—By @nocoastoffense and myself—
Stropical depression
Stroppin’ bombs on your moms
No Strop Till Brooklyn
Strop snitching
Strop it like it’s hot
All Strop and no play make Homer something something
Bonus: Can’t Strop won’t Strop
The NBA playoffs are jumping like a lie detector, and we’re nearing peak season of the percentage of truth per game. Football’s designed to focus solely on what happens in the playoffs, and baseball is forever about what could, or could have, gone down. Basketball’s solidly in the middle, the fleshiest body with which to work. Almost no one doubts the wisdom of the best-of-seven-game basketball series, so it’s endlessly compelling in real time. There are five ideas about how this will all play out that maintain any credence: The Heat pull it out, the Heat blow it, the Celtics somehow hold on, the Spurs asphyxiate more victories, or Oklahoma City bombs and hops its way to glory. There are at at most 13 games to figure this all out, which means a fortnight of new world orders.
I think that’s all I had to say, but here’s Rondo being Rondo:
In his recent essay on football, Chuck Klosterman writes:
So here’s a low-grade thought experiment: Try to think of something that is (or was) highly controversial and increasingly popular at the exact same time. It won’t be difficult. Here’s an abbreviated list: the rise of Howard Stern, the Beastie Boys in 1986, 2 Live Crew in 1989, Herman Cain last October, Basic Instinct, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, Andrew Dice Clay, salvia, Scientology, Dennis Rodman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Answer Me!, gay marriage, the Sex Pistols, and laying in the middle of the freeway because you got loaded and watched The Program.
With the possible exception of salvia, what all of these have in common is that these things are not, in and of themselves, dangerous. Or rather, The Program is not dangerous, but lying in the middle of the road because of it is as needlessly dumb as, say, watching CNN for fun.
Klosterman’s trying to draw a connection between the “controversy” surrounding football and its popularity, but that straw man never had life. There is no controversy about football right now. A few vocal people are upset that older players are dying and are just starting to raise their voices. They are, in fact, the complete opposites to the “controversies” above, each of which was manufactured. If you don’t think football’s critics have a leg to stand on, you’d better think they can levitate.
The fact is that no critical mass really cares about concussions, a tragic point Klosterman could have made well enough. Instead, he argues that the argument is at a fever pitch at which it will remain, in mutual orbit with this “controversy,” ad infinitum. This is not the same as saying football will always be violent. It will. If he had said that, he would have been bland but correct, the broken clock at the moment of magic.
Football will change. It will change on its own accord, not despite itself. Klosterman presupposes that the NFL/NFL Jr. would never voluntarily make changes, but they will, because they are in the business of making money and dead people equals bad business. Helmets will get better and brain trauma will be treated better and years from now we’ll look back at the game today as barbaric as we look at the game of the 1970’s. The process will repeat itself. That’s what he’s trying to say, I think, but he could have done all of us a favor by saying it.
Oh, and: “Imagine two vertical, parallel lines accelerating skyward — that’s what football is like now.” He actually wrote that. As far as analogies go, this is the singular one that has been stamp of the fourth-rate snake-oil salesman for more than a decade. Watch your wallet.
It is ideal weather for attending a Major League Baseball game. The Mets are playing in 90 minutes. They play way over there. I’m pointing to the stadium right now. I’m not going.
Watching baseball in New York is a miserable experience, by definition. The Yankees are boring and imperial, and the Mets are a joke. Their stadiums don’t help the matter whatsoever. Both are bland, vacant echoes of other places: The Yankees’ of Yankee Stadium, Citifield as the ghost of so many other ballparks across the country. The park evokes Ebbetts Field like Justin Bieber evokes Nas, despite what the Mets would have you believe.
