Sports On Computer

Spring training is in full swing, which means that fans of every team get to read nothing but magical tales of potential turnarounds, strange roster hangers-on looking “pretty good,” and free agent acquisitions praising their new digs as if they were running for mayor of their new city rather than just being some Dominican guy who’s good at a baseball.  Most of it is pretty transparently smoke, but after a long winter, smoke is often enough.  They don’t play baseball in the snow or the freezing cold.  Unless they’re in Minneapolis.  And even then, Summer’s eventually coming.  So even if your favorite team is predestined to another year of futility, the awshucks Spring Training reports about some 30-something career minor leaguer named “Googe” busting up a double play in a split squad loss against the Pirates are enough to fill even the hardest of hard-luck fans with something resembling hope.

Until around mid-May.  And then if your team sucks, you more or less know it.  The rest of the season is a long haul of individual storylines, often of the “hilarious illustration of ineptitude” variety, curiosity about prospects, and endless debates about what’s wrong and who should be fired and what the team really needs, as if a left-handed power hitter could turn the franchise around overnight.  If your favorite team sucks and you know it by mid-May, the largest points of interest during the long season for you are: which one of our guys will be the token member of our team in the All-Star Game; what are we getting in return for our lone All-Star at the trade deadline; who is getting called up in September and how are they doing (which we usually delegate to the member of our family and/or circle of friends still dedicated enough to watch games at that point).  This is what it means to root for a sucky baseball team.  I know all about it.  I’m a Nats fan.

The Spring Training smoke I’m reading is largely of the “painfully transparent” variety.  Everything seems to be about 18-year old baseball wunderkind Bryce Harper; what he ate for breakfast, which is his favorite Spice Girl (answer: I don’t remember the Spice Girls), what psi he prefers to inflate his tires to, whether he’ll be the next Willie Mays or merely the next A-Rod.  All well and good except there’s almost no chance he’ll play in Washington this season.  Bryce Harper Spring Training coverage is essentially a white flag.  It’s “wait ‘til next year” before the season even starts.

There are other sale-worthy storylines seeping out of Viera, Florida.  Unfortunately, they’re of the drearily rote variety.  There’s “hey, we know we paid way too much for way too long for a selfish money-grubbing asshole who doesn’t care about winning in Jason Werth, simply because we need to prove that we’re willing to pay a lot of money to snare other selfish money-grubbing assholes in the future, but the guy can play!”  Or, if that’s not enough to get you excited, “We swapped Adam Dunn for Adam LaRoche at first base!  Adam LaRoche is kind of like Adam Dunn except he doesn’t hit as well, but he actually knows how to play first base!”  Or else there’s “Remember that catcher-of-the-future we picked up in the Rule 5 draft who was good for a half season three years ago?  Well, he’s back from his latest injury rehab and he still hasn’t had his annual season-ending injury yet!”  And “Stephen Strasburg’s rehab is going SO WELL HE MIGHT BE ABLE TO THROW IN THE ARIZONA FALL LEAGUE!”  And “Ryan Zimmerman is still great!”  And “Look for improvement from Ian Desmond in year 2.”  And “With Danny Espinosa at second base, we might be able to successfully turn a double play this year for the first time in franchise history!”  And “Maybe the starting pitchers will somehow be good for once in their sorry, miserable lives!  For instance, can we just remind you how excited we are about Chien-Ming Wang potentially coming back from an injury soon!  THE Chien-Ming Wang, the one who played for the Yankees and posted a career 4.16 ERA before he got hurt!  A 4.16 ERA is AVERAGE!  Feel the excitement!”

It’s a cornucopia of false hope.  But still.  It’s Spring.  It says so right there in the name: Spring Training.  So at least it’ll be warm outside.  And Adam Dunn really could not play first base for shit.  That much we know is true.

None of which is actually disturbing to me, except the Chien-Ming Wang stuff is mildly aggravating, if only because there should be somebody better to sell us than Esteban Loaiza 2.0.  But no harm, no foul.  I know a padded column inch when I see it, and anyway it’s the Nats.  What are they going to say, “Omar Minaya gutted the team irreparably while it was under MLB collective ownership and nobody noticed because it was in Montreal, and then after contraction fell through they relocated the team, struck a profit-killing broadcast rights deal with the owner of the other nearby team, and made just enough cosmetic changes for it to look almost like a real team in order to unload it on some dopes for a huge profit?”  Come on, nobody would believe that.  And anyway, that’s hardly “news.”  None of that bothers me.  Or rather, it used to, but now I’ve just accepted that the Nats completely suck and will continue to completely suck for at least another year.  But they might miiiiight maybe might not completely suck for the entire rest of human history.  I’m not bothered by the smoke-and-mirrors nature of the “things are looking up” Spring Training stories.  From a Nats perspective, they’re a yearly occurrence.

