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For those of us who prefer to spend our “working” afternoons in pursuit of player transaction gossip, Major League Baseball’s winter meetings are the highlight of the season. For a few days each December, the front office honchos from every MLB team, the agents who represent the millionaires who play for them, and the media whose job it is to report it all (and we mean all) gather in the lobby of some hotel room and try to swindle each other. In the process, general managers do their best to end up on the post-trade Frank Robinson/Babe Ruth side of things, agents do their best to have their players end up on the Kevin Brown side of things, and sports writers do their best to not end up on the Rob Neyer (scroll down) side of things. With so much action — and the scoop-hungry masses who are tasked to cover it — concentrated in one place, the winter meetings turn into something of a perfect storm for rumor-making.

Until this year, the worst to come out of all this might have been the hurt feelings of a player or two. But that was before the combination of Twitter and what one Winter Meeting press attendee characterized as the “mom’s basement contingent” conspired to make a mess of things in a manner that can only lead us observers to conclude that this whole new media democracy set-up is actually capable of policing itself.

On Monday at 3:00 p.m., Rotoworld senior baseball editor Aaron Gleeman tweeted that he and his colleagues were “going to learn a lot about everyone’s quality/standards of reporting this week” and that “[s]ome people aren’t gonna look so good.” Presumably, this was a reference to the same mom’s basement contingent that his fellow baseball rumor monger Jason Rosenberg had implied was polluting the proverbial well. Gleeman followed that up six minutes later with a response to a tweet from MLB Trade Rumors‘ Tim Dierkes (who’d taunted the rest of us with promises of a “spreadsheet that I will never share, with the major reports that were wildly wrong”) where he claimed that he wasn’t “going to go nuts ‘outing’ anyone,” but that it would “be tough not to remember what’s going on.”

We here at Unfit tried to get a hold of Gleeman so that he might enlighten us as to what was going on. But since we don’t seem to have the clout of, say, Peter Gammons, we got no response. So here’s a guess: Mom’s basement reporter-type hears some crazy rumor. Mom’s-basement reporter-type prints said rumor without so much as vetting it with any sources. Report gets tweeted, retweeted, and kind of becomes news. Until, that is, a not-so-mom’s-basement-reporter-type susses out the truth, sinking mom’s-basement-guy’s rumor and maybe his or her (well, we’ll guess his) fledgling career.

‘Course, without the ability to so quickly and widely publish his rumor, mom’s-basement guy is left with an audience of exactly his mom. A fact which should bring the whole Twitter thing home to those of us who are totally stoked about being able to receive news in real time. That’s nothing new. But that the mom’s-basement joker(s) got so jumped on serves as proof that not all media types are so blinded by the relative shiny newness of social media that they can’t police themselves. And that’s encouraging — even if the end result is that those of us who crave instant updates have to wait just a bit longer.

A Tiger divided against himself ...

The rumor goes something like this, give or take a few sordid details:

The Great Athlete, flush with success and fame, sees a beautiful woman from across the room at a swanky party. The woman, who recognizes the Great Athlete, is flustered and nervous. But the Great Athlete is confident and full of brass. He approaches, she waits – What will he say? What will she say? He arrives, looks her in the eye, and asks, “What are your hopes? What are your dreams?” The woman is surprised by this line, even finds it ridiculous, but after all this is a Great Athlete and she’s always wanted to meet him – to bed him – and so she indulges the conversation. After 20 minutes, the Great Athlete gives her a card with a number on it, the number that when called will summon his driver. And with that, the Great Athlete disappears. After the party, she calls the number, and sure enough a driver comes and picks her up and takes her to an apartment building, where she takes the private elevator to the penthouse suite, where on a bed lies the Great Athlete, shirtless. He politely but firmly informs the woman that they are going to have sex, and they do. Quick, business-like sex, the woman will report later: functional and to the point. The next morning the Great Athlete has his driver take the woman back to her home. Tryst complete.