There is no novelty at either park. You are provided the product of a baseball game and provided with the opportunity to engage with the screens and purchase high-quality food and drink products and officially licensed team merchandise, which gives you some cache to return to the park and repeat the process. I can’t say a thing about the full capitalization of the fan experience better than @muziejus did in “Paris is Earning.” You should check it out. The result is that as a potential new customer of New York baseball on any given day throughout the season, I repeatedly find other things to do. The game is hardly the thing. No single win or loss defines the Yankees: Being the Yankees does. Even if you saw “history,” it would be a footnote. The Yankees make sure of it that they’re more important than you. The Mets are the opposite, especially given that they’ve never had a no-hitter. Every single game promises to be something for Baseball purposes, right up until it doesn’t.
I do think the Mets will be sneaky fun this year. There are literally zero expectations, and they have some potentially likable young players.
They’re not likable enough for me to make the trek out to Queens, which isn’t so bad a trip in itself. It’s that you always have to make the trek back, and make it with Mets fans sulking in the primordial stew of another loss or the similar acid bath of knowing their win was illusory and up for debate again tomorrow. It’s a six-hour commitment in a place where many people can walk to any type of exciting thing in under five minutes. Baseball monetized the sun a long time ago, but the lowercase-p park has been running a nonprofit on the same business model literally forever. I see no need to participate in a system that gets me to spend money so that I continue to do so. If I want Shake Shack, I won’t suffer through Mets baseball to get it.
I learn so much from far lefties on the Internet that I feel bad criticizing them. Remainder rage fuels the Internet, pays the bills for someone like myself, and is entirely avoidable. I mean, what about the last line of John Cook’s otherwise well-reasoned “Barack Obama’s Bullshit Gay Marriage Announcement” isn’t high-class trolling: “Obama is moving backward, not forward.”
There is enough nonsense in that to make your stomach churn. There’s also enough nonsense in there to discard it entirely. The Internet Thunderdome of Ideas is a good thing, on the whole. The universe only exists because matter outgrew anti-matter by a tiny, tiny fraction of a percent after the Big Bang, and so is the progress of ideas, just in general. Their fundamental rightness leads them to slowly build up over time. The Internet accelerates this trend. Charles Pierce wrote yesterday about the inevitable acceptance of homosexuals in sports, correctly, that, “In 50 years, our grandchildren are going to wonder what all the fuss was about.” While that’s hardly anything to be proud of, it’s a fact. Progress happens.
But man, is it brutal in the short term.
If this is the end for Mariano Rivera, it finished not with a whimper but the thud of a baseball against a wall. That was always one potential finish, but this was like the residents of Pisa waking up to find the damn thing toppled over and finally having to answer the question of “What now?” Rivera stood for so long and broke so many rules that the talk today will likely be of what a tragedy it is for the whole exercise to end this way. I don’t celebrate it, but in the end River’s body did what no single hitter could ever do convincingly, and that’s show that the guy is human. This could have happened at any point since the strike. It happened in 2012.
Rivera’s career isn’t just staggering. He’s sui generis, a now-fallen baseball god with no father to his breathtaking style. Cal Ripken was eventually the Guy in Gehrig’s Shadow, and the bulky guy who didn’t meet a batting stance he didn’t like. Rivera was the converse. Almost ashen in his wiryness, his control panel had one button and he pressed it with joy. Yankees fans loved him for it, and why not? They won and won and won and won, and they won with happy endings the likes of which all sports fans may not crave, but love, because it puts them at the center of the narrative. Rivera was Disney-like, and if there’s anything good about the way it likely ended it’s that we can appreciate the man instead of the myth.
But oh, what a myth! Even in his most visible moment of “failure,” against the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2001, it was in play. He only gave up broken-bat singles, and when called upon to throw to second base, he pressed the only button he had, and chucked it into center field. In a moment so potentially fraught with symbolism just after September 11, mighty Mariano fell short, and the winners weren’t New York’s brokenhearted but a bunch of Curt-come-latelies from Arizona. The gift here was the same as the injury, in a way: It showed that life doesn’t give a shit about your narratives, and the lesson is to enjoy the good times when they happen.
