That's My Word: Fungibility

Obviously I apologize for putting Mike Francesa's nightmare face and voice in front of your face. But I would be, as they say, "amiss" if I did not highlight Francesa's vocabulary lesson from today's show in re: Cliff Lee. Hat tip to Gerard at CSTB, who put this up first (and presumably suffered through The Francesa Experience in order to find it).

Obviously I like words, and type them and use them and sometimes miss use them. But I've got to bow down in the presence of a player who is greater. No one gets a word wrong as proudly, as loudly, or as repeatedly as Francesa does here. It's so unique and distinctive, it's downright fungible.

LeBrocalypto

I feel bad for Annie Leibowitz and her crippling personal debt, but it bears saying that most Americans losing their homes have not taken photos anywhere near this stupid and symbolically questionable.

So, the LeBron thing. You know, LeBron James the basketball player? It's a big deal in the way that sports things can be a big deal, and also in the sense that it is currently totally dominating the sportsy discourse, to the point that no one is even talking about Daniel Orton's amazing showing in the NBA Summer League. But The LeBrocalypse is most significant, I think, in the way that it is blazing barfy new trails in effectively unsourced sports journalism and, through Thursday night's one-hour (!) LeBron Selection Special on ESPN, pioneering a new and odious method of brand synergy. Oh, and it's also making most of the sports media freak the fuck out in what are generally some kind of embarrassing ways. The fact that LeBron could remake the NBA for the notably suckier if he actually does go to Miami -- which is what those squishily sourced "reports" are reporting -- is of some interest to me, too, but I'm more fascinated by the meta- and epiphenomena surrounding this goofily grandiose spectacle than I am by what it might do to, say, the Eastern Conference. Because frankly: whatever to the Eastern Conference.

Because it is my job and because I am habitually reckless with my carpal tunnels, I've been writing a ton about LeBron and what swirls around him of late. I rarely link to my Daily Fixes -- they really are only good for a few hours -- but I'll flatter myself to say that pretty much everything you should read about L'Affaire L'Bron is in this morning's Daily Fix. And I wrote about the click-chasing demi-bullshit scoops that have defined free agent coverage at Can't Stop the Bleeding yesterday, and I have a piece about the aforementioned media epiphenomena at CSTB today. If you'd rather read something not written by me on this topic, which is totally a good idea, the two best pieces I've read on it are this one from the blog Straight Bangin', and this one by Dave D'Alessandro, who is the best guy writing about the NBA for a newspaper, and does so for a newspaper in New Jersey.

Oh, and there will hopefully be a cleaned-up version of the Shawne Williams/Summer League post -- that is, one that might make sense/be enjoyable to those I'm not already dear friends with -- running in The Awl sometime over the next few days. You know, once everyone goes back to talking about the NBA Summer League and forgets about this silly hubbub about the greatest player of his generation changing teams and possibly cruelly breaking up with his hometown on live TV so he can move someplace warmer that offers lower taxes and better strip clubs. For a guy who is so palpably/unpleasantly concerned with his personal brand, you'd think that particular dick move would jump out as a dick move, but... well, anyway, you'd think that. You would, but you don't think like the best player of your generation, and that's because you are not the best basketball player of your generation. Daniel Orton is.

What We Moan About When We Moan About The Mets

Self-biting: not in good taste, but who are you going to criticize? All you can do is acknowledge it, which is what I'll do here: the title of this post is lifted from one I used for my last long, overreactive (over)analysis of a minor move by the New York Mets at Can't Stop the Bleeding. I'm using it again because I can't imagine I'll come up with a better headline, but mostly because I just wrote another such long n' florid Mets-related overreaction.

Once again, it pertains to the painful botching of what should, again, have been something so minor that even an obviously unbalanced person such as myself could barely care about it. But in the same way that the Mets managed to make adding a washed-up veteran backup (something they've done literally hundreds of times over the past few years) into an exploded drawing of their own goofball managerial anti-prowess -- or came close enough that I could dedicate 1200 (uncompensated!) words to describing it as such -- the team managed to make putting a mid-rotation starter on the DL into a similarly carnivalesque affair.

I am not expecting much in the way of on-field success from the Mets this year, which is nothing new. But despite that expectation-revision, I've somehow found a way to be disappointed. Some of this is on me. But much of it is on them -- on manager Jerry Manuel and pitching coach Dan Warthen and GM Omar Minaya and the Hapsburgian Wilpon tard-dynasty -- for un-exceeding those low expectations: for popping champagne after acquiring The Least Valuable Player in Baseball, for proving hellbent on turning a potential ace starter into Guillermo Mota, for not being able to put poor John Maine on the DL without somehow humiliating and insulting the guy, making a bunch of unilluminating, free-associative non-explanations into open microphones, and generally continuing to give the impression that the entire organization exists in a consequence-free zone of upside-down reasoning, double-secret paranoia and retrograde illogic. This sort of low-yield high-handedness and general ineptitude is pretty much the team's calling card over the last few years, although it hasn't lost its power to shock and depress. Or at least to do that to me. Evidently. That is definitely evident.

