Outside
Oberlin
Spring Training
Musings: Rich Remain Top Dogs
Over
the last few days Ive had to face the fact that the football
season is over. Usually the season is over by early January and
I crawl into a sports hole for a while to absorb yet another disappointing
year. Not this year, though. Not only did one of my teams actually
win the championship, the Pats Super Bowl run had the added
benefit of extending the season into February. And you know what
comes in February, right? Yep, its spring training!
Hooray! No long layover.
I go through cycles with my favorite sport. When the heat is on
during the football season, Id probably tell you that its
my favorite. But then theres nothing quite like the thrill
of a pennant chase, and when baseballs in full swing, theres
no better sport. And when the NHL gets to playoff time... well,
playoff hockey is just freaking cool.
So before too long Ill be totally absorbed by the baseball
season. Which brings me to one of the best pairs of words in the
English language: pitchers and catchers. They officially started
reporting on Thursday. Red Sox pitchers and catchers actually began
reporting earlier than that for Joe Kerrigans pre-preseason
and wonder of wonders even Pedro showed up! Oh, its
going to be a good season. But enough of my New England bias (for
now).
Spring trainings always been a special time for me. It signals
a new beginning, a fresh year filled with hope and promise
and
all that cliché stuff. It signals another chance to end that
blasted 80-plus year curse whoops! There I go again.
Actually, theres a big problem with spring trainings
connotations of new beginnings: its not actually in the spring!
Its always made me kind of jealous, seeing all the footage
of pros in bright sunshine and 70-degree weather, while Ive
always been at home in the frigid cold, staring at piles of snow.
Seriously, though, theres an even bigger problem than that.
You can throw out all the clichés you want, but the truth
is that many of the major league teams dont start spring training
with lots of hope and promise. Any readers from Montreal, Pittsburgh
or maybe Kansas City? You know what I mean. Im fortunate that
my favorite team is from a major market and, when under good management,
can afford to compete (and come up short) year after year. But most
small-market teams can only hope to make the middle of the pack.
The owners thwarted plans for contraction may have been an
ill-advised scheme, but it wasnt hatched without a reason.
Fortunately, it seems that every year we get a surprise from one
small market team. In 1999 it was the Cincinnati Reds who made a
great run before losing to the Mets in one-game playoff to determine
the wild card. In 2000 we saw a great young As team take off
to win the AL West. And last year it was the forgotten Twins who
gave us our small-market thrills, holding the AL Central for most
of the season before giving way at the end. (And they wanted to
eliminate those Twins!) The Reds, though, finished second in the
NL Central and well out of the wild card race the following year,
before dropping to fifth last year. The As, meanwhile, have
been unable to finish off the Yankees in the first playoff round
in consecutive years, and who knows what fate awaits last years
surprising Twins in 2002?
These three teams have shown that a team with a smaller payroll
can compete in the big leagues and can be a playoff contender with
the right management. What they havent shown is that a small-market
team can win it all. We saw the Patriots win the Super Bowl this
year with the second-lowest payroll in the NFL and incredible coaching.
But the difference between the Rams payroll and the Patriots
was only (and Im using only loosely here) around
$20 million. The disparity between the payrolls of the Yankees and
Red Sox (the two teams who ran neck and neck for the Biggest Spender
title) and the Twins (lowest payroll in the league) was greater
than $80 million.
Clearly, MLB needs to do something about this. Contraction will
never go through and wouldnt solve the problem anyway. The
NFL really could be a good model. Theres a salary cap, the
draft is based entirely on teams finishes (I dont even
pretend to know how the hell baseballs various drafts work),
and even the schedule makes allowances for competitive balance.
The result is that any team, if properly managed, can win in the
NFL, and the Patriots proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt. In
baseball, on the other hand, the rich just get richer, which brings
me to
Some teams to keep an eye on: Okay, Im going to wait until
well into spring training before I make my regular season predictions
(which will inevitably be wrong because
well, arent
they always?), but I do think there are some things worth taking
a look at now, starting with:
The Yankees. Remember I just said the rich get richer? Well, the
Yankees are the rich. In a year when nearly every other team cut
payroll, the Yanks are going to push theirs to what? Is it the $150
million mark yet? I think its pretty close. Even the free-spending
Dodgers and Red Sox are cutting back this year (dont worry
New Englanders, the Sox probably wont spend more than $100
million this year, but itll be damn close). The Yanks have
added Jason Giambi, because, well, Steinbrenner wanted Giambi. With
him on board everyone will be predicting the Yankees to win the
World Series. Im shocked, are you?
The As. The losers in the Giambi affair. Apparently, fame
and fortune meant more to him than his mother-team, despite all
he said. The As have had a great run the last few years, but
just havent been able to clear that Yankee hurdle. With Giambi
now playing against them, that hurdle looks even bigger. The As
still have arguably the three best young pitchers in the game in
Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder and Barry Zito, but I think their window
of opportunity is closing fast, and itll be interesting to
see if they can squeeze another good run or two out of it.
The Diamondbacks. After beating the Yankees this year in the Series,
the pressures on them. And to think, if contraction had gone
through, the DBacks wouldve been moved to the AL and
wed have had both World Series teams in one league. Scary
thought. Was Arizona a one-hit wonder? I expect theyll compete
again this year, and with both Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson,
youll never be able to count them out.
And finally, the Twins. Will they fade like Cincy, or will they
put together some more strong years like Oakland? Its all
going to be about pitching, I think, since they havent added
anybody to their offense, which wasnt one of the leagues
best. The young offensive players will have to pick it up some,
the young pitching will have to keep clicking, and Rick Reed, whom
they got in a trade from the Mets last year, will have to prove
that he was worth it. (His ERA with Twins in 2001 was over 5.00.)
