Out….and safe

It’s been a rough day for the gays—Senate Republicans still prefer felons to LGBTs when it comes to military service; Jodie Foster defends Mel Gibson—but here’s some good news (admittedly a few days old) from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Cardinals indicate they will treat gay Kiss Cam request like any other.

Lest we get too grateful, the Cardinals’ official position, in response to a specific request from representatives of an LGBT group to be featured on the Kiss Cam during an “OUT at the Ballpark” event, was simply that they never took requests for the Kiss Cam, and they’d stick to that policy in this case as well. A spokesman for the team, noting that they were receiving calls both for and against the notion of showing same-sex couples on the Kiss Cam, gave this ringing endorsement of the all-American ideal of equality: “No matter what we do tomorrow, we can’t win.”

Nonetheless, you’ll be unsurprised to learn that the homophobes read “Cardinals….will treat gay Kiss Cam request like any other” as “Cardinals will grant extra-special privileges to godless sodomites in the interest of corrupting innocent children and making the baby Jesus cry.” Here’s a sampling of what the red-blooded Amurricans had to say in the comment thread (as always, reproduced with all original grammatical flourishes, and not including a handful that were axed from the site for their over-the-top hate speech):

Wear a red t-shirt that says… ‘gay carninal fan’ so they konw who you are… now if a man with his wife and 2 small kids happen to knock you on your ass… I’m ok with that…

Get rid of the kiss cam then you get rid of the 200 flamers demanding to flaunt their perversion. Gay Pride Day at the ballpark can the Cardinals really afford to have an empty stadium and how many of the real men who are the players would refuse to play. Last of all, commit an act of perversion in front of my kids and suffer the consequences. I WILL go to jail if necessary to protect my kids from perversion being on display in front of them at the ballpark in a park or where ever.

This isn’t California. Keep the deviant behavior in the closet – not in front of families.

This is like the ground zero mosque debate. Sure, two guys/gals have the right to kiss IMO, but does that need to be on public display in a ballpark? We have the right to have other sex acts too, but there won’t be a Lewinsky Cam or a glory hole cam in the mens room. A ballpark is not the palce for film of everything every person has the right to do.

We’ve seen this theme—the fear of Man’s Last Safe Space being violated by women, queers, and other not-sufficiently-manly types—before, but I’m immensely entertained by the specific ways this story sent the homophobes into a hyperbolic whirlwind. Most of the objectors swore that they’d never, ever buy another ticket to a Cardinal game if the team consented to show same-sex kisses, a position that intrigues me for a couple of reasons. First, I’m dying to know how many of these folks will stick to their guns when and if the team starts winning again; it’s easy (and, frankly, tempting) to boycott a streaky, moody club that isn’t going to the postseason. Second, I’m tickled to death that these dudes would rather cede their territory completely than have it infected by The Gay. Their dedication isn’t to the game of baseball, but to the cultural construct of baseball as a testosterone-only zone—yet I imagine they’d be the first to say that my girlfriend and my sister and my mother and I aren’t real baseball fans like they are.

Let’s not neglect one more important point: The Kiss Cam is completely and insultingly idiotic, no matter who’s locking lips on screen. I’ll rant in some future post about the proliferation of irritating ballpark gimmicks designed to make the game more palatable to people with short attention spans; for now, though, if the Kiss Cam can’t be banished entirely, at least it can be an equal-opportunity embarrassment.

Male chauvinist pigskin

In my belief system, football is to baseball as lemon bars are to brownies. It’s a perfectly cromulent sport, and in the absence of the clearly superior alternative, it’ll do just fine, but it’s not the stuff of agony and rapture, and it’s not something I expected to be blogging about.

But then Ines Sainz walked into a locker room.

If you’re not up to speed, here’s the short version of what happened:

1) Sainz, a sports reporter for TV Azteca, entered the New York Jets’ locker room to interview quarterback Mark Sanchez.

2) A number of Jets players greeted her with displays ranging from Cro-Magnon courtship to outright harassment.

3) One of them, Clinton Portis, later surmised publicly that a female reporter in a locker room must be motivated chiefly by the desire to see 53 hunky guys’ “packages.”

4) A day later, Portis, presumably under pressure from the Jets or the NFL, apologized.

5) Male football fans nationwide were rounded up and forcibly castrated.

