The rant in question is directed at tight end Vernon Davis, and shared by every unfortunate SOB who drafted Davis in their fantasy league.
But still... one teeny, tiny point. Mike, if you want winners, why the hell did you take the job in San Francisco?
It's Friday Tangent Time. Y'all have been warned.
A train ride on regional rail is mostly dull. People get into their newspaper, their handheld, their laptop and 95% of us don't talk, especially if it's an early hour or a car that isn't cramped and jammed. If it's late and/or packed, you might get some grousing or jerk moves, but it's just a grind commute; it doesn't need a lot of chatter. It's actually kind of nice, in that you can, as I do, get some work or reading done.
The last 5% will teach you something, as anything will, if you give it a chance. (Mostly just patience, but hey, take the teaching and move on.)
What has happened on my train in the last week has been a lot of guys drinking from brown bags. Well dressed guys, who don't seem entirely comfortable with drinking in public like this. Drinking because, well, they are scared senseless by what's been going on in the economy, specifically the markets and how it relates to their continued employment, and need something to take the edge off. (And yes, it's been far from a random occurrence. So far this week, I've seen a half dozen people in this boat. It's A Movement.)
This is, of course, as unsettling as you want to make it, but on the off chance that you are somehow reading this blog and thinking that life is more or less peachy, that no change is needed, and that times are not bad... um, not so much.
Hard times, are, of course, relative. The people who are downing brew or stronger at 6pm on a weekday as they wonder who in the office will be shown the door tomorrow -- assuming, on some level, that it wasn't and/or won't be them -- don't appear to be starving, or deprived of electricity, or at any real danger of being sold into slavery. By the standards of, oh, 90%+ of the world's population, they're doing swell.
But that doesn't mean that today, and this week, is a hell of a lot more worrisome than last, or the month before that, or that they've got any real hope that the holidays this year will be one to remember fondly. Or that retirement and all of the other things that people hope, plan and work for haven't just entered Commode Land.
In times like this, you can put your blinders on, focus on the work that's at hand, and try to ignore the feeling that you're being led to the killing flood. Or you can drink on trains and become paralyzed by the process and the fear. Neither choice is all that encouraging, really.
Or you can do what I do, and think too much about how to fill the bloghole, whether your NFL picks are sound, and who you should play in your fantasy football leagues. Ah, sweet sweet distraction, my own personal 40 ounce body bag...
The casual reader -- not that we have any casual readers; I know that all of you recite these words in weekly prayer group meetings -- will detect a faint touch of hostility towards Mr. Kornheiser in today's link. You might have to read it a little closely, but on further review, I'm pretty sure it's there.
Now, as a fan of the Eagles, Sixers and A's, I like to think that I can endure a fair amount of annoyance. I'm also the father to two little girls, and while my patience with them is not infinite, it does exist, and there's more of it than there used to be. A lot more.
So why, exactly, does this chancre sore still rankle, 19 hours after the Cowboys edged the Eagles?
I'm really not that upset by the loss; it was disappointing, perhaps, but not world-ending. I have no great goat for the Eagles, other than a continuing worry that the game has passed Brian Dawkins by, and that the game was never even in the same area code as Sean Considine. But that's for another day and post. Right here and now, we're going to continue to examine the toothache that is Kornheiser, and to a lesser but not very much lesser extent, all NFL telecasts.
When I lived in Northern California, I had some nice neighbors who had been on the block for coming up on two decades. We watched their dog and swam in their pool, and they were terrific people. Like nearly everyone else in the Bay Area, they were originally from somewhere else -- in this case, Wisconsin. They were also diehard Packer fans, and used to have season tickets at Lambeau.
You can imagine my surprise when I heard that they were looking to move to... Southern California. Because the Bay Area winters (in which the weather rarely drops below, say, 45, and it never slows at low elevation, and you can enjoy nearly perfect weather for up to 10 months of the year) had gotten too cold for them, Lambeau Past Be Damned.
The point is that with age does not come a thicker skin, or at least, not always. It also comes with the wisdom to realize that you don't have to put up with something you don't like.
Now, I don't know a single person who is really enthused about a set of NFL announcers. Do you? Is there anyone out there who you're really excited to hear call a game, or is it just a matter of which particular moron you get to avoid? Yay, it's the Fox #1 team -- no Tony Siragusa! Yay, it's the Fox #2 team -- no Troy Aikman! Etc. (SNF/MNF, of course, offers no escape, unless you consider double-header telecasts and the Mike and Mike and Mike gigglefest a relief.)
So your options are to figure out a way to simulcast the radio feed (which is looking more and more appetizing, if a little bit Pravda-esque), or pipe in the good Westwood One radio telecasts of Harry Kalas and Marv Albert... and, um, why?
Seriously, NFL, why?
You can telecast the game into Spanish. How about giving us an actual football option -- not some half-assed hybrid of Sports Entertainment, but an actual, focused, not dumbed down for the laypeople feed. I don't care who delivers it. I might even pay extra. I'm begging.
Because the simple fact of the matter is that three-plus hours is an eternity of time to spend with people who you would not piss on if they were on fire. And a league that makes its fans endure that routinely... runs the risk of fans realizing that they have other options. Many, in fact.
Be warned: this is an Inside Baseball blog moment. If you skip, I won't cry.
FTT's ads are provided by YardBarker, who act as a network placement service for many of us in Blogfrica. They ask that we refrain from the potty mouth, and in return, they supply us with the ads that you see on the site.
Yardbarker ad revenue keeps me in gum, and motivates me to keep filling the bloghole like a real live professional, because I am a greedy little black duck. But since FTT is more like a persistent hobby instead of an occupation, I feel pretty independent of the advertisers, if you catch my drift.