I’m trying to make chicken salad here, which might sound rich coming from a Red Sox fan, but I loved Rivera. He belonged to the Yankees, but he belonged to the baseball-playing human race, and that’s all I really care about. Shit, it’s better than he played for the Yankees. If anyone was deserving of the spotlight, it was him. Derek Jeter is a great, great player, but he’s symbolic of the Yankees teams in a way Mariano isn’t. Those Yankees teams were Derek Jeter and had Mariano, and that’s an important semantic difference. Mariano belonged to all of us, because things that damn awesome just do.
All that said, there’s no official word that this is the end for Mariano, but it is the end for the Yankees, who finally have to face life without him on a sustained basis. This is the moment everything changes. As fans of literally every other team can tell you, “relief pitching” is an oxymoron, in that it’s almost always a relief for the other team to see it activated. Through all the scuffling, the Yankees knew Rivera was on the end of that chain, and for as long as they needed him. Even as his appearances longer than one inning dwindled, you knew he had it in him, just like he had three innings in him in 2003 against the Red Sox in the famous Aaron Boone game. It’s barely remembered that David Ortiz came about two feet from hitting a home run off the great one in extra innings, and for good reason: Rivera kept him in the yard, and when Boone did Ortiz about 60 feet better, he ran to the mound and pounded it with his bare fists, crying like a man who had given everything he had to a game he loved. If your lasting image of Mariano is of the legend writhing in the dirt, tears streaking his face, make it that one, and not the one from yesterday. That’s the legend in carbonite, the tower that can never be rebuilt.
We don’t know why Junior Seau killed himself. If we were to guess, we’d almost all guess that it had something to do with head injuries he sustained in the NFL. Sadly, those wishing to make the argument hardly need Seau’s sad case to blast the NFL on head injures. There are Dave Duerson, Ted Johnson, and many, many others. Yesterday, Ta-Nehisi Coates described his own conflicted feelings on the problem of being a football fan: “I now know that I have to go. I have known it for a while now. But I have yet to walk away. For me, the hardest portion is living apart–destroying something that binds me to friends and family. With people whom I would not pass another words, I can debate the greatest running back of all time. It’s like losing a language.” After hearing Chris Berman spin the news in a potentially pro-NFL way, he proclaimed, “I’m out.”
I’ve made that claim before, and I’ve refused to follow it. I suspect Coates will too. The pull of the NFL is always stronger than the pull against it once the games start, and the justifications follow quite smoothly. I didn’t stop reading fiction because David Foster Wallace killed himself, and you could make an argument that being an artist requires exploring often dangerous spaces in your own mind. There are other non-pertinent examples that will seem perfectly reasonable the second Peyton Manning is playing Aaron Rodgers or JPP is facing Tom Brady (again). If Coates is able to follow through on his claim, I will be proud, and I will be listening. The NFL needs born-again humanists leading the charge against it if it’s ever going to change.
Part of my ambivalence, which may be irresponsible, is my feeling that the NFL will have to change, eventually. The unsustainability of the current system is put on display with every tragedy like Seau’s. There are many people like me, I suspect, who want to enjoy the NFL as-is because the NFL as-is is damn near perfect television. Nevermind that it’s a terrible game to watch in-person, and the pulsing joy of the tailgate is easily and often mitigated by the lower-than-lowest common denominator side effects of a group of drunken fans of violence cooking delicious dead animals. On TV, the NFL is so unstoppably great that a game between its two worst teams is glorious and preferable to going outside, into a world without television. There’s some beauty in that, and there’s so much strategy in the game that even Bill Belichick gets rightly called out for shitty drafts by armchair bozos. There’s so much to get right, and so many chances to get things wrong, that any even moderate level of success in the game is cause for celebration. If you lined up a one-time 1,000-yard rusher with a baseball player with 300 career home runs, I bet you’d have far more questions for the running back. I know I would.
