The Pilgrimmage

            If any of you guys see Marty, tell him his game is stupid.

            I’m talking, of course, about the game he taught us (us being just me) on the way to Green Bay for the Opening Game of this year’s NFL season.  Yea- the FIRST GAME.  I don’t think I can overstate how important this game was to me.  Not just the game at that, but the whole experience.  I took off work four hours early to make the trip and I spent most of that time trying to get a hold of Marty to tell him we should have left earlier.  I should probably have taken the whole day off, but I was concerned about using this glorious thing they call PTO too quickly.  We took off about noon, rolled into town about 430 and soon stopped at a parking spot at a local Catholic church (who do you think I am?) and only spent about a half hour trying to navigate through from the Maroon 5 concert to where my grampa was tailgating.

            But in between we played this game which apparently his GF and her friend invented.  It started out being called My Cows among them, but soon added My Horses and My Hay Bales.  So when you see any of these things outside the car (duh!), you just yell My Whatever It Is before the other person or people, then you count up as many as you can see.  That’s how many of those you get.  The idea seems to be to get more of those things than your competition.  I don’t know- competition is not really my cup of tea.  But you do get you Kill those things of the other guy if you see certain objects, for example- a Moving Tractor; Kill your Hay Bales.  But not being very competitive, I don’t quite remember all the details.

            (If you haven’t caught on by now, of course I’m competitive, I was just losing by a ton, so I decided to change the game.  Remember that game I called the alphabet game?  Well maybe I can fix up a hyperlink to said blog post right here, fourth one down.  But if not, I’ll explain a little as a contingency  plan, or just for you guys who don’t care enough to click back.  It involves finding the next letter in the alphabet somewhere outside the car.  The rules the two of us hashed out are that if you call out the letter sometime before you clearly look at something else, it counts as the end of you turn, otherwise you have to keep going, even if you know you missed one.  I have an even more extreme version of said game ready, where you not only time how long it takes each person to find all their letters [cumulatively, like chess], and then, get this, divide each time by the amount of points that letter is in scrabble. X would be money.

Anyway, we played that game for a while, too.  Pretty sure I won.)

            But now that I think of it, there was another competition we were there to see, too.  It involved the Green and Gold, and having had our fill of cheese concoctions, the two of us got to the seats about a half hour early.  My seats.  Well, our seats.  My immediate family’s, that is.

            Listening to a podcast recently, someone brought up the solid point that for as huge a star as Aaron Rodgers is, he has a pretty lame nickname.  A-Rod?  That was someone else’s first.  And yet I have a better idea.  It might sound cheesy (npi, [that’s No Pun Intended; I think it will stick]), but it might be perfect, too.  The Champ.  Or maybe just Champ, referring to the championship belt gesture, and how he actually is a World Champion.  It’s something they would call a heavyweight boxer, say.

            The game lived up to all the hype.  I was hoarse for the next four days, as I have a policy of making sure I Do Not Stop Screaming when it’s the other guys’ third or fourth down situation.  Somehow we pulled out this one without having a very high success rate in this department.  There was a TO or two and Randall Cobb ran one all the way back- I’ll admit I thought he was down, turned to finish paying for my beer, but then he was still running!  I think he’s already made it into Mah list of Boyz, or Mah Boyz.  As in “Randall Cobb, You’re Ma Boi!”  But not everyone can be my boy of course, so allow me to clarify the hierarchy: There can be no more than Seven guys who are Ma Boi (the singular form, of course) at any one time.  And if they get too famous (Rodgers, Matthews), they really can’t be Ma Boi because they probably won’t have the time for me.

Mah Boyz (in ascending order): Cobb; Jermichael Finley (gonna be huge, I know, but I knew he was gonna be good from when I first started watching him, plus I’m probably the only person who calls him Jer; C-Wood (Charles Woodson, second of the TD returning Heisman Trophy winning Wolverines who helped us win a Super Bowl); Mason Crosby (just a dude, and he’s scored me big fantasy points every year); Jordy Nelson (um, did you watch the Super Bowl? Prolly one of the best white wideouts in the game); Tim Mastay (most under-rated punter in the game- won us the NFC Championship); Tramon Williams (just an absolute game breaker).

            You might be wondering why I have a punter in my top two.  All I can say is that Mastay does it with what is still one of the worst kick coverage teams in the game.  They have a knack for giving up big runs at really inopportune times.

