As anyone who has ever followed sports at all knows, we St. Louisians are big baseball fans. Like, almost sick in our loyalty to the game. It’s been written about by actual sportswriters before, but I would – as many of them have - argue that the Cardinals fanbase has higher levels of emotional devotion and greater knowledge of the game in general than any other fanbase in the country, with the possible exception of Cubs fans (as much as it pains me to admit this) and pre-Curse Red Sox Nation.
And the smattering of really old dudes who follow the Dodgers because they remember when they played in Brooklyn.
Anyway, if you grow up in a sports-mad city, one of two things happens: either you become completely, impossibly obsessed with sports, or you hate them for life. There’s rarely an in-between. It’s one or the other.
I chose obsession.
And I didn’t limit it to baseball. I love hockey, following both my own St. Louis Blues and my family’s Vancouver Canucks – so you can imagine how totally awesome this last season was. I also adore college basketball. However, coming of age in the early 90s meant that I became a Duke fan, a situation I’m in no condition to change today barring some serious therapy. But if it makes you like me any better, I am slightly embarrassed by this.
I’m not big on football or the NBA (apart from Friday Night Lights, the Suns, and Sir Charles), but I will happily watch it. I will also watch soccer, tennis, boxing, golf, NASCAR, and anything Olympic. I even got into cricket one summer before BBC America realized that cricket is just about the dumbest fucking thing to show in an American market.
(Though I will point out that if, in New York, you ever go to the Target near Jamaica Bay on the weekends, you might find a pick-up cricket match on the stretch of grass between the shopping center and the Belt Parkway. BBC programmers, take note!)
Then I moved to Boston, where I lived for four and a half years. And, as you might expect, I fell a little bit in love with Red Sox Nation. Given that they’re an AL team, I saw little conflict of interest when it came to my Cards. Particularly because at that point, the Curse was still in full force. And, really, I have a serious weakness for lifelong losers.
Also, I’ve read The Stand. I didn’t want to be on Stephen King’s bad side, no matter how many metal pins hold his body together.
So I cheered like crazy in an Upper West Side bar when the Red Sox beat the Yankees in the seventh game of the 2004 ALCS. I even managed to get excited when they beat my beloved Cardinals in the World Series that year (a series I compared at the time to a cage match between my father and my mother - no matter who won, I would lose). Of course, had the Sox not swept the Cards, I might have been a bit less blasé about the whole thing. But it felt like nothing less than destiny, and I couldn’t help but get swept up in the moment.
I jumped around, I called all my friends in Boston, I got so unbelievably hammered that I spent the next day at work running to the bathroom every twenty minutes to either puke out the remainder of my guts or try desperately not to puke out the remainder of my guts out when it became clear that one of my bosses was in the stall next to me.
(I also choose to believe that the karmic payback for being gracious in defeat had something to do with the Cards’ World Series win in 2006. Which was, it should be said, one of the – if not the - greatest days of my life. I wept. In public. In a hotel bar in Bethesda. I say this even though I'm now a married woman, which means that I had a wedding day that should, according to women’s magazines, have been the greatest day of my life. I mean, yes, in a way it was, but along with the World Series win. Not instead of. And god bless my husband – he understands and accepts this. Why? Keep reading.)
Then I radically changed my life strategy and fell in love with a man instead of a sports team.
A man who had gone to high school in Boston and hated the town so much that when he moved to New York in the late 80s, he became a Yankees fan out of pure spite.
This proved to be a problem. I had too many Boston friends and had absorbed too much Boston mojo. I actually once sneered at a five-year-old in a Jeter jersey. And then chastised his mother for letting him wear it in Boston. (“Seriously: you should know better.”) My single favorite Boston memory is of the night after the Patriots won the 2002 Super Bowl, when the drunken, blessed-out fans in the street chanted not “Go Pats,” but “Yankees suck.”
(Football fans may be confused by this. Didn’t the Pats beat the Rams that year? As in the St. Louis Rams? As in Elizabeth’s hometown team? Yes. They did. And despite the fact that I don’t consider the Rams to be particularly St. Louisian, I was not hugely pleased by this result. I was only pleased by the Boston fans’ reaction. All this being said: I fucking hate the Patriots with an intensity that comes close to killing my liver, so overwhelmed is it with the amount of blood-level hate it has to filter out.)
