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Games 1 Through 3
I don't know why I like baseball. I mean, it's a mystery to me why my psyche latched on to that game and never let go. Ultimately, it doesn't matter. I'm a firm believer that people love what they love, and there's no justification necessary, unless you love something really horrible, like breaking puppies' legs or Dane Cook.
I do know that I like baseball, among many other reasons, for something that many people cite as its most glaring weakness: there's so much of it. I agree that it's hard to get into any one game when there are 162 of them a year. But I enjoy the long narrative arc of the season. It's like The Wire, but with a lot less shooting (although in both of them, Baltimore is in really bad shape).
One of the biggest reasons that the NFL is so popular is because the season is only 16 games long, so every single play has an enormous amount of importance attached to it. This is compounded by the fact that 95% of those games take place within a single 6 hour block of time. That's what makes the Weekly Ritual of the Sunday Games so awesome, whether you spend it at a bar with your fingers covered in buffalo sauce, or plopped on your couch completely immobile for half your waking day.
I love watching football, but football's problem is this: once those 6 hours on Sunday have passed, the games are over for a whole week (not counting a blip on Monday night and the occasional Turkey Day Tilt). Given the physical punishment of football, there's no better way to do it, unless you want every player's knees to turn to dust by age 28. But that six-day hiatus between games is absolutely brutal.
Opening Day is the perfect demonstration of why baseball is the exact antithesis of this, and why that is awesome. I met up with a few people after work to watch the last half of the Mets opener. The bar was one of those joints that has a bazillion huge screen TVs. With the Yanks rained out, most of them were tuned to Johan Santana's Mets debut, but a few others were trained on openers around the league: Cubs-Brewers, Twins-Angels, Phillies-Nationals, Giants-Dodgers.
So not only did I get to see Santana dominate the way he no doubt will all season. I heard Cubs fans delight as their new Japanese import torched the embarrassingly awful Eric Gagne, and cheered him by pronouncing his name FUCK-YOU-DOME! I saw Barry Zito get lit the fuck up by the Dodgers. I saw ex-Met farmhand Carlos Gomez have a great debut for the Twinkies. And for an added dash of schadenfreude, I saw Tom Gordon and the Phillies bullpen implode in my peripheral vision. All in all, it was an absolutely perfect Sports Viewing Outing.
And best of all, I realized: This is only game 1. We get 161 more of these!
Baseball's like a pet dog. Once he arrives, he sticks by you. Sure, sometimes he'll chew up your shoes or pee on your rug for no discernible reason. But he'll always be there, whether you need him or not. At least until October.
In comparison, football is like a divorced dad who tries to make up for his parental failings by buying your love every weekend. He takes you to amusement parks, buys you all the stuff you beg for, maybe lets you have some beer when you stay over at his condo. But on Sunday night, he drops you off back your mom's house, his Camaro vrooms away, and you won't see him for another week.
Monday was drizzly and dreary, up until I went out to watch the Mets. By the time I left the bar, around 8pm, I swear the temperature had gone up like 20 degrees. It was still windy, but it was no longer an angry winter wind. It felt more like a pleasant spring breeze. That may sound like total pseudo-poetic Mitch Albom-level bullshit, but I swear it happened. Baseball was back, and there was a ton of it, and I was happy.
Which, of course, meant that I was destined to be unhappy come Tuesday. Every Mets fan alive knew that Pedro Martinez would get hurt at some point this season. They just figured it would happen sometime down the road. At least after he'd thrown more than 3 1/3 innings and 57 pitches.
Monday was like finally hooking up with some chick you'd been eyeing for what seems like forever, and having a mind-blowing, earth-shattering, illegal-in-thirty-seven-states marathon freak session. Tuesday was like waking up the next day and having her tell you she's got herpes. Oh, and she forgot to take her birth control, too. Oops.
Tim Marchman assures me that Pedro's injury is actually not as devastating as it may seem. Using Baseball Prospectus' projections and formulas, he notes that even in a worst case scenario--prolonged injury, terrible replacement starter going in his place--his absence will cost his team no more than two wins. This accounts for Petey being out of action until June, so I'm inclined to agree with him.
I know I've shared my love for Marchman on this site before, but I think it bears repeating that he is a tasty mushroom growing amidst a sea of manure. To be honest, I can't even tell whether he's really so awesome or all the other sports columnists are so god awful that it makes him seem majestic in comparison. He has reasonable arguments and supports them with hard statistical evidence, while always acknowledging another point of view and leaving the door open to the possibility that anything can happen in baseball.
That doesn't sound too remarkable, does it? It's the standard to which all other journalists are held. But in sports media, you can totally get away with reckless accusations, emotion-drenched screeching, unsupported arguments, unsourced rumors, and pandering to the lowest common denominator.
And if you have nothing really important to say, you can look like you do by using one-sentence paragraphs.
With sentence-fragment stingers.
If the Colbert Report Stephen Colbert were real and believed all the stuff he said, and if he wrote about sports, his essays would read like 95 percent of the back-page hacks in New York.
The pain of Pedro's boo-boo was offset by a 13-0 shellacking of the Marlins in game 3, and the shutdown pitching of Oliver Perez. The Mets even had a bunch of crazy calls go against them--including an umpiring crew chief overruling himself, turning a home run into a double--and they still won with ease.
So within the span of three games, I got the dizzying highs, the terrifying lows, and the creamy middles. By the time the Mets had scored 10 runs Wednesday night, I was feeling so magnanimous that I switched to something else on the TV. We had a dinner guest, and The Wife had been talking enthusiastically about the Iron Maiden's Number of the Beast episode of VH1 Classic Albums. She'd DVRed the show, so I suggested we all watch it and share in the craziness.
"Really?" The Wife asked, incredulous because I never turn off a Mets game when they're winning. Even if they're losing as badly as they were winning this night, I rarely turn the channel, because I am a masochist, and because a blowout game means a 75 percent chance of an inappropriate outburst from Keith Hernandez. But I told her, "They're up 10 runs. They're gonna win. And if somehow they don't win, I don't wanna see it happen."
After a mere three days of baseball, I'd gone from begging for more to settling into its marathon pace. We've got 159 more of these to come. Thank god.
Posted 04.03.08 7:00pm * Permalink
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