Baseball - the problems

The steroids, never really bothered me (disappointing but a reasonable economic decision by a player, given the rewards), but the lack of revenue sharing that consigns the small market teams to B-league status is a problem. I'm a Yankees fan, but can imagine what it must be like to be a fan in places like Kansas City, etc. - and it's not the patent impossibility of hope that would get me, it's the third-tier baseball product I'd be offered. As a big market customer, I can't really say it's thrilling to spend big market bucks for a seat and go out to watch Kansas City. 

That said, don't think it doesn't suck to be a big market fan - as the saying goes, winning isn't everything. To me, a big part of enjoying a baseball season is going out to the ballpark. When I was in my 20s, and broke, I'd go out to 5 to 10 games a year, and saw the average ticket as a splurge, but not a wallet-buster. Now that I'm 50 and have a decent amount of scratch in my pocket, I look at a Yankee ticket as financial hardship, with concession stands that should list their prices like this: "F**k you it’s $10 for Bud Light!" I'm sure it's the same at Fenway, and Wrigley, and other iconic, perennially sold out parks where the assumption is that the fan is privileged just to be in attendance, an attitude that sadly has been adopted by a majority of fans who over-identify with the team. 

Even if I go, I'll only go to an afternoon game - the kids who replace the hardcore heels who are there at night make the experience tolerable. And don't get me started about the playoffs starting at 8:30 and ending after midnight. For an Easterner, it makes playoffs as hard to get through as a mid-May game from the West Coast – and if the team isn’t mine, I just don’t care to make the effort. Watching sports is just not what  I want to be doing at midnight. 

The late hours show that baseball and other sports don't care about two types of fans to whom the games matter most – children and binge drinkers

Footbal Injustice - Bring it back

In the early days of football, H-shaped goalposts were planted at the front of the end zone, four fixed obstacles within the field of play. There they remained until 1927, when overseers of the National Football League had a notion – move the goalposts outside the end zone, where fewer players would slam into them.

In 1932, however, goalposts were for some mysterious reason moved back to the goal line, where they remained until 1974 as hazards to the players and an impediment to red zone scoring. To gauge how much human progress can be made in roughly that amount of time, consider that in 1926, Robert Goddard launched the first liquid fueled rocket. In 1969 – five years sooner than it took the NFL to return goalposts to the back of the end zone – human beings walked on the Moon.

Like their predecessors, the people who run the NFL today aren’t exactly rocket scientists, yet the league remains an invulnerable juggernaut of ratings and revenues. Somehow, everything turns out gold for the NFL brain trust, even their missteps, which usually end up having more entertainment value than their considered efforts to improve the game.

For years, I wondered why I was finding pro football progressively less enjoyable than I used to. As this season began, I found myself fondly remembering last season’s referees’ strike, and the hue and cry it caused. Say what you will about the strike (and it was a debacle caused by the NFL front office), it restored to prominence a historic element of the game that the league has tried hard to eliminate – injustice created by human shortcomings.

Let’s face facts about football. For starters, most games are uneventful contests between teams that are either mismatched or are both not very good. Moreover, the live action on field comprises just 14 minutes or so of a 3-hour broadcast. Now consider football as a purely visual experience. While the highlighted excerpts of long passes, big hits, and breakaway runs are as visually compelling as vibrant cinema, about 90 percent of the 14 minutes of live action consists of images of extremely large men running a few steps and falling to the ground. Put in cinematic terms, it would be as if The Godfather consisted of Sonny Corleone’s assassination at the toll booths and 2 hours and 50 minutes of Clemenza, Luca Brasi, and Captain McCluskey wrestling in shiny pajamas.

How to make this feast for the eyes more compelling? In 1999, the NFL’s mandarins implemented instant replay. Ever since, any time something the slightest bit compellingly contestable occurs, the momentum of the game comes to a standstill while the cameras focus in on a middle aged man watching television. We in the audience then spend several minutes watching the referee ascertain what only the dimmest among us have not already figured out from the replays we’ve been shown. And then we cheer or boo the referee’s TV watching prowess.

Why wouldn’t it be better to go back to the old ways and let the refs make a call that we all have to live with, right or wrong? Excitement is what football sells. Injustice is exciting. Watching referees watching TV is not.

I know how great football can be – I was in the Orange Bowl for the classic Dolphins/Chargers playoff contest in 1982, supreme exhilaration ending in heartbreak for the home crowd. Yet my second favorite football memory is of injustice, specifically of the 1978 playoff game between the Oakland Raiders and Denver Broncos. Its turning point was described succinctly by Bill Williamson:

In the AFC championship game on Jan. 1, 1978, [Rob] Lytle, a tough running back with a nose for the end zone, fumbled at the 2 and Denver scored on the drive, giving Denver a 14-3 lead in the third quarter.