            But it all ended up not costing us the entire game.  Raji (another Ma Boi candidate) and Matthews made sure of that.  But when that flag fell in the endzone on the penultimate play, I knew what University of Miami fans felt in the 2003 Fiesta Bowl when that official waited a whole five seconds to throw a Pass Interference flag after Miami thought they had it won.  In all honesty, he has to just pocket it at that point.  I was rooting for the Buckeyes, but that was really atrocious.  Now that I think of it, A.J. Hawk, who had it called on him, might have been on that team.

Yes, We Still Have Baseball

            I know I said I was going to talk about the Packers, and I am, but this might be one of the last opportunities I have to bring up inconsequential and arguable points about baseball, so I really think it’s a higher priority right now.  But speaking of the Packers, I have to credit them with allowing my Twins season to go down so smoothly.  At least, much more smoothly than it would have for my Vikings and Bears fan friends.  When you have the best team in one sport, it’s so much easier to deal with having the worst team in another sport.  And it would have been a much worse season for me, you better believe, if the Brewers had gone to the Series, too, so that doesn’t have nothing to do with it.  As I always said, however, this is what sports is about: Losing.  It’s losing that makes winning so much more rewarding, speaking from very recent experience.  Yeah Buck, I hear, You only went 13 years without a championship.  But I can back that up with three instances that made this worth it, in between those two trophy presentations:  4^th and 26, Brett Throws a Pick (Part I), and the OT loss in Arizona. 

            Regardless, for a season in which the Twins weren’t good, there were still plenty of exciting moments- Thome’s 600^th, Bert’s Hall of Fame stuff, the Franchise’s No-no, and about seven walk-off wins.  I really enjoyed all of them, and I’m pretty sure this was the most Twins games I’d gone to in a single year.  I even went to one on the South Side of Chicago, which itself was pretty exciting.  But regardless of how much all this stuff helps, I can usually still use more distractions.  The 30 for 30 movies at my new place helped, and I went to see Moneyball, which itself was pretty good.  The one scene I keep thinking about was Scott Hattieberg’s walk-off pinch hit homer for the 20^th win in a row.  It reminded me of the homer from what I now only refer to as The Thome Game, and I’ve realized from those two events that a pinch-hit homer, especially of the walk-off variety, is probably the most dramatic, American event in sports.  It allows us to see one individual who’s given one chance to succeed against all odds, and does so in the most profound way possible.  Thome’s itself was from behind!

            But even without any of those in the playoffs, I found myself enjoying them.  It’s always fun when the Yankees go down, and though I was rooting for the Phillies momentarily, it’s been cool to see zero teams from the coast make it to a LCS.  Even if TBS is still getting its feet wet.

            So many questions surround the broadcasts in general- Why does Joe Buck enjoy the phrase “At the wall, this game is tied!” so much?  Are Craig Sager’s suits too distracting?  What is up with TBS’s montages for each team in the playoffs?  And why did Fox get rid of their old baseball theme? I’m not here to offer any opinions on the subject, but the fact that these questions are there is not a good sign.  Although I will tell you that the baseball theme, which can still be heard on FSN broadcasts, was inarguably one of the three best themes for a sports broadcast.  (Besides the original Fox football theme [on my iPod], there is the baseball one and the NBA on NBC theme.  And throw in the CBS NCAA tournament theme for good measure.) 

            To offer my two cents, though, I think America should be rooting against the Cards and for the Rangers.  Texas has had an underrated amount of sports agony recently.  The Mavs won the NBA championship, but now are locked out; the ‘Boys have been horrendous in the playoffs recently; and the Rangers themselves got whooped in the last Series.  Meanwhile, St. Louis sucks.  Did you hear me, Jeff?  Yea, I said it- quit trying be the Gateway to the West.  That’s our job- most of western North America is in Canada, and we’re closer to that.  And the Cards just won in ’06.

The Bold Return of My (Hopefully) Regular Posts

             Nobody wants to hang out with that guy who only talks about his fantasy football team.  But it is something to talk about, and if you are consuming this set of words, it is most likely in the written form, so I’m not actually talking to you.  Since this is going to be about fantasy football in some high-level capacity, I’m still probably going to be talking about my particular teams some, but still as little as possible and only as a reference.  As I write this, too, I haven’t even written out a rough outline, so I can’t guarantee that there will even be any examples needed.  The particular reason I have decided to come back to the game (this blog, not fantasy football) is because there are just so many bad decision I’ve made from this past summer, and from the two months before, that I thought it was about time I did something with them again.  Work is starting to settle into a pleasant monotony again, and I have very little to distract myself from it than thinking through various topics when I’m on my coffee buzz (which generally extends from 9-11a, then a redux around 2 if it’s an especially long day).

