Chosen Ones And Others

Last summer, in the frantic and screechy days leading up to LeBron James's peculiar, image-shredding, goofily grandiose "Decision" broadcast, I got pretty busy. There were some (Ryan Genovese-assisted) suggestions of ways to spice up the broadcast, inspired by the ultra-perplexing Dean Martin Variety Show and a puzzling over the week's wince-y phenomenology here and at Can't Stop The Bleeding (twice, actually). When James finally signed with the Heat, it was a let-down in a bunch of different ways and at a bunch of different levels, but it was also something of a relief. Not just because I'd no longer need to wade through inherently un-verifiable pseudo-scoops as part of my Daily Fix duties, although there was certainly that. Instead, something seemed settled about LeBron, who is pretty clearly the best and among the most interesting players of his generation.

It wasn't that he was a villain, although that was the narrative that (justifiably) emerged in the wake of his decision to break up with his home state in what amounted to a televised infomercial for himself. Scooby Doo cartoons and sports columns are the only place in which people "are revealed" as villains, and anyway the hero/villain thing is never not-bullshit, at least in a sports-y context. The real revelation, not so much on the evening of The Decision but during a season marked by some petty bully-boy bullshit, some pettier mean-girl bullshit, and finally by a certain hollowness -- was that LeBron was less the fun-loving if somewhat thwarted figure that he had appeared to be during his early years in Cleveland and was instead seemingly dedicated to chasing a Jordan-inf(l)ected vision of Greatness. Not greatness qua being great, although that's obviously part of it, but greatness as in vastness -- championships and memorable photos of himself after winning championships, a brand that expands and engulfs forever and ever amen, and so on. "Global icon" was a term he used for it earlier in his career, and in all its bleak, un-human and multiple capitalistic crassnesses it was apparently what he meant. It's one thing to pull against a player whose style of basketball or on-court affect or locality of employment are unappealing to you. It's another, easier, thing to wish defeat upon a player who aspires with all his being to global brand-hood, to someday being raptured directly into the NYSE. That was the disappointment, for me, with LeBron -- that a player with so beautiful a talent (and with what seemed a healthy sense of humor) aspired to become a post-human, living/breathing/sweating/pooping corporation.

It has been an orgy of revilement for LeBron since his Heat lost to the Mavericks in the NBA Finals, and while Bethlehem Shoals and I have discussed what that match-up meant to us in our GQ chats, and while everyone in the whole fucking world has discussed What LeBron's Problem Is, I apparently still had a little bit left in me on this. So I wrote something I'm pretty happy with about LeBron and His Sad Aspirations for The Awl. In it, I compare him to a Richard Serra sculpture, which is maybe not the high point of my metaphor-making career -- I'd imagine that would involve ham and either a politician or a quarterback, somehow -- but which did provide an excuse not to run a picture of LeBron with this post. So you're welcome for that, I guess?

Strictly For My Sportz Nerdz

This right here is probably the dorkiest thing I've ever written -- a piece for Wired.com about the joys of the do-it-yourself NCAA tournament fantasy basketball league. (Frequent collaborator and MacGyver commish Brendan Flynn is the hero):

We are all grown men: some of us fathers, some with post-graduate degrees, all of us comparatively well-adjusted, some of us smart enough to know that Richmond’s first-round matchup against Vanderbilt looks like a reasonable upset pick. Why were we doing this? Well, the simplest answer is that we are hideous, hideous basketball dorks who happen also to share a taste for fantasy basketball. (Ladies!)

But the more specific answer is that we were having a NCAA fantasy draft because we could. Licensing issues prevent fantasy sports giants from hosting player-driven NCAA drafts along the lines of the average NBA fantasy basketball league, and those sites do plenty well with their bracket-prediction fantasy games. Last year, 4 million people picked a bracket through ESPN.com’s Tournament Challenge, which features some nifty coding, a $10,000 prize for a perfect bracket, and a State Farm sponsorship. In contrast, there are eight of us in the hand-collated NCAA fantasy league run by Brendan Flynn, a doctoral candidate in political science at the City University of New York’s grad center. We’re still working out the corporate sponsorship thing.