What’s bothering me is this: apparently the Baltimore Orioles have some “things are looking up” Spring Training stories of their own.  And they’re of the semi-convincing variety.  I say “semi” because they’re still in the American League East, fighting for the lone wild card playoff spot not issued directly from God, via His name-bearing little green papers, to the Yankees and Red Sox.  But mere “exciting baseball” would be a huge coup for the Orioles.  Hell, the whole region.  If the Orioles are somehow good, and they have a decent shot at to at least score a few runs with new imports Mark Reynolds, JJ Hardy, Derek Lee, and in a cruel twist of fate, former Minaya-era Expo Vlad Guerrero.  That looks like a potentially interesting lineup.  On paper.  Thank God they still have no pitching.  If the Orioles became good, my head would explode.  And I’m surely not the only Nats fan who feels this way.  Unless of course I am the only Nats fan.

But why?  What does this say about the “rivalry” between these two neighboring cities?  What does that say about me?  The hand-wringing about the emerging Orioles coincides with a crisis of confidence I’m having regarding my hometown.  It’s multi-pronged.

Prong One: Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder is an incurable douchebag.

When the owner of your favorite team in all of sports sues the local free weekly paper for the express purpose of putting them out of business in order to avoid unfavorable publicity, and you have fond memories of that local free weekly paper as being your only source for reliable information about the location of the nearest all-ages Fugazi show you might experience as a teenaged rock fan, then that can shake your faith in the inherent goodness of that team a little.  Add in a racist mascot and the undisputed truthfulness of much of the unfavorable Dan Snyder publicity regarding doing things like suing fans and hiking prices, not to mention not winning footballs games with any regularity, and it’s a recipe for doubt.

Can I root for a team that has Dan Snyder as its owner?  He owns the team.  He’s not going to stop owning the team.  If they won the Super Bowl, NFL commissioner Roger Gooddell would hand the championship trophy directly to Dan Snyder.  Snyder would grin, sickeningly.  This would happen.  On a certain level, when I root for Chris Cooley to pick an errant pass out of the air and score, I am rooting for this eventuality, even though Chris Cooley is the best human being alive and Dan Snyder is possibly the worst.  On my own subjective scale.  I can’t provide evidence.  I just feel that way.  But the thought of that man holding a championship trophy aloft as if its attainment was some kind of group effort, and therefore to imply that in the process he had any relationship other than “leech” with the community that provides his means, well that’s hard to stomach.

It got so bad after this recent lawsuit that I casually joked with my brothers about starting up a “Ravskins” fan community, where Redskins fans travel the 45 minutes north into Baltimore and root for the Ravens as if they were the Redskins.  We’d just pretend.  I even looked at Michael Oher #74 jerseys with a customized “Go Redskins!” name on the back.  I think this is an inspired idea.  Or I did, until I realized that the Ravens are owned by Art Modell, who shamelessly spurned the entire City of Cleveland.  But at least he appears to know how to run a football team.

Do you see what I’m getting at with this prong?  Maybe Baltimore is better.  It’s a hard pill to swallow.

Prong 2: Me and the rest of my boring life.

I’m rounding into my 30’s.  And with that I’m in a period of deciding once and for all what kind of man I will be.  I’m trying to shed some of the values subconsciously implanted in me by circumstances of my upbringing that I never agreed to be a part of.  One of those, in the case of the Washington, DC area, is being a know-it-all.  Washington, DC must be the world’s capital of pretending to know things.  It’s a part of the culture.  People come from all over the world to be professional know-it-alls, working in think tanks and lobbying firms and in bureaucracy, hoping to bend the ears of power in their direction through the resolutely defiant declaration that “I know the truth, I’m right, and everybody else is wrong.”  It’s Washington, DC’s leading industry, and always will be.

As a result, many of the kids who grow up in the region have this incredible pressure placed on them to be smart, to know the score, to be right at all costs.  Kids in DC often come from a professional know-it-all household, sometimes with two income-earning professional know-it-all parents.  The resulting psychosis filters down through the ranks in the elementary schools, germinates, bubbles back up in the form of youth culture, and spreads again like an exploding spore of micro-fungi.

DC’s two greatest contributions to music are go-go, which is a form of call-and-response hip-hop-infused live instrumental funk punctuated by a beat that has not changed significantly in 30 years, and hardcore, which was launched by a bunch of self-righteous teenagers who preached the straight edge philosophy of not drinking or smoking or having any fun other than playing loud music as fast as possible and slamming into each other.  They’re both very DC as far as cultural achievements go.  Because they’re both fairly well constricted to a series of “right” and “wrong” aesthetic choices, and venturing too far outside makes you hip-hop with a go-go twist rather than go-go or post-hardcore rather than hardcore.  Go-go and hardcore (especially the straight-edge variety) are kind of boring.  I used to accept on faith that they weren’t, simply because I’m from DC.  But they are.  I admit it now.  Those are two boring, formulaic genres of music.  Some fun live, but ultimately extremely boring.

