THE FALL CLASSIC

If you happen to read this blog on a regular basis (thanks to both of you!) you might be a little surprised that with all of this great baseball happening I haven't said word one about what's going on in this year's MLB playoffs. Well the plain truth is that like a lot of fans and guys that actually play the game, your boy is very, very superstitious. Especially when it comes to my favorite team, the Detroit Tigers. If I were a proper journalist, I suppose I would have to eventually learn to wean myself off of the love I have for my favorite teams, but as is I can't help but be a fan first, writer second, and as a result I've had to keep quiet on the baseball playoffs while the Tigers were still fighting with the Yankees and Rangers, trying to reach their first World Series since a loss in 2006 to the St. Louis Cardinals.

It basically comes down to what ol' Crash Davis told Nuke LaLoosh in 'Bull Durham': never fuck with a winning streak. The Tigers were on one and in the myopic mind state of a dedicated Tigers fan, I had the feeling that if I started to gloat, comment, or complain about anything that had to do with the AL playoffs, I would somehow initiate some kind of new, alternate universe where my comments would eventually screw the Tigers over. Turns out, they went ahead and did that to themselves, so I am now free to say anything I care to about the MLB playoffs and give the world my two cents on how I think things will shake out in the 2011 World Series, which is set to begin less than an hour from now.

I could start with all of the usually effusive stuff that comes to my mind every year around playoff and World Series time, but if you want to go back and read about why I think that baseball is so pure and romantic and makes me go all school-girl silly, you can do that at another date. Instead, lets just get right to what led us to this year's World Series match-up and how I think it will affect how the Series plays out. The first thing I noticed watching the AL side of the things? The Texas Rangers line-up is really, really good. Top to bottom, there are threats for big hits or the long ball, and there aren't many teams in the league outside of New York City that can make that claim. It's why the Rangers just did the boys from Motown dirty and why they ended up in the World Series, because although their starting pitching has been solid, it has not been incredible, which is usually the case for a team that makes a deep playoff run. Oh yeah, and one Nelson Cruz is absolutely on fire. Not bad for a guy in the bottom third of your line-up.

The Rangers' starting pitching staff has been just good enough, performing at a level just high enough to let their big bats and their bullpen do all of the talking. Like I said before, I'm a huge Detroit Tigers fan and that has screwed with my bias to some extent, but as I watched, I definitely noticed that the Rangers are flat out better this year. I don't think that there pitching is better than Detroit's, but the Tigers found out that even though superior starting pitching always seems to win championships, a team that has a line-up that is as good as the Rangers, adequate starters and a deadly bullpen can still win the day. Sometimes, being able to swing a bat really well can overcome weaknesses in starting pitching, and allow your bullpen to do the lion's share of the work while you crush the ball over the fence and leave your opponent in the dust.

As for the St. Louis Cardinals, I don't think even the most keen-eyed of baseball observers saw them ending up in the World Series. They were left in the middle of the NL Central for much of the season, but got hot at the right time, with a blistering performance down the stretch run of the regular season that carried them to a Wild Card birth on straight through the NL playoffs. The soon to be free agent Albert Pujols, easily the game's best pure hitter, was particularly brilliant, shutting up Nyjer Morgan and his loud-mouthed Twitter account to knock out the Brew Crew and advance to the Series. Unlike the Rangers, the Cardinals do have stellar starting pitching, anchored by their ace Chris Carpenter. The Series will be an interesting contrast in styles, as the Cardinals hope to ride their starters and rely on manager Tony La Russa's manic manipulation of the bullpen to carry them through most games. They also have bats to help with their cause, led by the aforementioned Pujols and augmented by guys like Matt Holliday, who can certainly give the Rangers pitching staff fits on a given night.

For those of you who don't watch baseball on the regular, I think that the most intriguing part of the Series for the casual fan will be the philosophies of the teams' managers, La Russa and the Rangers' Ron Washington. La Russa is the epitome of the cerebral clubhouse guru, willing to do whatever it takes whenever he sees fit to give his team (particularly his pitching staff) the best chance to win. Washington is a shoot-from-the-hip wild west gunslinger in comparison, with the kind of enthusiasm in the dugout and go-for-broke base path strategy that sees the Rangers running whenever a guy gets on base and an improvisational style that can be hard to counteract at times. La Russa may have the rings, laurels, and published accounts of unprecedented shrewdness to accentuate his managerial prowess, but Washington brings an insouciance and will to take risks that was only emboldened by the Rangers' experience in their World Series loss to the San Francisco Giants last year.

As a guy who puts out opinions on the world of sports, I of course have to make my prediction for the Series. As such, I'm taking the Rangers in 5. I won't lie, with the Tigers in the ALCS I definitely watched more of their series with the Rangers than I did the Cardinals/Brewers showdown, so that might have led to a bias towards Texas, but I just think they are the best team on the field right now. That line-up is just absolutely too much to handle for any starting pitching staff, the Cardinals' included. I know La Russa is the mad genius and St. Louis has perhaps the best player of his generation in Albert Pujols, but I like Texas to continue their winning ways and make quick work of the Cardinals. If my Tigers can't be there to avenge their 2006 World Series loss, I'd like to hope that their AL brethren that just sent them back to the Motor City will take care of business. Here's to the World Series, have fun watching and if you never have, go ahead and pop your cherry on what should be an exciting bit of action as fall once again settles in and baseball takes center stage.

ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?

Football, especially in its professional incarnation, has always had somewhat of a bad reputation among people that are not avid sports fans. To an outside observer, the cerebral, exacting, and technical aspects of the game are rendered invisible by the violence, bravado, and muscle mass that also permeate the gridiron. For true sports fans, this balance is appreciated fully and it is what makes the game of football such a joy to watch: its graceful athleticism and carefully constructed game plans blend perfectly with the crushing blows and bone-jarring impacts that NFL and college players (not to mention players at any age group, from Pop Warner to high school) subject themselves too. It is this refined sort of violence that makes football so alluring at the end of the day, but as a regular viewer of the action that takes place on both Saturdays and Sundays in the fall, I cannot help but feel a knot beginning to form in my stomach that is due to the sheer destruction the game can bring to those who play it.

I’m not just talking about the controversy over concussions, short lifespans, or missing memories that many current and former players have come face to face with as the years go on, but I will say that those realities are what initiated this post in the first place. I’ve become an avid reader (as should every football fan) of a season-long back and forth between writers for the famous/infamous Deadspin (they’re the guys that gave us the pictures of Lil Brett) and the folks at Slate Magazine, who explored the football player’s existential dilemma with aplomb two weeks back. I don’t want to just rehash what those enlightened fellas had to say, because the facts regarding head injuries, short lives and rolling marbles in the football player’s brain are documented and chilling, but are not what has changed the way I view the game I love over the last couple of seasons.

I have read the statistics and processed the consequences, but there is something much more visceral acting on my spectating conscience than cold hard facts and medical records. It comes from simply watching the game of football and realizing that in my approximately 20 years as a cognizant football fan (I would say my initial years watching the game were spent more worshiping players and cheering the action as opposed to actually understanding the actual intricacies of game play) the game has changed for the better in terms of entertainment value, but that has come with some heavy baggage that is beginning to create pains in my intellectual lower lumbar. Although Jim McMahon’s account of not being able to remember what the hell he was just doing is one of those documented cases of abuse that garners my support for his lawsuit against the league, the players know what they’re getting into, and stories like McMahon’s have simply let the general public know what they’re getting into as well.

But like I said, all of the already established risks aside, as legitimate advancements in everything from training regimens, supplements and weight lifting programs have occurred alongside less publicly accepted strides in making football players faster and stronger like steroid use and detection prevention, human growth hormone, and starting a young athlete’s road toward athletic fame and fortune at increasingly young ages, the game of football as a viewing experience has become an undeniably violent contest that entertains its masses at the price of its competitors. The obvious and tired analogy to the human spectating evolution lies in comparisons to the Roman Colosseum and gladiators dying en masse at the whim of the emperor and to the delight of the crowd, and the more I watch collegiate and professional football, the more of a connection I feel to those ancient spectators. Sure, nobody is being eaten alive by a tiger or run through with a longsword, but if you’ve watched enough football, you’ve seen enough horrifying injuries and near death/life-altering experiences to make you question whether or not in the year 2011, this sort of violence for the sake of entertainment is still an acceptable way to pass your idle time on the weekends.

A week and a half back the NFL and NCAA saw two gruesome injuries on their respective fields of play, which you can check out here and here if you happen to have the stomach for it. I usually can’t watch injuries like the ones Eric Foster of the Indianapolis Colts and LaMichael James of the Oregon Ducks sustained more than once, and that holds true with these two videos. There is just something about watching a person’s body parts move at angles that would challenge a geometry student employing a protractor that gives me butterflies in my stomach. I’m not the only one either, as Foster’s injury was so gut-wrenching that it reportedly had teammates and opposing players alike crying on the field. These two injuries are only the latest in a long litany of football casualties––from Joe Theisman’s broken leg (perhaps the single most devastating injury you will ever see) to Willis McGahee’s shredded knee ligaments––that make you realize just how brutal the sport can be. And while I know that other sports have their share of similarly hard-to-watch moments, football stands alone as a sport where something like this can happen on any play.

It stems from the very nature of the game, which I guess is my point at the end of the day. I love football, but I do not like to see my fellow man dismembered in order for my weekend TV watching to be entertaining. Along with the type of injuries I just mentioned, the sheer size and speed of players has made football the most violent form of entertainment in America outside of a horror film. And when you hear a helmet crack against another one or see someone not moving after leading with their head on a kickoff tackle, there really is no other form of guilt quite like it. You know at that moment you’re getting your sporting jollies from the pain of other people and perhaps at the cost of the lives of other people, and it can become unsettling. Like I said, this guilt has become particularly prickly for me over the last two seasons, and I feel myself at a crossroads in my life as both a fan and a dood with a decent head on his shoulders.

My brain can’t help but start asking certain questions. Should I continue to watch a game that I know does nothing but damage to those that play it? Should I enjoy rooting for my favorite team when the guys that suit up for them have the chance to be killed as I watch? Can I be a true fan when in my heart I’m not really comfortable with concussions, memory loss, short life spans, and post-career suicides?

The plain truth is that I just don’t know. For now I’m enduring some serious cognitive dissonance side effects and I guess I’ll just have to see if the drug of American football keeps working enough to make me forget about the other(s) pain it causes.