Weekend Fun: No more George, no more

December 14th, 2007 | Posted by PostmanE

So we didn’t get to that late-night Mitchell roundup we promised last night, but if you’re still looking for that sort of thing, head to my post at the FanHouse here. It was an incredibly busy day, what with bouncing around from lurid detail to lurid detail, all the while trying to avoid visions of Roger Clemens’ big ol’ ass stuck up with needles. (Shiver.) But we’re a day removed now, so yesterday’s craziness probably deserves some sort of retrospective.

But what can I say about Major League Baseball’s past 48 hours that hasn’t already been said about Afghanistan? Looks bombed out and depleted. Yesterday was an exercise in confused emotion. The press conferences, report, and subsequent discussion were simultaneously angry, confused, pleased, amused … it seemed no one knew how to make single-minded sense of the report. That’s probably a positive. That’s not to say there weren’t polar extremists out, though. On one end were the apologists, those that see the Mitchell Report as the last and final end to the baseball’s steroid era; on the other end were the haters, convinced the sport is dead forever. The best place to be here, as you might imagine, is in the middle. Mitchell’s report was important and cathartic, but unless the game continues to make substantive changes on both a sociological and fiscal level, yesterday’s madness will go down as little more than a fun game of “Gotcha!”

That said, it was really fun, wasn’t it?

A final thought: I empathize with Orson Swindle’s thoughts on baseball. For a while in my youth, I felt the exact same way (though I didn’t trace any similarity to Jean Baudrillard in those beliefs). Still, for baseball fans, this is part and parcel in enjoying the sport. The flaws, the idiocy, the very knowledge that many of the games are just as good for their action as they are for their soft mid-afternoon nap encouragement and, yes, the steroids … all are things a baseball fan accepts and deals with knowingly. It’s a pact we make, one none of us ever really understand. After that, the games — all games — become about personal preference, which is all sports ever are anyway.

Stupid? Yes. But no more or less so than any other sort of fandom.

Everything Else:

Wait, you mean to say there’s other stuff going on this weekend? Like what? The fantasy football playoffs, of which I’m finally a part this year. (Sorry: no more fantasy talk.) So, go watch the NFL, have a few beers, and ignore George Mitchell for a while. That oughta feel good.