Situations

Reluctant Realism

August 8th, 2008

Iván Zatz

Ok, I am starting to believe in curses. First it was the strange errant throw to second base on a sure double play ball, from none other than the great Mariano. That’s the play that really cost the Yankees a fourth consecutive World Series title in 2001. In 2003, we did have the momentary magic of Aaron Boone, so you’d think the curse could not have begun in 01; but, later on that same postseason, the Yankees saw David Welles pull himself out of a game, Jeff Weaver come in to throw a cookie to the rookie for a deflating homerun, and Clemens unveil his career as a latter day liar by announcing a retirement that he would soon “reconsider” into extra revenue as a part-time starter in Houston, once again in New York and now the national tort circuit. Then, there’s the crown jewel of the refurbished farm system: Joba – and the gnats in Cleveland last year, the shoulder tendonitis this year. That has left the most expensive franchise in baseball with a starting rotation that consists of apparently only one sure bet Mussina, while the substitute number one starter, Andy Pettitte, slowly morphs into a version of José Contreras and the other three spots are now staffed by Giese, Ian Kennedy (recalled just now from the minor leagues, because he stank in the majors earlier this season) and the peripatetic Sidney Ponson. Of course, there’s also the injury to the titular and slightly overrated number one starter, Wang; the injury to the clubhouse leader of the team, Posada; the injury to the sparkplug leadoff hitter, Damon, who went to the DL for the first time in his career; the injury to Phil Hughes, the other pitching jewel of the farm system, who was not to be traded for Santana and who was going to be the Yankee answer to Boston’s Lester and Buchholz (though in typical fashion, the Boston rookies did throw each a no hitter, while Hughes got injured as he was no-hitting Texas last year and simply stank this season); and the list of ridiculous injuries goes on: the injury to Jeter, the injury to A-Rod plus the Madonna business (plus the ensuing divorce, and the fact that he still insists on being useless in clutch situations), the injury to countless bullpen guys, and now the injury to the new First-Ballot Hall of Famer brought in to cover Posada’s spot. This, of course, framed by the fact that the new manager and former Yankee player, Joe Girardi (hired to replace Joe Torre’s faltering postseason ways), claimed during Spring Training that one thing he could control and would turn around was the intensity of training in order to prevent the rash of injuries characteristic of Torre’s last years at the helm. To compound the curse’s irony, help may soon be on its way from the minor leagues… and it’s Carl Pavano. But, if this misery wasn’t enough, there’s also the fact that George has finally grown too old and feeble to interfere with the baseball operations people, but his kid is now in charge and he seems to know even less about baseball than his dad, but he knows just as much about talking to the press as the old man did. Son of Steinbrenner. Oy.

The crosstown rival Mets are not doing better. Two of their three top outfielders are taking playing lessons from Carl Pavano; and their center fielder, who has remained surprisingly healthy, is morphing into a hitting version of Andy Pettitte. Their All Star third baseman (and the Mets counterpart to Jeter) is making the type of crucial errors that rival A-Rod’s meltdowns at the plate; their número dos starter, Pedro, is joining the first baseman in the list of greats who are now showing their age; their second baseman aged himself out of the season (even though he’s in his early 30s, reportedly); and the replacement número dos starter, John Mayne, is also in the DL, recently joined by their closer, Wagner, though this last one may actually be addition by subtraction, since the dope has already blown seven saves this year. And, then, there’s the operations side of the organization, shaken by unwanted media coverage for the characteristically stupid way in which they handled the sacrificial firing of their manager, Willie Randolph, who has more World Series rings as a player and coach for the Yankees than the Mets have in their entire franchise history.

The proverbial greener pastures now seem to belong to the usually dysfunctional: the Garden seems to show promise with a new GM and flashy new Coach for the doormat Knicks, and a resurgent Ranger team; while the already green-colored Jets have a new megastar at quarterback and, though the date to the prom is not a sure thing, they are now at least in the running for homecoming queen.

