The After-Met: Baseball 2009...From the Ridiculous to the Surreal

Continuing to pick up the pieces...


Just another golden shower for Victorino.

Front-runners and other participants at the Yankers parade expressed and exhibited their smug American-ness in all sorts of different ways (warning: link is suitable for work, or at least it was produced at work, but there is nudity). Scholar-bloggers expressed their disappointment/resignation as to what the latest Yankees business acquisition means for baseball in other ways.

Ridiculous:
To remember that the Mets 2009 Metastrophe even wiped out an entire level of their supposed future: Fmart and J-Niese going down in flames.

Stomach-turning:
The bald eagle.












Surreal:
Pay-Rod feeds the compliant media lines about how he wants to play for free. You know, as long as there is an opportunity to pose shirtless at some point.

Nine months later [after getting caught with steroid drugs], Rodriguez wore a black porkpie hat and swayed to Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind” at City Hall to celebrate a championship. While the parade was special, Rodriguez, like some of the cold and eager fans, was already aching for more baseball.

“I wish we could just continue to play,” Rodriguez said. “Just show up and play for no reason. We have such a good group of guys. You know. No umpires, no scores. Just show up and have fun, like a softball game.”

***

If you're looking for a diversion, Patrick Brown has a nice stock taking essay, "In play--runs," about baseball fandom and the internet. He is probably more accepting of the often shrill climate wrought by the new breed of "fexperts," those who have soured an originally insightful perspective on baseball, and with a certain attitude, are making discussions of baseball increasingly devolve into grating, know-it-all statistical pissing contests smugly performed by recently minted WAR fundamentalists, who don't let the fact that they couldn't pass a freshman statistics class hinder the delivery of jejune message board lectures based more on their uncritical acceptance of a particular statistical package and the performance of "gameday" software then on actually watching the game, but so be it. The new fan/expert has found their hammer and everything is a nail, and even better if they can hide their subjective preferences in a discourse licensed by their perceived membership in a club of people who actually understand what they're doing. Luckily, robot umpires are just as susceptible to having beer dumped on them, but one wonders if anyone will notice when, in the future, the MLB just broadcasts Gameday simulations of games in small markets when player salaries eclipse national GDPs and ticket prices become unattainable to all but the ultra-wealthy--'hey the sim-Pirates beat the virtual Royals last night without sacrifice bunting!" The old guard of crusty, data-averse sportswriter Luddites, who resist the statistics that increasingly replace their stories, have provided a convenient scapegoat in all this. There is no middle ground to be found in mom's basement, and at times, it can get as tiresome as listening to the double-breasted suited jock morons spout inanities and patent falsehoods. But I digress.

Reading Brown's essay, I also have to wonder what happens when we collectively get tired of the "citizen journalists" who write "from the fan perspective" and all the experts are gone--both the charlatans undressed by the "fexperts," and the insightful commentators moved out to pasture by the general failure of the journalist business model--and "we" (fans) are the only ones to listen to about baseball, other than a few jocks? Mom's basement has become an ironic rallying cry among bloggers, but it gets damp down there and I'm not sure if I want the view from the basement to be the only one available. Accepting this norm, the baseball fan equivalent of happily busing our own tables at McDonald's so that the giant corporation doesn't have to pay anyone to do it, may yet turn out to be a wrong turn.

It's hotstove time...do you know where your GM is?


Above, an attendee of the Latin Grammy Awards exhibits strangely fake looking body parts. And, on the right, old Omar Minaya fave Sammy Sosa.