I think Don can answer but okay, it’s an expression for doing some math to figure something out…what needs to be figured out?
I’m glad that I could help. The idea of the MLS Wooden Spoon (and even the name itself) has been around for much earlier than 2015 - I even remember it being talked about a lot in a semi-joking, semi-mocking manner since shortly before the start of The Golden Age. It was simply in or around 2015 that someone finally decided to create a physical trophy of it. GO SAN JOSE EARTHQUAKES!!! -G
Objectively speaking, we’re the worst team in the league this year, and we’ve accomplished that more times than any other team since MLS began, back in 1996. No calculation required. Y’all might be overcomplicating this, but it’s really simple. You can crunch the numbers all day long and we’ll still have the most wooden spoons. Want to guess why?
Fisher has won 3 but this last one, man…we’ve been through some crap seasons but 2024 takes the cake.
No one's trying to "over-complicate" anything. We all get that we're last and were very, very bad this year. The only holdup is your trying to nitpick "crunch the numbers". It's just an expression. Nothing to see here.
actually the only hold up was you butting in when you didn’t need to and talking nonsense, at least that’s what I come up with when I crunch the numbers.
There was no need to take issue with Don G saying finishing last is an objective "crunch the numbers" thing. And forums like this are not private conversations. We're "allowed" to comment on someone else's post. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Everyone knows how bad we were this season. There's no reason to waste time arguing semantics.
I wasn’t taking issue, I was simply trying to understand what he meant, and then you butted in, and here we are, and I’m still not sure what he meant. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Sometimes it’s best if you just let people speak for themselves like for instance when the question wasn’t addressed to you.¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I meant the last place team is defined purely by data. Ostler didn’t need to muddy matters by referencing the Spoon. But he was trying to be cute rather than to report. The Quakes were a straw man for his separate agenda. He doesn’t give a single f#ck about Quakes fans. (Fisher’s A’s didn’t finish last this year. By the way).
I thought it was obvious what he meant so I weighed in on it, which as far as I can tell is legal and perfectly normal and usual on this forum. This is not exactly a forum where people wait around and hold fire for fear of "butting in" on little tea pary conversations.
I have some meetings and you guys start arguing about semantics. We could crunch all kinds of numbers to assess the many ways that the team is bad. Goals allowed? Goals scored? Games won? Points earned? But it certainly isn't necessary to do any kind of calculations to see that no matter which metric you're standardly deviating, we come in near or at the bottom. It's not in any way entertaining.
Sigh... There's no argument about semantics or which way we're bad or about whether or not we're bad. Don wrote - all you have to do is to "crunch the numbers" to see how bad we are, which of course was not meant to be taken literally. It's just an expression. That is all.
When exactly did we cement the wooden spoon this year? I couldn’t tell when that article was written.