The problem was that television replays (these were the days long before NFL challenges) showed that Oakland safety Jack Tatum forced a fumble in a mid-air collision before Lytle scored. Oakland nose tackle Mike McCoy scooped up the ball and was bringing the ball back for an easy score.

But it didn’t count. Lytle's touchdown did and Denver won 20-17, advancing to the Super Bowl against Dallas.

I was watching the game at my boyhood home in Miami Beach. It was winter, and all the neighbors’ windows were open. Behind us lived the Kaufmans. Patriarch Howard was a coarse, opinionated, and contrarian local political gadfly, whose bullheaded and palpably otiose efforts to mold his daughter into the next Chrissie Evert on the local public tennis courts constituted a prolonged public demonstration of child cruelty.

Kaufman was a passionate fan of the Oakland Raiders. Today’s Raiders home games seem like nothing so much as Halloween at the penitentiary, but back in the 70s, the team had more of a Brown Shirt appeal – a thin veneer of discipline, a thick threat of spontaneous thuggery.

Which evidently appealed to Kaufman. He lived in South Florida at the height of the Miami Dolphins’ Don Shula era successes and then in their bitter aftermath, when the Super Bowl teams’ core players jumped ship for the World Football League. We Floridians didn’t much care for the Silver and Black.

            When the football was jarred from Lytle’s grip during that championship game, I remember hearing a mounting cry from over the hedges. “Fumble! Yes! FUM-BLE!!,” Kaufman screamed. “FUMMMMMMMBL…wuhhhh? What? What? WHAAAAAAAAAT!” A few seconds of silence as Kaufman took in the momentousness of what had just happened to his Raiders, and then: “F%*^&*#@^*&^*^$#^%! F&(&(*#@$#$%! NO! YOU CAN’T! YOU CAN’T! You mnnn….gmm…fnnf…..nnnnnn….

            “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!”

            It was the most satisfying schadenfreude I have ever experienced, because Kaufman’s anguish added not a droplet of pain to the ocean of genuine human misery. Had I witnessed Kaufman getting popped in the face by one of his daughter’s forehand returns, sure I would have enjoyed it, but would also have felt a little small. Not so with the non-fumble. In a manner that did not violate my humanitarian principles, I was able to think: “[Expletive] you, Kaufman, you and your [expletiving] Oakland Raiders.”

            The supreme pleasure of such moments is precisely what has been lost in the effort to make everything fair. If there had been instant replay in 1978, the fumble call would have been reversed and I would remember nothing of the game or of that day. What I remember 35 years later is that I had fun. Personally, I don’t recall a thing about last year’s AFC championship, save that the Broncos won.

As do films, plays, and literature, sports offer an arena in which we can choose a hero and enjoy his successes, defeats, and even the injustices that befall him. Why? Because we are willing to suspend disbelief and immerse ourselves in the made up logic of an alternate world that can affect no genuine harm on any of the things that we hold dear. By trying to make sports fair by eliminating human error – at the cost of imposing boredom upon us – the powers that be have acted in the spirit of Nahum Tate, a 17^th Century writer whose claim to fame was rewriting Shakespeare’s King Lear so that it ends happily. We recognize Tate’s impulse as misguided – why not official review?

So try paying attention to some of the calls affected by official review. Maybe some of the few bad calls (the refs usually get it right) will go against your team. Maybe some will go in its favor. I’m guessing things will balance out, as historically they seem to. Old timers like me might remember, for example, the Pete Banaszak “fumble” that won the Raiders a game the season after the Lytle non-fumble.

Then consider the entertainment value of meaningless outrage – both your own and others’ – as opposed to the egalitarian bureaucratic soul suck of watching referees watching TV week after week.  I believe injustice, injustice shall you pursue. 

from Leon Weiseltier's Kaddish

p. 73

Look at the night sky. You are not seeing only the light of the stars. You are also seeing the journey of the light of the stars toward you. Admire space and admire time. In this way, immensity conducts you to history.

p. 75

Abjection, I mean genuine abjection, is not a disorder, or any sort of soul-storm; and there is nothing morbid or glamorous about it. Abjection is just an inference from experience, a conclusion calmly drawn from the commonplace observation that there is a difference in scale between yourself and the universe.

