Like most other pre-lobotomy sports fans in the greater New York area, I have come to regard The Post as fountain of lies, a journalistic shit-stain further tainting our collective unconscious (and making us pay a higher psychic price than we imagine) —and while that is not the main theme of this blog, it is an opinion that have not hesitated to express here, when appropriate.
However, when I looked at the back page of that publication this morning, I was greeted with one of the most brilliant headlines I have ever read, a headline involving two of baseball’s foremost legends, a headline that kept me grinning all the way to work, a headline that read “Conseco: A-Rod met ‘roid dealer, tried to pick up my wife.”
…if you follow the link, be sure to look at all three images in the mini-slide show. The pictures of Conseco and, especially, A-Rod are completely priceless. The article itself is kind of bad.
Showing posts with label A-Rod. Show all posts
Showing posts with label A-Rod. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Oh Fuck It, Let’s Sign A-Rod
This is kind of an apology. As either of my reader’s might remember, I actually started this blog with some scathing words about David Wright saying in spring training that he would be willing to move to accommodate the acquisition of Mr. Rodriguez. My response to this was to question, not only Wright’s intelligence and sanity, but also the ethics of the newspapermen who were willing to feature the headline prominently (“Wright: I’d Move for A-Rod”) at the risk of fatally shocking Mets fans.
At the time that I wrote that first post on this blog, I was by no means a professor of A-rodology, getting most of my information on that person from the back-page of the New York Post. Even that is no excuse, and should, in fact have quickly revealed the flaws in my anti-A-rod thinking: everything said in the Post is either a lie or irrelevant, and frequently both; since the Post’s running implication was that A-rod was somehow to blame for the less than optimal performance of the Bronx Bombers, it should have been instantly, and manifestly, obvious that the only decent thing about the team in the Bronx was, in fact, Alex Rodriguez..
At the time of the first post on this blog, I also had some peculiar notions about clutch hitting (I thought it existed), which contributed to my feeling that Rodriguez would not do any good for the Mets. Particularly, I believed that the October stage would prove too much for A-Rod. I did not in know that A-rod’s career post season numbers are not actually all that bad and that he has only been truly awful in the last handful of post-season series for the Yankees; I had not reflected that the New York media’s perception of A-rod as a choker in the post-season (and post-season stats in general) was based on a ridiculously small sample size-- although if I had I probably would have remembered that small sample sizes are truly awful sources for any sort of information, and my A-Rod conversion would have begun much sooner.
Simply put, A-rod is the best hitter in baseball, by a lot. EqA (Equivalent Average) is an ultra-complicated stat that aspires to measure the total level of a player’s offensive contributions, with corrections for the league’s overall level offensive talent; it takes into account base-running, but not defense. It was designed to look sort of like batting average, in a failed attempt at not scarring off old baseball men. League average is always .260; A-Rod led the AL with an EqA of .340—the only person with a higher EqA in baseball was Barry Bonds, who gets a boost because he gets a walk pretty much every time he bats with runners on base.
VORP (value over replacement player) is the number of runs that a player contributed, over the average offense of someone at their position (again, not adjusted for defense). A-Rod led all of baseball, with a VROP of 96.6. I could go on, or discuss his traditional stats (which aren’t too shabby, either), but my point is that it is pretty much impossible to argue that A-Rod is not the best hitter in baseball. If you choose to believe that the best hitter in baseball becomes psychologically incapable of performing in pressure situations and the playoffs, you are welcome to do so; to me, it seems that his dubious play-off stats are likely the result of a small sample size, and the fluctuations in performance that occur with all baseball players.
Now, just because A-Rod is the best hitter in baseball, it does not follow that the Mets ought to sign him. The Mets are relatively good offensively—their weakness is pitching. If there were any particularly good free-agent pitchers on the market, or if the Mets were particularly strapped for cash, a case for not signing A-rod could easily be made; however, neither of these things are the case. The pitching market is very thin this off-season, and the Mets have a ton of money to burn. In addition to revenues from the network (SNY) and the seats and all the rest of it, they will get $20 million (or 2/3 A-Rods) a year from Citi bank, for playing in Citi Field; also Pedro and Delgado’s expensive contracts will be coming off of the books after 2008 which gives them some long-term flexibility. As it stands, the single best way to make any team better, right now, is to get Alex Rodriguez—the Mets can afford to do so, and almost certainly should give it a shot. And with A-Rod hitting in the middle of the Mets line-up they will score enough runs to be able to use Mota and Showenwise whenever the hell they feel like it; when Alou gets injured, and they are forced to go with Gomez, they won’t really have to worry about the massive drop off in offense; they could think about letting LoDuca go, and signing a defensive catcher.
