Bryan Joiner

Why then I
October 26, 2009

Do Yankees Fans Have Legal Rights?

One year ago last month I served as best man for my friend Mike’s wedding. He married Laura, despite the fact she is a Yankees fan. He is a Phillies fan. Today, this is a problem.

Facebook comments have already suggested that divorce proceedings are being discussed, and possessions are already being separated. The problem here is that Laura is a lawyer, and Mike is not. She has crafty advantages as they sort through their property. At particular issue is the dog, whose name is Brooklyn. They both want him.

Being on the side of things that are good, I decided to consult some other attorneys, who, also in the name of good, have volunteered to help Mr. Tepper, pro bono. Here is what I have learned.

• Being a Yankees fan is grounds for divorce in 49 of 50 states.

This is not altogether surprising. Anti-NYY sentiment dates back as far as the Magna Carta, and was written into the Declaraton of Independence (it’s the stuff in invisible ink, on the back). While marrying a Yankees fan is one of the freedoms permitted by our First Amendment, it wasn’t always clear that this was the case, and most states put some sort of Yankees divorce clause into their charters just to be sure. The only one that didn’t, interestingly enough, was Massachusetts. “If you marry one, it’s your own damn problem,” was written into the Commonweath of Massachusetts charter in 1629 after being devised on the Mayflower.

• The rights of Brooklyn shareholders

As a full-time resident of Brooklyn, it is within my legal rights in the State of New York to claim Brooklyn the Dog by eminent domain. Pennsylvania (as the couple is, it is important and overdue to note, based in Philadelphia) and New York have an extradition arrangement wherein if a judge were to approve my motion, the dog would have to be delivered to me within two (2) business days. The dog then becoming mine, I could give him to Mike and Mike alone, whereupon he could either withhold the dog until Mrs. Mike decided to renounce her Yankees fandom or moved more than 500 feet away, the standard distance applied by Pennsylvania law for those seeking to avoid Yankees fans.

• Superseding clauses

The kicker is that Laura actually has no rights to any possessions as a Yankees fan. While some declare the law to be “wildly unconstitutional” and upheld during only the “darkest hours on our Supreme Court,” McGonigle vs. McGonigle ruled that Yankees fans are inherently Treasonous against the American ideals of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness and as such are not entitled to hold U.S. property. They simply live among us, like UFOs that have taken the shape of humans, and are not protected by the Constitution. It is only by marrying Mike—a living, loving, breathing human being—that she is entitled to protection under our laws. Notable is that President George W. Bush attempted to overturn this law in the final days of his second term, only to have his deep unpopularity torpedo it. His successor, elected on a populist platform, announced during his Inauguration address that he would uphold the current law, drawing a rousing cheer from the millions on the Washington Mall. In subsequent months, despite harsh criticisms on literally every other front, right-wing critics such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck have applauded Mr. Obama’s leadership on this issue.

In short, we see nothing to indicate that Mike has anything to worry about, in a legal sense. In a baseball sense, this is a hell of a series, but the games will be fleeting (and hopefully, given the strength of both teams, great for everyone). He has chosen the path of life and liberty, and is legally protected into the far future.

4 Comments
October 26, 2009

Blame Bradford Campeau-Laurion

The 2004 title wasn’t enough. The Red Sox humiliated the Yankees in the ALCS, won the World Series, and got the so-called monkey off their back. Still, Yankees fans brought the bravo. Instead of “1918” T-shirts, Bronx-ers parroted lines like, “There was no curse… you just sucked for 86 years” and “26 to 6… who’s counting?” Humbled they weren’t, even if they had become the historical standard for in-series futility. They were the Yankees. The ship would right itself.

In 2005, the status quo reigned. The Yankees and Sox both went out in the first round of the playoffs. The Yankees took their series to the seventh inning of game five; the Sox got swept.

In 2006, the Yankees crept back up to the top. The Red Sox finished third in the American League East, which drew chuckles around these parts. Sure, I was laughing when Kenny Rogers absolutely b*tched the Yankees in the playoffs, but there was a real concern that 2004 was just a fluke. A beautiful, miraculous, oh-my-God it happened fluke, but just a giant speedbump on the Yankees dominance train.