Yardbarker also produces a daily newsletter to their subscribers, highlighting some of the more notable pieces that they've seen in the network. FTT has gotten the occasional link from it, and we're always appreciative. It's also a nice little tool to keep an eye on what other sites are doing.
In yesterday's issue, there was a link for a fellow blogger and friend of the site. I won't name him, for fear of Getting Into A Pissing Match. Anyway, he (mostly) went off the sports reservation with a gleeful spew targeted at Keith Olbermann.
Olbermann is, of course, the ex-SportsCenter anchor who now irritates the right wing on a highly rated MSNBC show, "Countdown." He also appears on NBC's "Sunday Night Football", which I guess makes him fair game for a sports site. It's a reach, but so be it.
As Olbermann's show is the highest rated thing in MSNBC's history, Olbermann has gotten more and more to do, including the SNF gig and a prominent position at the Democratic National Convention. He's also become the target for claims of media bias, in the eternal right-wing narrative of how the media is so very, very unfair to them. Mean, even. (I'm leaving the whole Faux News Experience, and a lifetime of grievances, alone right now, in a doomed attempt to stay on point.)
Olbermann made news himself by missing the Republican National Convention (the reasons why were the subject of my friend's rant), and then getting taken off MSNBC's election night coverage, along with fellow network personality Chris Matthews.
Now, it's fine if my friend from the other side wants to go off into a non-sports tangent. I probably do it a half dozen times a month at least without y'all seeming to be too offended; at least I'm not making you suffer with a creepy love for femme-y soap operas that show me to be a borderline statutory rape candidate.
(Seriously, Lemur Boys... please, for the love of God, stop talking about the new 90210 or whatever Real World is happening right now. I desperately do not care about what you masturbate to.)
If you like a certain writer, you give them a little leeway; you give them the trust to take you the long way from time to time.
But I am curious as all get out as to why the Yard decided to link to it... especially as my Friend From the Other Side's day job is to, well, work as a political operative.
Getting his anti-Olbermann dig into the populace counts as a point for His Side, and a relatively effective one as well, since it got publicity in a key demographic that has a large number of undecided voters.
Now, if a blogger wants to go off topic into politics, so be it. We all fill our hole some way or the other. If they want to drag their day job into their work, that's their right as well.
But when a publisher wants to give air to that, it's advocating one side over the other... and making me wonder all kinds of unkind things as to their motivation for doing so.
Which isn't good, whether I agree with them or not. And it's especially not good with so many of us having raw feelings over the outcome of the next election, no matter how it goes down, and with said election less than two months away.
So, um, YB? Please don't give me any further reason to lump you into my Compromised Media pile, OK?
And as a side note... the Lemur decided this week that it's also sports to tell you how Cindy McCain enjoys racing cars.
This election can't come fast enough, folks...
There's a pretty fascinating piece in the NYT today (you will have to register to read it, but it's not a bad trade-off) about the role that society plays in gender differentiation. It's mostly about how less industrial societies have fewer gender differences than people in more industrial societies, since they are doing more similar jobs. But where it matters to us in this little corner of the blogosphere is how it relates to sports.
Running is mentioned as the perfect test case. It's a nearly universal sporting activity, and what you'd expect to happen -- i.e., males to be more competitive, and have greater separation from best to worst then females -- turns out to be the case on a damn near universal basis -- even in places where men and women have the same roles and jobs and fewer pronounced differences between genders. So there is, as per the study, an enduring "sex difference in competitiveness."
Now, I realize this is all a little dry, but the takeaway is this... in my lifetime, there has been an increasing amount of interest in women's team sports, with folks trying to get people interested in events like soccer and basketball.
It hasn't really worked from a ratings standpoint, with the occasional burst/fluke moment like the US women's soccer team, or the compromised effort that is beach volleyball, where you've got prurient interest adding to the competition. (I'm going to avoid talking about the individual events like golf, tennis, figure skating and gymnastics for the most part, because those seem to be more about individual personalities.)
Many people have posited that this is because of a lack of coverage, or the older generations not having grown up with the endeavor, or some other more nefarious plot, mostly involving patriarchy.
But what this study is showing you is that, on some level, there's just less variance in performance, independent of the culture. You can give me any reason you like as to why that is, but it doesn't really matter; the sun rises in the East, water is wet, and men have greater competitive differences.
Strong variances make for better viewing. When teams and athletes are similar in abilities and performance, you don't have upsets, drama, storylines; you have parity on an individual competitor basis, which is to say you've got a lot of the middle muddling about.
Sports is about seeing who is better, and feeling that the differences are not utterly random, and that the differences matter. Women's sports simply have less of that; you can juice it up all you like with all kinds of reverse engineering and marketing, but it is what it is.
And I wish it weren't so, being the father of daughters and someone who feels the odd twinge of guilt over the fact that my kids don't see Dad watching girls play sports. Moving on...
by Tracer Bullet, Staff Writer
I'm probably just being a prick, but I really can't stand the NFL Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony.
Make no mistake, I love all things pigskin-related and the Induction Ceremony is kind of the first event of the new season, so it is a good thing. But while I enjoy seeing old clips and hearing the speeches, I really don't need Chris Berman's Foghorn Leghorn act or Adam Schefter's oily charm to provide perspective.
Likewise, why the hell is there a studio team there to comment on the thing? It's old men giving speeches. That's the whole thing. NFLN could have save about $3 million if they'd just hired me.
