The Play's the Thing

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project uses the computers of people around the world. Whenever a participating computer is otherwise idle, it is scanning the ambient noise from space looking for patterns that might indicate an intentional effort to communicate.

In the same way, any corner of my brain that’s not otherwise engaged is always looking for blog ideas. There was an item in last week’s Sporting News that noted that both the college football national championship game and the Super Bowl featured an opening kickoff run back for a touchdown – by the eventual losing team. It occurred to me that it could be a good jumping-off place for a blog… if I wrote the kind of blog that supplies sports insights. I know from experience that many of the people who enjoy reading this (all 4 of you) don’t care that much about sports or even understand why I might care so much.

*Light bulb*.... One of the things I do attempt with this blog is to explain why something is important or interesting or funny, to try to get people to look at some topic differently. And it ought to be a better place to start than a couple of my occasional motivators:

• I thought of a joke and now I need to think of a couple hundred words to set up the punch line.
• It’s Friday and I haven’t posted anything in almost (or over) a week.
  

Usually, of course, it's such a brilliant, potentially life-changing insight that if I didn't share it immediately it would be tantamount to malpractice....

Think about the elements of great drama: conflict, resolution, some unexpected twists along the way. It also helps if the setting is recognizable enough that you don’t have to focus on that along the way, so you can reach a comfort level that promotes letting yourself be absorbed.

Of course, you’ve also just described every sporting contest: two teams , or a group of individuals, competing in a familiar event for a victorious result that can’t be predicted (just ask the 1980 Olympic hockey team). In fact, for many years the Olympics were a sporting event that happened somewhere in the world every four years; if you were lucky you’d read the story in the sports page the next day or catch a few highlights. Then ABC tapped into the intersection between games and drama – the Thrill of Victory, the Agony of Defeat; the stories behind the athletes – and now the Games are a televised phenomenon.

Any sport is, for those of us who love it, a familiar milieu that approaches ritual. But at the same time, since most of the time we’re watching it as it happens, the unexpected is almost commonplace. I have watched a staggering number of baseball games in my life – it would be an embarrassing number, in fact, except I’m not embarrassed at all because I’ve loved every minute of it. Still, when the Dodgers got two runners thrown out at the plate on the same play (in the playoffs last fall against the Mets), I saw something I’d never seen on the field before. I have to admit I wouldn’t have been quite so enchanted if the teams were reversed.

Much in the same way that I like to eat, but I don’t like all foods equally, I love “sports” but it’s baseball that gets its own dedicated portion of my brain. I don’t think I can explain that part very well; I have plenty of friends who are NASCAR fanatics but couldn’t care less about baseball, or who can’t wait for football season but are bored by basketball. In fact, it’s not that rare to talk to someone who loves college football (or basketball, for that matter) but doesn’t watch pro football (or basketball). Just a matter of how your taste buds line up, I suppose – and what you were fed when you were a kid.

In the current sports universe, free agency makes it possible for players to move between teams frequently. And so people like me are often asked, “Why root for the Mets? The guys keep changing – you’re really just rooting for a shirt.” I like to think there’s more to it than a laundry fetish. Regardless of the guys inside the uniforms, there is a tradition and continuity that preserves a connection.

My sister-in-law is a big fan of ER. When she was living in a town where she couldn’t get cable or even broadcast TV (and why even typing those words makes me break out in a cold sweat is something to explore another time) we taped ER for her every week. Well, OK, not quite every week; each Thursday at 9:58 my wife would ask if I was ready to tape it, and I’d scrabble around looking for a blank tape… occasionally I struck out. But she just wanted ER, no interest in any other show.

If you had watched ER in about 1994, and then not seen it again until last week, you might well wonder if it was the same show. None of the faces are the same – but they’re still doing the same stuff in the same place. I’m sure many people still miss George Clooney, or think Law & Order was best with Briscoe and Logan, but they’re still fans of the shows.

Well, I suppose the Mets' Briscoe & Logan are Tom Seaver and Jerry Koosman, and maybe the part of George Clooney is played by Mike Piazza... but really, how different is it? I haven't noticed any great drop-off in popularity of Shakespeare's plays since Lord Olivier made his last exit. In fact, the change helps make it fun; every new player and team provides a Compare & Contrast with the memories of the past.

I actually still enjoy ER, even in its post-peak years, and I'm an avid watcher of shows like Grey's Anatomy and Lost. But for pulse-pounding drama, sports (particularly baseball, of course) has given me unparalleled thrills. I will never, ever forget Game 6 of the 1986 Championship Series (won by the Mets in 16 innings); or, it goes without saying, Game 6 of that year's World Series -- the most exciting single event in the history of history; or even a regular season game like this one... which made me scream so loud I think my parents thought I'd fallen out my bedroom window. You want to talk reality TV? I got your unscripted drama right here.

