Facing the Music

Poor Irving Berlin.  “God Bless America” isn’t his best work, but it’s been made to bear the brunt, now, of the boorish, thuggish conformity of the New York Yankees whom, despite the name, are in a lot of ways the antithesis of American ideals.  And to have the NYPD enforce listening to his empty demonstration of empty patriotism?  It’s the non-conformists like me who should be angry and paranoid, not fools like this.

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Miscellaneous Misgivings

One of the reasons I’m a sports fan, and I’m a big sports fan, is that it is a usually consistent respite from the nonsense of every day discourse, a place where actual achievement can be measured and where the final result is pretty much just that – final. Someone wins, someone loses, game over.

I especially need this refuge because the nonsense and bullshit is coming down thick and fast. Here we are, almost seven full years into WAR ALL THE TIME, living in a country with a foundering economy, a government which spies on all its citizens and which tortures people for no reason other than the sadism of weak, cowardly men with compensation issues, and this is the kind of trivial, mean-spirited and small-minded gossip we get from supposed professionals. If political journalism was baseball, these fools would have been kicked out of the league a long time ago, replaced by actual talent.

Unfortunately, we seem to be in a stretch where this kind of nonsense has developed too much power and prominence in sports. For example, can anyone explain to me this mess around Brett Favre? He’s one of the greats, and when he announced his retirement, it seemed the ideal moment. The best time for the best athletes to retire, I think, is when they have satisfied their own sense of wanting to play well, and prior to a drastic decline in skills and achievement. Go out at or near the top, if you can. Favre had a fine year, but a tough time in the NFC Championship game, which was sentimentally supposed to favor the old quarterback playing in brutal conditions. Instead, each close-up shot seemed to show him in physical distress, eyes watering from the cold, trouble breathing. The Giants were able to pressure him, and it was his final mistake that sent the underdogs to the Super Bowl. Meanwhile, Eli Manning seemed to not even notice that it was zero degrees on the field.

But, I’m sure Favre can still play. And although there is some sense of embarrassment in retiring and then rescinding that decision so soon, he’s the best quarterback the Packers have right now. So why are they so desperate to keep him from playing? Why do they feel they must play Aaron Rodgers? If the goal of sports is to win, they have a better chance of winning with Favre, and it doesn’t take a leap of imagination to say that. Favre changed his mind, can’t the Packers? But they have now gone into government-corporate thinking mode, where things are done a certain way, and that’s that, and they made a decision and are sticking to it. The quality of the decision doesn’t matter, it’s all about staying the course and trying to spin some justification for it. They are now the GOP of the NFL, stuck in their own lack of ideas and their values of authority and obedience. And of course, the weird desire to have Daddy both scold and protect them from themselves. Which is all John McCain has to offer, along with his narcissistic sense of grievance the he deserves this, and how dare they expect him to have to campaign for votes.

Meanwhile, how can this be explained? Here’s a guy committed to winning and putting his resources behind the front office to make it happen, and a city that wants a winner. It’s very strange that Cuban could offer the highest price for the Cubs, and BE TURNED DOWN! What does it take to make his money good enough? He has to properly belong to the elite club. Most fans, and most Americans won’t understand that, but then the owners are generally like the Republicans in baseball as well. They pay lip service to capitalism and practice socialism amongst themselves; they value hereditary privelege over merit; they think they understand things better than the rest of us, even though by definition they are stupid; and most of all they seek to maintain an elite status for themselves and work to keep as many people as possible out of the club. When Karl Rove tried to portray Obama as the nasty, superior guy at the country club, it can have only made sense to himself, or maybe David Broder. They’ll have to do a lot better than that, or this.

Back to the Cubs – they’ve had an impressive year so far. They really showed how good a team they are when they went to rival Milwaukee and swept a four game series. Merit wins out – spin is for the losers. And my Dodgers made the trade of the year, getting a great ballplayer for just about nothing, making what I think is a wise gamble in a weak division. I saw his first at-bat in Saturday’s game, the fans giving him an ovation as he walked to the plate, then demanding a curtain-call after he hit a two-run homer. The great thing about it though is that we’ll be able to tell exactly how wise it was. The White Sox made a big deal too, and they are clinging to a tiny lead. Did they really need more left-handed power, though? The Yankees certainly needed catching, and they made a steal too. Hey, baseball can be based on faith as much as politics, and the Tigers believe in Kyle Farnsworth. That’s a pretty odd cult, though.

