The Weak In Rock

Is it me, or has professional baseball gone dull?

Try as I might, I cannot seem to care about any of the games I’ve watched so far this season.  It could be that my team, the Oakland Athletics, are about as much fun to watch this season as toenail fungus, that I hate the other Bay Area team, the San Francisco Giants like the recently unemployed hate bill collectors and that my favorite NL team, The Los Angeles Dodgers, are doing their best to win the “expensive AND feeble” prize for 2010.

These are, however, logical explanations, and I’ll have none of those.

I blame Bud Selig, again.

Look, if you love baseball you simply have to hate Bud Light.  The man is a scourge upon the game.  He’s good at coming up with novel tricks to get people temporarily fascinated with the game, but he clearly has no sense of the game’s history or its place in American culture.  He pats himself on the back constantly for creating the most competitive balance in the league that it has ever had.  Blow me, Bud.  Competitive balance?  Really?  Tell that to fans of the Baltimore Orioles, Kansas City Royals, Toronto Blue Jays, Pittsburg Pirates, Montreal Expos/Washington Nationals and Cleveland Indians.  Perennially sucky teams are still sucky. My favorite team, the Oakland A’s, still play in a lousy stadium, with a cheap-ass owner, and basically no solid fanbase, (It could be argued, by the way, that the Giants don’t have a fanbase either.  They merely have a gorgeous ballpark that’s one of the few nice places in San Francisco in which one could spend a summer evening, and with a moderate willingness to field a talented team they manage to semi-contend every year in the least competitive division in baseball, but I digress.).  Bah and feh to your competitive balancing act, Bud.

As I started to say, Selig is good at coming up with gimmicky notions that will put butts in seats temporarily, until the novelty wears off.  Case in point: the Wild Card.  The Wild Card round of the playoffs has given more teams a chance to make it to the World Series.  That might seem like a good thing, except for two big problems I have with it:

1. It rewards mediocrity.
2. It means playing the World Series in weather unsuitable to baseball and to watching baseball.

To the first point - baseball used to reward the best performing teams throughout the season with a trip to the championship.  You won a pennant by having the best record over the course of a long season in your league.  I’d argue that the framers of the baseball constitution, as it were, were pretty brilliant.  Who needs a playoff series to determine the best of each league.  The baseball season is LOOOOOOOONG.  It’s not only an endurance contest, it’s a contest of strategy and planning.  If you’ve filled out your roster with strong talent, built a strong coaching staff and the players gel so they can play collaboratively for six months, you can win it all.  Things got muddled when divisional playoffs entered the picture, but those were really necessitated by the expansion of baseball beyond the model of 8 teams in each league.  Even then there was some natural symmetry to things.  You had a West and East division in each league.  The best teams from each division played each other for the right to go to the championship.

Selig mucked it all up when he realigned the leagues into 3 divisions each.  No more symmetry.  So then adding a Wild Card seems like it would make sense.  It doesn’t.  Why 3 divisions?  No one has ever been able to explain that to me in a way that convinces me of the necessity for it.  Don’t even get me started on there being 14 teams in the AL and 16 in the NL, or the ridiculous mess that is the NL Central.

So, what do we get?  We get two teams in the playoffs every year who really don’t belong there.  They aren’t the best of the lot.  No, they’re the best of the teams that aren’t very good, and it has warped the season.  Instead of playing to win your division, build the best team you can, etc., now there are teams who just try to hang in there, not get hurt and squeak into the playoffs and pray for randomness.  And it works.  Just look at the 2004 World Series as an example.  The 2004 Cardinals were the best team in baseball that year.  The Red Sox were the luckiest team in baseball.  Ugh.  It makes my stomach hurt just thinking about it.

My second point doesn’t really need too much elaboration.  Baseball is a miserable game to play and even more miserable to watch in frigid weather.  I stopped going to Opening “Day” games several years ago because I got sick of freezing my nuts off by the 5th inning.  Baseball is a joy and thrill to behold in warm weather or on a clear night.  Rain, cold, freezing wind and (seriously) snow make baseball intolerable.

