Okay, so this is a chatty moment, and I’m going to say something that probably isn’t entirely suitable for our business model. I sat on this while making my homemade marinara–no proper Italian-American buys Ragu, thank you very much–and as the pot simmered, so too did I. Sometimes, some things need saying.
Early this afternoon, I was exchanging news with a colleague in the Fourth Estate, and talking about how much I’m looking forward to Will Carroll’s update on the status of King Felix. Hey, what can I say, I work here, but I work here and I have the remarkable good fortune to work with people who give me insights I’d never get on my own. My colleague’s comment? Boiled down, it was that Felix Hernandez was carrying his fantasy team, so he really hoped the young Mariners ace-in-the-making was okay.
Does anyone else see the problem here? I have no special love for the Mariners–indeed, as an admitted A’s fan, I’ve been very up-front about how I see the Mariners’ rightful place in the world as an AL West ballclub is that it does what it can to help propel the A’s to greatness. I say that half in jest, of course, and I have sympathy for Mariners fans who have had to endure their share of near-misses, whether during their superb bit of underdoggery in 1995, or in the wake of their crushing disappointment in 2001. A Mariners fan has never tasted ultimate success, so a Mariners fan endures. If he or she has gone through the miseries of waiting for Jim Presley to get out of Edgar Martinez’s way, or hoping against hope that Dick Williams was going to fix everything, or has gotten worked up over Alvin Davis or Phil Bradley or even Leon Roberts, that Mariners fan has coped with the basic agonies of fandom, and gotten very few of the payoffs.
So, these poor people get King Felix, and that is quite simply a beautiful thing. And then we have last night’s departure from the mound. I have to think that when Hernandez came out of the game waggling his elbow, thousands of hearts leapt into thousands of throats, not even all of them belonging to Mariners fans, but to baseball fans. And then this afternoon I get reminded that there’s a huge subset of the audience that could care less about King Felix, Mariner, source of hope, because they’re interested in “F. Hernandez, RHP, Commodity, $25.” Cuz he gets strikeouts, donchaknow, and those are worth points.
Points. Points? We don’t have “points” in baseball. How about wins? What about the Mariners and their fortunes? What about the people who live and die with this team, the people who might have checked him out at Everett in 2003, or Tacoma in 2005? The people who’ve been clinging to something, something more than just a perfunctory “Ichiro’s really good,” something that is instead more about hope, and the future, and maybe even destiny?
I recognize that fantasy baseball is immensely popular. I recognize that it’s been a very good thing–for baseball as an industry, for fans who want to entertain themselves, for Baseball Prospectus. It seems very clear–fantasy baseball is a good thing. But it also isn’t what attracts me to the game–I love watching the game, I love the tactics, I’m fascinated by team construction and player usage patterns, and how real teams try to really win or really get better. For me, there’s something fundamentally wrong when the order of concern isn’t over a great young pitcher’s future and what his possible injury means to him or to his team, but instead first flips to whether or not this injury affects something that, to me, is about as exciting as playing the futures market, and feeling the thrill of putting everything on soy.
Now, naturally, your mileage may vary, and I’m not going to say fantasy players aren’t fans, nor will I have the conceit to call them something less than ‘true fans.’ They’re baseball fans, and that is a good thing, perhaps one of the best of things. But I do wonder if there isn’t something fundamentally corrosive that fantasy sports do to a person in the act of following baseball. I find myself wondering and worrying that too many people who love baseball now look at the boxscores not for the tales they tell us about who won and why, but instead do it just to see how ‘their guys’ did.
Maybe I’m overly fond of the morning rituals that date back to my childhood–chores, breakfast, boxscores, and slowly firing up the mind through the act of seeing what they say to me. Maybe those days are gone, or are about to be lost to us–the people in the newspaper racket seem to be doing a lovely job of putting themselves out of business, after all. But I can’t help but fidget over what’s being lost here, and that what I think of as the natural response–what will an injury to King Felix mean to him? to the Mariners? to Mariners fans?–may be drowned in the rush to figure out something new, something that I do not think of as progress:
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