Wait—sorry. Number 5 didn’t actually happen; you’d simply have assumed so if you read virtually any of the online response to the brouhaha. Check out a few of the comments (faithfully reproduced, spelling and all) on the first article I unwittingly clicked:

His only mistake was apologizing. The PC crap makes me sick.

he meant that a female, reporter or not, would love to go into a locker room with 53 strong guys walking around naked. IT’S TRUE. Plus their millionaires. Romantic Stories happen like that. In regards to professionalism, what was she wearing because she’s a hott.

If there must be equity to keep the feminists from squealing, ban all reporters from the locker rooms.

I’ve noticed that Seniorita’s tails stick out high like that too. I wonder if it’s Mexican genes or just Mexican jeans?

If you read into the story about inez-HOT-sainz, she was cool with everything, the OTHER broad with her was offended and demanded she do something about it…..but you don’t see pictures of her, because she doesn’t have a lot of the same qualities of inez…..if you know what i mean….FEMINIST RAGE trying to create a problem where inez had none.

Broads like that kill me. She wouldn’t have a job as a sport reporter if it wasn’t for that body. Stay out all man locker room dressed like a hooker period.

Unless they are a bull dyke, they likely would find at least 1 of 53 attractive and stimulating. In more cases than not, they would find 35-45+ interesting to look at.

Ines Sainz being called a “reporter”. Is like Janet Reno being called centerfold material……

Next thing you know construction workers and pimps will be issuing formal apologies. Or better every man on earth will have to apologize for being well…..a man.

let these men shower in piece.

She’ll be in playboy baring all soon enough.

When another woman and I pointed out the stinking, sweaty pile of misogyny accumulating in the comment thread, the rebuke was swift and terribly creative:

Get your asses back in the kitchen where you belong!

[Goes to kitchen. Gets peanut-butter Oreo. Two, actually. Returns to computer.]

The themes here are as wearyingly predictable as the Cardinals’ late-season swoon: “Hot” women deserve whatever men do to them; non-hot women aren’t worth men’s time to begin with; lesbians aren’t actually women at all; women who don’t want to be harassed should quit being so female when (straight) men are around; and feminists exist to emasculate men.

The overarching message, of course, is that professional sports are men’s province, a “man-cave” of enormous proportions where women are guests at best and invaders at worst. When Clinton Portis apologized for his crudeness, reasonable people appreciated the gesture (or, at least, the fact that whoever scripted it understood the wisdom of not alienating forty-plus percent of your fan base). The dudebros of Amurrica, on the other hand, knew that he had just signed away the deed to one of the last bastions of alpha-masculinity. He had, like, symbolically handed over the remote control and let the nagging, haranguing, can’t-live-with-’em-but-can’t-live-without-’em broads change the channel from ESPN to Oxygen.

Ah, sports. The thrill of victory….the agony of defeat….the tragicomedy of insecure hypermasculinity.

There’s a serious conversation to be had about the double standards that apply to female sports reporters and on-air personalities—the folks decrying Sainz’s “unprofessional” attire neglect to note that that’s probably precisely the apparel she’s expected to wear in order to continue drawing a paycheck—but the dudes (and, sigh, the smattering of patriarchy-soaked women) currently controlling the discussion aren’t remotely ready to have it.

For a mostly enlightened perspective on the Sainz saga, read Jelisa Castrodale’s piece for NBC Sports—and for a reminder of why we still need feminism, read the comments.

E pur si muove!

I promised, and fully intended, to wait until tomorrow to resume carping at Tony La Russa; however, I cannot. In the wake of another Cardinal loss—this one in 12 innings to the Braves, who tried very earnestly to let the Cards win it several times—I need to take a quick late-night dig at Tony’s managerial bullheadedness.

Some happy brew of historical record and urban legend tells us that Galileo, when informed by a Vatican heavy that the Earth, being the center of the universe, could not possibly move about the sun, shrugged his shoulders and muttered “E pur si muove”— “And yet it moves!” In other words, you can say it as often as you like, but reality demonstrates otherwise. Point, Galileo! (They proceeded to imprison him and execute him nine years later. But he was right, dammit.)

Only slightly less revelatory than the news that the earth orbits the sun is the news that Tony La Russa is a relentlessly formulaic (some would say “obsessive”) manager (some would say “over-manager”).* For example, in the cosmos Tony inhabits, left-handed hitters cannot hit against left-handed pitchers as successfully as they can against righties, which is why he brought in the team’s only non-ailing lefty “specialist,” Dennys Reyes, to face Jason Heyward leading off the seventh inning of a 2-2 game this afternoon.