To be fair, I don’t solely blame Bud Selig for the post-season going into early winter at both ends of the season.  I’m pretty sure the bigwigs in New York, when they came up with the Wild Card, realized the best way to make it work would have been to shorten the regular season by 15 or 20 games.  The obstacle there was the player’s union, who would have had to agree to players being paid less for working fewer days.  Not a chance of that happening with those short-sited halfwits (yes, I love baseball, but the current configuration of your typical pro baseball player is sort of disgusting in it’s greed and lack of perspective - sort of just like Mr. Selig).

I could go on, and on, and on, detailing the faults of Bud Selig, but I’ll spare you, gentle readers.  I do have one last thought though…

I recently finished reading a fine book by Bruce Weber called As They See ‘Em: A Fan’s Travels In The Land Of Umpires.  Weber spends several years amongst the umps, training with them at umpire school in Florida, working minor league (and even a couple of big league spring training games) and getting them to open up about their profession.  I’ve always done what most fans do, and hated the umpires, and I still sorta do even after learning a lot more about the kind of crap they deal with on a daily basis.  Now, however, I realize that the umps are often probably the only people on the field in a pro baseball game who are actually enjoying themselves.  They love the game, and you would have to in order to endure the hatred, the contempt and the abuse they endure for a job that no one admires and that pays pretty poorly considering its importance to the sport.  Throughout Weber’s book though umpire after umpire says the same thing - for everyone else in baseball, be they coaches, players, owners or league officials, it’s a business.

Maybe that’s why I’m losing interest.  I think I’m beginning to see the businesslike nature of the game come through on the field more and more.  Sure, players still make dramatic diving catches, but there’s a sense that these are mostly because the individual player involved is just trying to get himself on SportsCenter that night (actually, I’ve been told by a couple of seasoned baseball folks that it’s rare that an outfielder will dive for a ball unless he could catch it by simply running under it - diving plays are showboating done to get oneself on TV, which feeds an individual player’s popularity, which leads to All-Star Game ballot placement, which enhances one’s next contract negotiation position).  And yes, we still see monster hits and clutch plays, but it is beginning to look just a bit too mechanical.

As a kid I used to love watching professional basketball.  I pretty much can’t stand it anymore.  The players are too skilled and out-sized for the court.  Again, it’s too mechanical and automatic.  I hope that doesn’t happen to baseball.  Much as I detest the Giants, I love that their star player is a fat guy.  Now that’s the baseball I grew up with.

File this one under the heading of “Idiotic Lengths Parents Will Go To.”

Concerned with potential injuries, a group of “concerned” parents in Toronto have started up a non-contact ice hockey league for their kids.

I’ll let that sink in for a minute.

Yes, you read that correctly.  Non-contact ice hockey.  You can read all about it here.  Gee folks, what’s next?  Non-moving bicycling?   Non-swallowing eating?

Yes, I’m belaboring the point, but I really am getting tired of my fellow parents.  Yes, we love our kids, and we don’t want to see them get hurt.  I certainly don’t think getting is a concussion is a good idea for an 11 year old boy, but it definitely seems like the world of parents is overpopulated by the overly cautious and incredibly confused.  Ice hockey is a full-contact sport, just like American football or rugby.  Take the contact out of ice hockey and you’ve turned it into figure skating with sticks and a puck.  Not only does that sound stupid, it sounds boring.

Personally, I don’t think the problem is with kids playing ice hockey.  Anyone who grew up in Canada or the northernmost parts of the US will tell you that kids have been playing ice hockey forever.  The problem, friends, is the same problem I see with Pop Warner Football and Little League Baseball - too much adult involvement.