Punchline:

Several months later that same woman is at another party and sees the Great Athlete from across the room and he sees her and walks over with that same confidence and brass, and she smiles this time, less nervous, ready to reminisce about the evening they spent together, ready to rekindle. And what does the Great Athlete say when he arrives? “What are your hopes? What are your dreams?” The woman is surprised but decides to play along; surely he is just being coy. But wouldn’t you know it, after 20 minutes of conversation, the Great Athlete is handing her a card with a number to call that will summon his driver, who, sure enough, at the end of the evening takes the young woman to that same building with that same private elevator that leads to that same penthouse, where – sure as you’re born – the Great Athlete is lying on his bed shirtless. They proceed to make quick, business-like love, and in the morning, the Great Athlete’s driver takes the woman home. At no point does the Great Athlete give any indication that he has any idea the two of them have ever met, much less done this peculiar mating dance – step for step – once before.

Ladies and gentleman, that great athlete: Derek Jeter.

That’s right: The captain of the world champion New York Yankees, the Sports Illustrated 2009 Sportsman of the Year, the man who’s honor and decorum the likes of Michael Jordan and 60 Minutes‘ Ed Bradley have lined up to celebrate. Hell, even  legendary writer Gay Talese once wrote, “[i]n this era of boorish athletes, obnoxious fans, greedy owners and shattered myths, here’s a hero who’s actually polite, and that has to have come from good parenting. You can’t compare him to Joe DiMaggio, for DiMaggio didn’t have bad manners — he had no manners. Where have you gone, man with manners? Here you are, Derek Jeter.”

But then look at the stream of self-affirming moralist rhetoric that was spun in the direction of Tiger Woods this week, post-automobile incident. Those same sportswriters and society pundits who for years have been falling all over themselves to praise Woods’ playing and his work ethic and his character turned on him with the fanaticism of the newly converted when they learned he had cheated on his wife, peppering him with the condemnation, luxuriating in their disappointment, and waiting patiently for the inevitable public apology.

And that might be the lesson that we should take from all of this: Woods and Jeter are both sports starts of gigantic proportions — men being supermen, larger than life, yet excelling at an activity that, in its basic form, extends back to humanity’s primitive days in the caves and that speaks directly to the most basic breeding instincts at the center of our reproductive process. The difference? Tiger tried to deny his place in the world and settle for family life … and the eventual (and perhaps inevitable) fall from grace that so many public alphas have had to endure. Jeter, on the other hand, inoculated himself against the ethical quibbling and criticisms of the mortal chattering class — in this case, the sportsfan blogosphere and celebrity gossipmongers — by simply being that thing that they would all hope to be had they been born with his … talents.

We love Derek Jeter because he acknowledges who he is (a superstar) and what he is (a philanderer) and acts accordingly (Hopes, anyone? Dreams?), while we resent Woods for desiring normality, breaking vows he probably never should have taken in the first place, and apologizing to millions of people he’s never even met, much less wronged, when he got caught. The same way we loved the lecherous, hard-drinking, cocaine-using politician Charlie Wilson and hate mealy-mouthed family man Governor Mark Sanford. The same way we celebrate George Clooney for brazenly taking 52 models a year to his seaside Italian villa and attack Jude Law for furtively cheating on his fiancee with only one nanny. We like our stars brazen and brave, convinced that society’s conventions don’t apply to them and celebrating the fact that they are beyond the need for explanation or apology.

Otherwise, they’d be just like us.

Photo by bikesnotscott via Flickr

Sports fans have been inundated this week with speculation — scientific and otherwise (all at the same time!) — about Bill Belichick’s decision to try to convert on fourth down, deep in his Patriots’ own territory, with very little time left in the game. And sure, it might have been a stupid call — or it might have been a brilliant call — but, his players failed to execute, his opponents got the ball back, and the rest is recent history. (Cue insanity all over sports talk radio.) For NFL pundits who’ve been itching to rip apart Belichick for his supposed arrogance, it was July 4 — all fireworks, picnics, and celebration. And though the event was certainly worthy of notice, what’s been lost in all of the gleeful post-game Belichick hate is that New England is still 6-3. Still in first place in the AFC East. And still — barring total collapse — playoff-bound, a status that has, let’s remember, been awfully kind to the franchise since 2001. Which is to say that the gutsy, brilliant, but ultimately failed effort from this past Sunday is illustrative of one thing only: That Bill Belichick is still the only reason to watch football.

