The Noble Art of BandWagon-ing
Loyalty should never be bestowed
Much this-n-that from a weekend of so-so sports. I mean, when I’m splayed on the Sunday afternoon couch watching the Mexican Open — the what? — you know the pickins were slim. A bit o’ Three Dot wandering, then. . .
MPWS and The Noble Art of Bandwagon-Jumping. The Pirates are 20-9, best record in the NL. Before dining on the Nationals over the weekend, Pittsburgh took two of three from the mighty Dodgers. The website Spotrac says Ell-Lay should win that fight, 226-75. That’s the payroll differential. Thankfully, hardball isn’t checkbooks at 10 paces. At least not all the time.
Frequent Perusers will note I dropped the Buccos from my passion list several seasons ago. Simple reasoning: I’m not dying for a team that wouldn’t grieve my death.
Some might also recall my affection for front-running fans. They make the games go ‘round. I don’t begrudge diehards. I just think their loyalties are misspent. I’d rather root for a toaster that lasts a decade than a team that consistently stinks. You’re getting your money's worth with the toaster.
Bandwagon-istas can affect change. If enough show their disdain by keeping their wallets holstered, maybe things improve.
When it comes to sports loyalty, there is a thin line between what is admirable and what makes you a shmuck. The “thank-you-sir-may-I-have-another’’ school of fandom puzzles me. What was so great about attending every Bengals home game between 1992 and Marvin Lewis?
If you’re in a bad relationship, do you hang around for the misery, just so you can attest to how loyal you are? Are relationships with teams more important than relationships with spouses and family members?
You better believe there are folks out there who divorced their spouses, but not their Bengals.
I divorced the Pirates July 31, 2018. That’s the day Buccos GM Neal Huntington traded his team’s future to Tampa, for a pitcher named Chris Archer.
"Chris Archer has been, and projects to be, an upper echelon Major League starting pitcher who we are thrilled to add to our organization to help us win games for the next three-plus years," said Huntington.
For the record, Archer went 6-12 with a 4.92 ERA in two years and 172 innings with the Pirates. He averaged nearly four walks and two homers per nine innings. For that slice of glory, Huntington traded SP Tyler Glasnow, OF Austin Meadows and SP Shane Baz. Meadows has been an all-star, Glasnow has been dominant when he’s been healthy and Baz, also oft-injured, might still have a future in the Rays rotation.
The Pirates, losers of 100 and 101 games the previous two seasons, more than justified my separation. Until now.
I have no problems hopping back on the Buc-wagon. I ain’t apologizing for taking a peek at their games on the MLB app, or listening to them on the radio when the Reds aren’t playing. I ain’t apologizing for nothin’.
Sports are commodities, same as toasters. When I feel the Pirates are giving me value for my emotional dollar, I’m back in. That’s not yet, even with their touched April.
Baseball’s Big 162 tends to reveal poseurs. At the moment, the Pirates are a tech stock, when tech stocks boomed early on. Do they have the foundation in place for sustained success? The fundamentals? I don’t think so.
Pittsburgh leads the league in runs. They lead the league in run differential. The Pirates have 14 more stolen bases than the NL’s 2nd-best stolen-base team. For you stat-geeks, they are 4th in all of baseball in Barrel Rate and 5th in Exit Velocity. Translation: They hit the ball squarely and they hit it hard.
More importantly, they just extended the contract of their best player, OF Bryan Reynolds, and there are indications they’re thinking of doing likewise for SS O’Neill Cruz and SP Mitch Keller. That shows tightwad owner Bob Nutting is at least trying.
I look at all these glad tidings and see 77-85.
So much good stuff from so many unproven players, whose fall to earth will be every bit as dramatic as their rocket-rise in April.
Johnny Bandwagon is enjoying the boomlet, but he’s not getting caught up in it. Busted hearts need more than a great month to risk themselves again.
The Pirates play 3 in St. Pete starting Tuesday. I guess we’ll learn a little about their staying power. Nine toes off the bandwagon, for now.
Now, then. . .
