Nolan Ryan and the Death of Baseball

Put it on Pallid Puddle/Porridge-Faced Nolan Ryan! Fox Producers Hasten the Death of the Great American Game

That baseball has a lot of problems we all know.  For those of us who love the game, those problems are mostly situated with other people, who don’t get its beauty.  I saw Fox throw up a graphic about one of the teams, pointing out how there were a bunch of Hispanics, on one team, anyway, and how that made this “World” (oh the cringeworthiness of Americans, selling the sizzle and never the steak) Series really international.  May-be, but was there even one black American on either team?  I mean, on the playing field, as a regular?  I don’t know.  But I do know that 20-30-40 years ago, you’d sure see one hell of a lot more black Americans playing the game.  Somebody needs to break the barrier, again.  The last couple of World Series’ of baseball, involving Japan and Cuba, and Japan and Korea—man, now that was some baseball.  My lord that was good ball.  This 2011 World Series was such a joke, in terms of execution, that you really had to wonder if anyone out there knew how to play this game.  Abner Doubleday wouldn’t turn around in the street if somebody called his name after this fall classic. It sure looked as if Americans had handed the game over to those who cared more about it; hell, Canada shut down the U.S. at the Pan-Am games.  A little hustle and a little heart, which Canadians possess (forget talent), is enough to do in America now.

Anyway, I love the game, and, yes, sure, baseball has problems.  One is that it isn’t a very good tv sport, but that has everything to do with producers.  One can, of course, beg the question of just what is a good “tv sport,” and maybe Americans would have to travel before they realized the basic oxymoronic nature of the phrase “tv sport.”  How about we watch guys on couches watching sports?  ** wait—I just trademarked that.  It’s called: “real guys watch tv.”  Done and done.  That patent has pended. Baseball always shows us pitcher throwing at catcher, which is weird when you consider the number of players on the field.  Then, in that Sunset Boulevard death-in-life way American tv producers have, we get the 1 camera go-to of pudgy porridge-faced Nolan Ryan.

This, this was a series I just wasn’t much interested in.  When it began, I found myself in the impossible situation of kind of cheering for Texas, a team I never could have imagined cheering for.  But, for personal fan reasons, I just always had the hate on for Tony La Russa, whatever his baseball genius and tenacity (and then there’s the McGwire taint, etc.).  But as time went on, and I grew so completely sick of seeing camera 1 on Nolan Ryan every 10 seconds, well, I shifted my allegiances.  In the end, perplexing to me as it was, I had become a Cards fan.  By not being Nolan Ryan, the Cards seemed to become a symbol of baseball for people like me—people who like the game, not fat, ossified billionaire celebrities sitting next to brittle, evidently bored and uncomfortable wives, and ex-presidents who couldn’t spell “millionaire” despite being one.  The Fox camera 1 on Nolan Ryan puts many things about the state of the game in a nutshell.  A complete disinterest on behalf of Americans and tv producers regarding anything else but vapid wealth and celebrity, etc.  I mean, consider other sports.  When your go-to moment is, dozens of times per telecast, a picture of a fat, dull man in a black overcoat rubbing his eyes (many of these times well after midnight on the east coast), well, I think you could say that that black overcoat is a-coming to get your sport and yank it into history, where they only had black and white, and often not even the black to give the white any perspective whatsoever.

Baseball has so much to show us.  Defensive alignments that shift with virtually every pitch, to say nothing of every batter; batters warming up, signs being given—really there are endless ways to try to interest people in the game.  But we get fat puddle-faced Nolan.  “They say he threw 95 back in the day.”  Yeah, I remember that, very well.  But that was then.  That and five bucks will get me a coffee, today. 

Hockey has become infected with the same hopeless bug, too.  Now, instead of looking at anything on the ice, producers are ordered to lock on pictures of GMs, gleaming beneath the hideous fluorescent glow of upper booths, amidst the styrofoam diet-pop detritus of the end of the day; they might as well give us a downcast Willy Loman coming up the walk and mopping his brow and loosening his tie and wondering how he’s going to trade in that Chevy, or that fridge.  Or that Kotalik.

Anyway, this is merely a ragged rant that evidently has not got a lot in terms of constructive criticism (unless one draws from and *builds* upon it and so forth).  Maybe I’ll say more.  Others will.

I’ll just finish by saying what I started out to say.  This was a colossally badly played World Series, from every aspect (as they often are).  If you want to see real baseball, see the World Series played every four years, involving countries that really give a damn about baseball, the game.  Going in, I couldn’t believe it, but I probably did want to cheer for Ron Washington and the Rangers. ????  But it didn’t take me long, after watching Nolan Ryan every couple of seconds, to decide that, well, my allegiance was with baseball, not fat ol’ Nolan.  So I became a Cards fan.  And the Cards won.  Somehow I don’t feel really happy that my team won, but in the sense that fat ol’ Nolan didn’t, and baseball maybe did, I, as a fan, feel less bad than I could.

**[And a footnote.  All those who say, well, you could turn off the tv.  Duh, of course I did.  Most of the time I had Shulman, Valentine, and Hershiser coming through my computer or radio as I was raking leaves.  Those guys were mostly better than Sutcliffe and Horne – Thorne? – the tv talking heads were ok.  But surely to goodness every now and then you must go to the tv to see the most dramatic play—the home run, the inning-ending double play, and so on.  Surely you must see that!!  But no, you’ll see fat ol’ Nolan sitting there, like Pete Rose’s wife, inscrutable and unviewable.  Illusions shattered, you’ll go back to raking leaves, too, baby.]

Cards win! Cards win!  Bleh.  Whatever.  Minor victory for the game over dubya n’nolan, though.

If you love this game. . . .

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