If the past decade of sports history has taught Boston sports fans a single lesson it should be this: In the course of a game — or a series of games — there is no true predictable outcome. Oh sure, we can ogle the crap out of stats; use them, for example to vindicate superficially poor decisions, say — or explain why solid play from what might have seemed like an unlikely source, wasn’t really all that unlikely after all. But the truth, the real truth that belies even statistical analysis, is that we just don’t know what’s going to happen until it actually does. This is, as they say, why they play the game — and it’s why we watch it. Frankly, there’s a reason that only the most diehard fans can sit through a blow-out. I mean, who cares if the thing is over — the outcome predetermined — before halftime.

Early on Sunday night, the Patriots got off to a strong 24-7 lead. By the fourth quarter, it been extended to 31-14, and the game looked, at least from the comfort of my couch, as if they were in the bag. (Eff you, Colts — what’s the Manning face for crap, there goes my undefeated season?) Then it was 31-21, and then 31-28. 4th and 2. Go for it. Turn it over on downs. Bring on the Manning face for hey, thanks for helping out.

And now we’re supposed to believe that the air of infallibility that surrounds the Belichick name has been befouled. Maybe. But frankly we don’t give a fuck. After all, this is entertainment. And though the hooded genius may have received some kind of cosmic comeuppance, or dealt his team a Greek tragedy of a loss, he did so in the process of entertaining me and you. For that, he retains the must-watch title.

At least until he goes back to dealing in blow-outs.

Photo by IYM via Flickr

A week ago, Yanina Wickmayer, the world’s 16th-best female tennis player (according to rankings) was suspended for violating a portion of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) code. To be clear, no one has directly accused Wickmayer — who, at 20, had a breakthrough run in this year’s U.S. Open — of using a performance-enhancing substance. Nope. What’s got officials miffed is the fact that the Belgian phenom broke the agency’s reporting rules, according to ESPN, “three times within an 18-month period.” If you believe Wickmayer, the year-long suspension was the undeserved result of a rules mix-up and a few crossed e-mails and postal wires. If you believe the World Governing Body of Tennis, “[i]t is recognised [sic] and accepted that No Advance Notice Out-of-Competition Testing is at the core of effective Doping Control, and without accurate information as to a player’s whereabouts, such testing can be inefficient and often impossible” — so Wickmayer’s failure in this regard is detrimental to the anti-doping movement. Either way, Wickmayer’s punishment and that of fellow Belgian Xavier Malisse — who was found guilty of the same bureaucratic oversight — came as a surprise, and there has been some speculation that the harsh penalties they received were more directed at a former player than anyone currently touring.

In so doing, the various sporting powers that be have given sports fans another reason to question the purpose of WADA — and, really, why, in the face of such ridiculousness as that which Wickmayer and Malisse have fallen victim to, any of us spectators should care at all about whether or not players in any sport engage in doping.

In the United States, questions about performance-enhancing drugs begin with Lyle Alzado. Alzado was a defensive linemen for the NFL’s Denver Broncos, Cleveland Browns, and — most memorably — the Oakland Raiders. He died at the age of 43 in 1992, after a battle with brain lymphoma, a rare form of cancer that he blamed on his use of anabolic steroids. As ESPN put it, “ Although there is no medical link between steroids and brain lymphoma…[h]e became a symbol of the dangers of steroid abuse.” Eventually, the NFL began testing and suspending players for the use of a host of so-called “banned substances.” The fallout from that program — instituted here for the sake of saving future Alzados, even if the real solution to football’s heath crisis has little to do with anabolics — has lead to multiple four-game suspensions for players who, like Wickmayer and Malisse, don’t necessarily test positive for a performance-enhancing drug (PED). Diuretics, for example — which the NFL considers to be evidence of guilty system flushing — seem to lead to more penalties than PEDs themselves.