But when you’re in love and all that, you want your partner to be happy. And I happened to choose a guy whose own happiness happened to be hugely dependent on the Yankees’ winning percentage. Because his sports-nuttiness puts my own sports-nuttiness to complete and utter shame. One of my favorite games is asking him to provide World Series stats at random and vaguely inappropriate moments. Like, at a large dinner party where he’s managing to come off as normal: “So, uh, say: who was the MVP of the ’53 Series?” Or, at the grocery-store check-out line while he’s counting out change: “How many games did the Series last in ’73?” Or, while he’s in the bathroom: “Hey! When’s the last time the Series was best-of-nine?”
(This is extra mean, because the Yankees lost the series in question in eight games.)
This is a man who actually owns books not just about Larry Bowa, but by Larry Bowa. As in: Larry Bowa: I Still Hate to Lose. No joke: he has a google news alert set up for the guy. We have his baseball card on our refrigerator. If Larry Bowa were a chick, I might be a little jealous.
Hell, I’m still a little jealous.
But he loves the Yankees, and I love him, and so ... I love the Yankees. If the Yanks were an NL team, it would be another matter, but they aren’t, and so, slowly but surely, I have switched to the dark side. I got to know the players, the history. YES suddenly became my most-watched TV network. I stopped hating Derek Jeter. I started hating Kyle Farnsworth. And now I am, undeniably, a Yankees fan.
Even so, I hid it for as long as I could. Because let’s be honest: rooting for the Yankees is roughly equivalent to lobbying for higher gas prices.
When I finally revealed my change of heart to my Boston friends, I was hoping for the best but expecting the worst. I got the latter. One representative and not at all tongue-in-cheek email:
“YOU'RE A FUCKING YANKEES FAN?!
“Seriously, are you going to be wearing Crocs at dinner? What about short shorts that say ‘Bootylicious’ on the back? Is your cellphone set to play the Hamster Dance music? Going shopping later for a pink NYPD sweatshirt?
“I don't even know who you are any more.”
So there was that.
Then I told my friend Annie. Annie’s a Marblehead native who once nearly started a fight with a pair of Yankees fans. In a very nice restaurant. In Italy. Three thousand miles from home, and she still found Yankees fans to hate.
I came out to Annie while we were in Vegas because I figured that the promise of booze and gambling might help dull the pain of my revelation. I was wrong. She just stared into her Jack Daniels like a six-year-old fifteen minutes into Bambi.
“Please stop,” she said. “I might start crying.”
My own father wasn’t even sympathetic. And he even used to follow the Yankees back when he was a kid, when Yankees radio broadcasts were, inexplicably, the only baseball broadcasts available in British Columbia. Still: “What’s next,” he asked. “You’re gonna be a Lakers fan?”
(Aside: if I can have a nickname based on Lakers legend Elgin Baylor and STILL hate the Lakers, I think that’s a hate that can withstand anything.)
It even gets me into trouble with my St. Louis friends. The weekend before last, while I was watching the Cards play at Busch Stadium with my friend Ellen, we were wondering whether Chris Duncan would be better suited for the AL, where he could be a DH. (First base for the Cards being unavailable, of course, as it’s the position of franchise player Albert Pujols.)
Suddenly I found myself chattering on about Chris’s brother Shelley, who plays for the Yankees, and why it pains me to see Jason Giambi’s shrunken head out at first when he can barely even catch the ball, and how Shelley’s forearms could crush a fully grown man, and did you know he had to dress up as the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz last year?
Ellen just looked at me as if I’d grown a second head.
In any case, here’s my point. I have plenty of friends who wouldn’t be caught dead in a stadium, who think baseball is boring and ice hockey boorish. They wonder how I can simultaneously love musical theater and the baseball post-season. They know not to try to talk to me during the first weekend of the NCAA tournament about anything other than the NCAA tournament - but that doesn’t mean they like it.
On a basic level, they think sports are stupid.
Usually I respond with long-winded speeches about fandom-as-community, about the intense human drama of an extra-innings pitching duel, about learning the limits of the mind and body in the seventh game of a Stanley Cup final.
