Getting to First Base

Today is a big day in the state of Nebraska. It marks Day 1 of the Bo Pelini Era - yes, we define the years based on who the head football coach is. I will not be at tonight’s game, but even if I didn’t know it was happening, I’d feel that it was Gameday on the University of Nebraska campus. My dorm building is eerily empty and has been for several hours - everyone left for the stadium long ago to either tailgate or get in line. The area surrounding campus is completely inundated with cars. Actually, the entire city of Lincoln has been overtaken by the usual deluge of traffic that comes with home football games.  Therefore, I’ve made the decision to stay inside. If I don’t get the payoff of being part of the Sea of Red, I don’t want to dodge all the foot traffic around the 80,000+ seat Memorial Stadium. (The Sea of Red)

So here I sit, one of the few people left behind in my dorm, looking forward to a new season and a new era of Nebraska football. The last few seasons have been a lot of letdowns, piled one on top of another. Arizona State quarterback Sam Keller transferred to Nebraska to start for us last season, and was a letdown, leading the team to a disappointing 4-5 record to start the 2007 season. Then-junior Joe Ganz stepped in at QB1 for the Kansas game, and had a terriffic game, but his 400-passing yards, 39-point performance wasn’t enough because Kansas stomped all over the Husker defense.

Under Ganz, the Huskers went 1-2 to end the season, but things were looking up. Husker Nation (mostly) rejoiced when head coach Bill Callahan was fired. I was particularly giddy and a little bit mean about it.

When Bo Pelini was hired away from LSU to be the new Husker head coach, optimism soared among Husker fans, at least the ones I know. I still remember the cheer he got when he made his first appearance on campus. He was maybe 40 feet from me at a Husker basketball game; people slowly started to realize he was there, and pass the news along to their neighbors, before a PA announcement of his presence brought a thunderous roar from a home crowd hungry for some victory.

Pelini’s previous experience here at Nebraska makes me confident he’s ready to do things the right way again; that is, to win games. When winning happens…there is no place like Nebraska.

Yesterday I was browsing the Michael Phelps facebook page - not his personal profile but the public fan page - and I came accross this discussion of the merits of his accomplishments:

Why in the world do we care so much about a human who can swim really fast and win a bunch of shiny things? Who really gives a s*** as it doesn’t mean a thing to my life or your life. Why are people who make great advances and actually better/prolong people’s lives (discoverers of new medicines, surgeries, devices, etc.) quickly forgotten (or not even known in the first place). For example, who knows the name of the physician that pioneered coronary bypass surgery and thus improved/saved/prolonged the lives of literally millions of people? I’m quite sure no one on this board knows this person (without googling it of course). The world makes no sense… we “worship” (this was the word use by a Chinese fan of Phelps on CNN.com today) such trivial events like winning a bunch of shiny things and ignore those who truly better our society…. completely crazy.

On some level, I do actually agree with this guy. “Worship” is an awfully strong word to use on an athlete, isn’t it? I have to stop and think about my priorities all the time, and I ponder whether it’s healthy or worthwhile at all to devote so much of myself to following and writing about sports. And then I wonder about people who play sports professionally - is it worth sacrificing family time and jeopardizing their future health to have, at best, a few years of elite professioanl performance? And of course, I wonder the same thing on a greater scale about Olympians. These people dedicate so much of themselves for such a long time, with the ultimate goal of competing in widely televised amateur games. When it’s phrased that way, I wonder why anyone would sit out their childhood and become a slave to a sport.

I also look at fans and how much we do for sports. We cast aside our regular budgets to go to a big game, scoffing at gas prices as we travel all over for our teams. We plan our social lives around who’s playing whom, and whether it’s on TV. We may wear embarrassing clothing or body paint, or make posters proposing marriage to our favorite pitcher (Yeah, I did that once), in some interminable quest to look like a bigger fan than the other people in our section of the stadium. And some of us study, study, study; buying volume after volume of books that break down every aspect of our sport, converting the games on the field into charts on a page.

All of this…for what? Sometimes I fear that when I die, God’s going to be pissed that I spent so much time on baseball. He’ll look at my daily blog-reading time, add up the hours at the ballpark or in front of the TV or radio, and just shake His head at what a waste of a life I was. And in the meantime, I think some of my friends feel the same way. It is kind of silly, isn’t it? And yet, I’m still a sports nut, and I will not stop anytime soon, because sometimes real heroes emerge from sports. Sometimes a single hit in one ballgame is enough to send the usually mean-spirited cynics at Deadspin to the edge of tears (or further), because sometimes a child with cancer uses baseball to show us how to be better people.

If you haven’t already, learn about life and humanity from John Challis, an 18-year-old who just died of cancer. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazettte ran an excellent, bookmarkable story on Challis this spring. I can learn a lot from this kid:

“I guess I can see why people see me as an inspiration,” he said. “But why do people think it’s so hard to see things the way I do? All I’m doing is making the best of a situation.”

John then raises his voice.

“Why can’t people just see the best in things? It gets you so much further in life. It’s always negative this and negative that. That’s all you see and hear.”

* * * * * * * * * * *

So rest in peace, John Challis. Though I never met you, you inspired me today. You showed me, through baseball and football, how to be human and how to be strong. You’ll never win eight gold medals or set any kind of world record, but you showed that you know more about life and love than most adults, let alone teenagers, and your message is a bright beam of light in a dark cynical age.