Next up was baseball, which — thanks to the efforts of Jose Canseco — eventually found itself before Congress. When it did, the question wasn’t so much who was using but who wasn’t. And, as repeated leaks from a 2003 positive test list seemed to be confirmed by ritualized mea culpa after ritualized mea culpa, it indeed became apparent that — among stars at least — baseball’s collective use of PEDs was rampant. Still, even after all of this reckoning, the lingering effect isn’t one that will ensure a level playing field for future generations. Rather, it is the assumption that the multi-millionaires who benefit from performance enhancement will find ways around whatever testing protocol is instituted, no matter how rigorous it is; an air of suspicion that brings on the sort of Kafka-esque environment where non-PED using athletes find themselves condemned for small bureaucratic infractions — and the real WADA targets get away with their drug use.

Just to be clear: This goes for every sport. Wickmayer, Malisse, and Joselio Hanson of the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles have all, in the past week, found themselves suspended for the mere appearance of improper medical enhancement. This, while two weeks ago, two admitted steroid users helped lead their team to baseball’s world championship. Until WADA and the various sports governing bodies that subscribe to its program can figure out a way to evenly, fairly, and responsibly enforce anti-doping rules, there seems to be no reason that any one should trust their rulings. And because science will no doubt provide athletes intent on finding a way to artificially enhance their respective performances a way to do so ahead of whatever testing there is to stop such activity, it seems as though the only folks who’ll get caught up in all of this are (and will be) innocent of any direct PED crime.  Which is to say that maybe, we’d all be better off without any of it.

Photo by Cubbie Nation via Flikr

Fully one-third of your Unfit Times staff considers itself to be of the set that ranks baseball up there with Shakespeare in terms of entertaining drama. And though wholehearted enjoyment of this fact escaped us until relatively recently, over more than a quarter century of baseball watching, we have been treated to plenty in the way of examples of our favorite sports‘ ability to trump the bard in terms of nearly every experiential emotion.

We expect to be treated to par in this regard when Pedro Martinez and Andy Pettitte do battle — ah, battle — this evening in Game 6 of  the 2009 World Series. And though we have no real (read: Red Sox-related) rooting interest in tonight’s proceedings, we are fairly certain that there is nothing better in the whole wide world of sports than watching two skilled veteran hurlers go head to head.

In honor of the event, we’ve decided to finally bring the two highest forms of drama together. Enjoy.

Another part of the field.

Enter MacPettitte.

MACPETTITTE.	[Three days rest I am given.] Why should I [not] play the Roman fool and die On mine own sword? [Ah, but] [w]hiles I see livesPhillies, the gashes Do better upon them.

Enter MacPedro.

MACPEDRO.	Turn, hell hound, turn!
MACPETTITTE.	Of all men else I have avoided thee. But get thee back, my soul is too much charged With blood of thine [teammates] already.
MACPEDRO.	I have no words. My voice is in my swordchangeup, thou bloodier villain Than terms can give thee out! They fight.
MACPETTITTE.	Thou losest labor. As easy mayst thou the intrenchant air With thy keen swordchangeup impress as make me bleed. Let fall thy blade on vulnerable crestsNational League lineups; I bear a charmed life [potent offense, and short right field porch], which must not yield To one of woman bornwho suffers the “who’s your daddy” chant.
MACPEDRO.	Despair thy charmmystique and aura, And let the angel whom thou still hast served Tell thee, Macpedro was from his mother’s wombyour fearful chant Untimely ripp’dreleased.
MACPETTITTE.	Accursed be that tongue that tells me so, For it hath cow’d my better part of manmade me awkwardly jostle my rosin bag! And be these juggling fiendsYankee ghosts no more believed That patter with us in a double sense, That keep the word of promise to our ear And break it to our hope. I’ll not fight with thee.
MACPEDRO.	Then yield thee, coward, And live to be the show and gaze o’ the timeserve up a hanging breaking ball to Ryan Howard. Or perhaps Chase Utley. We’ll have thee, as our rarer monsters are, Painted upon a pole, and underwrit, “Here may you see the tyrantwashed-up mercenary.”
MACPETTITTE.	I will not yield, To kiss the ground before young Malcolm’sHamels’ feet, And to be baited with the rabble’s curse. Though Birnam Woodadvanced age and poor use of the minor league system be come to Dunsinanethe Bronx, And thou opposed, being of no woman bornno fear of the “who’s your daddy” chant, Yet I will try the last. Before my body I throw my warlike shield! Lay on, Macpedro, And damn’d be him that first cries, “Hold, enough!”