It might be different if anybody ever had anything interesting to say. Steve Mariucci would struggle to find fault with Stalin, let alone dare to suggest that each inductee could possibly be something other than the greatest football player who ever drew breath, the finest patriot since Captain America and a combination of the best qualities of Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Seka.
I am sick and damn tired of all the Hall of Famers pretending to be the damned Brady Bunch. I realize that these guys were all great players (yes, I suppose we have to say this of Art Monk, too) but some of them hate each other and they've hated each other for decades. You can't get some tape of a curmudgeon like Chuck Bednarik saying foul things about Michael Irvin? What the hell is that huge production team good for then?
Nope, I want a bit of edge injected into the proceedings. I want someone to serve as Designated Bastard who'll say bad things about the inductees. I don't even care if he says anything fair or even accurate, so long as he's not boring. Lucky for you, I'm just the man for the job.
Fred Dean -- I always get you confused with Fred Dryer. Which means two things 1) you're career wasn't all that memorable and 2) I'd rather watch "Hunter" than watch you play football.
Darrell Green -- Playing 20 years at CB in the NFL is very impressive. But lots of guys work hard jobs for a really long time to make their child support payments too and nobody has built a Hall of Fame for them.
Art Monk -- A Hall of Famer because somebody in the selection meeting stood up and said, "Look, nobody wants this guy except those idiots from Washington and they'll keep ranting and screaming until we finally break down and let him in. So we can spend four hours debating this every year for the next 15 years, or we can just let him in now and go to lunch."
Emmitt Thomas -- Are you kidding? A 1-2 record as interim coach for on of the worst teams in modern history is hardly worthy of the Hall of Fame. Madden probably didn't deserve to go in as a coach either but at least he won a Super Bowl. Thomas has one more win as a head coach than I do and I spent the entire 2007 season on my couch and furthermore . . . What? One of the best CBs of his era? Feh. Dan Pastorini, Archie Manning and Dennis Shaw were starting quarterbacks during Thomas' career -- how hard could it have been?
Andre Tippett -- An integral member of the Patriots 1985-86 Super Bowl team -- the team that allowed the Bears to roll up 46 points in what was the most lopsided Super Bowl loss up to that point. Hey, Steve Grogan and Tony Eason were integral members of that team too and nobody is fitting them for an ugly sport coat stolen from a Century 21 office in Van Nuys. Nobody with the taint of that loss deserves to be in the HOF. Though I do think his 1971 record "Black Moses" is a masterpiece.
Gary Zimmerman -- Broncos partisans are convinced their team is underrepresented in the Hall, so maybe this will silence their incessant whining for a few years. In truth, unattractive white men with terrible moustaches really are underrepresented and his induction will help alleviate a big backlog.
I am convinced that, at some point, the Lemur will just drop the pretense and stop covering actual games entirely in the weeks before a Trade Deadline. Because, really, who wants to cover what actually happened when we could speculate about what might happen instead?
On the off chance that you are smarter than me and haven't been paying attention, the latest athlete who feels that we need to be informed 24/7/365 of their relative happiness at drawing a paycheck at his current address is Manny Ramirez.
Since this happened in Boston and the little dears just get all verklempt if you don't pay attention to their every burp, hiccup and bowel movement, the non-stop speculation on where he's going (Florida? The Mets? Hell?) and what the Red Sox might get in return and could they ever live without him oh my god oh my god oh my god click on another link to see what some other talking out of his anus Boston feeb has to say about it.
Look, chowds. I know your world is coming to an end, because your world is always coming to an end, but the whole Manny Experience... really isn't all that important to the rest of us, and probably not even to you. He's just not that great anymore, and he's not going to get any better. The Yankees had this exact situation last year in whether or not to sign Bobby Abreu, which is to say, a reasonably good player who's expensive and not getting any better. They bit the bullet and signed him. It wasn't really a story.
The Sox are dangerous if (and only if) David Ortiz is one of the ten best hitters in the American League in the last two months of the season, and if the pitching holds up. They're also a lot better defensively on the road when ManRam isn't in left wandering around like an ADD kid, so losing him isn't exactly the end of the world.
Besides, even with the Yankees taking on passengers for the stretch run (nice of the Tigers to give them a fairly useful Ivan Rodriguez for the eternally doomed Kyle Farnsworth, especially since the deal with Pittsburgh for Damaso Marte, and the emergence of Jose Veras, made him more of a 6th inning option than the 8th), the Sawx are a better than even-money bet to make the post-season, since no one really expects the Rays to be left standing in a three-way dance with the charter members of MLB+.
(A small moment on the Tigers. Kyle Farnsworth? WTF? Why not take Brian Bruney instead, who's the same pitcher for a tenth of the money? This isn't the NBA, when you're hoping to take expiring contracts against the cap. Idiots. Anyway...)
Back to ManRam. But instead of, I don't know, reporting on things that matter, or restraining themselves to a contained rumor segment for all of the fast twitch fantasy honks who have skin in the Manny game, the Lemur has gone into full Missing White Girl panic over this. They've also got to take the idiot's bait when he holds up a Brett Favre sign, because there's nothing they like more than when the meal makes its own sauce.
Oh, and Manny? Kudos to you for making what is an absolutely ordinary baseball transaction about race. As if the Red Sox would have been better off with a broken-down Pedro Martinez or Nomar Garciaparra. As if Sox Fan won't happily cheer anyone who gets them wins. Hell, they tolerate JD Drew, and he strangles puppies with the entrails of hobo children. (Allegedly.) As if a man who is getting paid what you are getting paid -- i.e., somewhere along the lines of, oh, the second most money in baseball -- has the grounds to cry foul when his employer doesn't sign up for the tail end of your career, you know, when you get fat and lazy and defensively deficient, with eroding offensive numbers. (Oh, wait, that's already...)