Unfortunately, just because the Post said that David Wright would be willing to move over for A-rod last spring, that does not mean that there is a particularly logical place for D-Wright to go. The re-signing of Alou (a weird move anyway, because Alou WILL spend half the season injured) bodes really badly for the signing of A-Rod: if they did not have Alou they could think about putting Wright in left field. As it is, the options seem to be either first or second base. I have a feeling that Wright at second would end badly, although I don’t really have a lot of evidence to go on. Unless there is a really compelling reason to think that Delgado will be much better than he was in ’07, putting Wright at first, and getting rid of Delgado, either through a buy-out or a trade, seems like it might be the way to go-- I am very sad to say this, because I really like Delgado, but he was truly awful last year. An infield of Wright, Castillo, Reyes and A-Rod… it makes that Howard-Utly-Rawlins jive that they have going on down in Philly seem sort of quaint.
Moving Reyes to second, and letting A-rod play Shortstop is a rotten idea, because it would be too obviously a slap in the face to Reyes, who fared badly at second (and expressed an overall distaste for the position) after the advent of “Colorado” Kaz Matsui. Of course, if one wanted to run the team with ruthless efficiency, they could sign A-Rod and let him play short, and then try to deal Reyes for someone like Santana, C.C. Sabathia, or Fausto Carmona—but this is a course of action that I do not support in the slightest.
The defensive positioning seems kind of minor, though, compared to what is at stake. A-Rod is ridiculous good, and the best upgrade available—he would pretty much make a place in the playoffs a lock. As I said in the title of the post, fuck it, let’s get this guy. And give David Wright a chest-protector for Christmas.
At the time that I wrote that first post on this blog, I was by no means a professor of A-rodology, getting most of my information on that person from the back-page of the New York Post. Even that is no excuse, and should, in fact have quickly revealed the flaws in my anti-A-rod thinking: everything said in the Post is either a lie or irrelevant, and frequently both; since the Post’s running implication was that A-rod was somehow to blame for the less than optimal performance of the Bronx Bombers, it should have been instantly, and manifestly, obvious that the only decent thing about the team in the Bronx was, in fact, Alex Rodriguez..
At the time of the first post on this blog, I also had some peculiar notions about clutch hitting (I thought it existed), which contributed to my feeling that Rodriguez would not do any good for the Mets. Particularly, I believed that the October stage would prove too much for A-Rod. I did not in know that A-rod’s career post season numbers are not actually all that bad and that he has only been truly awful in the last handful of post-season series for the Yankees; I had not reflected that the New York media’s perception of A-rod as a choker in the post-season (and post-season stats in general) was based on a ridiculously small sample size-- although if I had I probably would have remembered that small sample sizes are truly awful sources for any sort of information, and my A-Rod conversion would have begun much sooner.
Simply put, A-rod is the best hitter in baseball, by a lot. EqA (Equivalent Average) is an ultra-complicated stat that aspires to measure the total level of a player’s offensive contributions, with corrections for the league’s overall level offensive talent; it takes into account base-running, but not defense. It was designed to look sort of like batting average, in a failed attempt at not scarring off old baseball men. League average is always .260; A-Rod led the AL with an EqA of .340—the only person with a higher EqA in baseball was Barry Bonds, who gets a boost because he gets a walk pretty much every time he bats with runners on base.
VORP (value over replacement player) is the number of runs that a player contributed, over the average offense of someone at their position (again, not adjusted for defense). A-Rod led all of baseball, with a VROP of 96.6. I could go on, or discuss his traditional stats (which aren’t too shabby, either), but my point is that it is pretty much impossible to argue that A-Rod is not the best hitter in baseball. If you choose to believe that the best hitter in baseball becomes psychologically incapable of performing in pressure situations and the playoffs, you are welcome to do so; to me, it seems that his dubious play-off stats are likely the result of a small sample size, and the fluctuations in performance that occur with all baseball players.