            One of those poor decisions I’ve made has been to join just way too many fantasy leagues.  I have to defend myself by saying that most of them were necessary, as they were either work leagues or leagues I’d done in the past.  But it nonetheless puts me in that special category of Freak, which I often dread/pine for.  Five fantasy leagues means that I have a stake in almost literally every game on TV, which is frustrating and exciting at the same time.  I’ve really learned how to root for the right things to happen for my team, as in you will always root for an offensive player to score against your defense.  But to calm myself, I’ve learned to focus on two to three games each week other than the game my Packers are playing in.

            And the question inevitably comes up about what if you actually have to choose between your fantasy team and your reality team.  This is first of all rarely the case that it could literally come down to that.  Of course I would say Packers come first, but if you were to break my joy down in a pie chart for each weekend of football, it would be something like 55% the outcome of the Packers game, 45% my fantasy teams.  Maybe even a greater percentage for fantasy.   Don’t judge me- I have FIVE TEAMS.  So I’m bound to be more than fifty percent happy each week the Pack wins, just ‘cuz it will be so rare that I lose every fantasy match-up.

            Taking part in all these leagues, of course, really helps in doing scouting for what/whom I would want whenever I start my own league.  Such as what I did in one of my leagues this year.  I became commish.  Probably the greatest position of power I’ve taken since I became Treasurer in a club at college my senior year.  The moves I made as commissioner were both tepid and bold.  One of the bolder ones was to punish missed extra points (-5 points).  Another was giving bonuses to forty yard plays (+5, I believe).

The New Conversions

As big a fan as I am of sports in general, it’s frustrating to go between sports and never know how to compare what one of your teams has done to what another has done.  This conversion chart is something I have been mulling over for quite some time, as I have been dwelling on certain sports so much recently.  One, football, in which my team has just achieved the ultimate goal, and the other, baseball, in which my team has a lot to look forward to this upcoming season.  But I’ve mixed in a couple other sports as well.

Pick Sixes are the most exciting play in football, without a doubt.  If you have a team that is a threat to convert them, it gives you a game-changing play in your back pocket, and if you have a quarterback prone to throwing them (paging Brett Favre), your team is in constant danger of losing any momentum it grabs.  But is there an equivalent in baseball.  Possibly, as I’ve come to theorize.  There might be different levels of momentum changing (of creating) the equivalent of a pick-six in baseball.  At the very basic level one could argue that leaving runners in scoring position, one or no runs having scored, then scoring two or more the next inning would be an equivalent.  To really get the full effect, though, I would have to add the requirements that the pitcher worked out of a two-on-less-than-two-out jam, then the runs score the next inning on a home run.  In other words, Jim Thome ended the Sox game last season with the equivalent.

If we extend this metaphor to punt returns, too, does that make Thome the baseball equivalent of DeSean Jackson?

            Moving on to what I like to call Association Football, in my somewhat superficial exposure to it, I’ve come up with another comparison between it and normal American sports.  Goals (soccer) equal Games (baseball). Bringing this thought up with a friend of mine at work who is a huge soccer nut, he agreed, in that Premier league teams tend to reach a comparable amount of goals as MLB teams do games won.  I think it’s appropriate for several reasons:  A soccer game has similar frequency to series in baseball, and similar results, “scoring”-wise.  Soccer fans probably also go about as nuts for each goal as a ballpark goes when their team wins one game.  And the goals in soccer generally mean about as much in the standings, because even if you haven’t won a lot, you could also draw (giving you a point in the standings), and the first tiebreaker is goal differential.

            “Traffic Light” (FOX) equals “Better With You” (ABC) equals “Perfect Couples” (NBC) equals “Rules of Engagement” (CBS).  What do all of these programs have in common?  They all follow the unabashedly unoriginal theme of following three different couples at three different stages of their relationship (unless you consider that David Spade’s character on RoE is never in a steady relationship.  Also, they just added an Indian guy- it’s fun).  But these three comedies might be proving that TV really is running out of ideas.  All but “Perfect Couples” have a good chance of staying, if only because Traffic Light and RoE are now slotted behind really successful comedies, the former Raising Hope, the latter Big Bang Theory.  But in the spirit of un-originality, this idea was actually gleaned from the Onion AV Club’s “The Hater”.