This brings us to one of our other favorite spectator sports, electoral politics. Just like the baseball season, the race to any high office in the US is a marathon, not the sprint of the football season. Today’s win or loss will be forgotten tomorrow, and getting hot at the end of the season may be more important than being tepidly consistent throughout the length of the campaign (candidates do save their tv money for the last month or two before the general election). So far, Obama has been blandly ok throughout, McCain and the Republicans are in an awful slump after achieving presidential supremacy with Nixon’s election (Carter was a hiccup, and even a cursory examination of Clinton’s legacy demonstrates the domination of the Republican agenda) and Legislative superiority with Gingrich’s. Are Obama and the Rays twinned by a promise to sink the Republican and Yankee juggernauts, respectively? Are the Congressional Democrats equal to the Jets and Knicks as a source for cautious optimism? Is the resurgence of the Democrats in local elections (e.g., Governors, state legislatures, mayors, etc) the same symptom of transformation presented by the MSG Rangers? Or is this merely mid-season/pre-season front-running, which the marathon pros will obliterate in the last five miles of the race.

Well, if the sports scenario is an indication, it breaks this way: the Yankees tanked their early season so badly that they now have to win two-thirds of the games left since the All Star break to have a realistic shot at the Wild Card, the only way they will make it – the Rays seem to be performing well as we enter the dog days of August, and it seems unlikely that the Yankees will make up the six game gap to overtake them for first place in the division (which will probably grow to eight or nine games when the Yankees conclude their current road trip). Since The Break, the Yankees have a 13-7 record since The Break; seemingly so far, so good. But, they ran a consecutive streak of eight wins when play resumed, followed by a putrid 5-7 since (two of the seven losses were to divisional cellar-dweller Baltimore, ‘nuff said). Now the Yankees are going to Anaheim, where they probably will lose all three games of the series, and then to Minnesota also for three, where they might win two but could just as easily also get swept. I expect their post Break record to stand at 15-11 by the end of this road trip. Things get worse, they come home to face Kansas City, then go again on the road to face Toronto and Baltimore. Bad teams all three, but they probably will win their series against the Yanks. Only at the end of August do things get better, the Yankees face the tougher teams, but they seem to win a lot of those series. In fact, their schedule for September is even tougher. At that point, maybe Wang is back, maybe Kennedy and Hughes rescue their season in the final month; heck, maybe even Pavano has a rousing comeback as he fights for a new contract somewhere next year, hopefully all the way over in the same Japanese league that gave us the immortal Igawa. So, the Yankees could get really hot at the end of August and through September, steamroll through the final series of the season against the Manny-less Red Sox and squeeze their way into the postseason as the American League Wild Card. This year’s Super Bowl notwithstanding, it would be sweet revenge on all those giddy Bostonians who broke their own curse by humiliating the Yankees in their own stadium and then winning their first World Series in nearly ninety seasons, all during the same year in which their Presidential Candidate lost the General Election (it is supposed to be the other way around, you idiots!).

At any rate, It can be seen that there’s always the chilling prospect that McCain’s slow start will heat up with, say, a surprising comeback from of an injured GOP veteran (say, Karl Rove) or an end of the season collapse for the Obama campaign – Mets fans know what I’m talking about. And of course, there are unforeseen circumstances: a couple of rain postponements in August could force costly double headers for some team in September, and political races could be altered by “accidents” of the economy, acts of war, or the sudden discovery of an embarrassing fact in the life of a candidate. (And, of course, an election could be changed by mechanical deficiencies in the voting process – though, that one may also require a sibling running the state where the voting “accident” would happen.) Of course, it is still too early in both marathons to forecast the winners, but the eternal pessimist in me sees the end of the Yankee run, and does not necessarily see the end of the Republican dictatorship. If I was an optimist, I would believe that electoral sports behave differently from baseball, and that the Yankees will make it to the postseason, while a suddenly enlightened electorate comes to understand that the Republicans are the real illegal aliens in this country and votes to have them all deported. So, it may be that the middle ground of realism actually obtains this year and Yankee fans end up mourning the end of a long string of consecutive postseason appearances, but lefty radicals get to celebrate, however skeptically, the end of the Republican curse (let’s face it, the Democrats are just another type of curse). With mixed emotions, I’ll settle for realism.