Now, just because A-Rod is the best hitter in baseball, it does not follow that the Mets ought to sign him. The Mets are relatively good offensively—their weakness is pitching. If there were any particularly good free-agent pitchers on the market, or if the Mets were particularly strapped for cash, a case for not signing A-rod could easily be made; however, neither of these things are the case. The pitching market is very thin this off-season, and the Mets have a ton of money to burn. In addition to revenues from the network (SNY) and the seats and all the rest of it, they will get $20 million (or 2/3 A-Rods) a year from Citi bank, for playing in Citi Field; also Pedro and Delgado’s expensive contracts will be coming off of the books after 2008 which gives them some long-term flexibility. As it stands, the single best way to make any team better, right now, is to get Alex Rodriguez—the Mets can afford to do so, and almost certainly should give it a shot. And with A-Rod hitting in the middle of the Mets line-up they will score enough runs to be able to use Mota and Showenwise whenever the hell they feel like it; when Alou gets injured, and they are forced to go with Gomez, they won’t really have to worry about the massive drop off in offense; they could think about letting LoDuca go, and signing a defensive catcher.
Unfortunately, just because the Post said that David Wright would be willing to move over for A-rod last spring, that does not mean that there is a particularly logical place for D-Wright to go. The re-signing of Alou (a weird move anyway, because Alou WILL spend half the season injured) bodes really badly for the signing of A-Rod: if they did not have Alou they could think about putting Wright in left field. As it is, the options seem to be either first or second base. I have a feeling that Wright at second would end badly, although I don’t really have a lot of evidence to go on. Unless there is a really compelling reason to think that Delgado will be much better than he was in ’07, putting Wright at first, and getting rid of Delgado, either through a buy-out or a trade, seems like it might be the way to go-- I am very sad to say this, because I really like Delgado, but he was truly awful last year. An infield of Wright, Castillo, Reyes and A-Rod… it makes that Howard-Utly-Rawlins jive that they have going on down in Philly seem sort of quaint.
Moving Reyes to second, and letting A-rod play Shortstop is a rotten idea, because it would be too obviously a slap in the face to Reyes, who fared badly at second (and expressed an overall distaste for the position) after the advent of “Colorado” Kaz Matsui. Of course, if one wanted to run the team with ruthless efficiency, they could sign A-Rod and let him play short, and then try to deal Reyes for someone like Santana, C.C. Sabathia, or Fausto Carmona—but this is a course of action that I do not support in the slightest.
The defensive positioning seems kind of minor, though, compared to what is at stake. A-Rod is ridiculous good, and the best upgrade available—he would pretty much make a place in the playoffs a lock. As I said in the title of the post, fuck it, let’s get this guy. And give David Wright a chest-protector for Christmas.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Mets vs. Yankees
In the wake of the Subway Series I feel that I might as well say a few words about the state of the Yankees/Mets rivalry. It is, essentially, the opinion of ‘Sam’s Mets blog’ that there is no such thing-- and the perception of one is a result of the travesty that is inter-league play and shameless marketing. In fairness, the marketability of rivalries such as the Yankees and the Mets was one the major factors behind the establishment of inter-league play; but, regardless, the true rivalries are within the divisions: the Yankees and the Red Sox; and the Mets and the Braves or, perhaps some day, the Phillies. Since they don’t play within the same division, or even in the same league, the Yankees and the Mets, in the normal and just course of things, should have nothing to do with each other. But, like two roosters bred and trained from birth for cock fighting, with blades attached to their feet, riled up, and released into the ring, so the Mets and the Yankees have been drawn into something that is called a rivalry, by the marketing minds behind Major League Baseball.
Thus, it is the duty of any true fan to regard match-ups between the two New York teams, and all other inter-league games, with a certain degree of disinterest: rooting for one’s team and wistfully hoping for the day when interleukin play will go the way of three ball walks and the spit-ball.
I still don’t like the Yankees. For one thing, George Steinbrenner is a criminal who made illegal donations to the Nixon campaign and received a presidential pardon form Reagan: if we weren’t living right now in the asshole of history, those two would top the list of worst ever Americans. Fuck Steinbrenner and everything he lays his pudgy little fingers on, even if he weren’t conspicuously obnoxious, shortsighted, and greedy in his management of the team.