But what I really mean is this: being a sports fan is, at heart, about fierce, unadulterated feeling. Take away the commentary and the merchandising and that jerk-off high school quarterback you hated, and it’s all right there. With sports, you get family. You get hope. And you get love. Even if your everyday personal life lacks all of the above.
It’s one of the many reasons I knew I wasn’t ever going to let go of my then-boyfriend: if I loved him so much I had come to love the Yankees, I knew I had stumbled upon something truly special.
And so, Reader, I married him.
And yes, Reader, I married his team as well. Even though Jorge Posada totally pees on his hands, even though Hideki Matsui brings his porn collection on road-trips, even though A-Rod routinely makes me want to throw things at my television. Because when the Yankees win, my husband throws his arms in the air in raw, animalistic joy.
And my own heart makes like the Grinch in the face of a hand-holding chorus of Whos.
Sport fans aren’t necessarily stupid. But they are necessarily loudly and passionately human. And by thoughtlessly excluding sports from your cultural field of vision, you can miss out on the latter and focus unduly on the former.
Which, I hate to say it, means that you think most people in this country are idiots. Which in turn means that you’re an over-generalizing, unsympathetic snob. From which then follows an even more unpleasant conclusion: you’re the one who’s stupid.
You don’t have to like sports – I’m not asking everyone to tune into Sportscenter each night. You like what you like. Fine by me. But if you meet a girl or guy who’s into sports, don’t dismiss them off-hand. After all, somewhere along the line they’ve learned to love.
And if you’re lucky enough, they might end up loving you just as well.
Even if that means you have to hear about Larry Bowa every single goddamned day.
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love is a battlefield
everybody clap your hands
I live about fifteen minutes by subway from Shea Stadium, so even though I’m a lifelong Cardinals fan, I go there from time to time to get my in-person baseball fix. Now, Shea Stadium has few aesthetic charms. It’s ugly, it’s falling down, and it reeks of urine and twenty-one years of despair. Even so, it’s become one of my favorite places to watch a game. Because nowhere else can you find The Jose Reyes Spanish Academy, a series of stadium videos in which Mets shortstop Jose Reyes teaches fans basic – and often bizarre - Spanish phrases.
Like this one:
Strangely, Reyes has never related any actual baseball phrases while I’ve been in attendance. Which got me to thinking about foreign-language sports terminology. So, in honor of the postseason, I went and did a little Internetting in search of a few resources for baseball-loving linguaphiles who might want to follow the playoffs on ESPN Deportes.
The first thing to note is that there are two Spanish words for baseball itself: la pelota and el béisbol. Anyone who’s ever studied Spanish knows that there are massive lexical variations from one region to another – something that’s particularly problematic if you, like me, have a penchant for profanity. I haven’t quite been able to pin down the locations where pelota is used instead of béisbol – my initial instinct was that one would be used in Europe and the other in Latin America, but that doesn’t seem to be true.
In fact, both seem to be in use in Puerto Rico. This site notes that “in Ponce, broadcasters never refer to the baseball; the thing the pitcher throws is la Wilson (because she is la pelota - but in Caguas, they call it el Wilson because he is el béisbol).”
Another tidbit from the same page is this: “An interesting point is the use of the adaptable suffix -azo (‘wicked big’), which is too slangy to be taught in high-school Spanish.”
I can’t help but wonder: are there Red Sox fans in Puerto Rico?
In any case, if anyone knows the rhyme and reason behind la pelota and el béisbol, I would love to hear it.
The best resource for baseball Spanish is the great bilingual baseball dictionary available for download at Baseball-Reference.com. The dictionary includes a full list of all the baseball terminology you would ever have to know in the course of a regular game. It also includes useful phrases like dedos de mantequilla – literally, “fingers of butter.” This phrase has also, apparently, been turned into verb – enmantequillarse - meaning “to bobble.” Or, as I like to think of it, “to be-butter oneself.”
Another evocative definition can be found in the entry for “fluke”: gloria de mañana, or “morning glory.” In other words, something that blooms brightly in the morning and dies in the afternoon. And the translation for the Texas Rangers is Rancheros or Vigilantes – something that made me smirk pretty nastily until I remembered that in Spanish, vigilantes just means “watchmen.” I choose, however, to think that there’s a double meaning there.