I'm happy with it, and enjoyed the experience immensely, as I have enjoyed all my experiences writing for Wired's Erik Malinowski. That said: serious levels of nerderation jumping off on this one. Sports + MS Excel = LADIES!

Gimme That Internet

For awhile, I was planning on trying to tote up all the words I wrote during the week before the Super Bowl. Why I was going to do this was a question that didn't occur to me until later than it probably should've, but it did occur to me. Not only would it not be much of a conversation starter -- especially when I'd have to later allow that, averaged out, I got something like seven cents per word -- but it would also probably be something of a bummer. More so to me than to the poor human stuck listening to me talk about it, but probably to both of us.

Luckily for me, though, some of those words were kind of a big deal for me. Over the last half of the week, I crashed through a story for the Wall Street Journal that was pretty easily the biggest thing I've yet done for them, and definitely the biggest journalistic "get" of a career essentially devoid of them. Which is fine, since that's not really what I do -- I compare athletes to deli meats, first and foremost. But I can see what's cool about this sort of thing, now. The piece is about the rediscovery -- after 44 years of being presumed lost -- of the network broadcast of the first Super Bowl. That one's here, and I'm pretty proud of it.

I also wrote what will probably be my last Kicked Off column for The Awl, and it is -- spoiler alert -- about the Super Bowl, and also has some more description of Super Bowl I (and more profanity, and more adjectives) than I was allowed at the Journal. I'm probably prouder of it, because my affection for my own voice overshadows my desire to be a scoopy newspaper dude. I also think I came closer to saying what I've been trying to say all year in this one than I previously have.

It's not a failure of taste that leads NFL owners—all of them owners of profitable teams, all of them beneficiaries of a television deal that pays the league $4 billion per annum—to boldly demand massive concessions from the players union because Of These Difficult Economic Times. Or that leads Sports Illustrated's NFL hagiographist/coffee-critic Peter King to write a tone-deaf piece fretting over the prospect that commissioner Roger Goodell—"sandy-haired and fit at 51," recipient of nearly $10 million in annual pay, point man on the owners' plan to extract those concessions and add two regular season games (which fans don't necessarily want) to the NFL's already brutal schedule—might be working too hard, according to friends. Or, at the most distant pole, that led Chuck Klosterman to get up at the Varsity Letters reading series on Thursday night and extemporize to the effect that the prospect of a NFL player dying on the field is something he likes most about the game. "Think about it," Klosterman said, tipsy off his own contrarianism, "they're putting their lives on the line out there." Klosterman seemed, beneath his grin and that beard and at the distance from which I regarded him, to be moved by how moved he was at the prospect, and amused at how amusing he found it.

That is all rotten, of course. But while the above are not in good taste, they are failures of perspective first and foremost. They reflect an inability or unwillingness to see beyond the self-flattery of dumb comforts and acknowledge complicated circumstances and context. Or, if you prefer, those distinct idiocies are different symptomatic presentations of the same disorder—a terminal inability to give a shit. The NFL, as it presently exists, is built to elicit this response in people—it makes emotion cheaper and easier to digest, it takes the laziest arms-length cruelties and ignorance and processes them until they are rich and filling. But the bigger the NFL makes itself—the more it gorges on synergies and succumbs to the distorting, obliterating appetites of irresponsible wealth—the more obese it becomes. The reason why the long march to the Super Bowl is exhausting—and why the entire NFL experience is increasingly obscene in an increasing number of ways—is that the NFL is not presently in shape to make a journey this long. It is too big, and getting bigger.