            “Sunday Afternoons” equal “Never Saw This Coming.”  What I mean by that is, I’m pretty sure the universe is conspiring to get me to watch NASCAR on Sunday Afternoons for the foreseeable future.  We’re not getting cable soon in this house, so apparently, thanks to the new FSN agreement, we won’t be able to watch baseball on the tube at all this summer, Sundays being our last bastion of hope.  Football and Basketball are both going to get locked out soon, either of which I would have taken in the past.  And is Hockey even on TV anymore?  (To their credit, I have enjoyed the Mid-Winter Classics.)  The funny thing is though, for a guy who up until recently didn’t even want to consider Auto-racing a sport, I’m really enjoying it.  I watched most of Daytona, and even turned on some of the Cobalt Tools 400.  (The fact that I remember even the name of that race is the scary part.)  But the 500 was epic and I’ve come to the conclusion that more technology can only help their broadcast.  I’m also not sure if my having a car makes me more excited for the sport, or vice versa.  Just don’t tell my parents.

Small Pleasures in the Digital Age

The more technology grows, the further we become disconnected from people- or so conventional wisdom grows.  But I think if that’s the case, it’s only because we’re not using the technology the right way.  In many ways, we can cut ourselves off from other people by becoming more adept at sharing our thoughts and opinions to a much wider array of people.  Look at the guy who tweeted Shit My Dad Says.  His account (and the book he eventually wrote) became a crappy TV show on CBS. 

But I do think tweeting is the way of the future. And while it seems like Not Social Networking is the new Social Networking, there are so many simple joys it can provide us. Ignoring people who aren’t really your friends on Facebook, for example.  But as far as the more active uses for these products of the Web 2.0, one of my favorites is definitely watching a big sporting event while on Twitter.  In fact, any event whatsoever provides endless enjoyment from a variety of personalities who will criticize or lampoon anything or everything.  It's really like you're there watching a game with all your friends, wherever they are.  And some of your friends are celebrities.  At times it has even clarified situations at times for me.  The Oscars, for example, gave me the FunnyOrDie people’s tweet that “every time Anne Hathaway references an at-home drinking game, you have to drink all the alcohol in your house.”

Probably the best way to keep up with this coming wave is to get an iPad.  An iPhone, like I have, would work quite well for those who do this frequently.  It’s less cumbersome than an laptop, but also looks less toolish than an iPhone.  It will probably make you squint less, too. As for playing games, though, I would have to recommend the smaller device.  Speaking of which, you know what a fantastic game-playing device is that’s going to be forgotten soon?  That’s right- the deck of cards.

I’ve been noted as a very slow shuffler- but the important thing is that I can shuffle.  I can also confidently start a game of cards.  For me, that game is usually Presidents and Assholes.  I have been playing this game since before I knew it was also a drinking game, and I honestly have played almost every version of it in the five state area.  Six states, if you include Illinois.  The idea is to get rid of your cards first, whereby you become President, but I hope most of you knew that.  In some places you can lay doubles on singles and so forth, in others you can just give away your twos if they’re your last cards.  But the rule I insist on playing with now, that’s revolutionized the game for me is Socials.  You ought to be able to complete the set of four (if you can) whenever you can.  And…drink.

But what’s become so under-rated in the digital age, I’ve found, is going out to things.  You never really know what you can find when you look around.  This past fall there was a Labor Day bluegrass festival down at Minnehaha Park, which was really enjoyable- highly recommend the band Sawtooth!  But even just getting out instead of watching from screens will put you in a better mood.  If you can say I Was There (or tweet it, or Facebook it), you were really part of that thing happening.  You can even go on ESPN Passport and tell the world you part of it.

What a Game!

If there has been one constant in my argument about why I don’t care that the football team I root for is from out of state, it’s that football is not my favorite sport; baseball is.  (Other arguments for me not caring include: Football is only played on weekends, and if I had to, I could go over to Green Bay for every home game, excluding those games in the Gold Package, ‘cause we can’t get tickets to those, stupid Milwaukeeans. And that I have maintained a vehement dislike for the rest of the state, not Green Bay.)  For those of you, then, who argue that I cannot be a Packers fan and a Twins fan, the biggest flaw in that argument is that I was a Twins fan even before I was a Packers fan.  Question that loyalty if you must, but the Twins were my first team.

But baseball just makes more sense to me as a game than most other sports.  Of all the major sports in this country, it’s the only one in which A) both teams are not entirely on the field at the same time, and B) game play isn’t primarily back and forth across one playing surface.  It’s also the only sport in which there is no game clock, because the game isn’t over until the last out has been recorded.  I have rarely ever been convinced to leave a baseball game early, which is to say, I’m not sure I have left a ball game early since before I even understood what was going on in the game.