No, Manny, by all means, cry race in a town that's got long-standing problems in that regard. Make the pie higher for the Mass-Wide Lemur. Elevate Kevin Youkilis to the status of Jeff Kent -- heck, go all the way and claim that since he's a Jew, Youk is controlling the media coverage of this to, you know, make you look like an utter jackass.
Meanwhile, the fans of the other MLB teams -- even the non MLB+ ones! Gosh, we still exist! Isn't that, you know, quaint? -- will wait and be thankful when it (Manny, the Lemur's existence, our waning interest in baseball) is all over. One more month until football, folks...
Item: The growth in Spanish ad- vertising was five times that of English buys in the first half of 2008.This is where I should make any number of Colbert-esque pander-jokes, wrap the post up in a big pinata or sombrero, and call it a day. But I've got more to do here.
Here's a list with a lot of work, some of my favorite poon, the 19th use of the Aqua Teen Lite Brite That Stopped Boston, and one of my very infrequent attempts at image manipulation. Plus, it confirms all of those deep and dire suspicions you've always had about global warming. If you don't like it, pay nothing!
In this week's New Yorker is a long piece on the mechanics and treatment of itchiness. It's actually pretty fascinating. Among a lot of stuff about phantom limbs and mirror therapy, there was this: a fair amount of what we think is just a natural reaction to skin conditions is mental, and that you can, provided you are exposed to the right mental weather, make yourself itchy.
Here, I'll prove it. I want you to imagine a mosquito walking up the back of your right leg, just above the ankle, then slowly lowering its head towards the skin. Now it's opening it's jaws, and moving closer... and now it plunges its teeth into your skin, engorging itself with your blood. Really concentrate now, and see the mosquito on your defenseless skin. Clear your mind of everything but the mosquito on your leg.
Now, imagine a second mosquito landing next to the first one.
Seeing how as I've made some of you as bothered as you've been on this blog since the WNBA post, now try this. Visualize a soft terrycloth bathrobe coming out of a dryer, which you fold with your hands. It's warm, smells good, and feels expensive and luxuriant. You can even bring it to your cheek if you like; no one's watching.
In studies with not just my plodding words but also full sound and video, test subjects in a theater were observed to scratch more to the first scenario, and to be clearly soothed and made more calm and still by the second. Unlike, say, tickling, itch/scratch has no social component; you can make yourself itchy whenever you want to, and, perhaps, also stop it. (Hell, I'm scratching more just from the self-edit.)
I'm in the sixth paragraph now, which means I have to bring this back to sports, right? (In earlier drafts, this kind of mosquito dithering went on for a lot longer, just to prove some sadistic meta-point. Anyway, moving on.) Well, it's pretty obvious to me -- sports radio, sports bloggers, sports writers and sports networks all exist on an itch/scratch continuum. SportsCenter soothes more than it irritates; when it does so, with Braying Jackassery, the powers that be think it's a good thing, because an active audience is better than a reactive one. They'd see it as a spice to the main meal.
It is the nature of Art to mete out Itch with Scratch, Carrot with Stick, Pleasure and Pain. (Hey now. My image search for this post just got a lot more interesting.) But that's not what sports coverage is usually about. Sports coverage is pure Scratch; it's an arena where we pay to see events that don't really matter, so that we can avoid thinking about things that really do matter. (And if you don't believe that, consider the existence of the Post-Game Gloatathon that every NFL team telecast provides to its local market. Scratch, scratch, scratch.)
When we do bring in things that matter into sports, we have to do so carefully, and we lose a portion of the audience. If you are, say, a Yankee fan, you'd much rather watch Alex Rodriguez hit than hear about his contract, but since his contract defines other aspects of the team (say, their inability to have mid-salary performers on the bench, or the chance to bring in other big-salaried free agents), most people will go along under the feeling that it's something that they have to know. But no one, with the possible exception of Hank Steinbrenner, wants to see the full cost-benefit analysis of Rodriguez with the Yankees to see if he's bringing in more than he costs. That level of reality / itch is not welcome.
This also gets to the crux of why The Lemur bothers me so much and so often; it is a mosquito. It is an ever-increasing amount of Itch. It is Commerce masquerading as Art, a slow pollution of the purity of our drugs, a bastard child that decent men and women should not accept nor easily tolerate. In a better world, there would be competition that delivers nothing but Scratch Goodness, so that we don't have to endure all of the mistakes they foist on us.
Some might read this as simply a cranky old man rant, since the mosquito is something the young'uns are just used to by now. But, um, no. In the end, the Lemur likes to make us itch, just as many other players in the space do.
And yes, that makes them reprehensible, at least intermittently... and it means that most of the people who do this hobby of mine have reprehensible moments.
But it also means that I'm culpable for letting them get to me, and I can get them to stop whenever I like, by just thinking hard about a nice soft cloth. Maybe being held over various mouths...
At what point, really, did we all become franchise owners?
Perhaps it's just that we can't fathom the size of an athlete's salary, or that we have been so boned over the years on ticket prices and cable rates and merch and concessions... but every other conversation you read or hear about the players on the teams you root for is about the contract details of each player.
Lito Sheppard's contract is too big for him to stay with the Eagles as a nickel back. The A's had to move Dan Haren and Nick Swisher while they still had good contracts. The Yankees are nearly auto-obliged to turn first base back over to Jason Giambi, because of his contract. Bill Simmons is masturbating again with his trade widget. (Seriously, Bill, put it away. You'll go blind.)