So, after what was certainly the busiest week of my professional life -- I even did a Sunday Daily Fix this morning -- I feel mostly physical sensations. I fell on the ice in New Haven this morning, so I've got this shame/ache cocktail going on there, and I've some of the expected carpal tunnel/brain issues. But feeling even a little bit of pride is nice, and sort of a surprise. I look forward to resting, whenever I'll get to do that, but I didn't expect all this to feel as worth-it as it currently does. This could all be undone by another slip on the ice, though. Young septuagenarian over here. Jeez.

Ulcers With Bylines: Okay, Gregg Doyel, Okay.

Most people in the world don't have to have an opinion, well-informed or no, about the sports columnists at CBS Sports. I suppose that I don't really have to have an opinion myself, although the fact that CBS is one of my regular visits when I'm doing The WSJ Daily Fix Thing means that I am at least familiar with who those columnists are. So this gives me a really uncool edge on all of you -- and it's probably more or less all of you -- who can be all, "Um, I know there's definitely Shannon Sharpe. Or Sterling Sharpe. And also I think Hugh Downs and Sherman Alexie? And is Summer Sanders still doing that blog?" It's one I would trade to you for pretty much anything. But it does enable me to have opinions on things that are transparently unimportant and none too interesting. To wit:

So CBS Sports has a bunch of columnists, more or less all of whom are at the very least Fix-usable and three of which -- the very great Ray Ratto and the very better-than-serviceable Dennis Dodd and Gary Parrish -- are pretty good. All of them have really terrible column photos, though: Parrish's gel-and-loosened-tie look is uncomfortably Frat Semi-Formal, Dodd looks like Mitch Pileggi For SlimFast and Ratto looks like a skeptical walrus. Again, it takes nothing away from any of them, and Ratto -- it bears mentioning again -- is one of the most consistently wry and wise and overall excellent writers out there who types about sports. But the picture atop Gregg Doyel's column is actually exactly right, and maybe even pretty flattering considering that the mohawked nightmare above is also Gregg Doyel. But the sour, puckered-up face Doyel is making in his column photo -- it's atop this column, which I'm going to write about in a moment -- is just so right for him. It's a picture of someone losing his train of thought mid-scold; it's a photo of the worst dad at a Little League game suddenly realizing that he has to go to the bathroom, number two, and pronto. It's pretty representative of Doyel's writing, too.

(It's worth mentioning, parenthetically, that Doyel may not actually be the worst columnist at CBS Sports. The hilariously, relentlessly anodyne Mike Freeman is just as predictable, but his dull, dutiful columns -- here's one about how the Mariners' knowing acquisition of rape-y former Rangers prospect Josh Lueke represents baseball's declining commitment to moral players -- aren't nearly as gripping as Doyel's equally dull but much more in-your-face troll bait. Also, Freeman loses points for forgetting about legendary Raw Talent Ambiorix Burgos. And one should never forget about Ambiorix Burgos, because he's presumably going to get out of jail someday)

Anyway, Doyel's an ulcer. I mean, I don't know what he's like in real life, but given how eager he is portray himself in columns as a guy who enjoys screaming disgustedly at his television it would seem unkind not to take him at his word. Of course, taking Doyel at his word would mean accepting his own self-assessment as a fearless truth-speaker, forever willing to take big names to task in near-unreadable columns that make for easy SEO-stack headlines. And it would mean ignoring the fact that he's obviously working the WWF Heel angle pretty hard -- drawing fire, drawing comments, hopefully drawing links and hits and ad-views or whatever. He shouldn't be taken too seriously.

And yet, while I sense he gets his own Heelery at a level that's probably not entirely unconscious, it's occasionally amazing to see how far he will go for a sell. The premise of the piece itself is straight comment-and-link-bait all by itself -- Doyel is "asking" Boise State to lose to Virginia Tech tonight. But even knowing that he's playing up the whole Gregg Doyel thing as per usual in the grafs I'm about to quote, even knowing that he's fishing for "Doyel UR retard!!1!!" comments on his piece -- even knowing that, isn't this a bit much?

