The Wearying Drama

What does it mean to no longer be a true baseball fan?  It means that you no longer, even if you fantastically could, eagerly snatch the morning "Daily News" from your local newsstand and cup your hand over the line score of your favorite team under the headline "SCOREBOARD" at the back of the tabloid. And you no longer slowly expose each inning, removing by degrees the heel of your hand and revealing every goose egg or run scored. You no longer wonder about the condition of this pitcher or that outfielder. You no longer care if your favorite team's centerfielder is better than another team's. In short, you don't care because the love is gone.  Enthusing about athletic men forty years my junior, many of whom are compensated, rightly or wrongly, with more "cabbage" in one month than many of us will ever earn in a lifetime seems pointless.  Our darlings, our champions, our heroes, our proxy warriors who shower glory vicariously upon us: we who imagine a tribal allegiance to a professional sports team that supposedly compares to a blood bond equal to that of one for one's nation, race or family….do we need to embrace them to the point of idolatry? It's preposterous.

When dullards, the quietly intelligent, bumpkins and a variety of jocks were the majority, were circumspect, rarely made headlines by getting blotto at a tavern frequented by sports reporters or punched out their wives in public and knew basic social skills like politely answering questions about a recent performance, the prospects of a team or the health of a fellow player or himself, one could concentrate on his heroic deeds on the field and project many other kinds of halos or laurels onto his noggin that made being a fan an uncomplicated, enjoyable membership in a simpler society of other afficionados and also that made baseball truly a national pastime, not some desperate escape. Today, we've a bunch of half-educated, many well educated and even more over-educated players (relative to their "rights" and the advantages of sociopathic habits) than ever before. The ambivalence of fans about steroids, other drugs and the seductive life of fabulous wealth and fame (infamy seems less and less an attainable status as moral standards decay, but not for lack of striving) that a talented major league ball player can achieve, adds to the malaise that the game reeks of, in this blogger's estimation. The ennui is palpable and the conflicts of all these conflicted actors on baseball's stage or in its audience do not translate any longer into worthwhile drama or entertainment, nor did it really ever, once the game itself became secondary to celebrity that one could not celebrate.