Only now when I come home to visit from Chicago do I see the area for what it is.  The cruelty of being right all the time permeates.  People in DC are jerks.  The lone difference between DC and other east coast Jerk Cities is that people in DC are at least educated.  They feel that’s an excuse to act like a jerk.   It’s not.  But: at least we’re not idiots.  Like Philly.  Or Baltimore.

Ah ha.  See?  It’s a slippery slope.  Once you start believing you’re smart and everybody else is an idiot, it’s hard to go back.  It’s a very human impulse.  I’m trying to fight my way out of it.  It’s not easy.  I’m from DC.  My father is a professional know-it-all and my mother has a master’s degree in child psychology.  I know things, ok?

But I don’t live there anymore.  I live in Chicago now.  Chicago is not a Jerk City.  It’s a Midwestern City.  Midwesterners are great.  They’re totally fine with being idiots, and if you get all upset about who’s right and who’s not right, they just laugh at you.  Life’s too short.  We could all freeze to death next winter.  Calm down.  Have a sausage and a beer.  Relax.

Chicago has been good for me.

And Baltimore is not a Jerk City.  People from DC just lump it in with Philly because we’re lazy.  Baltimore is Charm City.  The name is appropriate.  What else would you call a crumbling mess of a post-industrial port town where they handle more heroin than anywhere else in America?  How can you not root for that town?  And then there’s also the weirdness of it.  The John Waters edge.  The Maryland School of Art kids skronking out insane electric noises in abandoned hat factories.  They don’t have to make a big deal out of having all-ages shows, because there are endless available warehouses and the cops are overworked dealing with real problems.  If you can’t pull off a punk show in Baltimore, your head ain’t screwed on right.  Go outside and throw a rock.  You’ll hit a potential venue.

What else can I romanticize about Baltimore?  Those hilarious accents from The Wire where when they cheer for their team it sounds like “Gowe Oh-ree-owes!”  Crabs.  Bushels of crabs for sale on the highway, plucked directly from traps that had been sitting not far from a cousin’s back yard.  Live, wriggling crabs, get ‘em before they claw each other to death.  Baltimore.  Etc.

It beats the shit out of DC’s regional claims to fame of bizarrely specific ethnic food (Westerm Himalayan?  Sudanese?  Ok, I get it, you’re from a different place) and liberal overtolerance (“I just had the best Westerm Himalayan Sudanese meal, and we were talking to the waiter and then we invited ourselves over to the HinduMuslim temple on Alaska Avenue, it was a hoot!),a half-smoke all the way at Ben’s Chili Bowl (the food equivalent of a barium enema), and making a big deal out of things that aren’t a big deal just to make yourself fell better for being “right” about something (“Hi, I’m Ian McKaye”).

At least as far as I’m concerned, at this point in my life, my values are aligning more with Baltimore than DC.  I understand that there has to be a hand on the rudder somewhere down the line, and it should be smart people, and it’s probably a mixture of good and evil necessity that they all congregate near the seat of our nation’s government, but yeah.  Baltimore is way more indicative of the person I’d like to be.

Prong 3: The thought experiment.

Here’s the thought experiment I came up with recently that further eroded my confidence in my DC sports team fandom: imagine you could have a random but representative demographic cross-section of the entire city of Baltimore, let’s say 50 people, and the same with DC, and you invited both cross sections to adjacent hotel conference rooms for two separate open bar parties.  Which party would you rather go to?

If you ignore the considerable possibility of some kind of gang war breaking out, the answer is Baltimore.  Clearly.  The Baltimore party would be way more fun, the conversations would be much more interesting and easygoing, people would get along better across socioeconomic and racial lines, and the bar line would move in a fast and orderly fashion.  Beer and a shot, next.  The DC party would be a nightmare.  Sharp divisions, like a junior high school dance, people on blackberries, insane drink orders clogging up the open bar line, everybody uptight, everybody arguing.  The only thing the DC party would have going for it is maybe the girls would be a little more attractive, and maybe one of the older white dudes would be a Senator or a General or something.  Oh, and there’s a slight chance of a go-go jam breaking out later in the night depending on the extent to which Southeast will be represented.  Each of these things is a momentary curiosity and nothing more.  You’d spend maybe 15 minutes in the DC party, in the form of a raid with some of your new buddies from B-more.  Probably just to steal their booze.  Again, we all agreed on no gang wars.

And this is the community you’re supporting when you root for the Nats or the Skins instead of the O’s and Ravens.  You’ve cast your lot with the Blackberries and stuffed shirts and appletinis.  If it weren’t for my family at this point, I probably wouldn’t even bother.  That’s my dirty little secret.

