Play Ball!

Well, I'll happily say it: I'm glad the baseball lockout is over. I don't even mind one certainly unintended outcome: the regular season will last a few more days into October. Oh joy, oh rapture!

I mean that too. While I will readily concede that those involved with the game at the major league level, the owners and the players (too many folks blame the owners solely for the issues within the sport, but the players are looking out for number one as well) adversely affect baseball as a sport, I am and will be a fan all my life. I try to avoid thinking about the troubles surrounding the game as only so much stuff and nonsense. It's a bane on professional sports on almost any level. I don't like what money and notoriety have done even to curling, quite frankly. Money alters things, even athletics. It's just that simple.

Give me baseball over football, basketball, hockey, or soccer any day. I get that some sports have clocks or the games might go on forever. Still, I regard that as a debit, a legitimate object for criticism. How many games are won in the last few seconds simply because the clock is allowed to stop an almost infinite number of times until the team with last possession of the ball can effectively sneak in a win anyway? (I'm looking at you, football). It lacks integrity; it is unsportsmanlike. 

But of timed games generally: you're ultimately only playing keep away. It would be better to play towards a certain number of points that against a clock.

All right, no more ranting in what I intended to be a positive column. Go baseball! I will be watching as soon as spring training begins this coming Friday, and will stay in the bubble all summer and, hopefully, into November.

What if they played a football game and nobody showed?

This afternoon, as I write in fact, there is a big football game in Ann Arbor between in-state rivals Michigan and Michigan State. At one point in my life I would have been drooling over the match up. Today, I have no intention of watching a single down. I won't say I don't care, but I don't care nearly so much as I once would have.

I've watched very little of my beloved Detroit Tigers this past season, and I saw very little of the Red Wings last year or so far this year. I've watched hardly any of the Major League Baseball playoffs which are currently going on, and baseball is the greatest game there is by far. I only pay enough attention to the NFL to see how my fantasy league picks are doing, and I'm not sure I should be bothering with that. I've missed the last two Super Bowls, and probably will not watch the next one unless I like one of the teams playing. I'm not sure I'll watch even at that. Even curling, a game I've played for thirty years now and whose season for me begins October 26th, doesn't have the appeal to me that it has in years gone by. I love the curlers, of course, and everyone I've met through the game; they're my greatest friends as a single group. Hell, they're my greatest friends, period. Only family is closer. But the point is that I find increasingly that sports are, well, a waste of time and energy.

Some of it has to do with the games as they now stand. They need improvement, and could make themselves better with a little effort. I've complained about that before, primarily about football, yes, but they all could use a heaping dose of integrity quite frankly. Why can't baseball give Armando Gallaraga his perfect game? It would be so easy to do, no one would argue, yet MLB doesn't do it. How can we expect sports to teach sportsmanship if the powers that be won't serve simple justice? Justice very easily served, I might add.

I've gotten tired of game officials blowing calls where the response is, essentially, oh well. That isn't fair play. And shouldn't sports be about fair play? Unless winning is indeed everything, at which point, damn the whole lot of it.

I've blogged before about my Grandpa Joe's attitude: drop the ball for all it matters. He's right to the point that sports shouldn't be so dominant in our culture although wrong, to be sure, so far as you should play your best if you do choose to play. But I've reached the point where the only games I care about were the ball games with my kids as the grew up, and pitching, catching, and batting with my granddaughter now. Tossing the ball around with Pops back in the day. The rest? It's just kinda become noise.

A lot of the fault is with me. I know that. Sports meant too much to me for too many years and it may well be that I'm overcompensating in this reaction. Still, that doesn't mean that I and the world as a whole haven't reached the point where sports and games have become bread and circuses, especially at the highest levels. That idea works fine in a completely secular world.

And that, perhaps, is what bothers me the most. I fear sometimes that we've become too much of an eat, drink, and be merry world, and that that's becoming institutionalized through sports. I can't help but wonder if we'd be better off if they become mere diversions rather than passions. Because as it is, and as I've said it before and recently, I feel that anymore the games play us more than we play the games. That speaks ill of both us and the games we watch.

The NHL Returns; So What?

The National Hockey League is back. Or, rather it will be, sometime around January 15th. Are we supposed to be impressed by this?

We shouldn't. Millionaires arguing with other millionaires over how a multi-billion dollar pie should be split. Isn't it a bit absurd that such a thing should matter to the fans who foot that bill?

This is not to single out hockey. It is a situation which every major sport faces from time to time, and equally absurd in the other prime sporting arenas. The fact is that sports and games have become too important to us, and the sports people know this. They know they can play the fans because they know the fans will come back. They would rather see NHL players stalking each other on the ice while they cheer in their blood lust.

It would be nice to talk about integrity here, but there really isn't any. Last minute deals such as the new labor agreement (doesn't it seem somehow an insult to real laborers that such sporting agreements are seen as involving labor?) in the NHL reek of self serving needs. They have to get a season in somehow and someway or they might lose their money. That isn't integrity. That's selfishness. There would be greater integrity in continuing the strike. The parties involved could then at least pretend that it was all about principle.

To be sure, a return to play will help the local businesses which rely on big sports to keep themselves afloat. That is perhaps the biggest reason for happiness over the NHL's return. That is perhaps the biggest reason for having huge and pricey sports leagues and teams, that they help the general economy. Yet none of that really matters to the sports magnates and their stables of players. If it did, there would not have been a strike to begin with.

Ah well. Let the games begin. Maybe a few fans will actively protest and not support the product, but that ain't likely. Bone jarring checks mean more than principle, more than the personal embarrassment of admitting that you've been gamed. The sports leaders know you better than you know yourself. The National Hockey League's return to play will demonstrate that.