It's nothing personal. Honest. I don't dislike Boise State or Boise State coach Chris Petersen, even if some of you in Idaho might recall a brief confrontation I had with Petersen last year on a conference call. If you're a conspiracy theorist, congratulations: There's another conspiracy for you. In addition to the SEC connection here at CBS -- plus I attended the University of Florida! -- Petersen and I butted heads, briefly, on a phone call last year ... so this year I'm getting even by rooting against the Broncos.

Problem with that theory is, I have notoriously bad phone etiquette. I also butted heads once on a phone call with Mike Krzyzewski. So the conspiracy theory falls apart there, because Krzyzewski coaches Duke and Duke beat Butler for the 2010 national basketball title and Boise State has been called the 2010 football season's equivalent to Butler, and since I once butted heads with Coach K that means I should, um ... now I'm confused.

So how about this. How about we just stick with the facts here?

And the fact is this: If Boise State beats Virginia Tech, the Broncos almost certainly will play for the national championship this season, and that's going to kill me. It's going to kill lots of fans of college football. Call us BCS snobs, call us front-runners, call us realists. Say we're stupid vestiges of the past, digging a moat around the BCS castle and guarding it with our alligator mouth and hummingbird ass.

Just say it in the comments, please. And on your blog, and on, like, Huffington Post and Bleacher Report, please. If Doyel is in earnest, he's got to be a pretty miserable guy. If he's not, then it seems like he's wasting what could be a pretty cool gig on what must be an exhausting and unsatisfying bit of play-acting. I'm starting to think that picture might be a candid.

Training Days

For an astonishing eight years now, Brooklyn's mighty Buttermilk Bar has sponsored one of the great joys of my New York existence: beers on tap. Also, they have very nicely agreed to pick up the New York City Parks Department field-registration fee for a long-running and very friendly intramural softball league/game that we know as Buttermilk Softball, and which will begin its ninth season at Ball Field Five at Prospect Park on Sunday. We are so official (not really that official) that we have an Internet Website of our own, which I write with WNYC mega-star and power-hitting corner infielder Joel Meyer, and I'm sorry I forgot how this sentence was supposed to end because I am just so excited to do this thing that I am honestly freaking out right now okay hold on a second. Hold on. All right.

All right. So, yeah: the teams change every week, with each side comprised of a combination of old (both physically and in terms of time-knowing-each-other) friends, random Prospect Park passers-by, the occasional BK tweenager, the occasional weird and very fancy Latin dude who doesn't believe in evolution and talks to you about it, and a bunch of former randoms who have become friends with the previously existing group of friends through Buttermilk Softball. We have made t-shirts and we have a blog that details -- occasionally in very great detail -- the goings-on in Buttermilk Softball. We're basically better organized than the Can-Am League, and many of our players are just as good. Sadly, we don't have the powerful brand of Rich Gedman to get us the notoriety we deserve, and also many of our players have moved away or given up or were called up to professional softball leagues. The last part is also not true. I am having a hard time telling the truth about Buttermilk Softball or writing coherently because I am too excited by the fact that on Sunday, July 11, we will play our first game of the season at Prospect Park's Field Five. It will also be one of just two games we play this season, for all the reasons I mentioned above except for the one involving Rich Gedman.

In honor of the long-awaited return of Buttermilk Softball -- well, long-awaited by me, at least -- I present a video of Cleo, my parents' very excitable puppy, working on her lateral movement and agility:



These drills are very difficult for humans to do, given that we are short two legs and two hundred thousand units of puppy energy. They're even more difficult to take good first-person video of:



Steady Blair Witching on fools. Apologies for any nausea or disorientation from that last one. If it makes you feel any better, any discomfort you're currently experiencing is nothing compared to how I'll feel after playing softball for the first time in a year.