So as you can see, my faith in DC as a community and a rooting base for sports teams is a little shaken at the moment.  I’m not in love with the town itself.  And from a sports perspective, the only major sports team in DC that is not currently awful is the Washington Capitals, and they are SO hard to root for.  It’s like rooting for Good Will Hunting to finish the math equation you’ve been working on for years, only he’d rather throw it in the fire to prove a point about how much more you need him than he needs you.

So with all of these factors coming together, how do I feel when I see these partially believable reports of the Orioles looking “pretty good” in Spring Training?  It’s complicated.  It’s very complicated.  One part of me, the DC part, the Nats fan part, is thinking “NO.  THEY CANNOT BE GOOD AGAIN UNTIL WE’RE GOOD TOO.  THIS SUCKS.”  And that’s the part of me that wants to be right all the time.  That’s the part of me that never really became an Orioles fan to begin with.  It’s just hard to get excited about baseball as a 9 year old when the local team starts a season with 21 straight losses.  Especially when the 9 year old in question is from DC and not Baltimore.  Because by any reasonable measure, rooting for an 0-21 team is the wrong thing to do.

This is why DC fans get (fairly) characterized as frontrunners.  There’s no reason to root for an awful team.  It’s not fun.  It’s not right.  Why pay insane ticket prices and donate money and eyeball views to local TV affiliates and cable companies for a team that doesn’t care enough about its fans to win games?  Time, too.  Time is money.  So spending your time watching a loser is like throwing money away.  Of course a decent number of us just love basketball enough to be willing to watch the Wizards lose every night against the NBA’s royalty, and that goes for the other sports too, but we’d much rather watch a winner.  I don’t think we should be blamed for that.  Not too harshly.  Say what you will about DC, but at least we’re not suckers.  Except for the Redskins.  We’re huge suckers for the Skins.  They’ve been around for 80 years.

And to the DC fan in me, the Orioles resurgence sucks.  First Orioles team owner Peter Angelos (who everybody in Baltimore hates too) tried to block the move of the Expos to Washington, and then as a compromise, he got the broadcast rights for Nats games, then messed up a series of negotiations with the local cable providers to the point that it was impossible for many in the DC area to watch ANY of the Nats inaugural season on TV.  We’re talking about the year 2005, this happened.  It didn’t matter as much then and continued not to matter, though, because both the Nats and the Orioles have always both sucked.  There was no rivalry.  Just two awful teams floundering.  Even last year’s battle of the beltways, where the Orioles swept the Nats in Camden Yards, was reduced to a minor annoyance in Nats fans rear windows once Strasburg was called up (and then got injured).

But this could be different.  If the Orioles become good, I might have to HATE the Orioles.  I can see all the angles already.  Number one is the DH rule.  The DH rule is ground zero for baseball snobs.  It’s actually perfect that the Nats are a National League team.  We get to look down our noses at those lousy non-hitting American League wussy pitchers and their easygoing, never-shake-up-a-lineup-card managers.  The National League is baseball the right way.  The right way.  Right.

And then a smaller, more accurate part of me, the part that loves Maryland just as much as DC (confession time: I’m from Silver Spring, not the actual city of DC, which if you look at a map is very very close), the part of me that would rather go to the Baltimore party than the DC party, that part is thinking “well, good for them.”  Which is the same way I always used to think of the Orioles back when they had those great squads in the mid-90’s before they ran up against Jeffrey Maier.  Good for them.

Actually, in retrospect, that’s incredibly condescending.  All of it is.  The whole “Ravskins” thing, the whole “good for them” thing, the whole “Baltimore vs. DC party” thing and the “value system I have now” thing.  It’s all DC.  It’s all “I’m right.”  Wait a minute.  This is an earth-shattering revelation.  From a figurative standpoint, I never left DC.  The whole “I adore Baltimore, it’s just so cute” attitude is the most DC attitude of all.  That’s why they hate us up there.  With good reason.  We treat their whole city like a fun little vacation home.  That’s the part of the equation I’m missing.  The difference between the DC party and the Baltimore party is I’m invited to the DC party.  The Baltimorons don’t want me around to spoil their fun.  Ok, guys, I get it.

Well great.  In that case, fuck the Orioles, fuck the Ravens, thanks again for the Bullets, enjoy your minor league hockey games (oh wait, you guys can’t support a professional hockey team), and I’ll see you guys again next November for Terrapins Midnight Madness.  Hold on, I forgot.  You guys went to UMBC.  In that case, go Retrievers (With A Regular Dog Face And Then A Dragon’s Mouth Tacked On).  Idiots.  The City That Reads, indeed.  More like The City That Can’t Get Its Shit Together.

Phew.  That was close.