Does this happen where you work? Of course not. Unless you're in a union shop, and my sympathies for such things are growing, as I continue to be exposed to companies with HR departments that couldn't find their ass with both hands and a map... well, you probably don't know what the next cube slave makes, or want to know, given how incredibly distracting that is.
And yet, sports (and if you are unlucky, your office) feels compelled to dwell in the yearly rate for all of these short-timers. The more naive among us decry athletes for caring more about dollars than wins when they make free agent decisions... and yet, if and when you get a job offer to go somewhere else for more, it's hard to imagine the people in your life telling you what a callous bastard you were for accepting it.
Finally, there's this... I saw a headline the other day of how parents were having a hard time explaining the Spitzer Situation to their kids. Beyond wondering why they were letting their kids watch the news, or why "The Governor lied and committed crimes, so no one wants to work with him any more, and he has to quit and maybe even go to jail..."
Well, isn't childhood supposed to be the time when everything *doesn't* have a price tag? And isn't some part of the appeal of sports is that you get to be just a little bit like a little kid again, and just watch and enjoy it for the moment, rather than running a cost-benefit analysis of the experience?
When I was growing up, if you wanted to impress someone with your intellect while watching television, you put on PBS and tried to look appreciative while people with British accents bored you senseless.
More importantly, you didn't try to impress them by watching television. Maybe, I don't know, you picked up a freaking book or magazine, or just gave up on the effort, since impressing people with your intellect is kind of like impressing women with your prowess in bed by dropping trou on the street -- it might work, but chances are, you're just going to look like a tool.
Lo, how the times have changed. Now, sports bloggers and writers feel compelled, for reasons that start at unfathomable and go straight to masturbatory, to tell you the music they are listening to. Or the coffee they are drinking. or their opinions on television shows that they have long ago shot past on the good old demographic scale.
To wit, if you are telling me how smoking hot some actress is, and you could have been having sex when she was born, this does not make you hip. or a man (and, yes, for this kind of wank, it's almost always a man) who is on the cutting edge of pop culture. It makes you a creepy statutory rapist wannabe who should really STFU, lest The Authorities decide that such a thing has now become criminally actionable.
More importantly, it makes you someone who is not providing sports content on what is purported to be a sports site. And well, the Web is filled to bursting with places that cover that form of timewaste.
And, well, if you must? GO WRITE FOR THOSE SITES. Start a side blog. Write under your wife's name (heh heh heh). Collect all of those little treasures, including your kid's field hockey moments and your hipster-certified music and your reality television problem and your relationship issues, and PUT THEM ALL SOMEWHERE ELSE. I have suggestions for locations, if you're stuck for one.
Because, well... when I want to read about sports, I'd like to read about sports. And not rants about people not writing about sports. (Oh. Wait. Crap...)
There is a time-honored literary device of Evil being unable to withstand the touch of Good. If you've been on board the Harry Potter train, it's the fight scene from the end of the first book/movie. It's why the Emperor needs Vader to do his dirty work in the Star Wars movies, and part of the reason why villains in animated movies inevitably turn monstrous before dying. (Especially women -- you can't kill a girl, no matter how bad she's been, unless she's a dragon or crone or snake or something. But I digress.)
It's a simple thing, really. We want to believe that the mere existence of Good -- a power that all of us believe we have, even if we don't choose often enough -- will protect us from darker concerns.
Hey presto, you can even find it in the Bible:
"And the Light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not." - John 1:5Now, before I send you scurrying off to some other blog that is making with the funny or the sports, or make you wonder about my ever-encroaching mortality or embrace of religion... let me reel this back in.
In the middle of a jaw-dropping story about protests *for* Michael Vick, this little nugget of joy:
On the West Coast, former Falcons coach Jim Mora said he has given Vick moral support in a text message Wednesday.You see what Mora does here? He does the lowest possible form of communication -- ephemeral text messaging -- to reach the guy who killed him at his last job.
Those would be the Oakland A's, the only baseball team that I've ever been a season ticket holder. Some of the best times in my life were either spent at the park or just listening on the radio to the sublime Bill King. I've read "Moneyball" and posted to A's blogs and even been to A's fan group outings... so how has it come to this?
I still want them to win, will watch them when they are on, look to their box score first, and wear the merch, Billy Beane remains the only GM or owner in any sport that I'd piss on if he were on fire.
I just can't stand watching them.
Why? Because this year's Oakland A's team not only isn't winning that much -- at 43-41, they are 8 games out of the division and 6 games out of the wild card -- but they've also committed the cardinal sin of being no fun to watch. By valuing the subtle things that win ball games and can be found on the open market relatively cheaply, they've managed to drain the lifeblood out of the ways in which baseball can appeal on a visceral level.
Like watching a ball shoot into the gap and seeing if the hitter can go for three? The A's aren't the team for you. Despite playing half of their games in a park with funky angles and an outfield that, during football season, sends balls to the wall faster than an airport tarmac, they rank 26th in MLB in baseball's most exciting hit.
How about when your pitcher rears back with a 2-strike count and blows the hitter away with heat? Not so much with these A's, who despite the AL's best ERA, rank just 23rd in MLB in strikeouts. Blame the perpetually injured Rich Harden, the biggest tease to hit Oakland since Todd van Poppel.
Does watching young players emerge from obscurity wet your whistle? It does for me, which is why those A's teams from earlier in the decade where such a kick in the pants... and why this team is such a collection of blah.
This era gives you the failed promise of guys like Harden and Bobby Crosby. Crosby's excuse is frequent injuries, but at some point, you have to accept that hitting like Jose Hernandez is not acceptable, no matter what your excuse is.
