Yankees Win? Like It Never Happened.
I’m reading tonight through David Mamet‘s excellent collection of essays, Jafsie and John Henry, and I come across a passage.
Our undeniable Puritan society can countenance chastity or pornography, but little in between. It seems we have a problem with the issue of control, and that we cycle from conservative to liberal excesses like a child with two sets of toys — joy with the new giving way to boredom, at which point the old is produced to our amnesiac delight.
I’ll come right out and admit that I was predisposed to find something in this book that I could quote. I thought, though, that what I settled on would be more obvious. More grand. This, though, is the one. There’s something in there that hits on sport, and on the World Series we’ve just witnessed. I don’t quite know what it is, but it’s there.
To some extent the celebration of professional sports is always the celebration of excess. That’s never more true, though, than when one considers the Yankees. In all things and in every way they represent excess. They stand as evidence of a peculiar dynamic that conspires to reward riches above work and spin it as if the opposite were true. We see it in baseball as we see it in politics, as we see it in finance and business. It’s the soft tyranny that’s been woven into our culture from the jump.
And yet there’s still baseball. Lowercase “b”, the game itself. The activity divorced from the business. I still love that.
So even as we consider and dissect the coming Hot Stove season — which is all business — there will be Opening Day. That Yankees victory last night already doesn’t matter, doesn’t mean a damn thing. Just another line on the ledger. Noted and dismissed.
Damn it, there are ghosts everywhere.
My alma mater just did a weird stage play which featured a Mamet spoof, which I think sums up Baseball (capital B) in many ways this week:
“Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuckity fuckity fuck fuck”
(Works better loud and while smoking a ridiculously big cigar and fondling yourself)
Seriously though, I can’t really explain how disheartened I am at the whole thing. Somewhere BBM is laughing at me…I will say this: if the Yankees finally winning it all (as if they have had bad or unsuccessful seasons previously) finally wakes everyone up to a serious dialogue about the uneven playing field then it will ultimately be a good thing.
Oh, wait. Selig is still the commish? Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuckity fuckity fuck fuck.
Meh, on to the hot stove season. As long as the Orioles’ goal is simply getting to fucking .500, I really could care less who wins the World Series every year. When we’re a contender and the Yanks are still screwing up baseball, that’s when it will really hit home. Until then (that is, when we are contending), nobody that the Yanks spend a gazillion dollars to sign would have come here anyway. Maybe that’s a skewed way to think about it, or a way to avoid the situation, but that’s the way I see it.
@dan the man – Winning the World Series is not the point. Nobody in their right mind would have called the 2001-2008 Yankees a failure. They were easily one of the very, very best teams over that period and they will most likely continue to be one of the very, very best teams into the foreseeable future, and a lot of that is because of their inherent financial advantage and because they have basic common sense enough to know that “Mark Teixeria good. CC Sabathia good. Danys Baez bad! Jason Marquis bad!”.
And so, because of this and the unbalanced schedule, if the Orioles are EVER going to smell .500 baseball again they will need to get past New York. And I hope you are starting to see the real problem.
Get rid of the unbalanced schedule and, believe it or not, profit sharing, as it just helps many small clubs’ ownership stay mediocre to collect money, see: Pittsburgh Pirates.
If there was an actual risk from poor performance (like the team folding or moving), there would be better performance, not all problems would be fixed, but it would at least solve the problem of teams losing with a profit to get more money.
@Andrew – The Yankees aren’t all of the problem. We need to field a non-retarded starting staff, for one. If I recall, our 2008 record against the Yanks was pretty even.
Yeah, I see the bigger problems in baseball. We can do nothing about it. So… why get ourselves frustrated talking so much about it? We all know the problems. Yes, we need to play well against the Yankees and Red Sox, but our overall road record in ’09 was fucking dismal. I think we won one game in Toronto. Toronto! Come on. .500 first, then we can worry about fixing the game of baseball.