Exeunt fighting. Alarums.

We here at Unfit will not be so presumptuous as to write the ending for a game that hasn’t happened yet. But, we’ll remind you, readers, that Shakespeare called for MacBethPettitte to be beheaded, and his line to fall.

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.

There is power in a union

After a relatively quiet summer off-season in the NBA, two big bits of news came in over the last week.

First, the league officially announced on Friday – after unofficially looking the other way since the days of Bob Cousy, short shorts, and fundamentals – that a “player who receives the ball while he is progressing or upon completion of a dribble, may take two steps in coming to a stop, passing or shooting the ball.” This after a March story on ESPN.com in which Joe Borgia, the league’s vice president of referee operations,  admitted that when it comes to the one-step traveling rule, referees “really don’t reference the rulebook.”

Then, on Tuesday, word came down that negotiators for the league and its referee’s union had reached an agreement on a new contract. If the contract is ratified by a majority of the union’s 57 referees at a vote scheduled for Friday, the men in black and white will be back at work in time for the beginning of the regular season, ending a lockout that began in mid-September.

Coincidence, you think? Arbitrary confluence of unrelated events? Maybe. But then again …

Up until yesterday, the negotiations between the league and the referee’s union had been a complete disaster, with the refs looking for pay raises and increases in severance and pensions and the league looking to give them nothing of the sort. In early April NBA commissioner David Stern pulled out of talks after he and the union’s chief negotiator exchanged insults through the media, and since then the whole thing has been in the hands of lawyers.

Preseason games, meanwhile, went ahead as planned, with replacement refs from the WNBA and the NBA’s Development league scaring the wits out players and coaches and making them long for the good old ways when they knew the names of the people they were screaming at.

But the real season is about to begin, and since both sides have a vested interest in everyone getting back to work (Stern doesn’t need the hassle that will come with inexperienced refs clashing with cranky NBA coaches, and the refs themselves have already missed two paychecks), it makes sense that a deal has been reached.

But what if the change in the two-step rule wasn’t just an arbitrarily timed decision made by league officials but rather a perfectly timed demand by the referee’s union to get themselves back on the court with dignity? What if it was being used as leverage this whole time?

Think about it: You have a rule that no players follow and no referees enforce but the breaking of which drives old-school fans and opposing coaches to distraction. Every time an NBA poster-child like Dwyane Wade or LeBron James is caught on tape taking extra steps on the way to the basket and getting away with it, fans and opponents scream up and down that the league has two sets of rules: one for superstars, one for mere mortals. And who do they scream at? The refs, of course. Never mind that basketball players are so quick and so athletic these days that it’s hard to tell if they’re traveling even in slow-motion replays; never mind that refs are only human and that they’re trying their best to see through a wall of impossibly muscular bodies in order to make calls; never mind, even, that these refs have been told by their bosses not to call players with traveling if they take an extra step. Never mind any of it; when a fan or a coach or a player or a sports writer sees an injustice, he is going to turn his wrath on the man with the whistle in his hand (and not in his mouth).

And who needs that? The one-step travel rule/non-rule was little more than a bludgeon to beats refs’ heads in with, leaving the men and women in black and white in an impossible situation: make the call and face the fury of an angry league looking to keep casual fans and sports-highlight shows interested; miss the call and face the spitting vitriol of the basketball blogosphere.

