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In all honesty, a large part involves not wanting to see another Portland Timbers great dissolve into a shadow of himself. Watching Diego Valeri play last season, but also mostly not play…I’m still not sure I can find the right word for it, but I’ll attempt an analogy: it felt like watching your dad reach a point where he can’t do things. Call it the unsettling feeling of mourning someone who’s still alive, and all that can mean.
But, no, I’m also not thrilled to read anything about a “medical condition” in Sebastian Blanco’s knee. And those two anxieties are very much related.
Anyone who follows this site knows I’ve been obsessing over the Timbers’ inevitable transition season since 2018*…which, factually, was never so immediately “inevitable” as demonstrated by two trips to MLS Cup between then and now. So, yes, I’m prone to worry, glass half-empty to a point that might make me an unreliable narrator, but, that transition is coming. Dammit. I’ll get a Yahtzee one of these rolls… [* I just searched my old posts and discovered the first time I talked about any kind of off-field transition (as opposed to the on-field tactical choice) was at the end of 2020…so maybe I’ve talked about it less than I thought.]
That another, smaller part of me felt a kind of relief at the idea of Blanco moving on seems implied in the above. Holding that dodgy knee in the back of my mind made the length and uncertainty of the negotiations read in such a way that helped me make peace with it. It’s not that I didn’t see the rumors of a potential deal with Real Salt Lake (think that was the only one), so much as thinking that the Timbers letting him go meant Blanco couldn’t possibly come back to haunt the team as some revenant dressed in claret and cobalt. About that...
“In an age where contract negotiations are becoming increasingly more public and visible, and players’ actions on social media are scrutinized to the nth degree. This raised some eyebrows and caused panic amongst Portland fans immediately.”
That’s from Sam Svilar’s January 3rd Stumptown Footy post on The Medical Condition queering the negotiations and that was another part of this. I place a highly naïve value on transparency, or, from the other direction, I hate feeling like I’m being spun or even manipulated - or, in this case, resenting the idea that I'll forever be denied a clear read on a situation due to the way negotiations work in spectator sports and sporitng culture in general...I mean, I just want to know. Anyway, I started capitalizing “The Medical Condition” in the spirit of one of that prick Donald Rumsfeld’s “known unknowns.” We all know there’s something wrong with Blanco’s knee, only without knowing either the degree of it, its potential to fail again, and on what timeline - as in, how long do we have, doc? - and we don’t know whether multiple opinions exist on the question (e.g., did Blanco’s team present the Timbers with a second opinion?). It’s possible, even likely, no one knows any of that with anything approaching certainty. At this point, Timbers fans can only know and accept the risk of the situation.
Timbers fans also know that Eryk Williamson has had issues with his knee. Jaroslaw Niezgoda, meanwhile, was brought to the team on the understanding he may fall apart at any moment, or at least that’s the feeling I get. And, against the absence of evidence, Diego Chara can’t go on forever.
Even as I see Chara making one hell of a fullback in his last season or two (I’m weirdly excited about this, honestly), I see all the above factors as an accumulation of risk. Sebastian Blanco’s two-year deal just constitutes a particularly heightened and personalized version of that larger phenomenon.
I don’t know how much Blanco will play over the next two seasons, or the extent to which the Timbers will need to rely on him over that same period. Questions about both his age and his knee would have existed, even absent The Medical Condition, and those will inevitably revive the sharp, unpleasant and disturbingly recent controversy over the wisdom of starting Blanco in MLS Cup 2021. I, like you, see new players coming in - e.g., David Ayala, but I lump Santiago Moreno into that group as well - as well as long-time players stepping up - e.g., Dairon Asprilla and (hopefully) Cristhian Paredes and (maybe?) Zac McGraw (if other options fail) - and I’ll expand on this in a later post, but, to point to the obvious, none of those players offer a like-for-like replacement for Blanco. Of all the players listed above, I’d call Williamson the closest, but a lot of miles can exist between one thing and another and still be count as “closest.” They’ll be a different team after he goes and however he does.
The best of all possible worlds will see Blanco have two more great and healthy years in green and gold; for what it’s worth, I’d gladly take even a middling possible world that gives him a great 2022 plus a 2023 as the super-sub that Valeri never became. So long as he gets on the field, and in reasonable health, I can’t see Blanco giving anything less than everything he has in the tank on any given day. Whatever doubts I have attach to the circumstances, not the player. None of that stops the anxiety around the specific and general accumulation of risk the Timbers currently carry on its roster.
To bring the thought full circle, I appreciated the realities of Valeri’s situation even if a year too early - again, his 2020 season bordered on heroic - but it still ended in a way that I’ve neither seen nor experienced in all my years following sports. And that leaves me anxious about Blanco’s future in a freshly unsettling way. I’ve seen plenty of essays that treat sports as a metaphor for life, but hope for the best and prepare for the worst took in a new meaning this off-season.