Then came 2007. The Red Sox won the AL East and won the World Series. They could compete with the Yankees on a decade-long basis. Good. But the cycle wasn’t fully complete. The Yankees still made the playoffs. They didn’t get to feel what it was like to sit at home in October, watching an octet of other teams compete for their trophy. They hadn’t seen the bottom.

And then, last year, it happened. In the farewell season to The Stadium, it was hoped that the Yankees would close it with a bang and title number 27. Instead, their playoff chances were done by September 27. Now they were the third place team, the second-class team, the funniest team money could buy. They were finally just another team, and it was glorious.

Unfortunately for all of us, they had sown the seeds of their resurrection. They just didn’t know it. In a September game, they kicked out a fan for attempting to pee during God Bless America. That man’s name is Bradford Campeau-Laurion. Bradford Campeau-Laurion is a Red Sox fan. And Bradford-Campeau Laurion is a bastard. You see, we finally had everything that we wanted. And then he had to go and ask for more.

Campeau-Laurion contended that the Yankees had violated his first amendment rights by preventing his tinkle, and sought to have them apologize and end the policy. Sure, he was completely legally right and was right to challenge the policy, but that’s hardly the point: Campeau-Laurion taunted the beast. “Look,” God said, “What else do you want? You’re not even asking for money. I gave you everything you wanted, and you want more. Remember everything I did for you to get you out of this mess. I think you’re being greedy.”

Campeau-Laurion was taken aback. “I don’t think I’m—”

“SILENCE!” God said. “I’ll be the judge of that.”

While He was judging , the Yankees signed CC Sabathia, AJ Burnett, and Mark Teixeira. A-Rod got called out to the point where he stopped caring about what other people thought of him, and simply cared about hitting a baseball. The Yankees finished a stadium with a 150-foot right field porch, and hit approximately 75 home runs in April.

I’m not saying God is all “Go Yankees!” They’re in the World Series now, and I doubt God has a preference between them and the Phillies. But something changed this year, and I refuse to believe it’s a long-overdue balancing of the scales. No, I believe other forces are at work. Campeau-Laurion won his lawsuit in May, getting his lawyer’s fees paid for and a small, unsolicited payout from the city. The Yankees also agreed to forever allow peeing during God Bless America. Unfortunately, that includes during the World Series, too. Ergo, Brad’s fault.

I hope you’re happy.

11 Comments
October 24, 2009

Football and Family

I’m supposed to play football later today, but it’s pouring out, so that’s not going to happen. Too bad, because it was the first football I was set to play this year…

It’s really amazing how much football I’ve played in my life. Or “football,” the game involving sprinting (but not running plays), passing and, formerly, tackling. The tackling thing seemed to let up once I graduated college, mostly because I wasn’t playing with the boys from home anymore. Geez, I’m *that* guy now, aren’t I? That’s okay. It’s reading “that guys” like me when I was younger that made me want to play in the first place more than watching games on TV. Those sure didn’t hurt, though.

It’s amazing how much stock I put into the football games of my youth. And how much I wanted to be better than Bruce Gray at quarterback. The great thing is, he wanted to be better than me more than I wanted to beat him. And he still does! Bruce, if you read this, I’m coming for you the next time I’m on MV for the holidays. Sadly, that won’t be any time soon.

Bruce seems pretty hard up for these games, and I can sympathize. I can sympathize because I’m the exception that proves the rule. For the last seven years, I’ve been playing football pretty much every weekend in the fall. One of my best friends from college (ornery commenter MZA) is from and lives in Queens, and his group of friends decided, effectively, never to grow up. I used to lobby this as an accusation, but I mean it now as praise. Now that the games are largely over, with the driving force having moved to L.A., I know what I am missing. Overgrown children, all of us, it was probably about time. Even without tackling, the cold ground takes a toll on your body.