Posted in Politics, Economy, Society, Culture, Sports | Comments Off

Metaphor as illness

July 7th, 2008

We are slightly over the halfway mark in the current Major League Baseball season; seven games over, when you look at the Yankees’ record of 47-42, to be precise. The adage from Bill Parcells is that you are what your record says you are; given the bloated Yankee payroll and its concomitant expectations, this is not a good thing. Of course the optimistic outlook is to point to last season and proclaim that the team is going to click on the proverbial switch and have a whale of a second half of the season, blow past all the pretenders and claim the Wild Card berth to the playoffs for a stunning 14^th consecutive season. I’m always a pessimist, and I think that the tightly wound new manager, ragged pitching staff (I was actually at the Stadium on Thursday and saw the Great Andy Pettitte simply stink up the joint), and oft injured and aging batting order (I also saw the Great Jeter, the Great A-Rod, the Great Abreu, and the Great Giambino simply stink up the joint) give me no indication that the switch will be necessarily turned on this season. If the pattern they established for this first half holds, I have the Yankees winning 80 to 84 games maximum. Given that the newly baptized Rays are leading the Eastern division by 5 games over the Red Sox and a whopping 9 games over the Yankees, this is a brand new factor that was absent last season, making the Yankees trip to the Wild Card berth an unusually treacherous one (though, to be fair, this difficulty may be compensated by the fact that they would not have to vault over all the Central and Western division teams that were contenders for the Wild Card last year). Again, the optimist hopes that the young Rays will wilt under the pressure of the dog days of summer, leaving the Yankees and Red Sox to fight over the Division and the Wild Card. The pessimist looks at the Rays’ pitching rotation and how superior it is to the Yankees bunch of overhyped clods, and figure that this is the year in which the string of postseason appearances finally breaks.

It often happens in sports “spectatoring” that fans like me turn metaphorical. Sports, after all, are the great trope for life, especially in the US. There are books out there about how the economy is like baseball, landmark teleplays about the waning of the American dream and boxing, and much sociologizing journalism about the cultural mainstreaming of NASCAR and Mixed Martial Arts as an emblem of the new demographics. (Of course, these same sociologizing opinionators have forgotten how they were festooning the rise of Reaganism with plenty tripe on the new demographics of the suburban moms and youth soccer; nowadays, the only thing that remains of that presumed sociopolitical shift is the acrid cynicism of Weeds, a Showtime series ignored by these blissful commentators .)

To help compound the conditions for metaphoric reflection, yesterday gave us a Wimbledon in which the absence of last year’s Number One women’s player loomed large, when she made good on her suddenly and surprising retirement earlier this year; and the men’s final yielded a new champion for the first time in six years, on what many call the best match they ever saw. It is as if we are facing a season of transformation, a changing of the guard that closes the book on an exhausted old order and opens the doors to some dynamically new state of affairs. Gone are the boringly dominating Yankees and Federer. Gone, too, are the Bushes (Jeb looming large with his absence from the presidential race, after his older brother pretty much ruined the franchise). Also gone are the Clintons, along with the political machine that shoved them into power and turned the Democratic Party into some form of “GOP Light.” Electioneering is, after all, just another sports spectacle in this country.

Metaphors, however, are the paranormal phenomena of analysis and writing, they thrive in a conceptual dusk and the reader can put into them whatever seems likely or is desirable at the time. As it happens, this weekend also gave us a women’s final with the return of the Williams sisters, with all the lingering memories of the arrogance that marred their appearances in the past. Their distasteful father was absent from the final because he was not going to have a comfortable chance to gloat in public when one of his daughters beat her opponent; but the mark of his bullying conceit will permeate all Williams sisters finals, at least until they retire. Similarly, Karl Rove is no longer an “advisor” to the current Republican nominee, but the mark of his bullying deceitfulness will permeate all presidential elections, at least until a viable third option enters the electoral arena, within or outside the Democratic Party. (An unlikely scenario any time soon, in my admittedly pessimistic opinion.)

So, what metaphor is it going to be? A season of change, a chance to hope? Or, the same old, tired song? The Lady or the Tiger? Then again, there is a chance for yet a third metaphor. Maybe this is all a false narrative, a mirage. Obama, after all, is now “going realistic” on a timetable to withdraw from Iraq, is fine with giving the telecoms a pass on naming names for W’s sleezy surveillance program, and wants to compassionately conserve the religious charity option. He is making himself “electable alternative” by adding his name to the trademarked Clinton hypocrisy that serves as the staple of any and all “new Democrat” politicking. McCain is scarcely worth commenting on – like Obama, going on his “maverick way” to court the right flank of his party, takes his share of “moderates” for granted, and leave whatever remains of the liberal left for dead (justifiably so, by the way).

It may well be that the Rays are a refreshing alternative to the Yankees and the Red Sox; as Nadal is to Federer and the Williamses. But that may not illuminate our dismal political future, where the ways of the Federal Reserve may dictate things far more than the ways of the reigning Clown-in-Chief. The metaphor, in this case, might be no more refreshing than the difference between Regular or Diet.

�

Iván Zatz

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