You can also take a good whiff of Eric Chavez, who used to bear a passing resemblance to a Hall of Fame third baseman, and now looks more like a platoon player. Chavy now holds the dubious distinction of being the active player with the most home runs who has never made it to an All-Star Game, and his current .250 BA isn't going to get him an at-large invite this year, either.
I won't even get into the certifiably bad guys on the roster -- not many, because Beane is smart enough not to give knuckleheads the fuel they need to hijack a clubhouse, but still. Esteban Loiaza and his DUI is not much fun to root for, even when he isn't hurt. Arthur Rhodes and Mark Redman were such asshats, the team had to take on the ruinous contract of Jason Kendall, who is in the last year of a contract that's so bad, he should be in the NBA. ($10 million for a catcher with a breathtaking .540 OPS, which is the lowest in MLB among players with enough at-bats to measure. Tasty.)
Mind you, these A's *do* have their fun moments. Jack Cust gives hope to every beer leaguer. Dan Haren haunts the dreams of Cardinals fans who are paying for the broken-down years of Mark Mulder. Travis Buck has half of the team's triples, looks very good for his age and made Milton DL Bradley go away. Daric Barton is tearing up AAA and could be Pujolsian one day soon. Let's make it soon.
If they ever got back the myriad number of injured players, especially in the bullpen -- where the team has somehow patched together outs due mainly to the joy of being rested from the quality starting staff -- they could go on one of their traditional July/August runs that saves the year.
But for now, the team just looks like Mark Kotsay to me... a textbook defensively, means well, nice guy, tries hard, with occasional moments of power, gets the most out of his abilities... and a .622 OPS. And he ain't getting any better.
I'd rather watch Kurt Suzuki than Jason Kendall. I want to see Daric Barton now, not when the season's decided, even if that means the outfield becomes a defensive nightmare. I'd rather watch some minor-league kid than Crosby (another .622 OPS). And I can't be the only A's fan that feels this way. Let's move on to people with a future, because the present is making me feel like this guy.
Stadium Watches Kid Pass Out At Game - Watch more free videos
And the season is too long for that.
According to various accounts, over 30,000 people decided to spend the anniversary of our nation's independence by... watching freaks eat hot dogs.
The World Wide Lemur decided to devote a significant portion of its news hole to this. They also decided to compare the six-year reign of the Japanese freak to the Chicago Bulls teams of Michael Jordan.
The President has told us that the terrorists hate us for our freedoms. I'm starting to wonder if they've got a point.
In last night's Yanks vs. Rockies game, 45K+ fans filled a park that usually only has 25-30K. Flash bulbs fired on every pitch to Yankee players like Jeter and A-Rod. In the 8th, in the midst of a Yankees rally that ended when Latroy Hawkins struck out Jorge Posada with the bases loaded in what would eventually be a 3-1 Rockies win, the crowd was more or less evenly split between Yankee and Rockies chants.
Which is to say, it was a typical Yankees game, or Red Sox game, or any game where the road team has a national following, and the local team doesn't fill their park.
Having been a road fan, and having suffered intensely through them while at home (2003 ALCS, Red Sox Nation cheered my A's still-warm corpse in front of me, causing a hate that the Twins, Yankees and Tigers will never eclipse), let me humbly suggest the following rules.
1) Do not wear your team's colors. Yes, I'm advocating that you be a ball-free pussy that doesn't enjoy the game to the fullest. I'm also telling you that it's rude, classless, and that you deserve any abuse you suffer, up to and including criminal mischief.
I'm not saying that I'm going to be the guy pouring beer on you, insulting your girl, decorating your colors with condiments, challenging your (shriveled) manhood and taking a secret piss on your clothes, in or out of the urinal. Or secretly daydreaming of you getting The Mussolini Treatment.
But I will admire it.
2) Do not chant for your team. The people around you have spent their lives, for good or ill, rooting passionately for the hosts. When the rival chant starts up, the benefit for your team is minimal. The hate that you are creating? That's permanent. It'll find an outlet eventually -- either on you, or someone less deserving.
3) Do not take pictures with flash photography. There's this thing called television. It even comes in high definition now. There's also this thing called a DVR, or Tivo. It allows you to record the game you were at, in better detail and clarity than your crappy cell phone camera. And guess what? In both cases, you won't want to look at it after the game.
Taking pictures of you and your friends, during the inning breaks? Absolutely. Taking pictures of every pitch? Seriously, is your life so deprived of excitement that you need dozens of pictures of routine at-bats in the middle of a career that will have something like 10,000 of them?
4) Get your head in the freaking game, for the love of... Do not wear comically out of date jerseys; this just in, Sox Nation, Pedro's not coming back. Do not use your cell phone to call the outside world just to say where you are. If you must, do so quietly, by cupping your hand over the receiver and moving in close, you know, like a polite human being. Applaud good plays by either team. Sing during the 7th inning stretch. Be a baseball fan first, a fan of your team second. Make me not hate you.
5) If the home team does not have violent and passionate fans that fill the stadium, preventing you and your horde from having sections of your own, it does not mean that the people who are there are doormat pussies who deserve to be abused. It means that they are fans of a franchise that does not provide to them the same level of service that your fan base has received.
Do you also go to areas with bad school districts and mock the parents that live there? Or bring take-out from fine restaurants into fast food joints? Or bring your luxury car into poor neighborhoods and laugh at people with older cars? Play practical jokes on the homeless?
No, one fervently hopes, because those would be acts without charity, or humanity, or class. You'd have to be an utter and complete asshole to do things like that.
Now... do the math.
6) Realize, for once in your blighted lives, that the world extends beyond your own ass. Or...