Okay, I’m getting self-indulgent. But the truth is, the act of even picking up a football is laden with meaning for me. I can’t hold one without thinking of it as the means—the only one that matters—of defeating my brothers in a way that they will recognize, respect, and feel in their soul. We all think we’re better than each other; take the Voltaggio brothers from Top Chef, add a third one, and you’ve pretty much got the idea (I mean, my name is Bryan and my brother’s middle name is Michael. Another Voltagii connection). Those brothers had to move 3,000 miles away from each other. Watching them in action, it’s clear that their competitive instincts are so paramount in their lives that they easily dominate them. One of my brothers lives in London, I live in New York, and the other lives in Phoenix. Draw your own conclusions. Until Top Chef shed light on it, I hadn’t fully realized that the need to beat them was so dominant in my life. Football is the only place where we agree to battle.

But: back to football. One of my brothers is the most exceptionally talented athlete who never played organized sports that I’ve ever known. By far. His skills translate so amazingly into football that it’s clear, abundantly so, to anyone who watches that he could have played at least in college. The high school coach used to ask him every day when he was joining the team. My brother simply had no interest. Why? Beating me was the only important thing. After that, there was nothing left to prove. The other is far younger, played lacrosse in college, and is in peak physical shape. This is a fact: I’m better than both of them. I know it in my heart because it is the only thing I’ve ever wanted to know. You could make a serious argument that it is the most important thing in my life. Every time I pick up a football, though, I get that glimmer of doubt. That, more than anything, is the reason why it’s probably time to hang them up.

9 Comments
October 23, 2009

True Phillies and Fake Yankees

I missed the baseball game yesterday (just saw the highlights. Yikes). Oh, the Yankees lost? Splendid. Lest I spew any pessimistic garbage about how they’re probably going to win anyway—which is true, even if only according to TEH PROBABILITIES—let’s ride this ALCS out to another game. 2004 did wonderful, wonderful things, my friends, and one of those is keep hope alive for the little guy against the Yankees. Sure, the little guy spends a ton of money, but don’t let facts get in the way. Anyone’s little next to the Yanks, like Conan O’Brien standing next to Shaq.

Whoever wins the series—and it will be the Yankees—will play the Phillies. Wild note about the Phillies: they’re the first team since the 2001 Yanks to make the World Series in consecutive years. A little mind-blowing, no? In basketball and hockey, it’s happened within the last two titles (hockey had a str8 up rematch last year). In football, it hasn’t happened since The Trits® threw down on the Iggles in 2004 and, as a result of their victory, I threw up in a bucket on camera, which was subsequently broadcast on Manhattan Public Access TV. Some things are better left unseen, though I feel bad for the alien spaceship cruising Orion’s belt that only gets MNN and is destined to pick up the signal in 400 million years. Not as bad as they’ll feel for me, I’m sure.

(One thing that should be noted about these aliens—or ones with a full array of channels—is that the switch to digital cable is going to seriously impact their ability to watch TV. Or will they be able to see even more channels with the rise of satellite TV? Or will they not see because the satellites are pointed at Earth, whereas old-fashioned signals broadcasted out from Earth? Is it that simple? And if not, how much bullshit is it that these future aliens can get the NFL package and I can’t?)

An… y… how… this Philies team has the possibility of becoming an iconic team, the type of which that even your mom knows who Chase Utley and Ryan Howard are. The Yankees, it should be noted, are like this every year. Given their outsized payroll and ego, the Yankees are always the self-fancied cock of the walk, each one trying to get their “true Yankee” cred. When people say player such-and-such “couldn’t make it in New York,” they usually mean that the player was unable to deal with the garbage of being booed mercilessly in the hazing process of becoming a “true Yankee,” the title of which, once bestowed, allows you not to be booed right up until the fans decide to yank it away. Which can be at any time. My boss, without a shred of irony, told me yesterday that A-Rod had finally become a “true Yankee” in this postseason. In his sixth year on the team. It’s not just that my boss is wrong in principle (he is), he’s also wrong on the facts. By trying to be Jeter Junior, A-Rod wore himself out, physically and emotionally, to the point where he corkscrewed himself into oblivion come playoff time. It was only after disowning that nonsense that he’s managed to absolutely rip it in October. A-Rod hasn’t become a true Yankee—he’s transcended it.

