(no subject)
I'm a bad sports fan. I know this, and still I watch them anyway. I'm the equivalent of the cafeteria catholic, the fair-weather patriot; the front-runner, as some old friends of mine used to say.
My interest in baseball only goes so far as the first, maybe second layer of the pop strata does; whom is on the team I like and they can do, and then on teams I don't like, and then who is in the playoffs and World Series, and who are the big names they keep mentioning on Sports Center, a show I only watch when the team I like is in it. Now that I think about it, this is roughly the equivalent of my interest in the Catholic church. Maybe if my mother made me attend Mets games once a week my relationship with baseball would be as fraught as it is with Catholicism. Whatever; the point is what I find interesting about them isn't necessarily the action on the ground. I like that it is this purely superficial thing that tie people of different backgrounds together, ergo transcending its own superficiality, in ways both profound and silly.
And I like it when the Mets are winning, and I dislike it when they're losing and my attentions fall elsewhere. I also have little idea of the other rosters on the team until they cross paths with New York, and I don't see any reason why I should. For this I'm a bad sports fan. A true sports fan, of course, is someone who loves their hometown and all its professional teams so much that they hates half the athletes on them and all but maybe half-a-dozen of his fellow regional sports fans, and none of them with the amount of vitriol and contempt that they hold for managers and coaches.
The true sports fan can rattle off an endless array of truly mind numbing statistics, unbelievably arcane and difficult to fathom. I have problems explaining the difference between a slider and a curve ball; these people can not only explain it to you, but they can say that that was the pitch that The Pitcher Who Should've Been Taken Out (or his close cousin, The Pitcher Who Shouldn't Have Relieved His Well-Performing Predecessor) has struck out Unlikely Slugger Who Was Merely Lucky 15 of 22 times, and 2 of 4 times with runners in scoring positions, BUT that Slugger was 6 for 7 during night games with three home rums, and with the wind blowing out to right and Slugger being a decent pull hitter when batting from the right side of the plate (career .368 on night games on the east coast in April when the temperature is over fifty degrees), Pitcher should never have thrown that pitch if he was even in the game at all, so it was all a fluke, but mark their words, Pitcher won't make the same mistake twice, even if it means getting their ace back in the rotation from injury or picking one up before the trading deadline, and besides Slugger always has a hot April only to lose it down the stretch.
I have a love hate relationship with these people. I sort of envy them. I like the fact that sports encourages one to disbelieve your own eyes: the fact that your favorite team's heartbreaking defeat can be explained away with an impressive array of statistics, and it doesn't really matter, because really, if you think about it, they should have won. Religion has nothing on sports in this regard, because all they ask is that you believe things you can't see based on evidence you can't possibly verify. Jesus Christ would have to come down, perform a spate of miracles and tell Fundamentalists everywhere that the dinosaurs were real, evolution exists, and He was more interested in poverty than sexuality for this analogy to work. "They're not saying 'crucify him,' they're saying 'Jesus! Try him!'"
But like all zealots, they're infuriating, and borderline sociopathic. Yankee fans still chant "1918" at Red Sox fans three years after they became the first baseball team in Major League history to drop a series from being up 0-3, and being three outs away (on two separate occasions) to having the whole thing sewn up. Delusional? Pathetic? Baseball Tonight. Of course, now that Johnny Damon, a thorn in the Yankees side that whole series, plays for New York everything's all right ... except in Boston, where his jersey was burned two years after delivering what was so long denied the city of Boston, a World Championship flag. Damon could probably have raped and killed several people in Boston during the winter of 2004, and gotten away with it ... but now he's in pinstripes, and forget all that.
How could you not find this phenomena fascinating?
Here's a case example of a perfect baseball argument. This was a bad weekend to be a baseball fan in the NYC area. The Mets dropped 2 of 3 to the Braves, including a heartbreaking rubber game on Sunday when they were up by three. The Yankees, in turn, were swept in Fenway Park for the first time since the 1980s, giving up something like five leads, most notably by three runs in the bottom of the 8th inning during Friday's game. Embarrassment all around, right?
Depends on who you asked. Yankee fans pointed out that the starters were fill ins and that, even though they lost, they took the Red Sox starters for a ride, so once they get their regular rotation back, it'll be a different ball club. Boston still sucks. As for Mets fans ... let me tell my story. I've never been one to call for the manager's dismissal, but I might bring murder charges against Willie Randolph and Shawn Green; the two of them took at least five years off of my life yesterday afternoon. Shawn Green missed a fly ball he could've caught, denying fellow Irishman Ambiroix Burgos a 1-2-3 inning. Willie Randolph then brought in untested rookie Scott Schoenweis, who proceeded to give up a walk and a home run. Three run lead, just like that - gone. So Mets fans could say, Green catches the ball, we win the game, Randolph overmanages, blah blah ... we still have depth in the line up, and our bull pen, well, Guillerma Mota will be back come June, so it's okay.
Then the conversation got funny: who should be more embarrassed? Yankee fans tried to pull off their historic sweep, blowing four run leads and giving up four consecutive home runs (itself tying a major league record) in Boston's own house, after winning five in the same place last year, as no big deal; but the Mets really should've won a game against a line up with a depth perhaps matched only by themselves, a pitcher posting Cy Young caliber numbers, and a solid bullpen. Likewise, Yankee fans could point to their own injury prone team walking in. The bottom line, of course, is that both teams really should've won one more game than they did - and it's the Manager's fault they didn't. (It's no coincidence, of course, that Atlanta and Boston fans don't think anything of other managers mistakes. I certainly don't. In fact I remember being completely shocked about the huge controversy surrounding John McNamara's decision to pull Clemens from game six of the 86 Series, among other supposed misfires.)
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None of this is what I meant to say and it's now almost two hours after I started babbling.
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But I like that sports provides a way to deal with the harshness of life, moreso than even the good guy/bad guy aspect of it. It's predicting the future; better, it's a way of casting a lien out to the future. As long as the Mets win tomorrow, nothing counts. And maybe we don't die.