My favorite entry by far, however, is this one:
biased umpire: n.f. estatua de la libertad
I don’t feel that any additional explanation is needed there. Unless, of course, it were to come courtesy of Professor Reyes.
It’s not like he has anything better to do at the moment, after all.
Later: Japanese baseball terms and how they shed light on the sudden star power of Kaz Matsui. Because I sure as hell can’t find anything else that explains it.
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famous last words
To a trusted confidante, when contemplating a long-simmering relationship: "How bad could we be? Just because we're assholes to everyone else, that doesn't mean we'd be assholes to each other."
To my mother, before moving to New York: "I know that the job doesn't seem that impressive now, but they told me that if I worked hard, I'd advance quickly. And I can totally live on twenty-six thousand a year."
To a knowledgeable friend, while filling out my NCAA bracket: "Yeah, I know that it's not, like, a bold choice to go with Duke for the championship, but as long as Redick doesn't crap out, I think they have a good shot."
One of these days I'm going to learn to shut the fuck up.
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basketball diaries
An admission: I don't normally go in on March Madness pools.
Please don't get the wrong impression, here. It's not that I don't care - it's more that I kind of care too much. If I were the sort of person to rank my priorities, college basketball would fall somewhere between paying the rent and Diet Coke. I know that I'm, like, a total girl or whatever, but the tournament is, all the same, kind of a big fucking deal to me.
But, even so, I usually don't enter tournament pools. Because when you get right down to it, I'm just too fucking competitive. If I'm publicly accountable for the predictions I make, I transform from your everyday obsessive fan to an actual, honest-to-God, foam-at-the-mouth crackpot, tearing at my hair when things go wrong and desperately indulging superstition when things go right. At some point, I usually end up on the floor in front of the television, knees pulled protectively to my chest while I balance a pillow on my head. Because you never know: the pillow may be lucky.
And remember, the tournament is two weeks long. Other events I typically bet on - the Oscars, for instance - are over in, like, 4 hours. I can get in, get out, and get second place with hardly any trouble at all. An NCAA tournament pool, on the other hand, will actively ruin my life.
Which is why I'm in some trouble this year. Because last night, while discussing the bracket with my dad, he basically taunted me until I agreed to go in on his pool (which is, officially, "for recreational purposes only") at work.
If anyone out there still believes that sports appreciation and cognitive ability are somehow mutually exclusive, they need only skim the rules of this pool to have their worldview severely undermined:
It's been nice knowing you, sanity. I'll see you again sometime around April 4th.
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the sporting life
I have been accused, on occasion, of compensating for my misanthropy by developing unnaturally intense fixations on fictional characters and situations. This is not entirely correct.
I also develop unnaturally intense attachments to sports teams.
St. Louisians are quick to tell you that our city is one of the finest baseball cities in America. And I think many sportswriters and baseball players would agree: Cardinals fans wouldn't know fair-weather if a Marlins fan came by and clubbed them in the face with it. And I do love the Cardinals. During this year's NLCS, I spent most of my time sitting cross-legged in front of the television with a couch pillow balanced on my head because I thought it would bring good luck. But baseball isn't the engine of my existence, sports-wise. Nor is football, about which I could really care less.
(I do, however, have a vague memory of going through an inexplicable Dallas Cowboys phase. I think a boy who liked me in elementary school gave me a Cowboys teddy bear. Oh, god, no, I remember now. It's so much worse than that. It was a troll. He gave me a blue-haired Dallas Cowboys troll. No wonder my interest in the NFL dwindled shortly thereafter.)
No, my two true loves are basketball and hockey. One I acquired on my own (thanks, freakish height) and the other I was born into (thanks, freakish Canadian relatives).
I generally prefer basketball of the collegiate kind - I'm a rabid Duke Blue Devils fan. Now, I absolutely realize that being a Duke fan is sort of like liking the Lakers - or, worse, the Yankees - but I just can't be shamed out of my affection for the team. I fell in with Duke basketball during the early 90s, which was a heady time for the program, the time of Grant Hill and Bobby Hurley and the famous and incredible game against Kentucky. I went to Duke basketball camp and practiced for a week in Cameron and one of my best friends insisted on being called "Christian Laettner's Little Princess." I gave my heart away and there is no getting it back.