And so ol' Bill Shakespeare said it best, as always (he must've been a sportswriter before his time) -- the play's the thing.

Season To Taste?

It was the noted philosopher and all-around role model Mae West who said, "Too much of a good thing is wonderful." Or at least she was quoted as saying that; when I was teaching, I always told my classes that everything in math is named after the guy who stole it from the guy who discovered it. I think quote attribution is similar -- and since she played a character in movies that was similar to what we know of her offscreen persona, there's an extra layer of complexity.

In any case, the wisdom of the quote was certainly tested this week. I think most of us who live in the Northeast have a fondness, or at least a tolerance, for the variety of the seasons. Even winter can be pleasing in its own way -- Currier & Ives got pretty famous with rustic winter scenes -- but I think a lot of us would have been fine with a couple of inches at Christmas, and another inch or two every so often just to keep it pretty. Instead, we basically got 2 months of brown and then the whole winter's worth of snow in one day.

I guess it shouldn't be too surprising, really; remember summer? Kind of nondescript and gray... until the temperature suddenly goes up to like 8 thousand degrees. If the pattern holds, spring will probably be completely blah, and then on May 1 the flowers will come out and the trees will turn green all at the same time.

Actually, it's autumn I'm a bit concerned about; if the kids are standing under a decent-sized tree when all the leaves fall at once, somebody's going to get hurt.

In keeping with the general "overkill" theme, we had not one but two snow days, occasioned by the always-fateful Snow Day Declared the Night Before. Seemingly inevitably, Day 2 dawned bright, clear and calm, and with completely cleared roads. So the family was treated to an extra day of Cabin Fever, and just generally 2 kids bouncing off each other like bumper cars.

To add insult to injury... the superintendent of the school where I went to high school was quoted in the paper about the necessity to cancel in that district because of the difficulty of transporting students in that town -- when we were notorious for never cancelling school, no matter what.

Say it with me: Fortunately, I'm not bitter.

And really, the pain of The Blizzard of '07, or whatever you would call it, was magnified by the contrast to the previous day. I had just heard the most joyful words of every winter -- no, not "Merry Christmas" or even "Super Bowl Sunday". The words I wait all winter to hear are, "Pitchers and catchers report." And so, in the depths of winter, a tiny green shoot of hope pokes through.....

Check Your Local Listings

I have to admit that I'm a big fan of reality shows. That probably sounds like it ought to qualify me for the Washington's Birthday Sale on lobotomies, but in truth I'm a little more discriminating than that.

I prefer the shows that feature people who can actually do something, competing with their talents, to those that are about trying to balance on a log or live in a house with a bunch of strangers. My personal jury is still out on the newest one, Top Design, but I have been an avid viewer of Project Runway, the just-concluded Top Chef, and (to a lesser degree) America's Next Top Model. Ironically, I've never been a huge American Idol fan, which probably has its origin in the same contrarian streak in me that had the school-aged Mark wearing doubleknits while all those around me wore jeans.

Combining my interest in reality shows with my son's well-documented fondness for Food Network makes me the ideal audience for The Next Food Network Star, which combines Top Chef with challenges that assess the chef's TV-hosting skills. Part of the swag associated with winning that contest is hosting an actual program on the Food Network. And while I'm pretty sure I don't have the skills to succeed on either side of the competition, I still enjoyed envisioning what my program might look like....

The more I imagined the outcome, however, the more I realized: digital cable may have brought about an explosion of cable networks but I'd be hard-pressed to think of one that would be right for my version of "Cooking With Dad".

Actually, maybe the Sci-Fi Network would enjoy the part where we're cooking along peacefully and suddenly the calm is rent by the bloodcurdling shriek of my daughter pounding up the stairs from the playroom screaming bloody murder (hotly pursued by my son wailing that he didn't do it). Believe me, it's the kind of thing that blows out the sound engineer's eardrums.

There might be a few other features of the program that would be a tough sell. I might not make very good eye contact with the camera, considering I'm almost always either reading or doing a puzzle (whether crossword or Sudoku) while I'm cooking. And we'd have to take frequent commercial breaks so I can answer the phone and take messages for The Pastor.

Because of all three of the above issues, I tend to find it a challenge to get the whole thing done in a 30-minute timeslot; on TV, we could edit out the dead spots. I can tell you that my family would really enjoy having the meals come out right on time every night!

I should probably also mention that I might have a hard time sustaining an ongoing series with my somewhat... ah, "limited" culinary range (does frozen ravioli count as a recipe?) -- not to mention that my frequent reliance on cheese, cream, butter, etc. would probably leave most of my viewers dead or recuperating from bypass surgery before the season was over. But hey, it works for Paula Deen.