I put those quotation marks around “specialist” because—guess what? It turns out that left-handed batters were hitting .288 and slugging .394 against Reyes entering today’s game, while righties were hitting .208 and slugging .226 (the rest of his platoon splits are equally stark). While none of the Cards’ relief corps had any meaningful history against Heyward, there were pitchers in the bullpen with markedly better records against left-handed hitters. But in La Russa Land, lefties come in to face lefties, and the empirical evidence we’ve racked up while watching Reyes serve up big hits all year doesn’t seem to count for much.

Those who don’t study the past are doomed to repeat it, of course, and thus it surprised precisely no one when Reyes needed a mere four pitches to be taken out of the park on a towering Heyward homer that may, in fact, still be orbiting the earth in a fashion that would make the 17th-century Holy See feel vindicated.

Statistics show that when doctrine faces off against real life, real life usually wins out, as it did again today in supremely frustrating fashion.

Galileo would understand. He always had trouble with Cardinals.

* I feel that there should be a term for Tony’s system. “Stubbormetrics”?

The day we didn’t hate the Yankees

September 11, 2001, upended much of what we thought we understood about ourselves, for better and for worse. If you’re a baseball fan, chances are that one of the admittedly trivial yet symbolically startling symptoms you experienced in the weeks after 9/11 was…..a soft spot for the Yankees.

I’m not saying you rooted for them, or went out and bought yourself a [pink] Yankees cap, or decided that Steinbrenner was really a pretty decent guy after all. I’m just saying that maybe you decided it was some sort of cosmic compensation that they found themselves in the World Series that year, a small salve for the people of New York, a sign that the universe’s Official Scorer was still paying attention.

They were strange times, and they were chronicled brilliantly a few years ago in an HBO documentary called  Nine Innings from Ground Zero, which you can—and should—watch on MLB Network this week, buy from Amazon or MLB.com, or rent from Netflix.

The hour-long show profiles a handful of New Yorkers with intimate connections both to 9/11 and to the Yankees (including the irresistible and baseball-savvy daughter of one of the pilots killed that day), following them through the postseason and the 2001 World Series, which we’d surely rank among the greatest Fall Classics of all time with or without the added poignancy of its context. It’s touching but not manipulative, and it keeps its eyes on the ball, understanding that to the faithful, baseball’s got enough emotional power of its own that it doesn’t need extra layers of sap. The only clip I’ve found online is of George W. Bush talking about throwing out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium; he’s not allowed on my blog, but the fact that I’ve watched this documentary three times despite knowing that he and John Ashcroft* are in it speaks to its quality, I think.

I’ll get back to spitting venom at the fantastically frustrating Cardinals tomorrow. Today, bigger things.

* Two of my chief sources of pride as a Missourian are 1) the pre-2010 Cardinals and 2) the fact that our state elected a dead man to the Senate over John Ashcroft.

Love-love

It’s a simultaneous double-header at my house this evening: I’m streaming the Cardinals’ game via MLB.com, and watching a U.S. Open quarterfinal match between Kim Clijsters and Sam Stosur on the television with the volume muted.

Muted, that is, until I saw two familiar faces next to each other in the stands: Frank Robinson and Hank Aaron. That’s 1,341 home runs, 6,714 hits, and a whole lot of awesome sitting quietly in the President’s Box.

And it only got better when Pam Shriver interviewed them both: Aaron named Clijsters as his favorite player and marveled at her ability to return to elite form after having a child; Robinson explained why he prefers the women’s style of play to the men’s these days; neither of them felt any need to apologize for being fans of women’s tennis or to talk about Maria Sharapova’s hotness; and Alec Baldwin, who was sitting right behind them, got third billing.

All-the-Way Faye

Barring a late-inning comeback and a late-season realignment of the stars, today’s Cardinal game likely signals the death of our hopes of winning the NL Central this year—which is why, despite not being a fundamentally morbid person, I found myself thinking about obituaries this afternoon. And one of my all-time favorite obituaries is this one from eight years ago, upon the death of Faye Dancer, the All-American Girls’ Professional Baseball League star whose hair-on-fire style of play (and life) earned her the nickname “All-the-Way Faye” and a thinly fictionalized portrayal by Madonna in the movie A League of Their Own.

