Bryan Joiner

I’m surprisingly excited about this World Series. The Cardinals have become the Steelers of MLB—the team one half of the league sends up to represent it when it can’t come up with something better, and one that works for everybody.

The Rangers are particularly compelling because they lost last year. They lived with defeat for a year, and they go into this series knowing that if they lose, they might have that same feeling for a lifetime. They (many of them, at least) know what it’s like to deal with this particular loss, and they know as well as we do that they might never get another chance.

To which many people might say, hey, that’s nonmeasurable mumbo-jumbo, knock it off. My response is this: If we know who the best teams are by measuring, what’s the point of the playoffs? The playoffs are measuring something different, by definition, That’s why they exist. They exist to make heroes out people who don’t necessarily deserve it, which drives some people batty. To non-fans, it’s no less batty than us making heroes out of people we think DO deserve it, people like Barry Bonds, Ted Williams and Don Mattingly, who never won championships, nor invented the Polio vaccine. (Salk was a lousy shortstop.)

The celebration of one group of ballplayers does not have to be a repudiation of the other, and it’s not a stab to the heart of cold truth to celebrate the World Series champions for having accomplished something great. “The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function,” said F. Scott Fitzy, and that’s something to remember when the games are played.

I’m sort of beating a straw man here, but I’ve spent enough of my life tearing down artificial constructs like the World Series, and now I’m interested in why we need them, and how they work. It makes everything more fun, for me.

A few more thoughts on Chris Jones’s Grantland headscratcher:

• Either rooting for a sports team is an inherently silly enterprise or it isn’t—that’s your judgment call. I say that it’s not, and I say that is only by the collective decision of myself and others that it’s not that the Boston Red Sox continue to exist. If we all disappeared tomorrow and John Henry still roamed the Earth, the Red Sox would no longer be a viable business enterprise. We are, in a sense, the real owners of the team, with our NESN surcharges and MLB.tv subscriptions. Breaking the experience of a fan down into its discrete elements, and evaluating them logically, will lead you straight to volunteering at a health clinic in sub-Saharan Africa. (If you would like to do this, by all means go, and you are a wonderful person.) For the 99.9 percent of us who live in a world where we acknowledge that hardships are relative, and life can be tough enough as it is, including ourselves in team experience is neither conspiratorial nor grandiose—it’s just reflecting the reality of the situation. Can it be annoying? Sure, but it’s a key draw for why people become fans in the first place.

• Using the Marlins as an example would seem to be the exception that proves the rule. The Marlins are only able to exist because the Yankees, Red Sox, et al have so many fans that there’s spillover cash. If anything, this would give Yankees fans an opportunity to call two teams “we,” instead of zero.

• It just seems like it’s buzzkill for the sake of buzzkill, and preaching to a choir instead of trying to make any real argument.

I understand that tearing Grantland down is easier than putting it up, so I’m trying to be nice about this (for once), but jeezo peezo, as Frowns would say.

From Grantland:

“I’ll tell you what you call a team without fans: the Florida Marlins. AND THEY STILL EXIST. They’re still watched over by their evil, small-footed owners, and they still put on their terrible, freshly laundered uniforms, and they’re still managed and coached, sort of, and they still go out on their nicely kept field to play every last one of their scheduled, mostly meaningless games. None of their day-to-day functioning actually requires fans. Sure, they might require your money somewhere down the road — if they can’t siphon enough from the New York Yankees, that is — but they don’t actually require you.”

For a more fundamental misunderstanding of how sports work, see Memphis Grizzlies vs. The Trade Deadline.

R. (Yankees fan) and I, watching Tigers/Rangers when Jose Valverde emerged:

R.: Man, screw all relievers who aren’t Mariano.
Me: That’s not really a fair comparison.
R.: Sure it is.

Wall Street and Yankee Stadium are separated by 10 miles, but they’re effectively neighbors in a Park Avenue Co-Op. The New York Yankees do not exist without Wall Street. They are its embodiment in sports. After the frantic, implausible Red Sox collapse, a friend made one of the best observations I’ve ever heard about baseball: You know nothing about what is going to happen, but you know the Yankees will be good. We know nothing about what is going to happen to America, but Wall Street will make money.

Now,some people have mustered the temerity to sit in upon Wall Street. They’ve been praised and marginalized, mostly the latter, but as they’ve stuck to their (verbal) guns, it’s been quite a bit of the former as well. They’re still criticized by some for not having a “coherent” message, but others are actually trying to tease out their motivations, and coming away impressed. They came to find the children and instead found the babysitters.

You don’t get a lot of thinking at Yankee Stadium. This is to the credit and detriment of Yankee fans, who treat every game like winning it is their birthright and expect, even in the darkest moments, something called “Yankee magic” but is really just a simple equation of dollars and talent and balls flying around the Bronx. Still, it’s extraordinary. I’ve been to about 20 major league baseball stadiums, and the closest analog I’ve found to Yankee Stadium is in Foxboro, Massachusetts. The difference is that the new-money Patriots have a Belichick/Brady-dependent expiration date. The Yankees will stop being good approximately when the Earth crashes into the sun.

What is the expiration date of Occupy Wall Street? Nobody knows, but we’re well past what I—and I suspect most—thought it would be in the first place. Instead of opening a milk carton every day and expecting it to have gone sour the protest is actually maturing, getting stronger, growing a culture. There’s even a library down there. It helps that the owner of the park which is being occupied has thus far refused to kick the kids out, and it helps that the weather has been, at least in the last few days, beyond cooperative. If there’s a nicer place than the northeast in the early fall, I’m not sure it has been invented yet.

Major League Baseball has locked the Yankees out. They own the park, but there will be no games. There will be no $1,200 seats sold, no more $9.50 beers consumed. Reality has set in for Yankees fans, if only for a day. They know they are baseball’s ruling class, its unstoppable force. They have their birthright, and they are unapologetic about it. The house always wins, and they’re rooting for it.

Many in the media, Bill O’Reilly included, think the Occupy Wall Street-ers are silly for trying to take on the house. That’s the long and short of it. But at least in theory, they are the house. Their house, their rules; that’s supposed to be how the country works. Anyone who calls them idealists is a fool. They’re pragmatists, doing the only thing they think will actually get attention. They’re watching, and now people are watching them, for as long as the show lasts.