Memphis Bleak

So, figure I wrote probably 15 cards for Shawne Williams, and then one long blog post, and now a slightly longer essay adapted from said blog post in which he's the effective protagonist. I'm not really hunting for more writing work at the moment, but I think it's fair to say that if Shawne Williams is looking for a biographer, I'd probably have to be on the list.

Luckily for me, I imagine that's fairly low on the guy's list at the moment, what with the lean-related indictment and the Orlando Summer League and the Vegas Summer League and such. But if the essay that just went up at The Awl is the last thing I ever write about Shawne Williams, I can at least say that I went out on a pretty okay note. As ever, it was a pleasure to work with them, and I'm pretty happy with the way the piece turned out. It's pretty long, and drifts and loops a bit (although less so given the gentle-but-helpful edit it received) and of course it will seem pretty familiar to those who struggled through last weekend's blog post on essentially the same topic. But, yeah: this website's ostensible purpose, besides the Puppy Vids, is for me to big up stuff like this. So I'll stop giving you reasons not to read it, and let you get on to doing so, if you're so inclined.

Oh, and my 500-page speculative nonfiction book about Shelden Williams comes out in September. Do that pre-order work!

Spitballing: Ideas on How the LeBron James Show Could Justify Its One-Hour Length

I've been fascinated, of late, by the long-form commercials for the DVD set containing The Best of The Dean Martin Variety Show (feel free to apply tone quotes where needed, as needed). It's not like I've ever seen one of these not-available-in-stores DVD sets that has ever made me want to call in, and I imagine that the rest of my life will probably go by like that, unless and until The Best of Mad TV: The Artie Lange Years comes out. At which point my life will end, because I will leap from something.

But upon researching the Dean Martin Show (read: looking the entry up on Wikipedia), the commercials started to seem even weirder. The maniacally stilted laughing-gas vibe of the variety show is, for generational reasons, as foreign to me as vaudeville, so the commercials are already pretty jarring. Hearing the crowd go apeshit when Michael Landon shows up at Dino's "door" -- a title announces who it is under his name, the crowd flies into Double Rainbow-grade ecstatic-tears like OH MY GOD IT'S MICHAEL LANDON HOLY SHIT I CAN'T BELIEVE IT'S REALLY MICHAEL LANDON -- or watching Martin lip-synch through a weird dance routine with Florence Henderson is already baffling enough to me. But that those hoary-from-the-jump shows could've been delivering their Hiroshima-grade hokiness payloads while Watergate was going on -- and that the show was on the air for nine freaking years! -- is even weirder. People are strange, obviously, and life moves quickly, but it's weird to think that something that's just five or so years older than me, and which was popular with regular American humans, basically looks like this to me now:



Anyway, given that the idea of spending an hour watching LeBron James get interviewed about where he will become a billionaire is roughly as impossible for me to imagine as sitting through a bunch of Dean Martin Variety Show episodes, I guess it was natural that the variety show format occurred to me as an easy -- and perhaps the only -- way for LeBron to make tonight's ESPN special watchable. I did some brainstorming with some friends -- thank you, Ryan Genovese and Brendan Flynn -- and I did some deep-dive conceptualizing myself. And while I know that it's probably too late for all but a few of these ideas to actually make it into tonight's show, here's what I'm most looking forward to from The LeBron James Variety Hour.

• A song and dance medley dedicated to the cities LeBron is considering, featuring musical and athletic ambassadors from each city. These would include LeBron performing "Crossroads" with Bone Thugz and Bernie Kosar, "If You Believe In Having Sex" with Luther Campbell and Edgerrin James, "500 Miles and Runnin" with MC Ren, Ice Cube and Loy Vaught and "Endless Summer Nights" with Richard Marx and Will Perdue. I know the last one seems out of place but 1) Common has an Old Navy photoshoot he has to be at and 2) Global Icons need diversified brands.


• Avant-garde moments, such as a mostly silent 15-minute segment in which LeBron paints an oil painting of Art Modell, screams a profanity, and then the show abruptly cuts to commercial. In another, a brief nature documentary about beavers plays, with dubbed narration in an imaginary language.