Furthermore, in their current incarnation, the Bronx Bombers have been looking to expensive free-agent signings that are geared towards short-term glamour and results, and failing to develop the beginnings of a pitching staff in the minors. The Yankees’ problem this year has been pitching, and paying Roger Clemens a record-breaking amount of money to work for a few months is grotesquely not the answer; unfortunately for the Bombers, the answer is to go back in time and get better prospects. During the best of the Torre era, they were powered by home grown players: Rivera, Jeter and Posada. Say what you will about the Yankees, but those are guys who play the game extremely well, and, particularly Rivera, have benefited the sport with their excellence. Spending more money than anyone else on the likes of Johnny Damon, Jason Giambi, Carl Pavano and A-Rod, and acting as if this entitled them to the Pennant seems fairly crass and unappealing.
Beyond all this, the Yankees have more championships than anyone else in the history of professional sports, and represent a legacy of amazing dominance. Historically, many, many of the greatest players in the history of the game have worn the Pin-stripes and to not respect that history would be ridiculous. But my instinct is to root for the under-dog, and I am drawn by the unlikely, as much as the excellent, in sports. Following a bumbling and unlucky team somehow more effectively complements my experience of the world: I’m a Mets fan.
And, sharing a city with the Yankees, and Yankee fans, creates certain tensions. On the most basic level, in the late Torre Era, hearing the same complaints and rants ad naeuseum is just plain tiresome—particularly when one is feeling starved and frenzied for information about one’s own team. It is hard putting up with the tedious drama of tensions between A-Rod and Giambi, A-Rod and Jeter, and Carl Pavano and the rest of the team, particularly from and organization that claims to find its strength in an almost corporate culture, and expertly maintained professionalism. Then again, there also is not much to be said for the belligerent fans who derive self-esteem from the depths of Steinbrenner’s pockets.
Anyway, of course I thought that the series went alright, and even though I wish he hadn’t beaten the Mets, you have to feel happy for the kid that the Yankees brought out of the minors on Sunday—walking right into the fabricated cross-town rivalry for his major league debut and throwing such a good game.
Thus, it is the duty of any true fan to regard match-ups between the two New York teams, and all other inter-league games, with a certain degree of disinterest: rooting for one’s team and wistfully hoping for the day when interleukin play will go the way of three ball walks and the spit-ball.
I still don’t like the Yankees. For one thing, George Steinbrenner is a criminal who made illegal donations to the Nixon campaign and received a presidential pardon form Reagan: if we weren’t living right now in the asshole of history, those two would top the list of worst ever Americans. Fuck Steinbrenner and everything he lays his pudgy little fingers on, even if he weren’t conspicuously obnoxious, shortsighted, and greedy in his management of the team.
Furthermore, in their current incarnation, the Bronx Bombers have been looking to expensive free-agent signings that are geared towards short-term glamour and results, and failing to develop the beginnings of a pitching staff in the minors. The Yankees’ problem this year has been pitching, and paying Roger Clemens a record-breaking amount of money to work for a few months is grotesquely not the answer; unfortunately for the Bombers, the answer is to go back in time and get better prospects. During the best of the Torre era, they were powered by home grown players: Rivera, Jeter and Posada. Say what you will about the Yankees, but those are guys who play the game extremely well, and, particularly Rivera, have benefited the sport with their excellence. Spending more money than anyone else on the likes of Johnny Damon, Jason Giambi, Carl Pavano and A-Rod, and acting as if this entitled them to the Pennant seems fairly crass and unappealing.
Beyond all this, the Yankees have more championships than anyone else in the history of professional sports, and represent a legacy of amazing dominance. Historically, many, many of the greatest players in the history of the game have worn the Pin-stripes and to not respect that history would be ridiculous. But my instinct is to root for the under-dog, and I am drawn by the unlikely, as much as the excellent, in sports. Following a bumbling and unlucky team somehow more effectively complements my experience of the world: I’m a Mets fan.
And, sharing a city with the Yankees, and Yankee fans, creates certain tensions. On the most basic level, in the late Torre Era, hearing the same complaints and rants ad naeuseum is just plain tiresome—particularly when one is feeling starved and frenzied for information about one’s own team. It is hard putting up with the tedious drama of tensions between A-Rod and Giambi, A-Rod and Jeter, and Carl Pavano and the rest of the team, particularly from and organization that claims to find its strength in an almost corporate culture, and expertly maintained professionalism. Then again, there also is not much to be said for the belligerent fans who derive self-esteem from the depths of Steinbrenner’s pockets.