Of course, the label is silly and self-gratifying to begin with. The thing about the Phillies is that the fans have unconditionally loved them since April, and embraced newcomers along the way (Pedro Martinez and Cliff Lee) like new members of the family. That’s true love, in the best sports sense. The Phillies may not win the World Series, but they know a good thing when they see it.

5 Comments
October 22, 2009

Content vs. Promotion

Minor League Baseball teams are masters of promotion. Last night, I was watching an episode of Man vs. Food where Adam Richman traveled to three separate minor league stadiums to sample their gimmicky food items. I saw him eat a bacon cheeseburger with a fried Krispy Kreme donut bun in Sauget, Illinois and a five-pound, five-cheeseburger Super Burger in Grand Rapids, Michigan, before I changed the channel. You’d never see these food items at a major league ballpark, not leastwise because healthy-eating groups would have a field day (One can only imagine Mayor Bloomberg’s reaction if the Yankees started selling a five-pound burger. He’d outlaw all stadium food, and spend $20 million to do it.) You see it in minor league stadiums because minor league baseball needs to give fans every reason possible to come to the park to watch something that is an inferior product.

Those who argue that promotion is more important than content on the Internet could learn something here. Superior products sell themselves. Major League Baseball has an advertising budget, to be sure, and has blistered the airwaves with their “Beyond Baseball” commercials this fall. But they do it because they’re competing against other forms of entertainment for dollars—not other forms of baseball. Geographic factors aside, Major League Baseball does not need to worry about Minor League Baseball stealing its market share. It’s just not happening.

But wait, promotion junkies might say: what if Minor League Baseball had Major League Baseball’s advertising budget? Then the playing field would be even, except it wouldn’t: MLB would still have the product.  MLB has long been accused of not selling the game well enough in the “hip-hop era” (I can’t believe I just used that term), yet attendance is up and while food at the ballgames is a draw, it’s not the draw. There are easier ways to get Shake Shack than to go to Citi Field. There aren’t really easier ways to get five-pound burgers than to go to a West Michigan Whitecaps game.

It’s the same on the Internet. As my friend Dustin, a comic strip artist, wrote in response to my previous post, here’s the phenomenon of Digg, in a nutshell:

Let’s say you get on the front page of Digg. I’ve done it a few times. You get 3,000 Diggs, it translates into 100,000 hits in one day. You’re like WOW, fuck yeah, this is awesome! The next day you get maybe 15,000 hits. The next day 3,000. Then it gets smaller and smaller and next week you are back where you started. That’s the thing with social media. It doesn’t build your fanbase unless youre constantly generating content that does well. It just gives you spikes in traffic.

Those Diggs are like the Krispy Kreme burger. They’ll get people to come to your MiLB game despite its obvious inferiority, but eventually the popularity will wane. (A result of a Lipitor scarcity, perhaps). That’s why MiLB are constantly running ridiculous promotions, like one in Pennsyvlania where 800 kids stood on the field as a helicopter dropped 100 pounds of marshmallows and 100 pounds of candy toward them. Or the one from 2008 where the Quad Cities River Bandits of Davenport, IA (hey, I’ve been there!) offered free season tickets to anyone who got a team tattoo. For Minor League Baseball, promotion is a full-time job because the product is inferior. The promotion is the product. If you’re starting a blog and have an inferior product, yes, you should focus on promotion. But the better solution would be to spend most of that time creating better posts.

UPDATE: The minor league hijinks are not, it seems limited to baseball.

2 Comments
October 22, 2009

Birth of a Salesman

Slow day today, so I’m going to follow up on some ideas I read on my friend Jeremy’s blog about writers-as-brand-creators. This will be a break from PHILLIES WIN!-type baseball talk, but I promise to get back at it soon. I fell asleep last night at 9:45 and didn’t get a chance to write any of this down.

Jeremy uses the story of an appellate lawyer who committed suicide as a jumping off point to discuss “how most jobs are really sales jobs, even the ones that don’t seem like they ought to be.  And if anything I feel like the new economy only intensifies that.” I was already nodding along with him, and then he hit this:

I think what doesn’t get acknowledged as much is that it’s hard and sometimes tiring.  Maybe you don’t want to be updating three blogs, two Twitter feeds, and a Facebook page seven times a day, forever.  Maybe you don’t want to have to come up with value you can add to the world every day.  Maybe you don’t want to have to think about networking and new leads and selling yourself.