A quick sampling:

Dancer once recalled that when she was playing for Peoria in 1947, two gangsters would come by to watch. They’d arrive in a blue Packard with bulletproof glass.

“The kingpin liked me,” she said. “He offered to buy my folks a new car. He offered me a golden palomino and said he’d put me up in the sporting goods business. Once, he even asked me if I wanted anyone killed. I told him, ‘Maybe the umpire.'”

Better yet, though, go read Dancer’s own words about her career in baseball (and note that Pepper Paire, a.k.a. Lavonne Davis, will appear in her own post on this blog in the near future, as we were fortunate enough to meet her and absorb some of her still-sharp, still-hilarious wisdom earlier this summer):

I met Madonna when they were making the movie in Skokie, Illinois. I liked her. She was just like anyone else who was earning 60 million a year….

The guys would look at our short skirts, then look at our legs and wonder how we could slide without taking all the hide off ourselves. Well, we did take the hide off ourselves. Today the men can’t even play if they have a strawberry, and they’re making all those millions. God, whoever thought it would get like that?….

[Manager Bill] Wamby didn’t know too much about how to handle women. He was going to school to become a minister, and when we’d cuss, he’d look at us with daggers. I thought, “How in the hell did he ever get in with a bunch of girls?” Because he made an unassisted triple play [in the 1920 World Series], that was the reason. Other than that, he didn’t know too much about the game….

A lot of these little taverns had blowfish, big round fish that had thorns. We stole those. What did we need a blowfish for? It was just the idea of taking them, that was the main thing. One tavern owner told us, “I won’t charge you for your drinks tonight if you’ll give me my fish back.” I said, “I don’t know anything about your fish.” He said, “You were the only people in this room, and I’d like my blowfish back”….

Enjoy!—and try not to walk around singing “I’d like my blowfish back” to the tune of “I want my MTV” for the rest of the day, as I’m now destined to do. It’s not bad, I guess, as funeral dirges go.

Pete LaCock’s grand slam is old enough to run for President

Thirty-five years ago today, a legendary career ended in a ludicrous way. On September 3, 1975, Bob Gibson threw his last pitch, and Pete LaCock, Cub utility player and son of Hollywood Squares host Peter Marshall, hit it out of the park for an eventual game-winning grand slam.

I haven’t found a video of the fateful at-bat, and I’m not sure I’d want to view it anyway. Here, watch this instead:

Pete LaCock can’t do that.

I do not think that word means what you think it means

Breaking news out of St. Louis: Tony LaRussa doesn’t think the Cardinals have been underachieving.

Now, to be fair, this is the same guy who’s gone on record saying that a Glenn Beck rally isn’t political and that Chris Duncan was a legitimate left-fielder. We don’t pay him to be a wordsmith, we pay him to be a Birdsmith (ha! see what I did there?), and there’s limited value in picking apart the sometimes baffling stuff that comes out of his mouth.

But my nervous hands need something to do while the Cards try to preserve a 3-2 seventh-inning lead over the despised Reds, so let’s pause to consider Tony’s latest quote, which seems to me to imply one of two things:

1) The Cardinals are achieving! Yeah. No. They stink. They just lost 384 games in a single week to teams that they should have swept.

2) This is the best they can do! Lord, please, say it ain’t so. Does somebody need to remind Tony that he’s got a first-ballot Hall-of-Famer, a couple of batting champions, a pair of Cy Young Award winners, and a potential Rookie of the Year in the dugout? Should we review the fact that at least three guys in his starting nine have seen their averages drop precipitously since a year ago?

Tony, dear, we’ve come to accept your lineup-tinkering and your bullpen-fussing and your juicer-defending. But for the love of Doug Harvey, at least do your team the service of expecting more from them than they’ve delivered lately.

It might be….it could be….but will it be?

Dutchie Caray, the widow of Harry Caray, has publicly thrown her support behind Ryne Sandberg’s candidacy to become the next manager of the Chicago Cubs:

“Ryne and Margaret [Sandberg’s wife] are good friends of mine,” said Caray, who was wearing a Cubs hat and No. 23 Sandberg jersey. “I love them. I think he’s a great guy. He’s come a long way, and he’s paid his dues.”

….she believes her late husband would support a Sandberg-for-manager campaign.