Let me explain - games are things that kids play for fun.  When a handful of kids grab a football and head to the nearest park (or street) to play a game fun happens.  Likewise when a bunch of kids take their bats, gloves and a ball to the nearest empty lot or haul their sticks and skates over to the local frozen-over pond.  When a bunch of dads get together and drag their kids to a ballfield, an ice rink or football field, suit them up and commence to yell at them because they’re doing everything “wrong,” there is a distinct absence of fun.  In that circumstance what there is an abundance of are frustrated kids who want to be somewhere else, fancy/expensive uniforms that make the kids look like mini versions of pro sports stars and lots and lots and lots of structure.

What we parents forget way too easily is that our children don’t like structure.  They honestly get plenty of that at school (and they’ll get an ass-load of it in their adult lives).  So why do we insist on enforcing more and more and more of it on them?  Play, including play in the context of games, is by its nature an unstructured activity.  We adults tend to view things like rules, time limits and whatnot as things that are necessary, but kids don’t see the world that way at all.  Rules in a game are just tools to keep things moving (3 strikes in baseball, offsides in hockey or soccer, etc.).  Uniforms are pretty, but they’re really unnecessary to a bunch of kids playing a game - they know who is and isn’t on their team - they’re only necessary for spectators to tell the teams apart.

So, let me try to drag this back to this idiotic attempt by some parents in Toronto to overprotect their kids with a non-contact hockey league.  The problem isn’t that ice hockey is horribly dangerous in and of itself.  Sure, bumps and bruises and maybe even gashes and broken bones will happen from time to time playing a full contact sport, but I think the problem is the parental involvement.  By organizing the league, keeping stats (heck, keeping score), and dressing their kids up like midget NHL players the parents are not setting up games for the kids to play, they’re creating a forum for the kids to play at being NHL players.

What do I mean by this?  Simple - not only are the kids emulating what they see pro hockey players do, namely hit each other really, really hard and at full speed, but because of the stats, the scorekeeping and the other parents acting as spectators there’s pressure to perform and win.  That pressure causes the kids to play like there’s something more on the line than simple personal pride.  And the organized teams, complete with pre-season tryouts and coach drafts, encourage the kids to see not their schoolmates and neighbors in the uniforms of the opposing teams, but adversaries.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I think organized sports are a good thing, but I question their value for kids 11 and younger.  I certainly don’t think that all this organization, structure and parental involvement makes the games very much fun for the kids at all.  So instead of trying to take all the bumps and bruises out of a game, maybe what we ought to be doing is taking ourselves out of the game.

As a side note: One of thing I’ve observed in my own neck of the woods is that there are so many organized sports leagues that for a good portion of the year it’s nearly impossible to find an unoccupied ball field in a park.   So, if you do have a bunch of friends, a pile of gloves, a bat and a ball you’re going to find it pretty tough to find anywhere to pull together a friendly and unstructured game.  Same thing happens during soccer or football season around these parts.

Selig comes out today and says that A-Rod “shamed the game” by using
performance enhancing drugs.

You have got to be kidding me. So, one player, albeit a very high
profile player, brought shame to the game through PED use, but Selig,
all 30 MLB team owners and the half-wits who run the Players’
Association who conspired to keep a lid on PED use for 20 years
because more home runs meant more money for MLB are blameless?

Give me a friggin’ break.

And don’t even get me started on what’s happening to Miguel Tejada,
who is looking at the very real possibility of spending time in
Federal Prison because he used PED’s and lied about it (along with
Selig, Donald Fehr and a host of other jackasses) to Congress.

I have said it before and I will say it again - so what? Professional
sports are entertainment, pure and simple. They are not
“institutions” nor do any other overblown, hyperbolic
characterizations of pro sports deserve anything but a sneer and
derision by anyone with half a functioning brain. We do not threaten
movie & TV actresses with jail time for wearing inflato-bossoms or
claim that Bruce Willis or any other follicularly-challenged actor is
setting a bad example for our youth when they sport a rug in order to
appear more attractive or youthful. No one is horrified that the
crowd scenes in recent epic films like Gladiator are digitally
enhanced rather than populated by real live extras, the way they did
it in the olden days.