But more and more, I think the world is moving to a place where to be successful, we have to.

These are really interesting observations to me, especially in terms of how I thought a/my writer career would play out and how it has. The fundamental shifts in the industry have occurred right as I was trying to enter it, making it as difficult to navigate as the God-fractured ground at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. There were rats, dad.

Growing up I read stories of how people 50 years prior had walked into newspaper offices and asked for jobs and were dispatched to Queens with a pencil and paper and—ta da!—30 years later they were Jimmy Breslin, or something. I knew that had changed by the time I had a professional job, but I definitely underestimated how much it had changed. Being a reporter didn’t involve working really hard to get to the point where you could find your place in the firmament, so to speak—it’s now about figuring out your place in the firmament, then working hard, and then establishing yourself. You’ll notice that I haven’t done it as of yet, but I only recently realized that generalism is no excuse for a lack of posts.

In a way, this is reassuring. In the new media landscape, writers will have been so singularly focused for such a long time that we’ll have experts on everything. The bad side is not so much that this practice discourages inquitisiveness among reporters and “reporters”—writers are, by nature, curious people—but that people might automatically discount writing that, say, a “sports guy” does about crime. (That is not an altogether random example.) On the flip side, building yourself as a brand allows you a lot of cross-platform opportunities, so I’m not sure that’s a good example. Like, if I wrote a really good sports blog, someone might let me write about movies. But I think I would always be known as the sports guy. Or “a” sports guy, I should say. The other title is taken.

Selling yourself isn’t new, of course, but I think Jeremy’s right that it’s taken more percentage of work time than ever before. That’s something that my friend Dustin echoed in his recent comic. Building a brand has become equally about the work you put in inside the medium and the work you do to promote yourself. Self-promotion has always had its advantages, but today, it’s about survival.

I mostly just feel what Jeremy was saying, is all.

UPDATE: As I watched Twitter this morning, MediaBistro tweeted about an article called “25 things I wish I’d known when I started blogging.” Number one is “Content doesn’t matter. Promotion matters.” MediaBistro immediately followed up to say most people would say that promotion is nothing without good content.

UPDATE 2: It would appear Tommy Friedman’s column from yesterday is also somewhat about this.

4 Comments
October 21, 2009

Chuck Klosterman, Bill Simmons, David Foster Wallace, Footnotes and Football

I wouldn’t say I was a fan of David Foster Wallace so much as I simply read Infinite Jest, a feat about which I was prone to brag. It was the worst type of bragging, too, in that I was completely passive-aggressive about it (that should probably say “am” passive-aggressive about it.) Whenever something came up that necessitated the “reveal,” so to speak, I would hold my information for a beat and really treasure letting it out of the cage—the whole time pretending that it meant nothing to me. I wanted my reaction to be like “Yeah, so what, I read it!” and in doing so, I’m sure it came across as the exact opposite. I’m sure it was, and is, annoying. I would have been better off just taking my literary d*** out, so so speak and laying it on the table, or bragging about it, Rushmore-style. I read a giant book. What did you ever do?

But yeah: I read Infinite Jest. The defining feature of Infinite Jest is that there are more than 100 pages of endnotes, which most people call footnotes. Reading IJ required two bookmarks and a constant reference-book like tossing of the middle section back and forth to see what DFW had meant by “the” in the thirty-seventh chapter. Once you got used to it, it was all very entertaining.

I mention this because I just read Chuck Klosterman’s wonderful book excerpt on football and Bill Simmons’ book excerpt on basketball, and they both use some sort of notation system (Off the printed page, they’re formatted as endnotes. I don’t know how they’ll be in the book, but is anyone going to care anyway?). Simmons has, in the past, acknowledged his use of “footnotes” as a direct homage to Wallace, whom he admired. They work in Simmons’ prose for the same reason they worked for Wallace—they appeal to the helter-skelter mind of the reader and the writer, allowing quick (or in DFW’s case, not so quick) tangeants on whatthefuckever. DFW was Twitter before Twitter.