I actually came really close to going to UNC-Chapel Hill for college. And I might have gone there, too, had my program's recruiting weekend not coincided with the Duke-Carolina game. I don't think I heard a word anybody said the first day I was there: I was too anxious to find an opportunity to beg, borrow, or steal my way into the Smith Center. I ended up watching the game at some frat house, drinking warm beer and deflecting the suspicious glares of die-hard Tar Heel fans. At one point a boy sidled up to the couch and started to lecture me about Carolina basketball because, apparently, I just wasn't excited enough about the game. Well, in fact I was fucking ecstatic about the game - Duke was up. But I couldn't very well tell them that. If I died by their hands, all of that work getting into college would have been for nothing.
But that was when I realized: I could hardly maintain the charade for one evening. There was no freaking way I'd be able to pull it off for four years. When I said unnaturally intense attachments, I meant it. My love of Duke basketball cost me a really generous scholarship.
And then there's hockey. My god, I love hockey. I started going to Blues games when I was just a little girl, back when they still played in the crumbling old arena. The entire place smelled of stale beer and urine, but I was too busy trying to decipher the rules and memorize the roster to notice. In my family, hockey is our tradition. And I learned its rituals from an early age.
I remember one game against Philadelphia in particular. It was some sort of promotional night, and every ticket-holder had received a lemon-yellow can cozy at the gates. Of course, the moment a hated referee made a disastrously bad call, the entire crowd reacted by throwing that shit out onto the ice. And I joined in, screaming at Kerry Fraser and chucking my cozy for all it was worth.
But I was only seven years old, so it didn't go very far.
Although my love of hockey is unassailable, my specific club affiliation has always been a bit problematic. My affections are now and probably forever will be split between the Blues and the Canucks. Again, it's a matter of acquisition and inheritance - it was impossible for me to live in St. Louis and not follow the Blues. But it was equally impossible for me to have my DNA and not love the Canucks. I had a Hull and Oates poster in my bedroom, sure, but I cried for the Canucks when they lost in the '94 Stanley Cup Final. It was the greatest sports heartbreak of my life.
And I still haven't quite come to terms with it, if my conduct from last night is any indication. See, last night I saw the Canucks play the Rangers at Madison Square Garden. And what team beat out the Canucks in '94? That's right: the fucking Rangers. So, naturally, I chose to go into a near sell-out crowd of drunken, confrontational Ranger-loving assholes wearing my Canucks game sweater and a dangerous expression. I put up with catcalls and insults and I got into three separate arguments about why I was not, in fact, directly responsible for the behavior of Todd Bertuzzi. I also drank a lot of beer.
Now, at Madison Square Garden, they give you your beer in a plastic cup with a lid. I was at the game with my friends Patrick and Sara, and since Sara has a tendency to spill a drink just by looking at it, I chose to keep my beer lidded and drink it with a straw. Which might have looked a little bit ridiculous, okay, fine, but stadium beer is fucking expensive, and I am really poor. I was just protecting my investment. But of course, the guys in the row below me (every last fucking one of them wearing a Messier or Richter jersey) took note and started heckling me in between games of Toupee or Not Toupee.
We carried on a lively ... I'll call it a "discussion" ... throughout the game, gloating at each other over goals and calls and fights. Our wit, however, deteriorated at a rate directly proportional to our rate of beer consumption. And I'm proud to say that I was the one to finally hit rock bottom. With only a few minutes remaining in the third period, the Canucks went up 3-2. I stood, one of three people in my entire section to applaud the goal, and looked below me at the row of glowering drunks. And then I made a traditionally inflammatory hand gesture and yelled, "What do you think of my straw now, bitch!"
If you drink enough Bud Light, such things are bound to happen.
I haven't had an uneventful or unsuccessful life, but I wouldn't be exaggerating to say that the sound of the final buzzer - and the groan of despair that burst forth from the Ranger collective - heralded one of the more deeply satisfying moments of my existence.
Sure it's possible that I like sports because I don't like people. But can people really provide that sort of satisfaction? It's not that I don't have faith in people and interpersonal relationships. But until the law allows me to throw low-cost promotional materials at people who piss me off, I prefer to limit my interpersonality to sports.
Even if it does mean that I have to interact with Rangers fans.
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