Anthony Rendon Plans His Exit

It seems to me that the great Dan Wetzel pretty much summed up everything that needs to be said:

There was something that happened at the end of this Browns Show that I found interesting. I don’t know if it means anything, but I found it interesting. You know how at the end of every game, the head coaches meet at midfield for a brief postgame encounter. Sometimes, they have a rudimentary handshake, sometimes they embrace, sometimes they will spend a couple of seconds talking … I always find myself grading the postgame handshakes. I do the same after tennis matches, when the players meet at the net.

In any case, there was nothing special about the postgame handshake between 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan and Our Guy Kevin Stefanski. The Browns’ offense and special teams made comical errors all game long, the 49ers simply outclassed them, it doesn’t seem like there was a whole lot to say.

But instead of running off the field, the way head coaches tend to do, Shanahan instead went to have a chat — a surprisingly long chat, as it turned out — with Browns defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz. I mean, it’s not surprising that they are friends — Jim Schwartz has been coaching forever and is admired and respected throughout the NFL. No, what was surprising was how long the conversation went on.

It looked like two head coaches talking after a game.

I suspect that’s the way things are heading.

Kevin Stefanski came to Cleveland six years ago with a strong reputation as:

He delivered, somewhat, on both promises for a while. Well, OK, he never looked like an offensive mastermind, but he was able to devise enough Baker Mayfield play-action passes and Nick Chubb runs to get the Browns to the playoffs in the COVID year, and then he and the Browns kind of stumbled into the Joe Flacco experience in 2023. He was named NFL Coach of the Year in both seasons simply because anybody who takes the Cleveland Browns to the playoffs is automatically named NFL Coach of the Year. It’s the law.

And as far as order, yes, that was his specialty. He never lost his cool. He promised to fix mistakes. He either kept his feelings buried deep, or he simply didn’t have feelings. He kept leaks to a minimum. He called reporters by their first names and never answered any of their questions. He would have been a fine crisis manager.

Like I say, it was pretty good for a while.

Unfortunately, they still keep score in football games, and so while he was breathtakingly good at conveying stability and sanity, the Browns are 6-23 in his last two years and have been outscored 40-or-so touchdowns. And they continuously lose in the most comical ways imaginable. Sunday, on a critical fourth-and-short from their own 33-yard line — with the score 10-8 — they bizarrely decided to go for it because, as Stefanski said, “We felt good about the play.”

The play they felt so good about was to line up rookie tight end Harold Fannin behind center for the first time in his life, I imagine, and have him do some sort of tush-push quarterback sneak. He obviously fumbled the snap, the 49ers promptly drove the 32 yards for a touchdown, and that was that.

"We’ll get it fixed,” Stefanski said afterward, because that’s what he always says, and it reminded me of something … but I couldn’t tell what.

Oh yeah — it reminds me of that band meeting in This is Spinal Tap after an 18-inch Stonehenge dropped from the ceiling during the concert.

The Browns’ special teams also fumbled the ball away and gave up a long punt return — Stefanski assured everyone that would get fixed, too. He then went looking for mandolin strings in Austin. I recommend Westbank String Shop on Mechaca Road. According to one Google Review, it is “The only place you should take your orchestra string instrument.”

The listed attendance for Sunday’s game was 64,042 — and NFL broadcasts have become adept at making crowds look full. But every now and again, you would get a shot that told the real story. The stadium looked half empty. The Browns are not just bad. They are uninteresting. They have a world-class defense, Deion Sanders’ kid at quarterback, and a seemingly limitless catalog of ways to blow games. If they were a television show, they would have been canceled.

And I suppose they will be canceled at the end of the year, when Kevin Stefanski will (probably?) get fired, Jim Schwartz will (maybe?) be the new head coach, the team will (possibly?) draft a new quarterback, and we’ll try thing thing all over again.

The Chicago Bears, for the moment at least, being the No. 1 seed in the NFC is just utterly wonderful. This Sunday, we’ve got a Bears-Packers game in Green Bay that means everything, and I’m so happy. It’s 1941 all over again. Give me some Sid Luckman and Don Hutson action! …

I obviously loathe the Pittsburgh Steelers — being a lifelong Browns fan, and all — but I’ve also always had a grudging admiration for them. They are, in so many ways, exactly what I’ve wanted the Browns to be. Stable. Consistent. Confident in their path. You know the whole story — three coaches since 1969, one losing record this century, great defense always, eight Super Bowl appearances, and all the rest.

But this offseason, they did something that seemed so utterly un-Steelers-like that it really threw me: They signed Aaron Rodgers. That’s just not something the Steelers do. That’s something the Browns do. That’s something the Jets do. Signing a 42-year-old diva in the unlikely hope that he will spark some long-lost magic in your team feels like the most shortsighted anti-Mike Tomlin move and anti-Steelers move.