Obviously, this is not quite the worst it has ever been. (Look right, but know that that's not really the worst, either) And anyway, it's not like it hasn't kind of been thus for a couple decades now. As much fun as I had with, say, the 2000 or 2006 Mets, it was clear that those teams were outliers. The Wilpons are very rich, but have always sort of struck me as fairly dim, and uniquely susceptible to the sort of dim confidence that plays well in interviews (with the Wilpons, not with newspapers) -- thus Steve Phillips (Gerard's headline on that post is perfect, and this one's pretty good, too) and Omar Minaya and Tony Bernazard (one of my all-time least favorites) and some of the other, lesser lights who have held important administrative roles for the Wilps. Stupid is as stupid finds appealing and worthy of confidence.

So where does this leave me, besides bashing out long exegeses of the hows and whys certain things suck/are-ridiculous and etc. Really, honestly, probably more or less where I've been since I was seven years old: watching the Mets on television. I love baseball, and I love that uniform, and there are still some guys on the Mets that I find interesting and inspiring to watch. And I'm not going to pay for MLB season ticket so I can put myself in the hands of a more ideologically simpatico organization like the Rays or Angels or Mariners. The thought of it doesn't seem appealing for even a minute, although I enjoy watching those teams play. In my life as a fan, I've never been able to pull off consciously choosing to care about one team or another. It just sort of happens, and not-caring about the Mets hasn't happened yet. (After the ongoing insult of the New Jersey Nets' Ratner Years, though, I did sort of stop caring. So it's possible)

I don't want to stop caring about the Mets, and while I want them to get their shit together in terms of being a little less embarrassing to work for, cheer for and watch, I don't even know how much I really want them to lose all the flubbiness. If they were mechanized infantry a la the Yankees, I think I'd find it hard to cheer or care. But I would love a little less incompetence than this. The losing I can take; I'm used to it. It's the so-thoroughly-deserving-it, at a number of different levels, that makes me sad. Anyway, the Mets unrelenting (and somehow maybe worsening, after the grueling death march of last year) Metsiness does at least ensure that I get plenty of screeding and ranting practice, and I need something to get those adjectives out of my system. I would love to feel less obligated to do all that typing, though. I would also love for them to send Jennry Mejia to Binghamton so he could become a starting pitcher. I don't expect either anytime soon.

You Have To Get Up Pretty Early to Pull One Over on CSKA Sofia. But Not That Early, Really.

I've got a bigger thing I should be working on today, but I wanted to link to a recent post I did for Can't Stop the Bleeding on Greg Akcelrod, a French event promoter/lite con man (redundant?) who overcame his tragic lack of being-really-good-at-soccer to become a soccer prospect in Europe, simply by doing a bunch of sketchy web marketing for himself. Jonathan Clegg's original Wall Street Journal story is here, my (admittedly not the best thing I've ever written) gloss/musing at CSTB is here.

While Akcelrod's story is pretty interesting, the truly interesting element, for me, was how decentralized and structure-less the world of soccer scouting appears to be. There's more about this in the CSTB post, but the broke-ass, hope-powered human lives of pro sports vagabonds, weird international minor leagues and itinerant athletes is one of my dream writing topics. (The Journal generally does a very good job covering this; I blogged about another great WSJ story on Weird Soccer at CSTB last year) It will likely remain just that, sadly: I don't sense the market for this sort of thing matches my depth of interest, and I'm also not sure there's an advance out there big enough to justify reporting trips to Manila or Baku or Rangoon or wherever the story might take me.

It also might well be that people who don't give a shit about God Shammgod -- or even know who he is -- might not find it so pathos-rich and fascinating to find him plying his playground-legend trade in China's equivalent of Flint, Michigan. I do know that I always find it interesting. Thomas Friedman's mustache of understanding notwithstanding, it seems to me that we don't quite seem to have this globalization thing figured out yet. Which, okay, attribution:

"It seems to me that we don't quite seem to have this globalization thing figured out yet." -- Joseph Stiglitz

So obviously I don't know too terribly much about globalization, although I suspect that there are a few supposed experts who could join me in that club if they were to put down the pom-poms and be honest with themselves. And anyway, I know enough about the shape it's taking not to like globalization very much, and that cheap certainty is just about good enough for me. But the weirdnesses of globalized sports and the human foibles and goofinesses that define that weirdness -- and, less abstract and more to the point, the human beings stuck riding those odd waves -- are pretty fascinating to me. Greg Akcelrod's too-easy soccer impostor-y and Stephen Constantine's one-man-soccer-NGO life seem to hint at something deeper than "funny old world," although it's an awfully big thing to try to understand the shape of. Fascinating and odd as their stories are, though -- to quote myself from the CSTB post, because cheapness is different than plagiarism -- the (human) haystack is more interesting to me than the (human) needles in it. Also, to point out the obvious, this is one fucking huge haystack. Made of people. To be clear. Okay, I should get to work.