Lousy with Baseball Talk

There are two things I can’t believe I haven’t found time to talk about yet. One would be the amazing concerts I’ve been to the past few weeks and the other is the new baseball season. Today I’ll talk about baseball.


The Braves have been puzzling so far this season. Not a single one of their starters has a win yet and the team has allowed more runs than any other team in baseball. That’s certainly not like the Braves. They have also scored more runs than any other team in baseball and have done so by hitting well with men in scoring position. That’s also not like the Braves. They have definite problems to solve but I have reason to believe they will solve them soon enough. I just hope the Mets don’t run away with it before we right the ship.


Former Major Leaguer, Darren Daulton is making the rounds on TV sports shows. He’s talking about the nature of being, skipping through time, talking to lizards, and other such things that are usually brought on by LSD experimentation, but Darren isn’t doing acid. He’s just spouting out what he believes. I feel sorry for him not because he’s saying these things or believing them, but because people in baseball will shun him. Baseball folks will put up with a lot of crap while you are still a productive and active player, but because he’s no longer in the game he’ll probably become a punch line inside baseball. But on the bright side I have Darren Daulton on my Metaphysics Fantasy Team.


Last month when Sports Illustrated broke the news about the new book Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroid Scandal That Rocked Professional Sports I was incredibly amused. Not by the details of the book which I don’t think anyone should find surprising, but by the fact that Sports Illustrated broke the story. It is one thing to scoop ESPN, the world-wide leader in sports on a big sports story, but it’s another thing all together to scoop them on Barry Bonds. After all, ESPN has a fulltime Barry Bonds reporter in Pedro Gomez. I thought it must be really rough for them to be so openly embarrassed like that. Then when the story was a big deal on the network evening newscasts and ESPN still didn’t do anything with it, I knew something else was up. That something else turns out to be Bonds on Bonds, a pseudo-documentary, reality, behind-the-scenes, fluff piece that is airing weekly on ESPN. This show has aired twice now. I haven’t watched it. I don’t plan on watching it either. My mind was made up about Barry Bonds a long time ago. He is one of the best baseball players ever. He could have retired before he started hitting homeruns at a beyond-historic rate, and I think he’d still belong in the Hall of Fame. The man is good at what he does. That being said, he seems to be an asshole. Incredibly gifted people, whether it is in athletics, academics, or the arts, tend to have extreme personalities. They are either jerks, crazies, introverts, or some combination of all of those qualities. Doesn’t make them any less talented in their respective fields, it just makes them difficult to handle. I don’t need to like Barry Bonds to appreciate his talent. A lot of people do though. Also, a lot of people like to pretend they didn’t know Barry Bonds was on something the past 6 or 7 years. That’s just naiveté. However, Major League Baseball’s role in this cannot be chalked up to naiveté. They are just as complicit as the players who juiced up and an investigation is not going to solve anything. We’ll see how it all plays out this year.

Lousy with Links

A short interview with Wayne Coyne from the Toronto Star:
“I don't think music or rock stars change politics," Coyne says. "If people aren't getting enough information from the TV and the Internet, I can't help them at this point. If you don't despise George Bush enough to go out and vote, you're beyond the help of a dumb rock band."

Here’s a great analysis of New York Times book critic, Michiko Kakutani. (Yep, we are critiquing critics now.)
Kakutani's refusal ever to take her eyes off the thumbs up/thumbs down prize, or to lay any of her own prejudices, tastes, or tangentially relevant observations on the table, is dispiriting. One of her favorite gimmicks for ducking subjectivity is to invoke the supposed reactions of "the reader" to a book. This is a rather underhanded device [...] and it's a perfect emblem of the way Kakutani muffles her own voice by hiding behind a mask. But it provides the only fun I get from her reviews: First thing, I always hunt for "the reader" (whom I visualize as a kind of miniature androgynous Michelin man) the way I used to count the Ninas in a Hirschfeld drawing.

Chuck Klosterman has written a very smart article on the "Barry Bonds situation" in baseball. It's lengthy but very worthy of your time.
In 50 or 100 years, they will search for events within the popular culture that supposedly embodied the zeitgeist of the time. Some of these people will use sports, not unlike the way contemporary historians might use Muhammad Ali as a means to define the 1960s. As these future historians try to explain what was wrong with the world in the early 21st century, I suspect they will use Barry Bonds. Here was a man accomplishing unbelievable things -- things so unbelievable that they literally should not have been believed, even as they were happening. But we did not really believe or disbelieve. We just sort of watched it happen, and then we watched it get out of control, and then we expressed shock without feeling a grain of surprise, and then we tried to figure out how we were supposed to reconcile an alien reality we unconsciously understood all along. So if you're wondering how to feel about Barry's passing Babe, here's one option: You can feel like you're experiencing how the present tense will be understood in the future.

Finally, the folks at Deadspin have an abolutely hilarious story about my least-favorite ESPN personality of all-time, Chris Berman:
Chris Berman walks by [a]nd without even breaking stride, Berman looks at the girl, points and says “You’re with me, leather.” And the girl looks up, instantly recognizes Berman, snatches up her jacket and walks out with him, leaving my friend in mid-sentence.

It was almost a year ago to the day that I, on this very blog, used a few words to describe how much I abhor Chris Berman and his ridiculous tradition of wearing that green blazer on Masters Sunday. Well this year was no different. Thankfully I didn't watch Baseball Tonight this time, which he usually hosts on Masters Sunday. Unfortunately I did catch his Plays of the Week feature on Sports Center. Every year it's the same thing. He starts out by mentioning that the green jacket is a tradition of his. (Great! Thanks, Chris. I don't think anyone would be able to notice the Crayola hue of your sports jacket if you didn't point it out.) I thought he was going to let the usual "jacket doesn't fit as good as it used to" joke slide this year but he managed to slip it in near the end. My list of grievances with ESPN is lengthy, but I'd let them have at least a year long grace period with me if they'd just show Berman the door.