What strikes me as the difference between baseball and a sport like football is how for me the latter makes you feel as if you can practically will your team to victory by screaming harder at them.  The guys who are bigger and stronger will usually win, because in large part it’s a game of brute force.  And the fans become part of that force.  But just as baseball is a thinking man’s game, I find that the teams with the smarter crowds are often those who win.  And no doubt, Minnesota fans are very smart.  (Not like those stupid Johnny-come-lately’s in Anaheim.)  Baseball fans want to be able to out-think their opponents fans, because there’s so much that’s a part of the game which wouldn’t seem inherent to just watching the given men in that position on that surface.  “So that guy standing over there wants to run in a circle before the other team can do what?  Tag him with the white thing?  And why does that guy in the middle keep throwing?”

And so if they can out-think their opponents fans, so can their team.  This feeds directly in to why it’s such a superstitious sport.  In 162 games, a lot can happen.  And there are so many individual acts that can go so differently with such minute differences.  Didn’t one of the Rangers relief pitchers throw eleven balls in a row at one point during the World Series?  And the same can be said for a batter in a slump.  It’s almost never a matter of just willing yourself to win.  More than just about any other sport, it’s about concentration.

My biggest pet peeve in athletics as a whole, is a lack of concentration, both in others and in myself.  When I’m playing disc and I make a poor decision on a throw, I dislike that way more than if I simply cannot jump high enough or run fast enough to keep up with the player I’m defending.  Since baseball, then, takes more concentration than any other sport, that’s why I see it as the hardest to win at.  You have to better your opponent in so many different things, over such a long stretch of time, without losing your edge.  A division championship is hard enough to get.  Playoffs are even more ridiculous.  But the Twins just signed Jim Thome to another contract, about 1 mil per year.  This guy is an old-fashioned ball player, and someone you want on your team.  He’s only paid to do one thing: hit the ball and hit it far.  But if he can do that as well as anyone, we’ve gained a big advantage.

Here We Are

In the aftermath of the Super Bowl, I have found myself gleaning from the leftovers: Minestrone Soup, my Aunt’s Guacamole, Banana Cake.  Bliss.

I had some conversations, though, which will stick out, simply because of what they say about how Americans view sports.  The first one came mostly from one of my friends, who seemed to be trying to convince me that I shouldn’t be a Packer fan. For as long as I’ve known him, I have never professed to be anything other than a Packer-backer.  But being from the same state as me, it can be tough to watch your friend’s team have much more success than your team.  Believe me, I went through it last year.  I will definitely go through it again, if the Vikings ever make a Super Bowl.

And I do feel bad for you guys.  The Twins have not won since ’91, which makes the Dome champion-less since that year, unless you count the Final Four in ’01.

The other conversation, however, I might have to agree with to some extent.  This friend, who is a large Association Football fan, was pointing out that playoffs are a bad format, because it doesn’t reveal who the best team over the course of an entire season is.  In the Premier League, he points out, every team plays every other team twice, and at the end the team in first is definitely better than all the other teams.  There is a certain amount of logic to that.  But in football that’s unrealistic.  They can’t play every other team twice, because that’s too many games.  The way I see it is this:  The teams that do the best in the first season get to play in the second season, then the team that does best in the second season wins.  The Packers were beyond a doubt the best team in the second season.  They went Four and Oh, while not playing any games at home.

Admittedly, there are a lot of ways they could have not even been to the second season, but all of these are based on rules that the football establishment have agreed upon, and most view it as a fair system.  I can only say that I will probably enjoy the next playoffs and Super Bowl that the Pack is not a part of a lot more while they’re happening.  Let’s hope that doesn’t happen.

But I have to make some admissions for my history of getting really involved in championships where I don’t have a clear stake.  The 1996 World Series: Sorry, Braves, that I rooted against you.  What made me think it was a good idea to root for a team from a big market that had already won the most championships in Sports and was primed to establish a new dynasty and you really weren’t?  I should have pulled for you guys as really the only team in the South as a conservative, battling against the liberal capital of the world.  Same to you, 2001 St. Louis Rams…  Were you really that dominant that you had to lose to the Patriots for everyone to feel good?  It’s not like I didn’t root for the Broncos in ’98, the year after they beat my Packers. (I have no comment on the rumor that I jumped ship to the Vikings that season.)