Too bad the guy is so windy. Lots of nuggets like these in his book, which I gave up on. I'll buy it though, and dip into in now and again.

By Philip Larkin

Days

What are days for?

Days are where we live.  

They come, they wake us  

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in:  

Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question

Brings the priest and the doctor  

In their long coats

Running over the fields.

             

                    Philip Larkin

Old School?

My 7-year-old son’s assignment was to read aloud the following passage while being timed to see how many of the 136 words he could accurately read in one minute.

Old School

Long ago, schools were only for boys. Most schools had just one room. Boys of all ages sat in the same room. The boys learned about reading. They learned about math. In history, they learned about kings and queens and wars. Paper cost a lot of money, so they wrote on little chalkboards called slates. The teacher was always a man. He could be very mean. He could whip the boys if they were bad. There was no place at school to cook lunch. The boys had to bring their own lunches from home. There were no lunchboxes like we have. They used pails or buckets to carry their food. Most people did not go to school for very long. Only rich men went to college. We are lucky to have schools where everyone can learn.

                The line about all teachers being men was the first thing that struck me as odd. I wondered whether all those Western movies with a “Schoolmarm” character were wrong, or whether my son’s assignment was misleading. But the next lines really rankled: “He could be very mean. He could whip the boys if they were bad.” Surely there were teachers worth mentioning who were wise, kindly, tough but fair, or primarily concerned about uplifting their students mentally, socially, and morally.

Generally, I’m not one to see liberal bogeypersons under every rock, but I am familiar with the arguments of Christina Hoff Summers, whose book War Against Boys critiques contemporary education as anti-male. So, as an involved parent, I further examined this little history lesson, which was produced by a publisher of Common Core educational materials (www.secondstorywindow.net) and assigned to all 2^nd graders in my son’s Land That Time elementary school.

While I’m not suggesting that Robert Caro write 136 word essays for second graders, history, at any level, should provide context and be specific and factual. Talking about things that happened sometime in the “long ago” and that have trouble meeting a simple standard of accuracy (the teacher was “always” a man, kids didn’t have lunchboxes) don’t cut it as “history,” even for 2^nd graders. In any case, my son is not learning about the history of education, and I suspect his next assignment won’t be about the Montessori Method. For the pedagogic goal of his assignment to be achieved, the subject could have been “Our Woodland Friend, The Beaver.”

The essay posits an educational dystopia different from the contemporary system that, as the writer concludes, “we are lucky have.” The writer explicitly details what he or she believes are the consequences of a system that only serves the needs of males. Okay, so the boys learn reading and math, but when it comes to history, what male instructors taught is the lives of kings and queens (the powers that be) and of wars (militarism). I hear in that assertion echoes of the academic rivalry between traditional and revisionist historians – the “great personage”/”key battles” approach to history is disparaged in left-leaning academia, which focuses more on history as a struggle between the elites and the marginalized.

Then, the essay gets provocative – after saying the teacher was “always a man, ” the first thing we are told is that this man “could be very mean,” with the prerogative of administering corporal punishment upon his charges. The word used is “whip” – a harsh word with many unpleasant connotations. Slaves were whipped. Abused children are whipped. Historically, would “paddle” have been more correct than “whip”? Certainly corporal punishment was only part of the story, and likely a small part – so why go there first, and to 2^nd graders? What image of the past is author trying to put into their heads?

Next, the narrative gets weird: “There were no lunchboxes like we have. They used pails or buckets to carry their food.” The writer is clearly thinking of the terms “lunch pails” and “lunch buckets,” both of which are defined in the dictionary as “lunchboxes.” Could the writer, and all the educators who reviewed that passage prior to publication, really be that clueless?

Finally, there is the non sequitur bit about “only rich men” going to college. This brings class into the equation, and since gender and class are two of the great bugbears of the Left, I cannot read this essay outside of an ideological context.

The historical inequities the essay points out were remedied long ago – today, more women than men receive college degrees. Why not talk about the progress our society made since the one-room classroom? Conversely, why not talk about some of the great achievements performed by American lads who came from such benighted circumstances? Because tremendous things were accomplished in this country, and why shouldn’t our children be learning about the positive values that made those achievements possible, giving them the chance to internalize those values instead of the language and logic of grievance?

In any case, the essay doesn’t exactly persuade me that there isn’t a war against boys in public school. I have been unpacking the story with my son in an age-appropriate manner, and using it as a teaching tool to help him understand the importance of asking questions and thinking independently. This way, when he is ultimately assigned Howard Zinn’s “A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present,” he’ll be prepared.