“I used to be afraid, but I’m not afraid of dying now, if that’s what you want to know. Because life ain’t about how many breaths you take. It’s what you do with those breaths.” - John Challis

“I wrote this song about you/
I wrote this song about you/

Just to let you know that I hate your guts/

And I think you suck.” -Reel Big Fish, with the most useful song lyric EVER

Dear MLB.tv,
It’s lovely that you and Fruit of the Loom wanted to give me a 5-day risk-free trial. Really. Very nice. But I’m a Royals fan, and my credit card is billed to a ZIP code in Nebraska, so your blackout policy dictates that I will never, EVER be able to watch a game that my team plays. EVER.

Coincidentally, your blackout policy dictates that I will never, EVER spend my hard-earned money on your “service”. The policy extends beyond greed and into complete and utter ridiculousness. My ZIP code is in western Nebraska; it really wouldn’t decrease ticket sales at this afternoon’s game. I’m not going to get in my car and drive from the southwest corner of Nebraska* to Chicago for one ballgame.

*not where I live now, but it’s where I’m billed. Another beef with the website - there’s no opportunity to enter a ZIP code different from my billing location.

Unlike you, I like baseball more than I like fleecing consumers. So let me watch a ballgame. More specifically, let me watch MY TEAM’s ballgame. Believe it or not, I want to watch the Royals even if I feel like they’ll never win another game. I don’t want the Giants/Astros game, nor the Tigers and Blue Jays, and especially not the Rockies and Diamondbacks. Please, please don’t make me watch an NL West* game. I’d rather die.

Spitefully yours,

Minda

*WORST. DIVISION. EVER! The NL West is led by the Arizona Diamondbacks and Los Angeles Dodgers, who are only 2 games over .500. How can two teams be that mediocore and still be in first place? What a joke. This is coming from a Royals fan, no less; it’s pretty bad when even I can talk smack about someone else in baseball. If the Royals were plunked down in the NL West right now, they’d be in 3rd. But I’d bet that if they got to play all season in that farce of a Major League Baseball division, they’d run away with 1st…if even the worst of the American League got to play in the NL West for a while, they’d clean up.Exept the Mariners. They’d still be awful.

The Olympics have barely started, and already there has been senseless violence in Beijing. My own cynicism got the best of me when I first read the story; I wasn’t the least bit surprised that something like that has happened at these Olympics. I was just talking to a friend about how I wouldn’t be surprised if something horrible (besides the restriction of information, unbreathable air, and alleged sanctioned racism) was going to happen there this month in Beijing.

I still think that’s a possibility, but I don’t think this murder had anything to do with those problems. It was one man, one knife, and God-knows what kind of motive, if any. He probably knew that his intended targets were family members of an athlete, but how? And why was his last mission in life to take them down? It doesn’t make any sense.

I still wish a different site had been chosen for these Games, so China could devote more time to actually following through on the tall promises they made to the IOC in 2001. They had a lot more than their air pollution to clean up before yesterday’s opening ceremonies, and these things take time. In winning the right to host the Olympics, China has placed themselves under an international microscope, exposing a lot of ugly shadows to the world. I’m curious to see how all the negativity that has led up to the Olympics will affect their public image in the future; whether people will be disinclined to do business or travel with them, whether there’s any kind of international pressure for them as a nation to clean up some of the human rights issues they promised the IOC they’d fix.

But in the meantime, I hope the U.S. men’s volleyball team finds a way to get through this. One of their own had his family ruthlessly attacked without warning or explanation. But they’ve all made it to this point athletically; it would be sad if all their hard work was taken away because some jerk with a knife decided to ruin a family. If they decide they are still able to play in their scheduled match against Venezuela tomorrow, I hope they can win it, as if to throw a giant middle finger to the misguided individual who took a horrible route to try to steal the team’s opportunity to succeed.

Yesterday at work I noticed some things that made me realize how tiny the world of professional baseball is, even though each of the 30 Major League clubs has at least six minor league teams.  It always astonishes me how many of the literally thousands of pro ballplayers out there know each other. Some used to be teammates in pro ball, but got traded away to different clubs, some played in college together. A pair of Omaha Royals were teammates somewhere in New England when they were 13 years old, and now happen to be teammates here.

One thing I love about showing up eeeeaaaarrrrrllllyyyy to work at games every day is seeing our players at the visitors’ dugout (or vice versa), where players who used to be teammates get to be reunited, if only for a short while. They get to gossip about former teammates, catch up on family news, and share laughs about old times, all as friends… Or they’ll go out for a drink together after games. Heck, even when the games are going on, you catch these guys chatting and giggling with each other when they meet up in the infield after a hit. I love how the pace and nature of baseball allows for that kind of comradere (even among rivals). It’s one of many things that makes baseball more human than any other sport.

Yesterday I met a few good people who came to watch the Salt Lake Bees (Angels’ AAA affiliate) play because they had been host families to some of the Bees back when they were in single-A. I think that would be so very cool, especially for the young kids of the host families, to watch the guys who lived with you, for whom you cooked supper and maybe did laundry, move up the ladder of professional ball. And those players know they have some lifelong fans; folks who will follow them to games at higher levels of baseball and cheer extra loudly for them. Everybody wins.