Anyway, of course I thought that the series went alright, and even though I wish he hadn’t beaten the Mets, you have to feel happy for the kid that the Yankees brought out of the minors on Sunday—walking right into the fabricated cross-town rivalry for his major league debut and throwing such a good game.
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Billy Wagner: a lesson for A-rod
If A-Rod ever gets bored of looking at himself in the mirror and trying to figure out which major league uniform would look best on him, he should give Billy Wagner a call- the guy is running some kind of clinic on how to be an extremely expensive, yet slightly underperforming, free agent acquisition, and still getting everyone to like you.
Billy Wagner? Underperforming? Well, mainly if you consider the fact that the guy makes more money than Mariano Rivera, and Mariano Rivera he is NOT. The way that you can tell this, is that when Rivera takes the mound, it is like Lee Van Cleef or Clint Eastwood at the end of a spaghetti Western- he projects nothing but danger and confidence; if he were still alive, the Yankees should get Sergio Leone to shoot his high-light real. When Wagner takes the mound late in games, my first instinct is to make sure that I’m not that far away from a full beer, in case he leaves me with a lot of problems to drink away- and while, during the regular season, the terror-beer was generally transformed into a celebration-beer by the end of the inning, Wagner always made it interesting, particularly in the post season when he put up a 9.53 ERA and took a loss.
In addition to scaring the shit out of Mets fans in late innings, Wagner spent some of the post-season dictating an EXCLUSIVE guest column for the New York Post to someone named “Burton Rocks.” It had very little insight into the game, but a lot of stuff like “Am I exited to be in New York on a winner? Does a one legged duck swim in circles?” It was not the paradigm of player-journalism excellence that was provided by Cliff Floyd’s blog, but it was a perfectly decent thing to kill a couple minutes of the agonizing periods when they weren’t playing baseball.
Anyway, Billy and Burton seem to have hit it off, because Wagner is getting more than his share of coverage in the Post during the pre-season, most notably in an article called “Cheats Lurk Everywhere,” in which Kevin Kernan talks to Wagner about the return of Guillermo Mota. Wagner told Kernan that cheating, looking for an edge, was a universal and eternal aspect of the game; previous iterations had included spit-balls, pine-tar, and corked bats- steroids were just the current form. Wagner said that you only had to say you were sorry if you got caught, and Kernan speculated that this was the most honest thing a ball player had ever said.
Wagner comes out of the article looking great. He claims that he is clean: “If I took steroids, I'd be a hell of a lot better. I know it. And that's why I don't have to take it. When they say, 'You know you are one of the top three closers in the game,' I don't have to take that [bleep- shit, presumably].” He is identified as a family man, and a fount of both wit and wisdom; he is eager and able to face the challenges of the big city, but still grounded enough in his humble roots that he has not lost sight of the swimming habits of one legged ducks.
The pro-Wagner attitude is pretty universal. The Post thinks that this year he will be better than he was in 2006, but no one seems to think that there is any danger of him being significantly worse- and to me this seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to worry about. The one thing that the Mets cannot stand, given the state of their bullpen, is their closer coming up unreliable- and I don’t think, particularly in the post-season, that serious unreliability is ever completely out of the picture where Wagner is concerned.
There is a huge lesson in how Wagner talks to the media, particularly in whatever relationship he has with the Post. Close games are lost by whoever you can write the best piece blaming, and by being a petulant dope, A-rod makes himself extremely blamable. By giving them a couple of columns in Spring, Wagner has saved himself a lot of pictures and puns on the back page after blown saves in the Summer. Part of it, of course, is that the urge to question Wagner can never be that strong for Mets fans: he ended the nightmare that was Braden Looper. But Wagner also projects the perfect mixture of folksy charm, positive attitude and complete confidence in his own ability to make sports writers hesitate before saying that the game was lost by the really expensive guy who gave up the game winning hit.