THE NBA is a league of stars and you can take that anyway you like. Prima ballerinas, embracing mirrors. I haven’t watched an entire game since LeBron was a Cavalier. The first time. I haven’t watched a playoff series since Bill Laimbeer was elbowing guys into the upper deck. To each his own.
I might give Lakers-Warriors a go.
Round 2 of the Western Conference finals. James-v-Steph Curry. They aren’t who they were, but as Curry showed Sunday, they can still make us say WTF. Curry's 50 — 30 in the 2nd half! — willed the Warriors over favored Sacramento in Game 7, Round 1. James performed similar magic in LA’s win over Memphis.
No one epitomizes why we watch sports more than the chance to watch aging superstars rage. The dying light provokes the best from them. We remember why we were drawn to them in the first place. Yahoo!:
It is easy to lose sight of just how great these guys are, and the impact they have on the postseason. Each is older. Each has missed enough time due to injuries the last few seasons to take them out of MVP consideration and slightly obscure their continued importance. Each has, at times, looked his age, including in these playoffs.
Star power will make me watch. It’s what the NBA does best.
1967 Camaro Z28
MY 64 1/2 MUSTANG. . . I bought it in 1978, my junior year in college, for $1,600 which back then for me was all the money in the world. It was an original, a 3-speed manual with 260 horsepower, a Falcon engine, not the 289 which came on shortly after.
Midnight blue, white interior, AM radio, heater worked when it felt like it.
Flew. Even with the smaller V-8, the ‘Stang did an easy 70 on the interstate. It was the vehicular version of Hunter Greene’s fastball. If I didn’t pay attention to the speedometer, I’d be pushing 80 before I knew it. If she had a set o’ wings. . .
I had it two years, put 25K miles on it, graduated college, needed a vehicle that wasn’t prone to having stupid little things break down. I sold it for $1,800 and bought, um, a brand new. . . Chevy Chevette. Swear on Henry Ford’s Bible.
At about 60K, the Chevette started rusting out on the driver’s side, just below my feet. Every time I drove in the rain and nicked a puddle, water geyser-ed up from the floorboards and soaked my, um, crotch. Imagine how fun that was, on the way to pick up a date.
I was never a Car Guy, not in the fix ‘em myself sense. My brother had a ‘73 Chevelle, my sis an MG Midget. My first car was a ‘74 Vega. I always had a 5-quart plastic jug of 10W-30 in the trunk, because the Vega burned a quart every 500 miles. Had it three years, never changed the oil.
If I could have had any car back then (when cars were interesting and every year’s new releases were anticipated hotly) it would have been a ‘67 Camaro Z28.
Yours, please. Diamonds, dogs, dream makers.
AND FINALLY. . . NY Times legendary columnist Maureen Dowd mourns the passing of the Newsroom Culture that predominated until a couple decades ago. Laptops killed it, COVID hastened the death and made it complete. Most newsrooms now are ghost towns. They look Route 66 towns, after the interstates re-routed the traffic.
As a sports guy, I was never part of the newsroom scene. After a few years at the Enquirer, I was there so infrequently they took away my desk. Fair enough. Dowd does a nice job describing what it once was like, when papers had big circulations and unmistakable souls.
The legendary percussive soundtrack of a paper’s newsroom in the 1940s was best described by the Times culture czar Arthur Gelb in his memoir, “City Room”: “There was an overwhelming sense of purpose, fire and life: the clacking rhythm of typewriters, the throbbing of great machines in the composing room on the floor above, reporters shouting for copy boys to pick up their stories.” There was also the pungent aroma of vice: a carpet of cigarette butts, clerks who were part-time bookies, dice games, brass spittoons and a glamorous movie-star mistress wandering about. (The Times never went as far as Cary Grant’s editor did in “His Girl Friday,” putting a pickpocket on the payroll.)
TUNE O’ THE DAY. . . Ironically, my favorite Beach Boys tune was a cover. It was written in 1966, for the Ronettes, Phil Spector’s girl-group creation. The Boys adopted it in ‘69. It was a perfect fit for the angelic voice of Carl Wilson.
That whole newsroom atmosphere was part of what attracted me to journalism. I had visions of booze bottles in desk drawers, cigars and cigarettes polluting away, paper flying everywhere, keyboards clacking and the hustle and bustle of a newsroom breaking great stories, upholding freedom of speech and the press and, in general, looking like the Daily Planet from the "Superman" films.