But, no, I’m also not thrilled to read anything about a “medical condition” in Sebastian Blanco’s knee. And those two anxieties are very much related.
Anyone who follows this site knows I’ve been obsessing over the Timbers’ inevitable transition season since 2018*…which, factually, was never so immediately “inevitable” as demonstrated by two trips to MLS Cup between then and now. So, yes, I’m prone to worry, glass half-empty to a point that might make me an unreliable narrator, but, that transition is coming. Dammit. I’ll get a Yahtzee one of these rolls… [* I just searched my old posts and discovered the first time I talked about any kind of off-field transition (as opposed to the on-field tactical choice) was at the end of 2020…so maybe I’ve talked about it less than I thought.]
That another, smaller part of me felt a kind of relief at the idea of Blanco moving on seems implied in the above. Holding that dodgy knee in the back of my mind made the length and uncertainty of the negotiations read in such a way that helped me make peace with it. It’s not that I didn’t see the rumors of a potential deal with Real Salt Lake (think that was the only one), so much as thinking that the Timbers letting him go meant Blanco couldn’t possibly come back to haunt the team as some revenant dressed in claret and cobalt. About that...
“In an age where contract negotiations are becoming increasingly more public and visible, and players’ actions on social media are scrutinized to the nth degree. This raised some eyebrows and caused panic amongst Portland fans immediately.”
That’s from Sam Svilar’s January 3rd Stumptown Footy post on The Medical Condition queering the negotiations and that was another part of this. I place a highly naïve value on transparency, or, from the other direction, I hate feeling like I’m being spun or even manipulated - or, in this case, resenting the idea that I'll forever be denied a clear read on a situation due to the way negotiations work in spectator sports and sporitng culture in general...I mean, I just want to know. Anyway, I started capitalizing “The Medical Condition” in the spirit of one of that prick Donald Rumsfeld’s “known unknowns.” We all know there’s something wrong with Blanco’s knee, only without knowing either the degree of it, its potential to fail again, and on what timeline - as in, how long do we have, doc? - and we don’t know whether multiple opinions exist on the question (e.g., did Blanco’s team present the Timbers with a second opinion?). It’s possible, even likely, no one knows any of that with anything approaching certainty. At this point, Timbers fans can only know and accept the risk of the situation.
Timbers fans also know that Eryk Williamson has had issues with his knee. Jaroslaw Niezgoda, meanwhile, was brought to the team on the understanding he may fall apart at any moment, or at least that’s the feeling I get. And, against the absence of evidence, Diego Chara can’t go on forever.
Even as I see Chara making one hell of a fullback in his last season or two (I’m weirdly excited about this, honestly), I see all the above factors as an accumulation of risk. Sebastian Blanco’s two-year deal just constitutes a particularly heightened and personalized version of that larger phenomenon.
I don’t know how much Blanco will play over the next two seasons, or the extent to which the Timbers will need to rely on him over that same period. Questions about both his age and his knee would have existed, even absent The Medical Condition, and those will inevitably revive the sharp, unpleasant and disturbingly recent controversy over the wisdom of starting Blanco in MLS Cup 2021. I, like you, see new players coming in - e.g., David Ayala, but I lump Santiago Moreno into that group as well - as well as long-time players stepping up - e.g., Dairon Asprilla and (hopefully) Cristhian Paredes and (maybe?) Zac McGraw (if other options fail) - and I’ll expand on this in a later post, but, to point to the obvious, none of those players offer a like-for-like replacement for Blanco. Of all the players listed above, I’d call Williamson the closest, but a lot of miles can exist between one thing and another and still be count as “closest.” They’ll be a different team after he goes and however he does.
The best of all possible worlds will see Blanco have two more great and healthy years in green and gold; for what it’s worth, I’d gladly take even a middling possible world that gives him a great 2022 plus a 2023 as the super-sub that Valeri never became. So long as he gets on the field, and in reasonable health, I can’t see Blanco giving anything less than everything he has in the tank on any given day. Whatever doubts I have attach to the circumstances, not the player. None of that stops the anxiety around the specific and general accumulation of risk the Timbers currently carry on its roster.
To bring the thought full circle, I appreciated the realities of Valeri’s situation even if a year too early - again, his 2020 season bordered on heroic - but it still ended in a way that I’ve neither seen nor experienced in all my years following sports. And that leaves me anxious about Blanco’s future in a freshly unsettling way. I’ve seen plenty of essays that treat sports as a metaphor for life, but hope for the best and prepare for the worst took in a new meaning this off-season.
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