Living the Dream

This past week or so has brought a tiny ripple of excitement to my life: a number of people have commented on my Sudoku blog entry (and since it doesn't go without saying, commented positively). Naturally, I always have a number of people respond to what I write, but this is one of the rare occasions that the number was greater than zero.

The danger in receiving affirmation, of course, is that I might revert to the state I described in one of my earliest postings -- if I do something someone likes, I have to figure out exactly what made it enjoyable, and then try to duplicate that exactly. But of course, that way lies madness.

It did make me reflect on the event itself, as well as the other times I've engaged in a public contest of some sort. I have already alluded to my spelling bee debacle... well, perhaps debacle isn't the right word. How about "soul-scarring experience"? And while I was writing about my shipboard obsession with karaoke, I failed to mention that I was equally hooked on the trivia contests held frequently (especially after I won the first one I tried, which as you know is exactly like when crack dealers give out free samples).

As much fun as that was -- although it would have been better if the prize had been an upgrade to an outside stateroom, rather than a plastic trophy-- the contest I look back on most fondly was Broadcaster for a Day.

At the time we were living near Albany and the Yankees' AA minor league affiliate was located in the area as well. When they announced a Broadcaster for a Day contest, I nearly jumped out of my skin. If it would have helped, I probably would have slept on the sidewalk like one of those knuckleheads looking for a PS3.

As with almost any other mental illness, to understand my reaction you really need to understand my childhood. I fell in love with baseball at a really early age, but as a realist from nearly as early an age, I understood I was probably not going to get to live out that dream. If not, I probably got a subconscious hint from my own fantasies: like many kids I wanted to pretend to be a ballplayer, particularly a Met. But whom to identify with? A couple of the best players were black, and while I'm certainly no racist I am extremely literal-minded. This also let out all the left-handed guys and the pitchers. Bud Harrelson was close -- small & skinny and not a great hitter -- but a switch-hitter, and besides I knew they'd never let me play shortstop. So I ended up with ... Don Hahn. I have to tell you, if you can't dream any bigger than Don Hahn, you probably shouldn't bother dreaming at all.

However, I was primarily learning to love baseball through the voices of Lindsey Nelson, Bob Murphy, and Ralph Kiner, the Mets' radio/TV broadcast team. And although I eventually tumbled to the fact that baseball broadcast jobs are even scarcer than baseball playing jobs, it's always been my answer to the question, "If you could have any job in the world...?" . Of course, the flames were probably fanned by the fact that almost any native English-speaker (and a few members of the animal kingdom) would be more coherent than Ralph Kiner.
So naturally at the appointed hour I showed up at the local mall to do my thing. The test would be to sit in front of a TV playing a game tape and pretend to do play-by-play. I was a bit embarrassed to note that among the competitors was a handful of boys, probably 9 or 10 years old; I wasn't sure how I felt trying to beat kids. I felt a little better when one of the kids went up and his performance consisted of, "It's a ground ball. (long pause) And he's out." Clearly I would be saving him from embarrassing himself -- although it's true that Phil Rizzuto did pretty well for himself with a smiliar level of detail.

All I remember about my turn is that the tape was of a Yankees game (of course). It was the 9th inning and Tim Leary was pitching. Actually, he wasn't; he was mostly pacing around the mound sighing -- which was depriving me of "action" to describe while my precious minutes ticked away. I did know that his career at that point was kind of on the skids, so I said, "He's probably afraid to throw the ball -- lately they've been coming back at him faster than they went in."

In any case, it was enough to win the day, and on July 16, 1991, I stepped into the pressbox at Heritage Park (a big step up, literally as well as figuratively, from the summers I worked the concession stand there). When I got there, it turned out that "Broadcaster for a Day" really meant "Broadcaster for an Inning" ... but I whined and fussed and convinced the regular play-by-play guy that they really promised me the whole game.

For nine lovely innings I got to live the dream... and along the way, I began to think to myself, "Hey, maybe if I really impress this guy, he'll invite me back." Of course, the thing about most broadcasters is that they love the sound of their own voice, so he was always going to be a one-man booth if he had any say in it... yeah, that's it. That must be why. If he hadn't been so jealous of his airtime, I'd be in the booth right now.

Well, not right now, it's pretty cold out there. And not there, because the team moved about 10 years ago. But you get the idea.

It's been a long time and I frankly don't remember anything much about the game itself. I do have it on tape, but I haven't listened to it in years. I wonder if hearing the game again would have that same powerful memory effect that music does -- to bring you back instantly to the spot. What I do remember is that I tried valiantly to soak it all in, to absorb every minute of the experience and the thrill. I had limited success with that, as I think is almost always the case, but I do know it was one of the most exciting things that ever happened to me.

The Yanks' AA affiliate is in Trenton, NJ, now, and there are only a couple of minor league teams within 100 miles or so... but if anyone involved with those teams (or any others) are reading this thing -- hey, give me a call, I work cheap.