So... |
[Oct. 22nd, 2004|02:39 pm] |
As those of you who are on the grid may have been bludgeoned with, my baseball team has moved on to the World Series.
And I apologize.
I would like to poiint out that despite their East Coast base the Red Sox Nation does NOT control the national media. I would stop the deluge if I could. I can't, but please don't hold that against the team. If you hated the team irratioanlly before this due to a preponderence of 18-20 fangurls/bois on LJ, well, you keep on with your lil hatefest and pray your team never manages to become popular.
If you're a Yankees fan, be an adult. Realize that your team has 26 rings and 39 pennants, and that's GOOD. You are however not entitled to the World Series. It is not, as I saw in a recent yankeesfans post, 'your month, your time, your Series'. It's that kind of whiny arrogance that helps you stay the most hated team in baseball. Well, that and all the damn winning. Today I read in the same community how dumb it is that teams like the Bulls and Lakers and the Cowboys (and the Yanks) shouldn't be hated 'just because they're winning'. Why not? The best reason to hate a team is because the beat you consistantly. It's a much better reason to hate a team than for say, having long hair and facial hair, no?
Regarding this hair thing - I don't get the derision that has been tossed at this Red Sox team for their sartorial speldor all year. As Americans we have collective worshiped at the shrine of rebellion since our inception. It's why most of our ancestors left home in the first place. It's why we massacre the Queen's English every day in a fond display of continuing revolution.
So why when a group of professional athletes decides to do what they want with their appearence do we take a shit on them and call them unprofessional? Athletes of all classes of people? I mean David Beckham (he's a soccer player for the Americans reading) gets a faux-hawk and is the fashion toast of the town, Kevin Millar grows out his facial hair or bleaches his head surfer blonde and he's a disgrace?
The Yankees are the class (heh) of the clean cut equals professional caste. So perhaps the clean cut look equating success comes from there, but thats simply a facist decree from The Man. Jason (Samson) Giambi shed his locks and his personality, his health and his place on the postseason roster. Do you prefer Arm and Hammer sponsored Big G, or the Jason that appeared on the 2001 ESPN baseball preview?
Back in the day before The Big Stein ruled with Absolute Authority over the Pinstriped Pavilion these Yankees were characters. Thurm? Oscar Gamble? Mickey Rivers? REGGIE! ? Lou Piniella? Sparky? Goose? Nettles?
Are they not worthy of being Yankees now? How but Broadway Joe New Yorkers? Are you disawoving him now? Is he less forthcoming than Curt Schilling wanting to shut up 55,000 New Yorkers? Would you shoot him down for wearing furs?
I just don't get this whole vein of thinking. I wouldn't wear my hair like Kentucky Fried Kevin, or Bronson Cornrow-Yo, but why should they conform with Yankee style? Why should they not have fun playing a little boys game? They are the new Masters of Chaos, the new Gas House Gang. Sure, they're dirtballs, but shouldn't someone be? Shouldn't some team go against the flow?
Those of you who've read this since the Good Times when I still posted may know that my least favorite aspect of Livejournal is the feeling that because you have a platform you can simply spout crap off it. Mostly due to a pathlogical hatred of stupidity.
Combine that with baseball fans common feeling that if you've seen more than 20 games you're a huge baseball fan and you have more uninformed stupidty rolling about this space than high school political debate. It's hard.
Folks, if you know nothing about the Curse of the Bambino? Shut up about it. If you really honestly think that there's a Curse, that George killed a goat on a granite altar in Sudbury and invoked the spirits aginst the Sox, then you need to stay in your house and not talk to people. If you think the Curse existed before 1990 you need to lay off the Sam Adams.
That's when it started. 1990. The Curse JUST made it to high school. My fandom predates it. It was just another Red Sox book in a glutted market. There are as many Red Sox books out there as self-help books, this is not an accident. The Curse sprang out of a need to explain in a post-Bucky post-Buckner world how the hell a REALLY good team could find such excruciating ways to lose. And it worked in its own little way. I mean the inexplicable happens to the Red Sox the way Ben Affleck picks bad scripts, often and painfully.
The problem is the kids don't know. They came to the team recently and the Curse has always existed in their experience, so to their thinking it's always existed, and the 'stupid Sox fans' have believed it since 1920.
Which is crap.
Yankee fans? Stop trying to figure out the Curse and start leaning on George to sign a Yankee-style player and not the most expensive player on the market. Trying to salvage a moral victory out of this collapse by saying we haven't taken care of the Curse, while claiming out of the other side of your mouth that you don't care about this rivalry and it's all in Boston's head is also crap. You got beaten, again. This is the fourth year in a row. By a variety of teams and styles, in a variety of series. Get your house in order and stop whining.
PS: We do NOT have Zero World Series victories. We have 5. So stop saying we have zero, it makes you sound like an idiot.
I want to stop hearing about how the Red Sox are screwed because now they have to face the Cardinals Murderer's Row. We JUST put down a team that has a lineup as good as this one. It went down due to good pitching and a WHOLE lot of it. We dodge the hotest pitcher in the postseason (Buzzsaw Brad Lidge) and we get a WEAKER starting staff than the Yankees. This Card's team has better defense and a better bullpen than the Yankees, but it's just as even as the last Series was. |
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