“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Remember Manny Being Manny? I sure do. I never had a baseball team growing up, but I had players I gravitated towards, and Manny was one of them. This has been established. What I didn’t really go into in my obnoxious REAL FOOTBALL article was the type of players I gravitate towards. I like the controversial figures. The ones who make Bill Plaschke, Skip Bayless, Colin Cowherd, and their garbage-opinion-having-ilk froth at the mouth with rage.
I like the ones who drive commissioners crazy…except for the domestic abusers, of course. Manny, A-Rod, Puig, Ochocinco (before he headbutted his then fiancé), Peyton Manning, LeBron James, Zlatan, Suarez. For one reason or another, these guys are controversial. Some of them don’t play the game the “right way.” Some don’t appear to be working very hard. Some aren’t, “clutch.” Some took steroids. Some are just batshit insane. All these criticisms make me nauseous. Let me explain.
I bring up guys like Peyton Manning and LeBron James because they are among the best ever to play in their respective sports, and yet, they have taken a never-ending pile of shit from the media for not being able to win the big one. For not being…clutch. There is nothing worse than a sneering Skip Bayless screaming on TV about how Matthew Dellavedova is more valuable to the Cavs than LeBron James. Factually incorrect? Check. Sensationalist? Check. Small sample size? Check. Borderline racist? Probably.
Here’s the thing I always fall back to: These guys are not tennis players. They are not golfers. They play team sports. They don’t deserve all the blame for a loss just like they don’t deserve all the credit for a win. That’s what makes LeBron in particular so incredible. His biggest accomplishment isn’t even winning a championship. It’s dragging that ’06-’07 Cavs team to the goddamn Finals. The second leading scorer on that team? Larry Hughes, with his 12.1 PER. Ready for some sensationalism? That might be a bigger accomplishment than any of Jordan’s rings.
(Pause for dramatic effect…)
OK, anyway, my nausea has only reached the lump-in-the-throat stage. Let’s get to the full-on heaving.
Back in the day, during some very formative years, I regularly read an outstanding blog called Fire Joe Morgan. The whole point of the site was to skewer bad sports journalism (mostly baseball). At the time, Joe Morgan was on Sunday Night Baseball for ESPN and regularly uttered nonsensical garble-flarble about how stats are overrated, and he didn’t like guys who didn’t play the game the right way, and why is that fella takin’ a walk when he can swing and get a hit. The irony, of course, was that he himself was a great player who exhibited all the best traits that statheads love. He used to do these chats on ESPN.com and FJM would post the chat and absolutely destroy every single Morgan response. Read it. I promise you will enjoy it.
Even though many years have passed since they stopped blogging, their work is still so much fun to read. They took on everyone. So many old shitty baseball writers got rightfully lampooned. You may notice that Ken Tremendous is very funny. That’s because he’s actually Michael Schur, head writer for The Office, Show Runner for Parks and Recreation, and Mose Schrute. Junior (Alan Yang), was a writer for P&R. We were all crazy excited when they revealed themselves. (By we, I mean myself and all the other nerds reading that blog religiously.) It was comforting to know that they weren’t actually writing the blog in their parents’ basement. Reading their work opened my eyes to a very important reality: the establishment is full of shit.
A-Rod and Manny both took steroids. They both got caught. Every writer in baseball has written thousands of words about the evils of steroids. (Why does Big Papi get a pass from like, everyone, by the way?) Many have drawn a line in the sand; they will never vote a steroid user into their hallowed Baseball Hall of Fame. They’re all completely and utterly full of shit. First, there’s no way that I believe these guys didn’t know what was going on when they all waxed poetic about that Summer of ’98 that saved baseball.
Remember? The Sosa/McGuire HR record race? How could it be possible that not one writer knew why power hitters started looking like the fucking Avengers? Of course they knew. And the vast majority of them said nothing. They were complicit. The league too! Let’s not forget that MLB only started cracking down on the problem after their financial future was in better shape and congress started paying attention (LOL). They didn’t even have a policy for PEDs until congress wasted taxpayer money investigating a game that adults play outside.
The other sickening piece of this is that every time the writers denounce steroid users, they then yearn for the stars of yester-year. You know…guys like Mickey Mantle, who had to bow out of the HR race in ‘61 because the injection site where he was getting his amphetamines got badly infected to the bone, or Willie Mays, who may have INVENTED amphetamines, or Ty Cobb, who is probably history’s greatest monster and maybe definitely killed a guy. Mantle, a noted carouser, would have been remembered like Gronk on steroids (well…more steroids) if social media existed in 1961.
Here’s the thing: I don’t care about Mays loading up on greenies or Mantle crashing his car into a shed any more than I care about Manny apparently trying to get pregnant or Yasiel Puig showboating his prodigious skills at the plate and in the field. It’s sanctimonious.
I’ll tell you what I prefer from yester-year: I wish sports writers gave today’s athletes, who maybe like to go out and have fun once in a while like a normal fucking person, the Mickey Mantle treatment of ignoring that shit. I would also prefer it if they had even a shred of perspective regarding performance enhancing drugs.
Manny Ramirez isn’t destroying the sanctity of the game. He fucked up at the end of his career trying to do what every aging player ever has done; he wanted to prolong his time in the bigs. Some guys have taken PEDs, some haven’t. I’m not sure what I would do if I had the opportunity to hang on for another couple years of a multi-million dollar contract.
OK…the heaving has subsided. Thank you for letting me get all that off my chest.
Finally, I’d like to address the hallowed practice of playing the game the right way.
First, it’s a fucking game. Relax.
Also, I LOVE IT when a player I like does something amazing and lets his opponent know it, just like I HATE it when a rival player does the same thing to my guys. THAT’S THE POINT. LIFE SHOULD HAVE HIGHS AND LOWS. THERE IS NO LIGHT WITHOUT THE DARK.
Give me Luis Suarez with his biting and his marauding up the pitch like a madman, or Zlatan and his insane skills and tremendous chutzpah over boring-ass Ronaldo and his designer underwear.
Give me Puig and his batflips, A-Rod and his taste in art, or Manny and his, well, everything, any time over lame Paul Konerko.
Give me the ones who burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars. I’ll pass on the ones who nobody bothers to write about, because they played the right way and never got in trouble.
