Sports
Photo by Scott Ableman via Flickr
As part of their attempt to make this year’s edition of baseball’s World Series something more interesting than the four-game Yankee coronation it will be, ESPN has decided to break out the ole ‘Team of the Decade’ evergreen and take it for a hack-driven spin. At the wheel is Jayson Stark who, among other key points of over-hyped and downright false interest, insists that the winner of the 2009 MLB crown will help us fans to understand “what this World Series REALLY means” — that if the Phillies can figure out a way to beat those pin-stripped bastards then the Red Sox (full disclosure: my Red Sox) will officially be crowned the team of the oughts. In honor of Stark’s wanton use of self-contradiction (seriously, go back and read this thing; it’s the perfect argument for mandated high school rhetoric classes), and ESPN’s continuing habit of false-quali/quantification, we here at Unfit would like to offer you our own poorly formed look at Baseball History. We call it: The Reason Why the Washington Nationals are the Team of the 2000s.
It All Starts With Poutine
The Unfit sports department has informed us that baseball gurus rely heavily on statistical analysis to provide insight into the game. We feel that this attempt to scientifically understand what is, after all, nothing more than a game, is nothing short of ridiculous. Instead, we’d prefer to rely on something more generally digestible. And what is more generally digestible than food? By food, of course, we mean french fries, and when these tasty, greasy delicacies are covered in cheese curds and gravy, we’d argue that no other brand of food (traditional or Unfit-defined) can come close.
It is our further belief that any sports franchise born in the land of poutine (which is, for you unfamiliar heathens out there, what French Canadians like to call french fries covered in cheese curds and gravy) inherits the spirit that the stuff inspires in its people. Namely that of intestinal fortitude. And since the Nats franchise was born in the land of poutine, its staff (and that means everyone from the lowliest hot dog slinger to the lowliest general manager) must therefore have been infused with the power of poutine (if only by association). That, friends, is the sort of solid foundation one could only hope to build a successful team on.
Jocks Can’t Spell: A Most Solid Proof
Of course, a solid foundation does not a $630 million stadium make. To fully complete the building of a franchise destined to be named the Unfit Franchise of the Decade, an organization must be able to prove its true sports-worthiness. Unfit’s crack research team has determined that the best way to prove true sports-worthiness is to use the ancient measure of 1980s television high school social status, a key dictate of which states that no true jock shall have knowledge of the world. Translation? If your team can spell, you suck. Thankfully, the Washington Nationals can’t spell. And, as such, the franchise goes a long way toward proving its athletic prowess.
Okay, Fine: Scientific Proof
Unfit correspondent Josh Rosenblatt reminds us that baseball is a “game of statistical failure” — and he’s right: As has been pointed out many times, a hitter has only to do his job 3 times out of every ten to be considered a master of his sport. And, as we all know, for there to be a master, there must be WAY more sucky performers (you know, the exception that proves the rule thing). If those WAY more sucky performers are the rule, then are they not what could be considered the personification of the purest form of baseball? So what if a team consisted of nothing but sucky perfomers or, as in the Nats’ case, had a collective performance that was so sucky, it nearly surpassed the suck of every sucky suckitude ever sucked in the whole wide world of suckball? That, friends, would mean that the team had achieved something monumental. To adapt Hindu mythology (via Robert Oppenheimer): They are become baseball perfected.
How’s that for statistical analysis?
The Greatest Gift: Returning the Sport to the Masses
As is evidenced by the booze-swilling, beer-gutted likes of Babe Ruth, baseball was always a reachable sport; something little Joe Sixpack could see his own booze-swilling, beer-gutted self participating in at an exceptional level. At least until Jose Canseco began all a-blubberin about how the sport was infested with drug-enhanced supermen. Now, thanks to all the hormones and abnormally large biceps, little Joe Sixpack is, when he wants to think semi-realistically, reduced to hoping he can one day spark a political tempest. Unless, of course, he’s a fan of the Washington Nationals: In Natstown, anyone can (and probably would) be better than the product on the field.
Which is to say that the Nationals are singlehandedly returning baseball to the masses. A success that neither of the over-rated teams playing in this year’s World Series can lay claim to.
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