This obsession with purity in sports has got to stop. It has to stop
if only because it cannot be reconciled with our cultural preference
for everything else around us being completely fake and
technologically enhanced. We love fake stuff in the country and we
love technology. Heck, we even love technology when it’s applied to
sports. Do you see anyone moaning about the mechanically wound
baseballs that are precisely manufactured to ridiculous industrial
tolerances in automated factories and how that’s detracting from the
game because we don’t use hand-wound baseballs anymore? How about
bats - ever hear anyone complain about the finely machine crafted bats
(other than about the handles breaking too often these days) that
allow a player to whip the bat around with considerably more speed
than Babe Ruth ever had at his disposal? And every year you hear a
new chorus of malcontents who want to replace the live umpires behind
the plate with sophisticated cameras that can precisely call balls and
strikes with no risk of error. We love that shit.

We also love things that are bigger than big and grander than grand.
Stadia full of tens of thousands of people do not pay outrageous
prices to watching low scoring pitchers’ duels (much as I wish they
would, but that’s more about the general stupidity of the modern
baseball fan and is fodder for another post some other time). People
come out to pay piles of money ($20 for ticket + $20 for parking + $8
for a beer + $7 for a hot dog = $55 - and that’s not counting
transportation to and from the game) to watch a ballgame because they
want to see dingers, and if they pay any attention to the pitching at
all they want to see 100 mph fastballs. We are not a nation of people
who appreciate nuance and subtlety.

The shame here is that the old white men in suits are wagging their
accusing fingers at players for doing precisely what the league
bosses, union heads and team owners wanted them to do - hit the ball
farther, throw it harder and break some records.

On the one hand I’m depressed at the disintegration of print journalism as the result of the economic non-viability of the newspaper business model.  On the other hand we have this whole Michael Phelps bullshit bong brouhaha that makes me eager for the demise of what passes for journalism today.

I’d like, very much, for someone to explain to me what public interest has been served by outing Phelps as a guy who stuck a bong up to his face at a party (because, absent any blood tests proving anything else, that’s all we know for sure that he did).  Even being generous, there’s no public interest served by labeling him as a drug user.  Plenty of halfwits will argue that “he broke the law” or “set a bad example for kids who look up to him.”  I call bullshit on both counts.

Let me ask this question - if the photo in question was of Michael Phelps hoisting a can of Bud instead of smoking bud would any news outlet have run it?  The answer is no, and the reason the answer is no is because our national attitude towards intoxicants is illogical, hypocritical and blatantly stupid.  America isn’t at war against drugs.  Americans love drugs.  We ingest 1.5 cups of coffee per day, with about 135 mg of caffeine per cup.  Read up on your caffeine folks.  It’s a powerful and extremely addictive drug and it’s not entirely benign.  I had to eliminate caffeine from my diet 7 years ago in order to correct a serious medical condition (the details of which I’d rather keep to myself).  And I’m not even touching on the amount of caffeinated sodas consumed per capita in the US each year.

Then, of course, there’s alcohol.  Sure, there are a fair number of teatotaling Americans who would tsk tsk Phelps for drinking booze as much as for taking a bong hit, but generally speaking we Yanks love our hooch.  We’ve built elaborate consumer industries around alcohol, not to mention entire segments of popular culture that are utterly dependant on the presence of liquor to sustain themselves.  If you like popular music you can thank the distilled beverage industry for heavily subsidizing rock, country and jazz and making their continued practice possible.  Confused?  Let me explain - live music venues depend on the revenue generated by the consumption of beer, wine and spirits to sustain themselves.  Without the money brought in through selling drinks none of these venues would stay open and the opportunities for live music fans and people who just like to dance to pre-recorded music would evaporate.