Billy Wagner? Underperforming? Well, mainly if you consider the fact that the guy makes more money than Mariano Rivera, and Mariano Rivera he is NOT. The way that you can tell this, is that when Rivera takes the mound, it is like Lee Van Cleef or Clint Eastwood at the end of a spaghetti Western- he projects nothing but danger and confidence; if he were still alive, the Yankees should get Sergio Leone to shoot his high-light real. When Wagner takes the mound late in games, my first instinct is to make sure that I’m not that far away from a full beer, in case he leaves me with a lot of problems to drink away- and while, during the regular season, the terror-beer was generally transformed into a celebration-beer by the end of the inning, Wagner always made it interesting, particularly in the post season when he put up a 9.53 ERA and took a loss.
In addition to scaring the shit out of Mets fans in late innings, Wagner spent some of the post-season dictating an EXCLUSIVE guest column for the New York Post to someone named “Burton Rocks.” It had very little insight into the game, but a lot of stuff like “Am I exited to be in New York on a winner? Does a one legged duck swim in circles?” It was not the paradigm of player-journalism excellence that was provided by Cliff Floyd’s blog, but it was a perfectly decent thing to kill a couple minutes of the agonizing periods when they weren’t playing baseball.
Anyway, Billy and Burton seem to have hit it off, because Wagner is getting more than his share of coverage in the Post during the pre-season, most notably in an article called “Cheats Lurk Everywhere,” in which Kevin Kernan talks to Wagner about the return of Guillermo Mota. Wagner told Kernan that cheating, looking for an edge, was a universal and eternal aspect of the game; previous iterations had included spit-balls, pine-tar, and corked bats- steroids were just the current form. Wagner said that you only had to say you were sorry if you got caught, and Kernan speculated that this was the most honest thing a ball player had ever said.
Wagner comes out of the article looking great. He claims that he is clean: “If I took steroids, I'd be a hell of a lot better. I know it. And that's why I don't have to take it. When they say, 'You know you are one of the top three closers in the game,' I don't have to take that [bleep- shit, presumably].” He is identified as a family man, and a fount of both wit and wisdom; he is eager and able to face the challenges of the big city, but still grounded enough in his humble roots that he has not lost sight of the swimming habits of one legged ducks.
The pro-Wagner attitude is pretty universal. The Post thinks that this year he will be better than he was in 2006, but no one seems to think that there is any danger of him being significantly worse- and to me this seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to worry about. The one thing that the Mets cannot stand, given the state of their bullpen, is their closer coming up unreliable- and I don’t think, particularly in the post-season, that serious unreliability is ever completely out of the picture where Wagner is concerned.
There is a huge lesson in how Wagner talks to the media, particularly in whatever relationship he has with the Post. Close games are lost by whoever you can write the best piece blaming, and by being a petulant dope, A-rod makes himself extremely blamable. By giving them a couple of columns in Spring, Wagner has saved himself a lot of pictures and puns on the back page after blown saves in the Summer. Part of it, of course, is that the urge to question Wagner can never be that strong for Mets fans: he ended the nightmare that was Braden Looper. But Wagner also projects the perfect mixture of folksy charm, positive attitude and complete confidence in his own ability to make sports writers hesitate before saying that the game was lost by the really expensive guy who gave up the game winning hit.
Tuesday, March 6, 2007
why a mets blog?
Over the winter I decided that I was going to start a Mets blog, which was a kind of a weird thing for me to resolve on, since I generally hate the internet, and until recently was ambivalent about sports. But the Mets have always had a special place for me and they were just huge winners in the re-distribution that took place in my psychic economy when I graduated from school and set about the task of working in modern society and not losing my mind.
Recently, a friend broke off on a tangent from a pointless, repetitive, and boring conversation that we were having about the NBA, to ask me why it was that the athletic competitions between people that we did not know personally, and institutions that we had no logical reason to be invested in, took so much of our time and energy. I told him that it sports offered one of the only breaks from the degrading monotony of industrialized society; one of the few breaks from the crushing weight of the mundane. I find something about spending eight hours a day doing a job that I don’t really care for, that sends me just running into the world of professional sports; I think this is a lot because in life in general things are perpetually on going, there is never a resolution to anything, ever, or even an ability to say, with complete accuracy and confidence, what just happened. Sports provide us with a time frame during which identifiable events will take place. Yesterday, for example, I brought several minor problems to my boss, who was able to give me indifferent amounts of advice, leaving me in only slightly less confusion and ambiguity, basically to hope that things would somehow resolve themselves of their own accord, or that at least no one would notice if they didn’t; also the Mets lost 1-2 to the Indians. Of those two events, I find the latter much more comforting, even if I am disappointed in the outcome- the game happened when scheduled, after nine innings a result was obtained, and the fans were left to turn to the AM talk shows and start shrieking their deranged opinions.