No, best to use the rule as a bargaining chip in your negotiations. Tell the league you’ll concede on pay raises and severance packages and pension plans for a few years while the economy recovers, but in return demand the league rescind a rule that was absolutely crushing you and yours on a nightly basis.

Then, two years from now, when those contracts are up again, demand that hand-checking and the three-second rule get struck from the books as well. Or out the door you’ll go.

The Red Sox in happier days

What to expect from the Boston Red Sox this offseason following their first-round playoff loss to the Los Angeles Angels (a tribute to my friend and fellow Unfit founding editor, devoted Red Sox fan Mike “Kanin” Kanin, on the occasion of his birthday):

- Looking to reduce the size of their pitching staff but unable to decide between keeping Daisuke Matsuzaka or knuckle-baller Tim Wakefield, Red Sox scouts are sent out to find a slightly overweight middle-aged Japanese man with a goatee who can throw a baseball 47 miles an hour on only six days’ rest.

- Kevin Youkilis is killed during an argument with Jason Varitek over who has the “cooler baseball name.”

- Three members of the Red Sox coaching staff are arrested after exhuming the corpse of Babe Ruth and taking turns beating it with a baseball bat.

- After second baseman Dustin Pedroia’s complaint that the shoddy state of the infield grass at Fenway Park was the reason he missed turning a crucial double-play in game three of the Division Series, the Red Sox fire their grounds crew and replace them with sprinklers.

- After realizing he’s spent nearly 15,000 hours of his life watching Red Sox games, 35-year-old Framingham resident Mark Shipley divorces his wife, Jenny, and renounces custody of their three children, Lucy, Kenneth, and Mark Jr., to devote more time to watching Red Sox games.

- Citing the success of the team’s 2003 “Cowboy Up” campaign, team General Manager Theo Epstein signs comedian Larry the Cable Guy to usher in new “Git-R-Done” era.

- Designated hitter David Ortiz signs five-year contract extension, telling reporters the Red Sox have the “best post-game deli spread in baseball.”

- Pitcher Josh Beckett grows mustache to go with his Fu Manchu beard but decides he doesn’t like it and shaves it off the next day.

- Wanting to spend more time with his kids, Manager Terry Francona announces that he will coach the entire 2010 season from his rec room via text message.

- In February, Roger Clemens stops by the team’s Florida training camp “just to say hi.”

The game at its purest

America is a land of mass psychoses. Witness the Salem witch trials, the Red Scare, the War on Terror. the Birther movement, the popularity of Will Ferrell. There’s nothing Americans like better than indulging themselves in the comfort of communal delusion and calling it shared wisdom.

And none of these delusions is more absurd (or more persistent) than the belief that college athletics is purer than professional sports.

Talk to die-hard college sports fans and they’ll tell you that college athletes play for the love of the game while professionals play for the love of the paycheck. They’ll scream up and down (faces painted, team hand gestures at the ready) that professional athletes don’t care, that they’ve been tainted by the money and the cars and the women, that they don’t try hard, that they don’t play with emotion, that they don’t care about winning, and that they won’t put their bodies on the line and give their all because … well, why bother, right?

This argument makes me so mad I can barely dictate this sentence to my unpaid foreign intern before sending him out to pick up my dry cleaning.

In order to even make it to the pros, you need skills and talent and size and speed and ability and luck, true, but more than that, you need to be so competitive that losing feels to you like death. The faraway dream of professional glory and riches isn’t enough motivation to keep a kid going through years of drills, practices, injuries, games, shame, and general inconvenience. His desire to not lose has to get him through. Athletes who make it all the way to the pros have been winning their entire lives, and the idea that their competitive instincts would just vanish because they’re suddenly making millions of dollars is nonsense. (And besides, when did making money become a cause for criticism in this country? In every other walk of life we look up to people who make money – especially those who came from no money, like many of our athletes  – as examples of the American can-do spirit. We don’t revere amateur rappers or businessmen or computer programmers. Is college sports fandom the last true bastion of socialism in America?)