Itll be tough, but I think theyll be fun to watch. I
know Ill be pulling for them (until they face the Red Sox).
Play ball!
Is There
Enlightenment in a Basketball Hoop?
What
are sports really?
Perhaps it is an easy question, perhaps not, but I ask it for several
reasons. Most generally, it seems to me that sport is quite a common
phenomenon throughout human societies, as widespread across the
globe as religion. Its ubiquity, as well as its connection with
spiritual practices, strikes me as being more than mere coincidence,
but to explain this I will need to fill you in on some details.
Scientific study, for example, into the human brain is amassing
a premium of evidence for the proposition that somehow human brains
are wired for spirituality in the same way that we are
wired for mathematical reasoning and emotional response.
Some experts, such as those Andrew Newberg describes in his book
Why God Wont Go Away, have used special techniques to peer
into neural processes and have observed marked similarities in the
brain-states of Buddhist monks in meditation with Catholic nuns
in prayer, noting the particular activity in certain regions of
their brains.
These disparities in brain-states from those observed when people
are not in deep meditation or prayer are thought to shed some light
on the testimonies of people who, during deep meditation, claim
to experience a sensation of floating or losing their identities
by merging with something greater than themselves. Scientists relate
these accounts to the changes observed in the parts of the brain
that are thought to control spatial orientation and the sense of
selfhood.
It seems to me that if it is true that somehow we are hard-wired
for God in this way, it is not a big jump from here to see that
we could somehow be hard-wired for sport. In fact, this latter notion
seems very much more intuitive than the previous one, perhaps especially
because I subscribe to a belief in biological evolution.
We humans all have bodies. These bodies reached their present form
over millions of years of minute adaptations, during most of which
we were spending a lot of time chasing food and running away from
predators. In other words, our bodies, in evolutionary terms, are
accustomed to a lot more exercise than has been afforded us by the
settled life of the last few thousand years, which most of us humans
who are not still hunter-gatherers are now living.
It seems more than reasonable to me to explain sport in this way
as the natural outgrowth and fulfillment of this need for physical
exercise, as well as the need for social bonding that any human
group needs and that team sports require.
I think it is therefore reasonable to say that, just as our minds
may be built for spiritual experiences, our bodies seem to obviously
be built for the physical exertion that sports involve.
Yet, as you might have guessed, the connections to spirituality
do not stop there. In fact, it is apparently quite common for very
devoted athletes to experience the same sorts of strange, almost
otherworldly things which people claim to experience during deep
prayer or meditation.
Michael Murphy, a writer on the subject of spirituality and sports,
has documented many accounts by athletes who testify to these experiences
in books such as In the Zone. He relates the testimonies of sprinters
who testify to the sensation of floating while running, much in
the same vein as deep meditators do. Fascinated by this idea, I
made a point of asking around to see if this might really be true.
I asked first-year track-runner Teresa Collins whether she had ever
felt like she was floating during a sprint, and, to my surprise
and delight, she told me that she had, saying that it involved an
ecstatic feeling of effortlessness and detachment from surrounding
events.
Even more intrigued now that it seemed to be a real phenomenon,
I asked sophomore basketball-player Chris Ikpoh if he could relate
to sensation of floating during his games, and he said that he could
not, but that what I was describing sounded very similar to what
he always called being in the zone during times on the
court, when, as he said, Every move you make seems slowed
down. Everything you want to do is so clear. When you take the shot,
the rim is so big. No matter what everyone else is doing, you dont
hear them.
After hearing all of this, it made me extremely curious about what
sort of relationship sport has to the human experience of spirituality.
I wondered, Are athletes experiencing their respective sports
as a link between them and their creators?
Whether or not God actually exists, if our minds are wired to experience
God, then somehow this spiritual function of the brain will find
a way to rear up its head. I was always comfortable with the notion
that its head reared through religious practice, but now it seemed
to make sense that this metaphorical head was also coming through
in the practice of sport.
Yet the connections do not even stop there. Religious practice has
been documented in many scientific studies to be highly correlated
with lower levels of stress in people. Religion is, in other words,
a stress-reducer.
Many doctors also claim that vigorous physical exercise helps to
break down stress-causing chemicals in the body, such as adrenaline.
So sports can be a stress-reducer. A no-brainer, you say. Everyone
knows that if youre feeling angry or stressed, you go for
a run to burn it off. Of course this is so.
Yet this sheds light for me on a seemingly completely disparate
topic: why sports and religion are so important among African-American
communities. According to a 2001 survey by George Gallup, some 65
percent of Americans believe that religion can be the answer to
todays ills, yet comparatively some 85 percent of African-Americans
subscribe to this viewpoint. I had always vaguely wondered about
it, being an African-American myself and completely missing the
connection, as I do not agree with this particular belief.
Given the economic and social conditions that many African-Americans
live with, however, generally battling more impoverished conditions,
more racial prejudice, and so forth, stress seems to be an understandable
physical reaction for many Americans of African descent.
If sports and religion are stress-reducers then, they therefore
seem to make perfect sense as reactions to the life ills of African-American
people.
Ultimately, all of this is simply the sort of the thing that tempts
me to view sport in a completely new light.
The question of What are sports really? seems suddenly
to be quite a complex one. Are they avenues to enlightenment? Are
they potentially just as valid forms of spiritual practice as prayer
or meditation? Are they somehow just as important and innate to
humanity as even our notions of God?
These seem like big questions to me, but maybe just a few years
ahead of their time, as I do not expect to see the Pope advocating
sit-ups over The Lords Prayer any time soon.
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