Pastime pause

So on to topics of wider appeal than what a solipsistic cretin my new officemate is. Well, perhaps not wider appeal, but at least more appeal to me personally. This post is going to be about baseball and not much else, so those of you looking for toddler antics and/or geeking out over sci-fi/fantasy concepts may not be as amused. (Although it is possible I might do a second bonus post later about toddler stuff, time permitting.)

Today is about as dead as it gets during the baseball season, as there are no games scheduled tonight in the wake of last night’s All-Star Game. Personally I’m not a huge fan of the All-Star Game. Let me clarify that a little. I am a huge enough fan of the concept of the All-Star Game, and in the notion of assembling a dream team from each league. Dream team assembly is always a fun mental exercise, whether it’s pulling together the deadliest team of mercenaries imaginable from books, tv, movies, comics and such, or trying to imagine what kind of Bonnapalooza line-up could actually get me to buy a ticket and attend an all-day rock festival at this stage of my life.


But the actual watching of the All-Star Game leaves me somewhat cold, because despite my fandom for the game in general it’s mostly focused on one team in particular and (inversely) on a few despised rivals, so there are inevitably numerous players on both sides whom I just don’t know or care about. And the constant substitutions in the roster throughout the game means that it’s hard for a meaningful narrative to develop (and yes of course I project meaningful narratives onto sporting events, do not even try to pretend you are surprised to hear that).

To top it all off, I’m really not a big fan of the “this one counts” evolution of the ASG. And I know, I know, I probably should have said so yesterday, before the American League lost, because now it’s just going to sound like sore loserdom, but I swear I have felt this for a while. It’s just illogical to base home-field advantage in the World Series on anything other than the records of the two teams who make it there. The better record should earn that team the slight edge, not the performance of the entire league in a single exhibition game that is only supposed to be a pleasant diversion at the midpoint of the season. I hope someday television ratings become moot and they go back to the game’s original “just for fun” purpose.

Of course I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the passing yesterday of George Steinbrenner. On the one hand, he built the Yankees into the Evil Empire, and that is an aspect of the team I love and embrace, so I’m thankful for the Boss’s particular brand of megalomania. On the other hand, he came across as kind of a jerk and I would hate to fall into the trap of overpraising someone just because they shuffled off this mortal coil. It’s a sad loss for his family, which to a certain degree includes the entire Yankees organization, and my sympathies go out to them. But life will go on.

I was also going to utilize this midseason opportunity to note how the Yankees were really on a roll there at the beginning of July, but for that matter so were the O’s, who managed their first four-game sweep in a decade or two, and against a team that’s not exactly hapless. I hope the O’s continue to keep the momentum going (I think there’s a redundancy in that sentiment somewhere) if only so that my wife can find some joy in the 2010 season, as so far she has not.

But what I really want to know is – how long have sportswriters been referring to Colorado’s team as the Rox? I suppose shortening Rockies to Rox makes exactly as much sense as shortening socks to Sox, but Sox is actually spelled that way on the Boston and Chicago uniforms, and isn’t so much a bit of headline shorthand as, you know, the legit team name. But I just saw Rox in the paper the other day and it brought me up short, but at the same time made me feel like maybe it wasn’t the first time I had seen it, just the first time I really noticed. Just weird.