If the NFL is going to survive in its current state, it’s going to need to shuffle players out of the league faster than it currently does. The problem is that being a football player is a life-consuming endeavor, meaning that the players to whom this would apply need to maximize their playing time to earn a lifetime’s worth of wages. That’s the ballgame. Roger Goodell has overseen an incredible run of success, even by the NFL’s standards, especially when it comes to Super Bowls, which have been almost uniformly great since he took over. If he can figure out how to save the league from itself, it will blow away any other successes. The solutions that come to mind will all probably be implemented in some way: Stricter concussion testing and prohibitions, maximum age limits, increased health benefits, better public outreach. All of these things are going to happen. It’s just a matter of when they do.
I want to be on the front lines of this fight, and to make it happen quicker. But for me the NFL is still about me, and not about them. That’s cowardly, but it’s true. I’d be willing to pay more for the NFL to underwrite better treatment of players, and the endgame is that’s probably what’s going to happen. Why shouldn’t it be the billionaire owners of teams? It should be, but it won’t be, at least not exclusively. We know that, because it never is. It will fall on the fans to foot the bill for what we have wrought, and we will pay it. It’s an addiction, and if you don’t believe that just jacking the prices will work, see Bloomberg vs. New York City on the issue of cigarettes. The difference is that there’s no outlet from which to pilfer cheap NFL like there is smokes. You can’t outsource the Patriots. The injury issue aside, the NFL is an extremely progressive game, as Chuck Klosterman correctly argued a few years ago, and is 100 percent Made in America. The NFL flips this on its head by effectively advertising that it is America, and on the concussion issue it could hardly bear a stronger resemblance to the military with respect to injured soldiers. The main difference is that one political party wants to strip the government of basically all revenue to do anything to help anyone, including injured soldiers, while everyone is willing to pay more for the NFL, even if they don’t know it yet. In the end, it will be about money. It always is, always was, and always will be. The language of Tony Dorsett of which Coates speaks was always backed by the dollar, and it will continue to be, and he and I and everyone else will likely pay to keep the language alive. It’s the beauty of sports and life, and the horror of them, that we’ll be able to live with these contradictions, and that we’ve been able to do so for so long.
Bobby V, only baseball’s most recent enduring snake oil salesman, walked straight into the wave of jeers, because they were coming from behind the bench, because where else was he going to go? The Yankees were pulling their remarkable comeback against the Red Sox on Saturday, and the fans booed the cocky symbol of change, the cosmopolitan brash jerkoff in the townie capitol of America, running their team. If this wasn’t the bottom, what was? How long before everyone just dealt with it?
Change happens slowly, but tiny moments often bear the weight of long periods of change. Nomar was traded, and the 2004 Red Sox went on a tear and won the World Series. This was a big deal because reporters liked to ask if it was a big deal, making it a big deal. How big of a deal was it? I don’t know, but the Nomar trade was a jumping off point for baseball writers eager to try their hands at fiction, the same way the Sox’ September meltdown last year was great fodder for the giant Internet writing workshop that is the Internet. Premise: Stupid, puritanical shit that has nothing to do with baseball affects baseball. Word limit: None. Go to town.
It will inevitably be this way for the Bobby V Sox and the Yankees’ nearly bloodless coup of the Sox for four innings in April, 2012. The Red Sox are too good not to be good, and when they’re good, the premise of the writing assignment will shift toward making a sly, patient gamesman out of Bobby V instead of an ineffectual braggart. Soon, we’ll be told he’s playing the long game, and the Sox will suddenly be “surprisingly” competing with the Rays and Angels or Rangers for one of the two wild card spots. Soon, because of a blip of a rule change Bud “Milquetoast” Selig made during the offseason, we will see Bobby V’s widened room for error, and forget about it because it ruins the narrative. If the current wild card system was in effect last year, Francona would have made the playoffs again, and he might still be around. That would have been good, though painfully mature. In turning over the management of the team, the Sox showed that the inmates are running the asylum. The Cubs needed to clean house because no one was running the show. The Sox live and die by the players. Bobby V is the mermaid on the prow, and as much as some players obviously can’t stand him, a rising tide lifts all boats. This is the real Moneyball: Money wins out. The Sox spend too much to suck. When they don’t, remember that Bobby V probably has shit-all to do with it.
