, being available to Shelton and having a chance to grow against men, as he was in Grapefruit ball. That's a win-win, in addition to being more entertaining for fans.
• Have I mentioned you're going to be wrong?
OK, good, because I was concerned I'd maybe forgotten.
You will. Big-time. And I dare say it'll be just as much fun, at least for me, as whatever happens with the other two teams combined.
No, these Pirates won't be a favorite for anything. Nor will they contend. I'm not being an idiot here. But to repeat, they'll again be competitive and, with intelligent, ambitious and organized people now employed in the front office, plus some needed fresh faces in the dugout, they could easily convert that into more.
Ha! I can just picture the faces I'm getting right now!
Like this guy:
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Llama, in Germany. - GETTY[/caption]
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