Respecting the Game

When I was first retired, I didn’t always know what to do with myself, so among other minor vices I listened to too much “sports talk radio”. For those of you not conversant with this particular form of entertainment, the format consists of a “host” who offers opinions about various aspects of the professional sports/entertainment industry and “callers”, individuals who phone the show to offer their opinions on the opinions offered by the host.

There is a lot of sports talk radio on both a national and local level and some of it can be entertaining from time to time. A few of the hosts display quite a lot of knowledge about their beat and sometimes offer opinions that are informed by that knowledge and are therefore insightful. But mostly it’s dreck. At its worst it panders to the racist fascist fringe, which is to say a lot of angry white guys who never managed to get past adolescence. Thus the boorishness and hubris of say Barry Bonds or Terrill Owens, both black athletes who display a lot of arrogance in public, are sometimes elevated to the status of some sort of crime against humanity. More frequently, however, the yahoos go on about how these guys (read niggers) don’t show any respect for the game.

Well, what a laugh. I should point out what is only logical and that is sports management and the media which underwrite and profit greatly from this particular genre are always portrayed as wise and all beneficent, working tirelessly to please you, the fan, who is, after all, the bedrock of the industry. They and you know how to respect the game, both of you selfless protectors of the great legacies of our national pride. Or something along those lines.

Well, excuse me if I dissent here. Television (TV) and the corporate wolves that run Major League Baseball (MLB) respected the shit out of the game just last Sunday night when they put on a game, a very important game at least according to them, on October 14 in Denver, Colorado, at night while it was raining. The temperature was in the 40s, may have even dipped down into the 30s, they didn’t talk much about that, but the people in the stands were well bundled up against winter weather. Then they did another one on Monday, not raining or quite so cold near as I could tell, but far from ideal or even acceptable baseball weather.

Furthering this pattern of respect for the game, the World Series will take place in Denver and either Boston or Cleveland and may stretch into November. And the games will be played at night. There’s a measurable chance that it could snow at one of these games. It did snow frequently last April (or was it late March?) in cities where major league games were scheduled. These games, being not nearly as important as the Denver fiasco, were sensibly postponed. Postponing the Denver game would have disrupted the television schedule too much, so that one, that very important one, was played.

We'll look at some other ways management and the media show their respect for the game in future posts.