Idiots Write About Sports

Sometime during Game Five of the American League Championship Series — the marathon game played Monday, not the marathon game played Sunday — the Fox cameras cut to a portly man in a Hawaiian shirt and an A’s cap. He was holding up a sign that read “Even West Coast Fans Care About This Rivalry.”

Within seconds an instant message from Jason appeared on my laptop. “Hey!” Jason wrote. “It’s your evil twin.”

“I hope they set that guy on fire,” I responded. “And dance to the rhythm of his screams.”

I was joking, of course. Sort of. Mostly.

The ALCS has been an exciting thrill-ride this year, even better than last year’s Sox-Yanks throwdown. Five of the six games so far have been thrillers, and the one blowout was so historic in nature, even it’s going to stick-around in the memory banks. Make no mistake: if you’re a fan of baseball, you would be hard-pressed to find a better series to watch.

So how come typing that last sentence irritated me so much?

Maybe it’s because the Yankees and the Red Sox are on the short list of teams whose failures make me giddy with delight. When the two of them get together, particularly in the playoffs, I like to say that I’m rooting for a rainout or a forfeit (nearly got my wish last night, huh?). I dislike the two teams for vastly different reasons. For the Yankees, of course, it’s because of the ridiculous amount of success they’ve enjoyed, their blowhard owner, and the fact that the roster contains the corporeal remains of Jason Giambi (his soul died and went to hell years ago). For the Red Sox, it’s all on the fanbase — the incessant whining, the come-down-from-the-cross-already histrionics, and the fact that the next Red Sox game I attend where some drunken, foul-mouthed Bay State ex-pat doesn’t cause an incident will be the first Red Sox game I attend where some drunken, foul-mouthed Bay State ex-pat doesn’t cause an incident. To hell with both teams, I say.

Or maybe it’s the insistence that every baseball fan is thrilled at the prospect of endless Yankee-Red Sox confrontations. “It’s the series everyone wanted to see!” one Fox bobblehead after another has declared. Well, no. I’m pretty sure fans in Anaheim and Minneapolis would have preferred a vastly different matchup in the ALCS than New York-Boston. For my part, I would have preferred to see the A’s play… well, just about anyone. The Sox. The Yanks. The Blue Jays. A high school JV squad. Anyone, so long as it’s the team I root for involved.

During Game One of the ALCS, I hung out in an ESPN chat room while the game played on my television. And as Boston continued to chip away at the Yankees’ once-insurmountable lead, the chat moderator was moved to post something so outrageous, I copied it down, bad punctuation and all:

These two teams should play every game of the season!! Why do we have any other organizations???!!!!!

Now granted: this is coming from a low-level Web monkey at ESPN. But nevertheless, she is a public representative of the self-proclaimed Worldwide Leader in Sports, and I’m willing to bet her attitude is shared by a good many folk at ESPN, Fox, and probably even the Commissioner’s Office.

So I think her statement deserves a response: because there are 28 other teams whose fans might get tired of the idea that the franchise they’re paying good money to watch is little more than a warm-up act for the Yankee-Sox headliner.

It’s never a good sign when you start quoting yourself, but I wrote this at the beginning of the season:

Think back to NBC’s coverage of the NBA in the ’90s. The Peacock Network always showed the same big-market teams featuring the same big-name stars. Which was fine — until those stars got older and those teams began to falter and ratings began to decline. It’s hard to get casual fans interested in the San Antonio Spurs, for example, when they’ve never been given any reason to be.

Baseball runs the same risk with a New York-Boston overkill. The more you convince viewers that only a Yankees-Red Sox rivalry is worthy of prime-time and their attention, the more they’ll be inclined to believe you.

I still believe that — more than ever, really. It’s great that this year’s ALCS is drawing more attention to baseball — but it’s not so good that viewers are being hammered with the attitude that anything other than a Yankee-Red Sox playoff is an anti-climactic bring-down. Because one of these days, another team might sneak in there and win an AL pennant, and it’d be nice if Major League Baseball and its broadcast partners were capable of feigning at least a passing interest.

All that said, who am I rooting for tonight — rainout or forfeit? Well, the way I see it, there are two likely outcomes.

1. Boston loses, and the Red Sox fans who convinced themselves to just be happy that their team avoided a sweep will have a new game-seven loss to piss and moan and bore the rest of America about. While a few fans will rightly take comfort in Curt Schilling’s amazing performance in Game Six, the vast majority will be driven insane with rage and fatalism; many will wind up in madhouses and pyschiatric wards.

2. The Yankees lose, and George Steinbrenner’s head explodes. But not before he fires his entire front-office, releases Mariano Rivera on unconditional wavers, banishes Joe Torre from the five burroughs and hasten the franchise’s return to the high-priced mediocrity of the 1980s.

Either way, as an enemy of both teams, I don’t see how I can lose.

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