• LeBron is interviewed by a 12oz bottle of Powerade.


• In an earnest and surprisingly informative conversation with Charlie Rose, LeBron lays out his proposal for reforming the electoral college.


• A bewigged and very enthusiastic James performs Broadway classics with the cast of Glee, finally bringing down the house with a rollicking version of "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Out Of My Hair." Then he signs with the Heat.


• A visibly nervous LeBron performs last night's Jay Leno monologue word for word, with uncomfortably long pauses for laughs after each Lindsay Lohan joke. He concludes with, "We've got a great show for you tonight, Reba McEntire is here, and I'm signing with the Clippers" and ESPN displays a test pattern for the next 56 minutes.


• After regretfully announcing that he won't be resigning with the Cavaliers, LeBron attempts to make it right with Clevelanders by punching Drew Carey in the face.


• Instead of discussing basketball, James delivers a teary and mostly incoherent 60-minute monologue on "Creeping Monarchic Fascism, In The Woodrow Wilson Tradition" in front of a dry-erase board on which he circles and recircles the word "Liberty." He concludes the show by yelling, "Wake up, Sheeple!" into the camera and pulling on a Miami Heat jersey.


• In a series of inspirational vignettes, LeBron visits overweight people across the country and helps them lose weight... and rediscover themselves.

To say that the possibilities are endless is obviously not true. To say that the end of this ridiculous and ridiculously tone-deaf orgy of poorly orchestrated hype is something I am seriously looking forward to is, however, very true. Start the countdown, and someone tell Michael Landon that he's on in five.

Swift Kicks To Wherever

I'm going to fight the urge to provide director's commentary on everything I write, and just link, here, to a new piece I have up at The Awl. The piece is about the odd and unfortunate emotional distance I feel from the rest of the world's wild, loud absorption in the World Cup -- which, as you might've noticed if you've gone outdoors anywhere in the world over the last few days, is happening right now. I'm pretty happy with the piece, if not necessarily at peace with the sentiment that inspired it, both because I want to join the globo-soccer party for real and because my ambivalence about/inability to do so means that I wind up providing a (stunningly well-written, obviously) tour of my own sports navel in the piece. I'm especially wary of putting myself on the Who Cares side of things when it comes to the World Cup, too, since other members of said coalition include Newsbusters asshats and nightmarish human ulcer Mike Francesa.

I may write more on the Cup for The Awl, if they'll have me back on this topic, and I may write more about it here, too. For now, though, I'm about to go take a really long subway ride to watch as much of USA/England as is left when I finally get to Bay Ridge, and that should be fun. Just, you know, not as fun as it maybe is for other people. In the rest of the world. All of the people in the rest of the world. Actually, you know what, pass the Diet Coke, Francesa. Oh... no, it's cool, I didn't realize that two-liter was all for you. Sorry.

Pete Rose Sings

I was too young to appreciate Pete Rose's jaw-dropping comedy value when he was actually playing -- I just thought of him as the old guy with the Dorothy Hammil hairdo who kept hitting singles and later got busted for gambling. But as I first learned from Joe Posnanski's book "The Machine" and then later from a long interview I did with Posnanski (here), the dude was simultaneously incredibly revered and acknowledged as a turbo-charged dirtbag during his playing days. That seems somehow too sophisticated for the current culture, but maybe people just better understood the appeal of a man in uniform awkwardly singing a jingle in those days.

This all came to mind because an internet friend emailed yesterday looking for information on Rose's brief and frankly impossible to imagine tenure in Montreal back in 1984. Because the Sports Illustrated Vault is one of the three or four best things on the Internet, I can link to an article about Rose's Francophone interlude. Lots of good Rose-working-out-on-Nautilus-machine stuff for the ladiez in the opening grafs, too. I don't mean this in a gay way or nothing, but...yummy.

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.