I can’t leave this subject behind without talking about prescription pharmaceuticals.  Mood altering prescription chemicals make up a gigantic segment of the pharma business.  The generation that once gobbled illicit chemical mood alterers at outdoor rock festivals now consumes larger quantities of compounds that have many of the same properties of their hippy precursers.

Yup.  We Americans love our dope.  But in typically puritanical hypocritical fashion we only approve of people who get stoned or stimulated in very specific ways.  Business people who get jacked on caffeine every day = fine.  Bars full of tottering boozers = no problem.  Suburban tract homes full of mood-altered residents funneling their savings into big pharma = it’s the American way.  One of the greatest Olympic athletes in history sucks down a bongload with some friends at a party = he’s a bad example who needs to be punished.

Again, bullshit.

The real message of that photo, and the teaching moment, if you want to call it that, is that when someone works hard to acheive great things he needs to chill every now and then, and most people who are under great pressure and stress need a chemically induced nudge to successfully take the edge off.  Instead of telling our kids that Michael Phelps is a bad guy and a disappointment we ought to tell our kids that what he did was very little different from the successful business person who caps off his or her day with a Martini.  And then follow that with explaining that yes, pot is currently illegal, but it was not always so.

Instead of telling our kids that some drugs are evil and some are good, which is really what we do as a society today, is to tell them that all drugs are potentially dangerous and should be approached with caution and care.   Instead of preaching this ridiculous and blatantly false story that gets sold in the D.A.R.E. program that if you ingest intoxicants your life will get messed up (a story that most kids figure out is nonsense, by the way, which leads them to mistrust adults and to discount and toss out good advice that comes from the same parents and teachers as equivalent manipulative bullshit), we should be using someone like Michael Phelps to say, “in spite of that crap they’re teaching you in school it should be obvious to you that Michael Phelps is not a loser or a failure, so it is possible to imbibe on occassion without it ruining your life.”

Of course that’s a complex and layered story to tell, and we Americans are getting progressively worse at complexity as times goes on.  But I can dream, can’t I?

Technorati Tags: Michael Phelps, bong

Ok, so with the momentous inauguration of Barack Obama as the new President just hours away how do I observe it?  By being a smartassed wiseacre, of course.

Naturally, Deadspin beat me to it.  Here’s their list of the Top 10 Ways Sports Can Improve Over The Next Four Years:

1. All youth basketball players must be taught to play man-to-man defense. Zone defense to be banned at any level below college, and coaches must be trained in the fine, lost art of footwork, blocking out, man-ball vision and taking the charge. This will make America strong once again.

2. Dick Vitale, Billy Packer and Joe Buck to be set adrift in the Pacific in a dinghy with only a sextant and a jug of rum.

3. Excessive NFL celebrations not only allowed, but encouraged. And scored by the officials.

4. Soccer gets only a certain number of chances to catch on with Americans, like with Baseball Hall of Fame eligibility. One more shot in 2010, and if it doesn’t take, that’s it.

5. Curb on stadium financing; no more funding elaborate playgrounds for the rich with public money.

6. Creation of a Supreme Court for Athletics. Kige Ramsey is the first Chief Justice.

7. Brett Favre must vacillate on retirement for at least six more seasons. This will keep many newspapers in business and save thousands of jobs.

8. U.S. to withdraw all military from Middle East; invade nations only to stop bullfighting.

9. Wii Olympics to replace regular Olympics.

10. Al Davis to be handcuffed to Richard Simmons for one year for our amusement.

I especially like the last one.  I’d give that old coot about three minutes before even being in close proximity to Richard Simmons would cause him to keel over, thus ending all once and future Raider fans’ long nightmare.

I’m also very much in favor of #3.  I find it beyond absurd that showboating in the end zone is frowned upon as much as it is.  When T.O. called his mom from the end zone I thought it was one of the coolest things I’d ever seen any sports figure do.