Klosterman’s thesis is that football is a progressive game in a conservative shell. For all the talk about football as being the man’s man, grounded-in-tradition sport, everything changes all the time. The forward pass, instant replay, challenges, the spread offense, the Wildcat: anything that’s new is at first rejected upon some sort of anti-traditionalism basis, then copied ad infinitum. Isn’t the same thing Klosterman and Simmons are doing with footnotes?

The correlation might not be perfect, but here’s a snippet from Michiko Kakutani’s review of IJ in the Times (emphasis mine):

The book seems to have been written and edited (or not edited) on the principle that bigger is better, more means more important, and this results in a big psychedelic jumble of characters, anecdotes, jokes, soliloquies, reminiscences and footnotes, uproarious and mind-boggling, but also arbitrary and self-indulgent.

A decade and a half later, Klosterman and Simmons, two pop culture writers, have brought the form to the mainstream. For Klosterman’s part, he realizes that the faux-anti-innovation processes he’s witnessed in football are present elsewhere:

I had played football and written about football and watched it exhaustively for twenty years, so I thought I knew certain inalienable truths about the game. And I was wrong. What I knew were the assumed truths, which are not the same thing. I had brainwashed myself. I was unwilling to admit that my traditional, conservative football values were imaginary and symbolic. They belonged to a game I wasn’t actually watching but was still trying to see.

Over time, I realized this had happened with almost every aspect of my life.

You can add one more to the list. As to the future of footnotes in pop writing, one need no look farther than Klosterman, again. If you like them, enjoy them while they last:

Twenty-five years ago, the read option didn’t exist. Coaches would have given a dozen reasons why it couldn’t be used. Ten years ago, it was a play of mild desperation, most often used by teams who couldn’t compete physically. But now almost everyone uses it. It’s the vortex of an offensive scheme that has become dominant. But ten years from now — or even less, probably — this play will have disappeared completely. In 2018, no one will run it, because every team will be running something else. It will have been replaced with new thinking.

3 Comments
October 21, 2009

A-Rod

I’ve probably written more about Alex Rodriguez than I have about any other athlete (last winter’s entry here). He has been everything a sportswriter could ask for: outgoing, vain, naive, foolish, and a hundred other celebrity adjectives. He’s been proud of all of them, even as his on-the-field performance—you know, his job—has suffered at the times it’s needed most. The stats tell part of the story. Until this year, he has been ordinary in the playoffs: not as bad as his critics say, but nothing befitting one of the best players in the game. Three years ago, he was benched against the Detroit Tigers when he was supposed to be carrying the Yankees past an inferior team. At the beginning of this year, he was outed as an incurable narcissist and steroid user in a book by Sports Illustrated’s Selena Roberts. It was the best thing that could have happened to him.

For years, A-Rod had been embarassing himself in increasingly ridiculous ways, and this March, the bubble finally burst. Short of being convicted of any sort of crime, the public’s love affair with the A-Rod foibles was over. People like intrigue, but they don’t cheaters (or what they consider cheaters, at any rate). So A-Rod fell into the background like only he could: he stopped talking, and started dating Kate Hudson. Only in A-Rod-Land can you start dating Goldie Hawn’s daughter and somehow become less interesting, but that’s exactly what happened.

Instead of being the incurable narcissist with the cerebral, psychologist wife whom he tried to please, he started a frivolous relationship with someone who actually appeared to like him. For all A-Rod’s popularity, he has always seemed very alone, trying to fill the significant gaps in his life with newspaper headlines and the plaudits of the baseball aristocracy. His bizarre fascination with cooler-than-thou Derek Jeter was odd, unsurprising evidence of this.

With a relaxed, simmed down A-Rod tearing up everything he sees at the plate, the rapport between him and Jeter has mellowed significantly. Every time something happens that’s good for the Yankees, it’s the two of them clapping and hollering on in lockstep. That is, unless it’s another one of A-Rod’s home runs. Then it’s only Jeter, clapping away on the top step for a teammate he finally respects.