Oh, how delusional I was. The closest I came to any of that was the UC News Record newsroom, 2009-2012. My internships with Cox Media Group and the Enquirer had me sitting alone, in a quiet newsroom, with maybe 10 other folks in it, tops. My first full-time gig in Indiana had me in a newsroom that had all of five folks in it, though the décor and the empty desks told me what that newsroom used to be.
Sadly, I think I entered the game a few decades too late to experience that newsroom scene that Dowd wrote of.
When it comes to cars, I'm currently aiming for whatever the record amount of miles is for a Chevrolet Cobalt. I've got a 2008, affectionately named Gertrude and nicknamed "Gerturd" by my wife, which just crossed over the 290,000-mile threshold last week. I've put roughly 250,000 of those miles on it myself since 2011. I've replaced one starter, one alternator, one timing chain and one battery in it -- that's it, besides the regular oil changes, brakes or the occasional need for a CV joint. The realistic goal is to get it to 300,000, but I'd love to get her to 400,000 or more. Sadly, to try to extend her life, I've limited her drive time to the Tri-State only, so 400,000 may be a whole other decade away.
When it comes to bandwagoning, the older I've gotten, the more understanding of it I've become. I hated kids in school who, growing up here, suddenly were Yankees fans or Braves fans because of a few world titles. But now, at 46, I get it. I wouldn't continue to spend my money and eat at a restaurant, just because I'd eaten at that restaurant since I was a kid, if that restaurant had gone to crap (i.e. Ponderosa). So, I don't blame folks who want to pitch their original team in the trash and find a better one. As you perfectly said, the team wouldn't give two hoots if you died tomorrow (like most employers as well), so why should you give two hoots about them if they stink?
I got my used sky blue 2017 Buick Cascada Convertible last year. It was on my sandpail list. I couldn't afford it, but there she sits, beautiful, mostly in the garage as I protect her like a diamond. I named her "Sky". That's the problem with sandpail lists...it's too expensive to own, but I had to have it. Now I have to give up other things, like eating out more, or having a Captain Morgan rather than a Hemmingway Pilar, which is way off my charts.
The Bengals '92 until Marvin. Many of those years I had season tickets. And every season the fans were led to believe this would have to get better if we just hung on during outrageous "ticket Promotions"...and every year was the same, worse...worse. The first round draft pick sometimes only made it through the opening day. And, most of the ones who made it, weren't first round caliber, except compared to the other losers on the team. I remember the hot dogs weren't great, but seemed to get better when they graduated to Mets. But as time went on when you purchased a hot dog at halftime, it would still be frozen on the inside. Then you would take it out to the isle next to the food stand and dig out your onions, which were usually frozen. The mustard pump was oftentimes empty. The beer got more expensive every year. It was selling like hotcakes, even back then but as each team got worse every year, the beer prices increased, and amazingly, because people were more disgusted about the lack of effort from the players, they drank more beer than ever, knowing 'this is going to be horrible'...and the prices just kept going up. I guess after your first one or two the only thing you felt you could do to get thru the game was drink more. The fans were caught between a rock and a hard place. I didn't drink beer much. Especially in the winter when I had to almost get undressed peeling off layers of clothes to go to the restroom...where I feared if I stayed there too long, redressing I might miss a "First Down"!
What I learned most, was how to despise the Stealers (not sic!) and their aggressive fans who bullied their way into the stadium, all louder and twice as big as the Bengals fans. The team taught us that cheating on each and every play was acceptable for them, "as long as you don't get caught" as it was stated by a Stealer player in an interview. Kill or be killed was their motto, and their biggest thrill was to take out any Bengal player who even tried to look like a threat to them on the field, generally when our player wasn't looking, and not even in on the current play, before he could do any damage. I lost interest each week only being able to cheer when we got a First Down in a game...which wasn't often.
I knew the only way to see this team turn around was to give up the season tickets. And, it worked! Joe Burrow was drafted and "abracadabra". Here we are. So THIS is how it's supposed to feel!!! All those years wasted!