If you don’t believe me, check out this footage from a recent preseason game between the Utah Jazz and the Chicago Bulls. Again, this is a preseason game. A game that couldn’t be more insignificant. A game where even the 12th man – whose job it is usually to demonstrate his mastery of the ancient arts of towel-spinning, overenthusiastic head-nodding, and chest-bumping – gets a chance to play. Just watch this video and tell me these guys don’t care about winning, that somehow their love of the game and of competition has been tainted by fame and wealth, that they’re nothing more than soulless corporate entities vying for bigger endorsement deals.

Go on – tell me.

Photo by bikesnotscott via Flickr

This morning’s edition of the New York Times features a story about the most recent study to connect playing time in the National Football League (NFL) with some forms of dementia. In it, reporter Alan Schwarz ledes with the very disturbing — for NFL vets, at least — point. “A study commissioned by the National Football League reports that Alzheimer’s disease or similar memory-related diseases appear to have been diagnosed in the league’s former players vastly more often than in the national population — including a rate of 19 times the normal rate for men ages 30 through 49,” he writes.

But it’s not until about halfway through the first electronic page that he gets to the operative portion of his coverage — a skeptical quote from Dr. Ira Casson, co-chair of the NFL’s committee on Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (MBTI), also known as the Concussion Committee. “What I take from this report is there’s a need for further studies to see whether or not this finding is going to pan out, if it’s really there or not,” Casson tells Schwarz. “I can see that the respondents believe they have been diagnosed. But the next step is to determine whether that is so.” Granted, the study, performed by researchers at the University of Michigan, relied on over-the-phone interviews, a method its own authors seem to think of as less-than-ideal. And most of the third-party physicians that Schwarz interviewed seemed to think that nothing covered by UM represented a conclusive argument for or against the idea that playing professional football could be linked directly to brain injuries. But, this cold response from Casson — coupled with the NFL’s history of ducking the issue — seems to speak volumes. Indeed, even now — after having been pressured into contracting for an independent look at what happens when a football player’s head makes contact too many times with something hard, and confronted with a bit of negative evidence — the league keeps … punting on delivering any sort of significant response.

A move that continues to guarantee that there will be more Ted Johnsons. Johnson, whose picture was included in the Times‘ coverage but whose story (which had been nicely documented by Schwarz for the Times and the Boston Globe) was strangely absent, spent 10 years playing linebacker for the New England Patriots. “Ted Johnson helped the New England Patriots win three of the past five Super Bowls before retiring in 2005,” wrote Schwarz in 2007. “Now, he says, he forgets people’s names, misses appointments and, because of an addiction to amphetamines, can become so terrified of the outside world that he locks himself alone inside his Boston apartment, in bed with the blinds drawn for days at a time.” At the time, Johnson was just 34.

Schwarz goes on to detail the grim turn in Johnson’s life, where depression and serious cognitive problems seem to have lead to a dependence on the amphetamine Adderall — a prescription for which Johnson was abusing at, writes Schwarz, a rate of “two to three times the dosage authorized by his doctors.” When the drugs ran out, Johnson would shut “himself inside his downtown apartment for days and [communicate] with no one until a new prescription [became] available.”

When the notoriously media-shy (-savvy?) Patriots head coach, Bill Belichick, and team trainer, Jim Whalen — who Johnson accused of allowing him to return to play after suffering multiple concussions — refused to comment for Schwarz’ story, it wasn’t exactly a shock. And when, two months after Schwarz’ piece was published, the NFL finally claimed that it would — as ESPN put it — “retool” its approach to concussions, the action also seemed to fall in line with what could have been a compassionate (not to mention logical) response.

But now, faced with an opportunity to make some changes that could positively impact what will be the already-creaky physical lives of future players, the NFL seems unready, unwilling, and unable to make that call. This should come as a shock. Unfortunately for Johnson and his like-suffering retirees, it doesn’t.