This is the best time of the year for the game, though. Division rivals play each other a lot, and most races are close. The Mets have their own shot, but the bullpen is shaky. They did nothing to improve that part of the team, and one would think that means they would attempt to play a different way, not rely on the division of labor that has become the conventional wisdom in the game. We’ll see. It will be proof of whether thinking can overcome inertia. That’s a challenge everywhere, of course, and sports are not completely immune to the herd mentality, to sticking with bad ideas because that’s how it’s done everywhere, of seeing the problem for what it actually is, rather than putting an easy and wrong label on it. It’s an institution, and can be slow to change.

But it did change drastically once. It took the right combination of daring, confidence, talent and attitude. It took a lot of courage and sacrifice too. One of the conditions that Jackie Robinson played under his first year in the majors was that he had to take whatever came at him, insults to baseballs, and not retaliate in word or deed. He had to just play, and show how good he was, and let the merit of the experiment prove itself. And was he good, and did he play. And after that first year, he took his revenge.

Obama is in a similar situation. He is a pioneer in the biggest game of all and playing under a bizarre set of rules that have been imposed on him. It’s one thing for John McCain to shriek and whine like a little spoiled baby – he’s a scurrilous, egocentric, dishonorable, petulant man who has no reason to be President except that he thinks he deserves it. But when other organizations agree with his rules, when McCain saying you can’t vote for the guy because he’s black is okay, but Obama . . . what . . . admitting, revealing (?) that he himself is a black man is playing the race card, then the rules are whatever the winer says they are that moment. And Obama is just going to have to take it, because that’s the way this game is played. It’s not a game, of course, except for a very small group of people. And Obama is trying to get into their game, and they are, at best, reluctant to let him play. Because, like Jackie Robinson, his very presence is demonstrating that the old, white men who have been running the game for so, so long may not actually have been as able as we were led to believe. Obama as President may mean that this idea may actually be broached in polite conversation. This is going to be a lot uglier than it is now, uglier than the climax of “Rollerball“, but the best revenge Obama could have is simply to win. And he’s got a great example to follow, in that of one of the greatest Americans who ever lived.

A Great American

It’s not an indulgence when you’re unemployed, it’s a necessity: the MLB Extra Innings package. This way, I can regularly catch West Coast ball games, especially the Dodgers.

Of course, what it means is I get the feeds from some broadcast or another, which emphasizes how many terrible, stupid announcers there are on the local level. Except for those frequent nights when the Dodger game is the Dodger broadcast, brought to the world by the one-man-band known as Vin Scully.

There is simply no one like him, nor has there ever been. Babe Ruth and Wayne Gretzky and even Michael Jordan had their peers – Scully has none. He doesn’t just give you the ball game, he narrates, he tells a story full of digressions that fill in the detail and meaning of what is happening in real-time. And, like baseball itself, he is a true maker of American culture. The Tuesday night Dodgers-Reds game featured a moment when he was speaking of Brandon Phillips frustration for grounding into a double-play in his previous at-bat, describing the ballplayer as the Red’s “Big Butter and Egg Man,” thereby bringing together ball, bat, Louis Armstrong, segregation and integration and baseball into a short set of golden syllables.

Thanks Vin. Thanks Louie.

And In Actual News

Can anyone catch the Arizona Diamondbacks? This is the kind of start that can cement first place for a team for the whole season, especially with the rest of the division scuffling at .500. Getting beaten regularly by Arizona isn’t helping.

And Brandon Webb is 6-0, which is wild enough, but he’s also had a decision in every start so far, which is statistically pretty amazing, if you want to do the math. Still, he’s allowed more total base-runners than innings pitched so far, so there’s room for improvement . . .