It’s hard to talk about A-Rod without talking about Jeter, and I suspect that Jeter realizes how much he needs Rodriguez these days. Jeter is still a great player, playing at a Hall of Fame level, but the needy, nervy A-Rod threatens to suck the life out of a Yankees team with brutal efficiency. It’s possible and likely that the Yankees’ new additions have kept the clubhouse “loose,” and with Mark Teixeira and CC Sabathia working their magic, A-Rod feels like he’s just part of the club of elites instead of bearing the weight of the Yankees season on his shoulders. If Jeter was impervious before, maybe he was oblivious to how much the toll took not on Rodriguez, but the team as a whole. For the first time, it appears they genuinely like each other.

Make no mistake: if the Yankees win this title, it will be A-Rod’s World Series. Jeter will get “one for the thumb,” but the talk will all be about Rodriguez. He’s done so much to lead them there so far it’s almost inspiring to think that he might be able to keep it up. Just as Barry Bonds transcended his October woes to turn in a signature postseason, it appears A-Rod is going the same. The difference is that Bonds did it through methods that ultimately made him a villain (and perhaps not incidentally, he lost). A-Rod did it the other way: by finally becoming the good guy.

7 Comments
October 20, 2009

Am I Missing Something, Or Have The Sane Baseball People Gone Wacko?

Old-school baseball writers and announcers have, by and large, become a straw man for online critics, who broadside their often ridiculous generalizations with statistics and watch them try to wriggle out of them or double down on their assertions that Derek Jeter is “clutch” without providing any new evidence. This was the entirety of the idea behind the website Fire Joe Morgan, and spawned a new type of “journalism” — take down the stupid guy! Yeah!

The problem with this type of work is that the people doing it are starting to double back on themselves. They’re so concerned with what everyone else is writing that they’re missing the low-hanging fruit. There are so many observations that could be made about what’s going on in the baseball playoffs that aren’t being made by either the “traditional” or “new” media that the “observations” they’re making instead are ridiculous.

Take the play for which Jeter was heartily lauded by Joe Buck and Tim McCarver last night. Bobby Abreu hit a ball into the right center field gap, and took a wide enough turn around second base that he couldn’t get back before Jeter threw to first baseman Mark Teixeira, who had raced over to cover. On the play, second baseman Robinson Cano had stationed himself in front of Jeter, but Melky Cabrera’s throw went over Cano’s head and into Jeter’s glove. Seeing Abreu lose his footing, Jeter snapped a perfect throw off, to the delight of Buck and McCarver.

Was it a good play by Jeter? Yes. But did anyone ask why it happened, then or now? Everyone said Abreu screwed up—and he did—but they never asked why. If you follow the play, it’s easy to see that Abreu was so far around second that there’s no reason for him to think he could have gotten back if there was someone there. So one might ask: why would he do this? How about because the second baseman and shortstop were both in front of him? It’s incredibly likely that Abreu thought there was no one on the base, but there was Teixeira, who had raced behind Abreu to make the play you’re taught to make in Little League but gradually forget to do. It was a brilliant play, for sure, just not for the person who got credit for it.

If Will Leitch wants to know why people hate Joe Buck, that’s why. Also, he announces the game’s like he’s Jacob Silj. But my real pet peeve is Buck’s constant attention to what critics will say. He always unloads, “well, the critics will say…” and ping-pongs opinions on the game. That’s not inherently a bad thing, but he does the faux-equivalency thing the MSM is guilty of w/r/t political reporting. Just because there are two opinions does not mean they are of equal merit. STOP TALKING ABOUT WHAT PEOPLE WILL SAY ABOUT THE GAME, AND TALK ABOUT THE GAME. (Oh, and being better than Chip Caray doesn’t make him good.)

Unfortunately, Leitch’s buddy at Deadspin, Tommy Craggs, is not much better. An Angels fan took a video of Mariano Rivera spitting on the ball last night and got a overboard with his analysis… leading Craggs in the odd position of trying to argue against video evidence to try and make a point. Perhaps realizing the silliness of his endeavour, at the end of the post he said it would be “just about the coolest thing ever” if Rivera did throw a spitter—just in case, he, you know, did. Which he did. Craggs’ point, I guess, is that some random Angels fans on a blog are more worth making an example of than focusing a laser beam on the obvious:

1) That yes, Rivera threw a spitter.