I will, unfortunately, continue my observations about the relationship between sports and the deadening effects of industrialized society in a future post, but I’ll end now on a topical note. Yesterday the post ran a piece with the headline “WRIGHT: I’d move over for A-rod.” http://www.nypost.com/seven/03052007/sports/mets/wright__id_move_over_for_a_rod_mets_mark_hale.htm, the substance of it was basically that someone asked David Wright if he would move over for A-rod, Wright said yes, and also expressed the somewhat eccentric opinion that A-rod was great. Whatever- its all several light years away from happening, which they mentioned somewhere in the latter paragraphs of article, which existed only to use famous names and take up column inches. I sincerely wish, though, that they would think, for like a second, before running hideously disturbing shit as headlines. Somewhere in Queens, there is an old man who has been following the Mets since the 1960s; his kids moved away long ago, and his wife is dead- the Mets are one of the few things that keep him going; in the moment that he read that headline, all those summers of ballpark franks took their revenge on his heart, and he sinks to the floor, not to be found until his neighbor notices the smell on Wednesday. But the tragedy isn’t that he died, it is that, mixed in with the memories of his life that flashed before his eyes in those final moments there is also a crystal clear vision of what he thinks is the future: the Met’s inglorious exit from the first round of the playoffs as A-rod lines into a double play with the tying run in scoring position- and then gives a press conference about how he had to take Delgado off his list of friends on Myspace.
You know what, New York Post, that old man was all of us: you guys are jerks.
Recently, a friend broke off on a tangent from a pointless, repetitive, and boring conversation that we were having about the NBA, to ask me why it was that the athletic competitions between people that we did not know personally, and institutions that we had no logical reason to be invested in, took so much of our time and energy. I told him that it sports offered one of the only breaks from the degrading monotony of industrialized society; one of the few breaks from the crushing weight of the mundane. I find something about spending eight hours a day doing a job that I don’t really care for, that sends me just running into the world of professional sports; I think this is a lot because in life in general things are perpetually on going, there is never a resolution to anything, ever, or even an ability to say, with complete accuracy and confidence, what just happened. Sports provide us with a time frame during which identifiable events will take place. Yesterday, for example, I brought several minor problems to my boss, who was able to give me indifferent amounts of advice, leaving me in only slightly less confusion and ambiguity, basically to hope that things would somehow resolve themselves of their own accord, or that at least no one would notice if they didn’t; also the Mets lost 1-2 to the Indians. Of those two events, I find the latter much more comforting, even if I am disappointed in the outcome- the game happened when scheduled, after nine innings a result was obtained, and the fans were left to turn to the AM talk shows and start shrieking their deranged opinions.
I will, unfortunately, continue my observations about the relationship between sports and the deadening effects of industrialized society in a future post, but I’ll end now on a topical note. Yesterday the post ran a piece with the headline “WRIGHT: I’d move over for A-rod.” http://www.nypost.com/seven/03052007/sports/mets/wright__id_move_over_for_a_rod_mets_mark_hale.htm, the substance of it was basically that someone asked David Wright if he would move over for A-rod, Wright said yes, and also expressed the somewhat eccentric opinion that A-rod was great. Whatever- its all several light years away from happening, which they mentioned somewhere in the latter paragraphs of article, which existed only to use famous names and take up column inches. I sincerely wish, though, that they would think, for like a second, before running hideously disturbing shit as headlines. Somewhere in Queens, there is an old man who has been following the Mets since the 1960s; his kids moved away long ago, and his wife is dead- the Mets are one of the few things that keep him going; in the moment that he read that headline, all those summers of ballpark franks took their revenge on his heart, and he sinks to the floor, not to be found until his neighbor notices the smell on Wednesday. But the tragedy isn’t that he died, it is that, mixed in with the memories of his life that flashed before his eyes in those final moments there is also a crystal clear vision of what he thinks is the future: the Met’s inglorious exit from the first round of the playoffs as A-rod lines into a double play with the tying run in scoring position- and then gives a press conference about how he had to take Delgado off his list of friends on Myspace.
You know what, New York Post, that old man was all of us: you guys are jerks.
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