“He would be very happy I think,” Caray said. “He really liked Ryno. Between him and Stan Musial, those were his two very, very favorite ballplayers. That’s a lot to say for Ryne because I don’t think Stan is able to do any managing today [Musial is 90].”

So it’s official, right? The Chicago fans, who some might say are owed some consideration after a rough century, want Sandberg. The Cubs’ roster, which is currently a mash-up of scrappy young guys who already know Ryno from Triple-A and mostly overpaid veterans who could stand a dose of his work ethic, seems designed to respond well to him. Harry Freaking Caray is lobbying for him from beyond the grave.

Yep, it’s official—the Cubs will hire somebody else, because the Cubs never, ever do anything right.

Dibble revisited, and my brilliant f***ing idea

Rob Dibble will have to ply his trade someplace other than Washington, DC, as he’s been given his unconditional release by the Nats after calling Stephen Strasburg a sissy-boy.

Aaron Gleeman of NBC Sports foreshadowed the move with a mildly pious post arguing that Dibble should be fired not for the specific crimes of dissing Stephen Strasburg and the female of the species, but for the general offense of being a lousy announcer. In today’s update, he ends with a preachy flourish: “I’m sure he’ll land on his feet with another prominent gig, because ‘loud’ and ‘controversial’ can generate ratings, but for now at least he’s no longer in the same profession as Vin Scully.”

And thus I find myself in the uncomfortable position of having to make a terrible, terrible confession.

Except for the sexism and the jerkiness, I’d rather listen to Dibble call a game than Scully.

Let me immediately begin backtracking and rationalizing the heresy I’ve just printed. I recognize, firstly, that that’s rather like saying “Except for the steroids and the attitude, I’d rather have Barry Bonds on my team than Roberto Clemente.” I want to be clear that sexism and jerkiness are generally qualities that I find inseparable from, not ancillary to, a person’s character. I know that by every objective standard, Dibs is a lousy announcer and not exactly a shining human being; by contrast, I have the utmost respect for Vin Scully—for his knowledge, his longevity, his integrity, his significance to the Dodgers and their fans nationwide.

Scully and Dibble represent polar-opposite ends of the spectrum of what I appreciate and (as a de facto outsider) envy about baseball. The Scully end of the spectrum is the one that’s easy to admit to and write about, the one with the gravitas of history and the magic of mythology, the corporeal manifestation of The Great American Sport As It Ought To Be Played. Dibble’s end? It’s the one with the grime and the foul language and the fastballs in the ribs. Neither image of the game is complete or honest without the other; neither, frankly, is the sort of cultural construct that my progressive feminist self would find compelling in practically any other context. But this is baseball.

And, heaven help me, Dibble, with all his coarse homerism and back-in-my-day self-indulgence, was one of my occasional guilty pleasures until he started flying his misogynist flag too plainly to miss. (I want desperately to believe that that sort of grittiness doesn’t have to walk hand-in-knuckle-dragging-hand with sexism, but alas, not in Dibs’ case.) As for Scully? I love and honor the guy, but when I listen to the Dodgers on the radio, I count the innings until he’s off duty. I’m not going to defend that position, or even attempt to explain it. It’s just proof that there’s no accounting for taste, and there’s room in baseball for all of us.

So perhaps the real problem, as Gleeman notes, is that in an age of endless media options, most of us still only get a couple of choices when it comes to our team’s play-by-play and color commentary. Sure, you can switch to the Spanish-language station, or log on to MLB.com if you want to hear the opposing team’s broadcast, but otherwise your choice is between whoever’s on the radio and whoever’s on the TV.

Which leads to the promised brilliant idea, developed some years back in collaboration with one of my oldest and dearest friends, who, like me, is a passionate Cardinal fan. While I think there’s room for all sorts of different broadcast options—women announcers, analysis for kids, Fantasy Baseball-themed commentary, etc.—what we decided we really need is an all-profanity broadcast. Can you just imagine the catharsis factor?

“Aaaaand Kyle Lohse has just walked another ****ing batter. What genius bought into the bull**** that he was ready to come back and pitch at the ****ing big-league level yet when he couldn’t even get the Triple-A *******s out?”

I think there’d be a big market for this, and I know I’d have tuned in during, say, the Cardinals’ most recent road-trip, during which they managed to lose eight games out of…..Hey, what do you know? Rob Dibble’s résumé just arrived in the mail.