2) Yes, it’s cool (I agree).

3) If Rivera is throwing spitters, it stands to reason pretty much everyone else is. So calm down.

Concerned with this? No, he’d rather tell you why your eyes don’t work. (Don’t worry, they work fine.)

I’m all for criticism (as you can see). But base it on what you see, and not what other people say. The game’s the thing. If you read something that’s tearing someone else down just for sport, just quit reading. You’re not going to learn anything anyway.

UPDATE: ESPN’s Amy K. Nelson tweets: “rivera spitball” No. 19 on google trends right now. so stupid.” Right, it’s stupid for people to be curious of things. The commissioner’s office also thinks you’re stupid, btw. They’ve just released a statement saying there’s no evidence he spit on the ball. I’ll assume they mean besides the evidence they have. Did Sammy Sosa have a corked bat or not?

Look, do I think the spitting thing is a big deal w/r/t fair play? Of course not. It’s silly and will pass, and I agree with Craggs that it’s even pretty cool. But it did, you know, happen.

UPDATE 2: Amen to new pals of this website Stupid Sports Blog for nailing this.

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October 20, 2009

Booze, Baseball and True Love

You’re not going to believe this, but after yesterday’s blotto football-and-supermarket session, I’ve been in a lot of pain today (I’m writing this Monday night instead of Tuesday morning). I did however, interview a major league baseball player at work today, so I had that going, which is nice. Now I’m full of vegetable samosas that I apparently bought yesterday.

And now some words on the baseball playoffs, I guess.

The only thing I do not want to happen this year is for the Yankees to sweep through the ALCS and World Series without much competition, stomping to a 1998-2000-style championship. I obviously don’t mean “sweep” in the traditional sports sense here, but one win does not a series make for the Angels, or, far more importantly, for me.

In the National League, I avoided paying attention until about thirty minutes ago. I’ve followed the action until now but haven’t really watched it, for fear of gorging myself on meaningless baseball. It was just: if the Yankees were going to romp whomever they played, the NL playoffs were something of a Bataan Death March. Given that I’m increasingly interested in Game 4, I guess that the Yankees loss has at least given me hope. Audacious, I know.

The Red Sox lost eight days ago, and during game two of the Yankees/Angels series—the so-called “classic” that lasted 13 innings—I turned it off after 11, realizing that I knew the outcome ahead of time, and that I hated both teams. But that realization was also a result of a day of booziness, and I realize that when I’ve had a couple and watch the Yankees, I’m immediately transported back to their glory years, expecting the worst. It’s a terrible way to live. In the light of day, it’s not so bad. My liver is excited for more of these “days” of not pounding back whatever’s put in front of me, as is my brain, my stomach, and everyone but my readers, really. You guys love some drunk posts, don’t you?

While we’re talking NL playoffs, a quick note on these Phillies. I’ve never seen a fanbase so dead-set on a repeat title that they have basically disowned their championship. I mean, they haven’t really, but they’re not using it as a hammer. They want this. For all the deserved teasing of Philly sports fans, there isn’t a much healthier attitude to have than to seize the moment. The only Boston team of the decade that inspired this attitude was last year’s Celtics, who were derailed by Kevin Garnett’s injury from what now appears to have been a very winnable title. Even when the Patriots did win back-to-back Super Bowls, they seemed inevitable, and the Sox’ 2007 campaign fell flat… but the Yankees won the playoffs. We don’t even need to discuss the hangover from 2004.

Like Celtics fans last year, Phillies fans are embracing the idea that the windows to win titles are small, especially in a sport as fickle as baseball. It’s one thing to put together good players, and it’s another to have championship teams. The alchemy between the two is mysterious and possibly apocryphal, but Philadelphians know they’ve got something good. Hell, they’ve waited long enough, they ought to know it when they see it. It’s kind of like true love, I guess.

UPDATE: Jimmy Rollins.

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