Burning Violin #8 - For Love of the Game

I was raised an Oakland A's fan. I watched the Bash Brothers knock elbows, leaned forward every time Rickey walked, knowing he'd steal second on the first pitch and third on the second. The steel plates under the first base seats would thrum underfoot like bass out of a broken speaker when Eckersley strode in to close out the game, all mustache, mullet and fist pumping. I can still name the starting lineup and pitching staff twenty years later and once on a Colorado mountaintop I listened to the Minnesota broadcast of A's at Twins on AM radio crackling in and out somehow from a thousand miles across the Great Plains. I died a little at Gibson's walkoff, erupted at the sweep of the Giants, died again when the Reds swept us.

I still have a McGwire foul ball sitting upstairs, a blueish smudge where the bat hit. It's a funny thing, no one else could say why that ball is any different than a thousand others bought at a sporting goods store. But I know. That's what faith is.

In 1997 McGwire leaves and breaks the home run record in a Cardinals uniform the next season. Giambi left after 2001. Tejada after 2003. The Big Three gets broken up after 2004. MVPs, Cy Young contenders, fevered fan favorites. Oakland doesn't even make offers to most of them. They can't afford it, so they don't insult them with a low bid. Classy. Frustrating and futile, but classy. This isn't mismanagement. This isn't making a bad baseball decision. These decisions are being made strictly financially. And none of this would really be a problem if not for the simple fact that not everyone plays by these rules. In 2008, the Yankees topped out the league with a payroll of $209 million. The Marlins bottomed out the league at $22 million.

$209 million. $22 million.

Yeah, yeah. The Yankees didn't win the World Series that year. The Phillies won it all with half the salary of the Yankees. Smart small market teams still manage to be competitive. The Yankees have higher revenues, of course they should be able to spend more money. I won't say these arguments don't have some merit, but none of them can refute the simple premise of equal opportunity being the foundation of sport.

The A's were competitive for years when on paper they had no right to be. Billy Beane and moneyball kept them going to the playoffs year after year, even when their best players left in free agency every winter to go play for five times the best the A's could offer. I know life isn't fair, but sports are supposed to be. They're supposed to be decided by who outthinks, outplays, outhits, just sheer out-desires the other side. Once you accept money as a major component of the equation, you might as well just be watching the stock market and rooting for the company with deeper pockets, because that's what sports becomes once you let the profit motive become part of the game itself. Sports franchises are companies. If their profit margin affects what happens on the field, all you are doing is rooting for one company over another, not one team over another. It might be splitting hairs, it might just be a tantrum over the purity of the game, but I don't think so. I think that purity does matter.

Sports matter because they don't matter.

We pour all of our passion into these games, fork over cash into billion dollar machines just to wear our colors, schedule our lives around the first pitch, kickoff, tip off. We live and die by our team's record. We don't have to do any of this. Absolutely nothing in our lives of substance changes on the outcome of the game. That fact alone is what makes sports matter, because it makes our devotion unconditional. If the game mattered tangibly to us, our love for the game would not be pure any longer. This isn't just intellectual masturbation, it's the basis for every religion from earliest times: sacrifice. It's not sacrifice, it's not worship, if you have a share in the outcome. If the game is already half decided by accountants three months before the season starts, the sanctity is broken. It's the ethical equivalent of buying salvation instead of earning it.

And that's when I accepted that the system was broken and walked away.

Love the sinner, hate the sin. I still love baseball, I just despise the system. Every year in late march, two DVDs (the VHS versions long since worn out and replaced) get popped in for viewing: Field of Dreams and Major League. The smell of grass in spring still reminds me of dirt and cleats, taking grounders and flyballs in the endless afternoons of late childhood. I still pull out my old glove now and then, bury my face in the leather that holds the smell of a thousand catches.

It feels like being part of a lapsed sect of a dying religion, the faith still kept in secret ritual even as I renounce it in public. I haven't watched baseball in years, I refuse to even check the standings online, because knowing would mean caring, and caring would mean that the bastards who destroyed the game would win. If you're an alcoholic, you don't set foot in a bar, because you know that once you're in, there's no way that you won't order just one drink for old time's sake, and then another because what's one more? And then I'd be back where I started, watching the parade of players leaving for New York and Boston every winter.

If they fix it someday, I'll come back. I'll fiddle again with the AM radio, die a little at the losses, smile a little at the wins, bask in the bleachers in perfect afternoon sun. But until that day, I'll keep the faith in private, and remember the game as it once was, when I was young and it was pure.