Although the World Series starts tonight, as far as I’m concerned Major League Baseball is over with until next spring. Even those sentimental Tommy Lasorda commercials, where he encourages disheartened fans to watch baseball despite the fact that their teams didn’t make the postseason, don’t have any effect on me anymore. On Thursday, during game seven of the National League playoff between the St. Louis Cardinals and the New York Mets, the most I could muster is a half-hearted, “I love this game?” It would have made the former manager of the Dodgers and ambassador to baseball cry.
In my defense, I did try to take Lasorda’s words to heart and go along with baseball even after the Dodgers lost all three playoff games to the Mets. After all, as a Dodger fan, how could I turn Tommy down? He’s probably the most visible face of the Dodgers and so, when Lasorda tells me to buck up, I try to do my best. After the Dodgers were eliminated by the Mets, I decided to pick up the pieces, hang up my Dodgers cap, and root for the very team that demolished the boys in blue.
I even developed a couple of reasons for rooting for the Mets, trying to develop some sort of second tier loyalty. First of all, the Mets have three former Dodgers on their roster: second basemen José Valentín, catcher Paul Lo Duca, and right fielder Sean Green who the Mets recently acquired from the Arizona Diamondbacks. I figured that basically, I was just rooting for the Dodgers, circa 1999. And who doesn’t love the Dodgers, circa 1999?
I also figured that the Mets were essentially nothing more than the replacement team for the Dodgers in New York; the Mets were founded after all, only after the Dodgers left New York for Los Angeles. Essentially, this amounts to a snobby kind of fandom where all you’re doing is rooting for the team out of pity. I was OK with this because it took the sting out of them beating the crap out of the Dodgers. The funny thing about this strategy is that you can just as easily see the Mets as the replacement team for the Dodgers’ rivals, the San Francisco Giants, who left New York about the same time that the Dodgers did. Thus, during the game both me and a Giants fan were united against the St. Louis Cardinals.
But the most important reason that I had for rooting for the Mets relied on a kind of cannibal logic. I figured that since the Mets beat the Dodgers, they absorbed their strength. Unfortunately, I guess the Mets really just absorbed the Dodgers ability to lose big games.
Now that the two teams in the World Series are the Detroit Tigers and the St. Louis Cardinals, I really can’t find a team to root for. Sorry Tommy. The reasons for my inability to feel the spirit of baseball are complex. Originally, I thought that the owner of St. Louis Cardinals was racist Marge Schott. You might remember her for praising Hitler’s early rise to power, for owning a swastika arm band, and for calling the African American members on her team racial epithets. But it turns out that she’s dead and owned the Cincinnati Reds. Nonetheless, the association remains. Besides, I’ve never gotten over the fact that, when I was a kid, I went to a Dodger game and one of the Cardinals didn’t drop his bat when he ran to first. Although they beat the Dodgers all the time, I’m still convinced that the Cardinals must not be that good; even an unathletic kid like me knew to drop the bat. As for Detroit, how can I root for a city that gave us Eminem and a state that has, according to the Museum of Tolerance’s map of hate, the most white power groups in the country? Certainly, Detroit has given us some good stuff like the Detroit Cobras, but that’s just a drop in the bucket, and it’s been a long time since Motown released anything as good as the Supremes.
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