Ivan Rodriguez is two things to me. He’s the guy the MVP award when it was rightful legal property of Pedro J. Martinez in 1999, and he was the guy on the Florida Marlins who hit singles the other way in 2003 like he was starting a trend. I always thought he was sort of a prick, and I stick by that now. A lot of that is playing for Texas for so long. Before their culture change, they were some unloveable losers.
Pudge was the catcher of his generation, more than Piazza, though maybe not in press clippings. He was a guy who knew what to do at bat and less controlled the game from behind the plate than kept it in line, unapologetically. If you wandered too far off of first, he would call you on it, and the universe would return to equilibrium. Someone would win and someone would lose, but the game would be kept on a level. The guy most like this now is Yadier Molina, and Yadier Molina is only hitting now what Pudge was hitting for years. He’ll be the first-ballot Hall of Famer that fans don’t give a shit about but that people within the game take for granted. The catcher’s job is really absurd when you think about it. is there a single other profession that requires so much crouching? And then to come up and swing away, one matrix into the other.
Enjoy the Hall of Fame induction. I won’t be watching.
Part of my job now involves watching and reading an irresponsible amount of sports commentary, most of it recently having to do with the New Orleans Saints or LeBron James. Everyone agrees that LeBron James plays wonderful basketball until a certain point. To use a cross-sport analogy, LeBron basically refuses to be his own closer. Deadspin’s Sean Newell exhaustively listed the reasons that this is okay, but he wrote one thing that will be, at some point, proven demonstrably false: “If Lebron took the shot and made it, LeBron and the Heat would have done exactly what is expected: beat the Jazz in March.” No. The sports-watching world is waiting for LeBron to shoot. If he takes a last-second shot and he makes it, it will not hesitate to congratulate itself for remaking James in its own image, even if it’s only one game and one shot, and one he’s taken before, albeit under different circumstances.
While Newell and even Jon Barry, whose argument Newell briskly escorts to the woodshed, both say that LeBron’s pass to Udonis Haslem against the Jazz was the “right basketball play,” I think they’re overstating what they know. I love statistics and I pray at their altar, but what we don’t know far outstrips that which we do. Is a surprise Udonis Haslem 15-foot open shot a better percentage play than a LeBron isolation play after LeBron has drilled miraculous shot after miraculous shot? I have no way of knowing. I don’t like that people think they know the answer. I think the source of my confusion is: context.
Context is why the same meal on fine china tastes better than on paper plates, and why better-looking people get paid better than worse-paid ones to provide exactly the same service. It is powerful and deceiving, and it is real. To go back to the baseball analogy, the Red Sox’ closer-by-committee didn’t work because the pitchers were crappy, but the generally accepted theory is that it didn’t work because pitchers wanted to know their roles. If you’re willing to admit that that sort of uncertainly had at least some effect on their performance—and I encourage you to imagine yourself at work, battling uncertainty, and compare that to your most productive times—then you’re granting that context provides an unknown. If Michael Wilbon was to be believed on PTI today, Magic Johnson told him that other players on the Heat are likely looking to James to take that shot, and that they see his passing it up as something akin to Josh Beckett removing himself to let Dice-K face the last batter when Beckett has 18 strikeouts. If context has some effect, then it’s almost certainly playing a role here, both in the short term and long term.
If you grant all that, and you believe in the numbers… well, if you’re willing to discount a regular season game as just a regular season game, isn’t it in LeBron’s best interests to kill this storyline? Process is important, as the Sloan Conference hammered at last weekend. So is realism. You can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The potential shitshow of this continuing nonsense is not worth one regular-season loss, even if it’s nonsense. I’m confident enough in my math to say that. We’re at that point. We don’t often get there. If LeBron takes the last shot the next time he has the chance, he will feed the monkey enough to shift the ball enough toward his amazing play that, if the stress is wearing on him at all, it’ll free him up to be even better.
Shoot the ball, buddy. It’s like sushi. You might love it if you try it.
Bryan Joiner 