7) Stay the hell home. The sooner you do, the sooner we can toss this interleague bullshit into the ashcan of history, where it belongs. (No, I'm not holding my breath.)
Man, on cell phone, talking loudly, on an otherwise quiet train. He can be heard for a good 50 feet.
Woman, sounding unhinged, three rows from him. "SHUT UP!"
Man continues to talk at same volume.
Woman, more unhinged, louder. "SHUT UP!"
Rest of train starts looking spooked.
Man quiets down and is not heard from again.
Conductor asks who said that.
Train full of people stare out the windows. Suddenly, we're all back in elementary school. No one wants to be a tattletale, but we all know who did it.
Woman owns up to it.
Conductor tells he that was very rude.
Woman plays the "He started it" card.
Conductor cuts her off with another admonishment -- as if that's polite.
Eventually, he collects her ticket, and dispenses life advice that you'd expect from the parent of an unruly five year old.
The woman responds with continued petulance and ire towards Loud Talker, along with the accusation that he was giving her a headache. (I smell lawsuit!)
Rest of train tries to stare out window or read books or fill their bloghole for the day.
FTT has a friend and reader (yes, I know you're surprised) for whom, we are certain, this situation would have involved a sudden and intimidating amount of ire.
In this situation, we see him, in our minds' eye, getting up to stare down the loud talker after about a minute, and saying something that would have either elevated or ended the situation.
He would have seen the vast majority of the rest of the passengers, who suffered Loud Talker in silence, as ball-free sheep.
He's probably right. He's also probably reading this. (Finally, he's ex-military. Just to give you the full picture.)
Because, at the end of the experience, you're either the oblivious guy who caused the situation, the very dramatic person who took it upon themselves to fix it, or someone who would choose not to be bothered.
It should be noted that the rest of my commute was in silence, which allowed me to create this little moment of timewaste. And that, in our experience on both coasts, you get more of the agitator and confronter in the East.
So, FTT Nation... be you sheep, myopian, or dramatist?
As the outside journalistic observer of all this, we abstain from choosing a role -- and any lack of comments will confirm our opinion.
BAA!
There is a wish, amongst those of us who still pay attention to the NBA (I know, it's theoretical, but at least we're not at the NHL level yet), to just get this season over with, put it in the books, give the Spurs their five minutes of huzzah and get on to what's *really* important.
Candidates for that include:
> Whether or not Greg Oden is a young Bill Russell, or secretly older than Bill Russell
> How Kevin Durant's weak as a kitten arms will somehow keep him from destiny -- being a slightly better Rashard Lewis
> How much of a stiff the tall Chinese guy (Yi Jianlian) will turn out to be, and what team will cause their fans to rip out their hair and take him
> Which member of Florida's frontcourt will translate into this draft's Chris Bosh (i.e., off the radar early, and possibly better than all of them late)
> Whether or not the Hawks will pass on a can't miss point guard yet again, so they can see just a little bit more of Tyronn Lue and Speedy Claxton
> How the Sixers will package all of their picks together to ensure their continued .450 existence as a phenomenally irrelevant team in a city that is quickly forgetting that it really loves basketball
> The bare minimum that Isiah Thomas can do to remain employed, and continue to make life easy for those of us who like to blog about the NBA
> Which team will overpay for Chauncey Billups
> Who would win in a Find Your Ass contest: Flip Saunders or Mike Brown (my money's on Mike, but only because he's got a bigger ass, and he puts his thumb in it so often)
> Whether or not Shaq, in a fit of hunger, will eat a dieting child on his reality show this summer
See, I just ripped off ten future points without really trying. My mind's in the future too. It's something we all do.
But in all of that -- the stuff that is, simply, more interesting than the Worst Finals Ever and the Worst Season Ever -- there's a simple but telling point... none of us, with the noted and extreme exception of the San Antonio Spurs, are living in the present moment when we dwell on these things.
We're all off in some wild blue future yonder, where the games are more interesting, the new lineups are more compelling, and Bill Walton is a silent figure on aging footage, throwing an outlet pass.
If Drew Gooden has ever, in his entire NBA career, devoted himself fully and entirely into the game... well, I'll eat my hat. In ten years, when he gets released and looks at a closet with 7 uniforms in it, he might -- might -- have a fleeting memory of what it was like to be in the Finals, having a Hall of Famer carry his water.
Watch LeBron James, clearly fouled on the final play of Game 3, shrug it off in five minutes and give Bruce "The Hitman" Bowen a mouth job for his 13 points in that game.
I hate to invoke Saint Jordan here, but how do you think he would have played this? No one wants to remember this, but the '90s Icon rode the refs worse than anyone this side of Larry Bird.
He also got the calls.
And when Jordan lost a series, early in his career, he wasn't concerned about his global marketing in the aftermath. Instead, he was creating new and exciting holes in his teammates.
Why? Because Jordan was entirely in the moment (no, I'm not saying heat -- I've looked at enough YouTube videos of that for one lifetime, thank you). Jordan was entirely committed to winning. He'd rather lose a family member than a game. He'd rather lose his livelihood than a bet.
This makes him a highly flawed human being, and a pretty terrible GM. It also made people want to watch him play basketball.
And that's not what they saw from the Cavs, despite James having (shh!) a better all-around game than Jordan did at the same time in their careers.
The Spurs? Hitman Bowen does not care that he's got a worse reputation in the league now than Ron Artest. Robert Horry's sole goal in life is to fill his hands with rings, so that he can win his game of Championship Ring Whip It Out with Scottie Pippen.
