A Hobby Sized Hole in My Heart

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.

Now, I’m left with a hobby sized hole in my heart. Comics are getting a little bit better since I last posted about them. But it’s still not the same. You still can’t really have a conversation about them and the fans tend to be just as weird as ever. Dodger cap hanging low, I’ll go back to reading comics but I’m not happy about it. Besides, my other hobby, library science only provides so many opportunities for practice. And I've already organized my books from AZ361.S56 1964 to Z253.U69 2003.

Comics vs. Baseball

The past two days have provided me with more reasons why Baseball should be favored over comics, at least seasonally. I saw this morning at Comic Book Resources pictures from Wizard World Chicago, one of the summer’s big Comics Conventions. The fact that I share an interest with these people is frightening.

While CBR has plenty of pictures of kids dressed up as their favorite characters, for every picture of a young Captain America beaming because he got to go to a convention in costume, there are more than three dozen like the one above. Here Butterball Superman, 15 year old Batman, and what appears to be Keanu Reeves in a bad wig as Green Lantern, pose for their picture. And while it’s obvious that these three like the attention their receiving from the comics fan press and no doubt their fellow fans at the con, there seems to be to be something unreasonable about a fan that goes to such heights. Where Superman’s smirk betrays a confidence, I’m just a little embarrassed for him by how the costume accentuates his man boobs. Is this just an expression of self-neglect and social stigma turned into a strange expression of prideful abnegation? Really, I think there are better ways to go. Even secret shame seems a more dignified response. Or even making fun of those who clearly have no secret shame.

The more positive aspect to this comparison is that I was recently inspired to work out harder by the Dodgers, thus avoiding a Super-Belly and Super-Heart Disease and Super-Diabetes. I was at the gym the other day and the game happened to be on. It was the top of the sixth, and the Dodgers were loosing to the Marlins, one to three. I planned on a fifty minute run and intended to leave when my time was up. But as I was running the Dodgers began to turn the tide, mostly due to the ineptitude of the Marlins’ pitching staff, which walked in three runs. By the end of the seventh inning The Dodgers were up four runs and I was nearly done with my run. Not only did I want to see the end of the game – another post-trade Dodgers victory – but it dawned on me that in running, I was in fact being more athletic than any of the ball players out on the field that day. While certainly they could all outrun me, out hit me, and out field me, a lot of the time they were just standing around waiting for a hit. By running at a constant rate, I was in fact getting more of a work out than they were. When the work out program ended towards the beginning of the eighth I decided to run for the rest of the game, and I ended up running about eight miles for about eighty minutes.

The recruiters should be knocking on my door any day now.

A Post in Which The Author Comes to Discover Why He Has Become More Interested in Baseball

On Friday night I went to see the Dodgers play the St. Louis Cardinals. We had excellent seats – about fifteen rows back from the field just to the right of home plate along the first base line. The Dodgers played well defensively, although I think they should have gotten Brad Penny off of the mound before he gave up a homerun to Chris Duncan. Offensively, they did not do much, only garnering five hits on a full nine innings. And so they lost two – zip at the end of the game. Given the Dodgers run of losses and bad luck to injuries it was more than likely that they were going to lose and I knew that going into the game. However, I suppose part of me will always suspect that the Dodgers should win against the Cardinals because the earliest baseball game I can remember seeing was a match up between the two teams and I can still distinctly remember one of the Cardinals running with the bat. Part of me still believes that the Cardinals must still, even though it’s been probably more than twelve years, really suck. I mean c’mon, even at eight I knew to drop the frickin’ bat

But despite my innate knowledge of just how bad Cardinals must at least secretly stink, the Dodgers offensive performance was disappointing. In the second half of the first inning Jeff Supan of the Cardinals struck the Dodgers’s big stick, J. D. Drew in the knee with a wild pitch taking him out for the rest of the game. I haven’t heard much about his recovery, only that the injury is not expect to be too serious. My new baseball hero, Nomar Garciaparra didn’t get much time to shine as he has in the other games I’ve seen this season. With three AB’s he popped it up to right field in the first, got thrown out later in the game, and was later walked.

But enough about the game itself. I noticed I’m more into baseball this season. Part of the attraction no doubt stems from the fact that I got last seasons EA MLB video game for my Game Cube. I’ve learned a lot more about the game – stuff that I probably should have learned growing up because I’m male and American. The other factor in my growing interest in Dodgers baseball is my hatred of Orange County and my proximity to the Angels, who I’ve always kind of suspected as being the WASP-Country Club team of Southern California. But I think my growing interest in Dodgers baseball has really lied in my decreasing interest in the comics that are being produced these days. Despite some of my posts, the stuff being put out by DC Comics (my company of choice) has just been boring and total dreck, and for the first time in many years I’m no longer a Wednesday buyer. Instead, I got a few subscriptions and when I’m in L.A. I’ll occasionally go to the shop and pick up something that I can’t get through the mail. Since something has to fill the “hobby hole” in my life, and its summer, baseball seems like a good substitution. It has some similarities, in that both possess a lore of trivia and have distinctive personalities and allow you to have irrational favorites. The upside of liking baseball in comparison to comics is that less people will begin to snore when you want to talk about it. Plus, baseball fans are not, on average, as scary as comics fans.

Anyone want to go to a game this season?