This time of year has always been disappointing for the (ever diminishing) sports fan in me. Basketball season just ended, as did hockey (though that has a vanishingly-small impact on me), and football doesn't start until late August. Baseball is ongoing (and ongoing, and ongoing, with its endless season) but I've never been more than a very casual baseball fan. Even when (especially when) I worked at the stadium in San Diego and attended every home game.
These days, the extent of my baseball interest is to absently root against the Yankees, glance at
the standings every couple/few weeks, and idly comment on the unexpectedly (to me, which isn't saying much) good or bad teams. Especially in Pythagorean terms, by comparing their record to their run differential. My old home town team, the Padres, were in first place early on, when they were something like 17-12. I was surprised to see that, but immediately disregarded it, since it was a fluke. They were something like 7-1 in one-run games, and their run differential was negative, despite their winning record. Today's standings inform me that they've since dropped seven games under and back into 4th place, but even that's a considerable illusion, since they've got the 2nd worst run differential in the National League.
Elsewhere, I see that Tampa Bay has won 5 straight, and while they're in 3rd place in the AL East, they've got by far the best run differential in the American League. They'll clearly come on very strong the rest of the way, if they continue to play as they've played thus far and overcome the bad luck that's depressed their win/loss record.
And that's it; I won't read a baseball article or view a scoresheet until oh... July. Ish. I'm actually a bit more plugged into baseball than I've been the past half decade+, since Bill Simmons does regular
podcasts with a friend whose a Yankee fan, and those are entertaining enough to listen to while I'm doing housework or cooking. I'll never take the time to read an actual baseball column, but hearing two friends argue about the Yankees and Red Sox is mildly amusing, even though they might as well be discussing European Soccer League teams, for all the knowledge I have about the fortunes of the individual players that comprise them.
I'm not a whole lot more devoted to the NFL or college football, either. I enjoy watching the games, but not enough to actually own a television. Or go anywhere with a television to watch them. I like them too much. Even when I had TV, I tried hard to never watch anything live, since the time sink of commercials so befouled the experience. I'd tape everything I liked to watch it later, when a 3 hour football game could be consumed in 45 minutes. But even then, that made for pretty busy weekends in the fall, with 3 or 4 good college games and 2 or 3 good pro games in 3 days. And I'd always get sucked into watching some bad game live while I was taping the good game on another channel, or I'd get lazy while watching and forget to fast forward between plays, or spend time reading about a game while I was taping it, etc.
The solution, for me, was to cut off the distraction and go without TV. I still follow the games somewhat, but only by looking at box scores or watching highlights online. That takes much less time, and since it's an active pursuit, rather than passive couch potato'ing before the idiot box, I'm aware of the time I spend on it and try to keep it reasonable.
There are 2 factors that have killed my sports appreciation and time involvement. (These are conscious choices. I considered getting into fantasy sports years ago, and decided the same thing I did about ever playing another MMORPG after Ultima Online ate most of a year of my life. That way lies madness, since I knew how much time I would feel compelled to devote to it.)
1) I was born too soon. I loved sports and especially stats when I was in my formative years. I remember spending hours in my tweens and teens, pouring over the box scores and the woeful amount of stats printed in the local paper. They had nothing worth reading in those days; records, points allowed/scored, and sometimes NFL leaders, by points or yards. I still devoured them, all but memorizing the yards on offense/defense for NFL teams, but that's all the info that was available, so I couldn't get that into it.
These days, as the
sabermetics revolution churns into its 2nd or 3rd generation, and the lessons learned from number crunching baseball are applied to other sports, I'd be in heaven. If I were 13 and had endless time to kill, with endless sites devoted to statistical analysis of pro sports. I just don't have the time to devote to that now, a lack of time that's largely due to my non-career choice, which leads to point two:
2) The fact that I eschewed a regular career in an office destroys my sports time. The vast majority of fantasy sports involvement is fueled by guys killing time at work, and if I could get paid just for showing up somewhere and doing 3 or 4 hours of work in a typical 8-hour day, I'd probably be following mock drafts and memorizing salary cap exemptions just like most of the white collar world. Since I actually enjoy my work, and since I only get paid for what I produce, rather than just for sitting at my desk and looking busy, I don't need to find time-killing hobbies to fill the hours. Plus, since I enjoy my work and have to concentrate and work hard at it to succeed, and since I'm forever producing less than I'd like to be producing, any time I'm online at my computer and not working (such as while writing overlong blog posts), I feel guilty and feel a time pressure to get back to some real work.
2.1) I think the fact that I don't have kids factors in as well. If I had a 10 y/o son he'd probably be a sports fan, and we'd watch football and basketball together. And his interest would spur me to pay more attention, and do some research online, etc. Plus TVs are useful for families, since you can all sit around together and watch it. It's mentally-vacant, but it's sort of a "togetherness" thing, and sports is a somewhat neutral type of program that can be watched by mutual agreement. Or at least without strong opposition.
2.2) Nor do I have guy friends in real life. I've not had close male friends as an adult, (and haven't sought them) which means that I never just hang out with non-females. Hanging out with women never involves watching sports; and seldom involves TV; I've spent hundreds (thousands?) of hours with the IG over the past couple of years, and of that maybe ten involved watching something on a screen, and those were all movies, mostly in theaters. I can watch movies by myself; when I'm with another person I like to do interactive things, usually conversation. And I don't hang out with people I don't enjoy interacting/talking with. Which brings us full circle in explaining why I don't have a circle of guy friends in real life.
Was there a point to any of that? Not really. Just doing the "thinking aloud" with my fingers thing that makes up much of my blogging output. Or did, in the old days when I used to put a long update here most every day.
In other sports news, the
Lakers won the NBA title over the weekend, and had their victory parade today. As always when this sort of thing occurs, I was amazed at the number of people who showed up.
Admittedly, LA is a vast hellhole of a smog basin, with tens of millions of people in the city and surrounding communities, but still... 200,000+ people stand around in the hot sun to wave at buses? Or fill the Coliseum to watch players hold up shiny golden statues and mouth platitudes? I don't see the attraction. I suppose a lot of it is just bored people with nothing better to do; the riots that always break out after a team wins (as happened Sunday night in LA) are much the same; gang members and other disreputable young men taking advantage of the chaos and crowds and excitement to engage in acts of destruction.
Making my disinterest worse is the fact that, in theory, the Lakers are my favorite basketball team. I watched them all through my years in San Diego, since SD has no basketball team and every Lakers game was on local cable. That I wasn't sufficiently motivated to get to a TV to see a single game of their run through the playoffs probably convicts me of being a fairly non-fan, though. As I did last year, when they lost to Boston in the finals, I thought a few times, "If the finals goes to 7 games, I'll suffer a sports bar to watch the last game." Last year they lost in 6. This year they won in 5. There's always next year?
Here are a couple of photos from the LA victory parade and ceremony today. Because they caught my eye in
the LA Times slide show.
Over 80,000 people filled the Coliseum to capacity hours before the parade even started.
Let's stand on the hot streets and yell! Yah, gridlock traffic in every direction!
Labels: basketball, sports