Manu Ginobili, for all of his flops and soccer theatrics, puts his nose into more contact than Steve Nash. Tony Parker sublimates his scoring to feed Tim Duncan. Tim Duncan sublimates his scoring to feed Tony Parker. Both of them take charges when they don't have to, fight through picks in blowouts, and make teammates that weren't this intense in other locations -- you think it's a coincidence that Jacques Vaughn and Brent Barry could stay in front of the Cavs' penetration, while Gibson, Pavlovic, et al could not do the same? -- suck it up.
And even in Game 3, when they had absolutely no legs, bounces or rhythm, they won on the road, mostly because they had the presence of mind to not do dumb things. Game Four, they got to every board and made just about every free throw. They focus.
On the final truly competitive play of this season, Anderson Varejao tried to penetrate and score from 25 feet away, against the best defensive big man in the game. One suspects that his head was in his own little video game, where Anderson has given his avatar God skills, or something. No matter what, it wasn't in the game.
The Spurs do not have that issue. They do not care who their first round draft pick is. They are not worried about who their coach will be. They have no meaningful free agent or salary cap issues. They don't really care what the Mavs are going to do, or the Suns, or any other team. They worry about these things as much as a lion would worry about what the gazelles are plotting.
When you live in the moment, you have power. You aren't multi-tasking, procrastinating, serving two masters or distracting yourself with doubt. You are a laser, a machine, a simple device that is monomanical in its focus. You are the Spurs, a team that takes care of today while everyone else is thinking about tomorrow.
And so, you win today, and probably tomorrow as well.
"Shooter, close the door and sit down. We need to talk."
"Um, OK. Say, who the hell are you?"
"Watch your tone, punk. You're in enough trouble as it is."
"Um, OK..."
"My name isn't important. My position is. I am the Sports Blog Ombudsman for Google, who owns Blogspot, Gawker Media, all dot com activity and the code of your DNA. Speaking of which, keep an eye on that colon of yours. It's not going to end well."
(Blinks stupidly)
"That's better. OK, the reason why I've called you in today is that you're showing a huge drop in cultural relevance."
"What? FTT's traffic keeps going up. We keep adding team members. We get comments now and everything. It's not like the old days."
"Shooter, we both know that's because you keep putting words like titty, shaved anal and Tinkerbell Hatefuck in your copy. You think you're the first sports blogger to think of such things? Though I have to admit, Kathy Bates in a hot tub did get my attention."
"Thank you, sir."
"Not at all. We at Google want you to succeed. We see at least three and a half more years of viability from you, before the colon problem compromises your usefulness."
(Subconsciously touches ass, winces)
"Anyway, independent of your traffic tricks, there's your lack of cultural relevance. Specifically, The Sopranos problem."
"I don't understand, sir."
"No, of course you don't. Shooter, don't you ever *read* the policy memos we send you from Google HQ?"
"I don't think I've gotten those memos, sir."
"I know too much about every man, woman and child living on this planet for you to lie to me, Shooter. You've been deleting them. That's why I'm here."
(hangs head)
"If you'd *read* the emails, Shooter, you would have known that you've got a big Sopranos problem. Where, for the love of God, is the post with the tortured analogies for the NBA Finals with David Chase's epic masterpiece? When are you going to get with the program and make a knowing allusion to something that happened in the series finale, all while repeating the phrase 'Spoiler Alert'? You haven't even dealt with the damage to pro hoops ratings -- you keep telling us that it has something to do with the Spurs being boring, or the games not competitive."
(awkward silence)
"Are you *trying* to make us angry, Shooter?"
(longer silence)
"I'm waiting, Shooter."
"It's just that...."
"YES?"
"I don't have premium cable. Sir."
"Like I didn't know that? Shooter, when you had HBO, you didn't watch 'The Sopranos.' But you were big on 'Sex and the City.' Very manly."
(begins weeping)
"Pull yourself together. I'm not here to kill you. The cancer's already doing that."
"Cancer?"
"Did I say that? What a silly thing to say."
"Permission to speak freely, sir?"
"Knock yourself out, Champ. We're pretty much beyond the talking stage now, anyway."
"Um... it's basically a mob soap opera, right? Since when did soap operas, even the ones that appeal to guys, have anything to do with sports? Shouldn't people who are reading sports blogs be able to, you know, read about sports?"
"Getting a little ranty here, are we."
"Well, sir, yes! If I wanted to hear about the Sopranos, I'm pretty sure I could find sites that tell me about them -- lots of them! Since when did people who are writing about sports decide that grabbing themselves with both hands and thinking of James Gandolfini was useful to people who want to read about sports?"
"You don't agree with the policy."
"No, sir, I think it's pointless! I think that tossing in references to TV shows and trustafarian celebrities and your tastes in music is all just a way to avoid, you know, coming up with an original thought or observation about the thing we are supposed to be writing about."
"Really."
"It's just another way for aging sports writers to think they're hip and with it. What's next, writing their entries as gangsta rap, or framing the entire piece as a reality show? I realize that we're entering the slow season for sports blogging, but we've got to be better than that."
"So referencing the Sporanos is hack writing, but stealing from Mark Jackson is fine."
"At least Jackson has something -- ANYTHING -- to do with sports. Unlike Fat Tony and Paulie Walnuts and Dr. Melfi and I'VE NEVER WATCHED THE GODDAMN SHOW AND I STILL KNOW ALL THEIR NAMES! GODDAMN IT!"
"That's the download kicking in. Don't fight it."
"What?"
"You think we would rely on email to get the message to you, Shooter? You think that you had any chance to avoid this? You really thought that measures would not be taken?"
"My head... Jesus... it hurts..."
"It will. Now get out of my office, you mook."