Now the Steelers have lost 5 of their last 7, they’re looking bad, the fans are booing mercilessly, and Rodgers is beat up and blaming his receivers for not showing up for film sessions and running the wrong routes. I know there are a lot of Steelers fans who have wanted Mike Tomlin fired for a very long time because they’re sick of barely winning records and playoff losses. We’ll see how the rest of the season goes, of course, but now, those fans might get what they wish.

And if that happens, Tomlin will have gone down in part because he chose Aaron Rodgers over his own personal ethos. …

Hey, there’s a little football buzz going on here in Charlotte as the Carolina Panthers are 7-6 and, for the time being, a half game behind Tampa Bay in the NFC South. The Panthers play the Bucs twice in the final three weeks, so this division is truly wide open.

And the big story is the recent emergence of quarterback Bryce Young. I’d say that more or less everybody in town — at least the folks I have talked with — had given up on Young after his first two seasons. It wasn’t just that he played poorly (though he did — his inaccuracy was particularly worrisome), it was the general Bryce Young thing. He’s listed at 5-foot-10. There is no way he’s 5-foot-10. He’s so small he gives off the “lucky kid who gets to run on the field and retrieve the kicking tee” vibe.

There simply wasn’t any way to watch him scamper about without thinking, “Wait, THAT GUY was the first pick in the draft?”

Occasionally, though, he would do something eye-opening — he’d escape the pocket, keep the play alive, fire a dart to a receiver who had broken free — and you’d go, “Whoa, OK, that was something.” I have spent pretty much my whole life looking for such signs with Browns quarterbacks*, and so now and again I would text Friend of the Blog and noted Panthers fan Tommy Tomlinson something like, “Hey, maybe Bryce Young has something!”

And before Tommy could even text back, Young would throw some gruesome pick-six, and nothing more needed to be said.

But now Young is doing those awesome things a lot more often. I wouldn’t say he’s a finished product as a quarterback — he will still have those games where he looks pretty helpless, like he did against the 49ers two weeks ago — but he pulled off a couple of miracles Sunday against the Rams, and the Panthers pulled off what’s probably the upset of the season so far, and Young has now become must-watch TV, which is not what almost anyone expected.

I know I’ve told the story a few times, but on May 22, 1999 — seemingly out of nowhere — Kansas City Royals first baseman Jeff King retired from baseball. It wasn’t actually out of nowhere at all. King was miserable. He had worked all his life to become one of the best baseball players in the world — he was the No. 1 overall pick in the 1986 draft, he had turned himself into a 30-home run, 100 RBI guy and a Gold Glove-caliber first baseman — but he truly loathed most of it.

“Oh, no, I can’t stand this song,” he once said when the National Anthem began playing before a game.

“What did you say?” Royals manager Tony Muser — a marine — asked pointedly.

“Every time this song plays,” King explained, “I know I’m going to have a bad day.”

It’s a hard thing for so many of us to understand — an excellent ballplayer not loving baseball — but if you think about it, this is the most human thing in the world. We don’t always love the things we are good at. I’ve always suspected that Mickey Mantle didn’t truly love baseball. I know so many terrific former players who don’t watch the game at all now that they’re retired.

All of which brings us to Anthony Rendon.

Rendon, like King, made himself into a fantastic baseball player. He was the sixth player selected in the 2011 draft — just ahead of Francisco Lindor and George Springer, two players who always seem their happiest on a baseball diamond. It wasn’t like that for Rendon. He always found baseball to be long and boring. He always thought the season had, in his own words, “too many dang games.”

He hardly seemed to argue when his old teammate Jonathan Papelbon said that Rendon “hates baseball.”

“It’s never been a top priority for me,” Rendon said. “This is a job. I do this to make a living.”

And yet, when Anthony Rendon was at his best, he was as good as pretty much anybody. His 2019 season is one of the truly great seasons of recent times. He didn’t win the MVP because his WAR wasn’t quite high enough, but he put up 1.000 OPS, led the league in doubles and RBI, he played excellent defense, he played fantastically in the postseason, and his Washington Nationals won the World Series.

It’s a reminder that, for all the cliches, you don’t have to love baseball to be great at it.

That led the Angels, who undoubtedly did no due diligence whatsoever, to give him a seven-year, $245 million deal*, one that has been a fiasco on every possible level as Rendon has been unable to stay healthy and unable to find a love for the game that, honestly, was never there in the first place.

Now, it looks like the Angels are going to restructure the last year of Rendon’s deal, and he’s going to retire. I honestly hope he finds happiness in retirement. He really was a terrific ballplayer.