Also, Billy Wagner gave up his first hit in over 9 innings yesterday. If there’s a proper way to play the bogus position of ‘closer,’ I’d say that’s it. Meanwhile, on the Left Coast, a team that I’m now fond of since they are far away has a puzzle on their hands. Is Barry not riding the skateboard enough? Note the cliché speak, that he feels he’s not pitching aggressively enough. I think if he starts daring hitters with his currently low-80’s fastball, he just might do baseball a service and help wipe that phrase from the lexicon of nonsense. And in token American League news (because it’s boring), wasn’t this the year C.C. Sabathia was going to become a very, very rich young man?

But what’s really on everyone’s mind right now, or should be, is how someone draped in cloth, in other words with their torso covered, can be described as topless? I thought the fact that people smoked marijuana was the greatest danger to the collective oligarchy of America, being that it is clearly an illegal immigrant substance, with that name and all. But, apparently, I’m wrong. Not that there’s anything else important happening . . .

Aura and Mystique

So Major League Baseball suspended Kyle Farnsworth. And the Yankees are pissing and moaning about it. If they knew what was good for them, and had any class, they’d shut up and dump the pitcher.

On the surface, what Farnsworth did was throw a fastball behind Manny Ramirez’s head, after Ramirez had hit two home runs already in the game. The part just below the surface, which seems to me taboo for baseball to broach, is that what he did was admit that he, and his team by extensions, are losers and whining, petulant jerks.

It works like this: the Yankees pitch to Ramirez to try and get him out, he hits two home runs, they then throw at him. Ergo, they by their actions admit that they cannot get him out, that he is too great a ballplayer for them to play against and so they must throw at him because they are upset he is better than they are. The only logical end to this is that the Yankees are losers.

Of course, we all know that. They could say that they welcome the suspension and don’t want a loser like Farnsworth on their club, but instead they gnash their teeth and rend their garments about not having a guy with a lifetime ERA of 4.47 available. They take on the loser mantle to protect and defend another loser. Hey guys, be my guest!

Oh, let’s not forget the spoiled idiocy too. The apples don’t fall far from the tree. Since they feel 1st place is their entitlement they have no answers for when it’s not handed to them, except to bitch and moan that Joe Girardi is not starting Joba Chamberlain. Part of this is the weird idea in contemporary baseball that relief pitching is hard and important – thank you, Tony LaRussa. The latter has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, but as for the former, the reason guys pitch in relief is that they are too limited to start. Joba can throw 101 miles an hour for three outs. What do you think he’d be throwing after three innings? Lots of doubles off the wall. But, the Yankees are welcome to try. They can’t get into their rebuilding phase soon enough for me.

On Hearing the First Foul Tip of Spring

Opening Day! It’s finally upon us. My dashboard widget tells me that the games begin in a half-hour. Today, baseball officially starts for me – the made for TV exhibition-games-that-count from Japan and the celebration of corporate wealth from last night don’t count as far as my soul goes.

And my soul needs baseball. After 15 important, formative years in San Francisco, I’m feeling very much the California boy transplanted to New York City, and it’s been hard in a few ways. While the winter was mild, it began with a cold fall and a chill has lingered into spring. Today it might be 50 degrees for the second time this spring, but wet. So, I’m needing spring with a jones more powerful than the basketball one I used to get in my ‘playing’ days.

I watched a bit of last nights Braves-Nats game, but it seemed more a celebration of the corporate takeover of American life, with the review of the fanciest amenities at the new stadium, the Dauphin, nose bright and shiny red from his ongoing bourbon binge throwing out the first pitch, and being noticeably booed. I’m glad I missed his appearance in the booth, talking his usual drivel while the country burns. I love sports and I welcome their distraction from the day-to-day grind, but I can’t be expected to numb myself with sentimental comity when someone who has damaged as many lives as Bush has is paraded through my living room.

But I love sports – the NBA, especially now that they’re playing good basketball again; the NFL and my beloved Jints – but baseball is still the best. It’s the best because it’s the most beautiful, because it inspires the best writing, and the best songs and the best art. There’s a lot of metaphors for the game, some overdone, some powerful, and one that is true for me is that it is like the best American music. The game has a set of rules, it begins with a pitch into the unknown, unfolds with a balance of cooperation, improvisation, chance and surprise, and ends when everyone’s finished, not when a clock says so. That’s jazz, baby.

Play ball!