Perhaps this will be the saddest elimination thus far this MLB season, as the Pirates were briefly our collective darling, having risen from the ashes of futility like a modern Phoenix (the bird, not the city), to make us love baseball in a special way. But let's be realistic - this is the second or third time the Pirates have done this in recent memory, and all those times have ended in the bitter taste of failure. Can we be content to dabble in success, and have these traditional teams who do not fit the alleged "large market" criteria to teeter at the periphery of relevance until we settle into the showdown of 8 or 10 of the same 10 or 12 teams? What if the Orioles do not make it as well, or are eliminated in the stupid wild card game playoff? Who will be our huckleberry then?
It is sad too because there are few teams with the bold artistic flourish of the Pirates. The bright yellow and black uniforms (traditional to Pittsburgh sports team, which in itself is a pretty cool thing for a city to do), the immensity of figures like LSD Dock Ellis or Playboy Cocaine Dave Parker or Kent Tekulve's wacky sidearm or Willie Stargell's quiet epicness or even the brilliantly legendary yet tragically short Robert Clemente, who was as much a pioneer for the black Hispanics who fill our 2012 rosters as Jackie Robinson was for regular American-Africans. (Man, "American-African" sounds so much more fucked up than "African-American" doesn't it? It is strange how our ears and mouths become accustomed to certain things.) The straight-sided caps, with the pimp stripes around the whole thing. Three Rivers Stadium itself, one of the best overhead blimp shots to be found in baseball history. The Pirates are a wacky and wild and wonderful team historically, and perfect for those crazed folks of western Pennsylvania.
But this is not a time that respects such craziness and wildling behaviors. This is not the age of American hallucinogenic exploration of self as in Dock Ellis, or proudly anti-authoritarian yet 1000% diligent and acceptable as in Dave Parker. This is a time of obedience and respect for nothing but the dollar, a forced worship for an abstract concept that is slowly losing its perceived value and never having had that much actual value to begin with. But the smoke and mirrors have gone into overdrive, and we shall be forced to believe in the exceptionalism of the almighty dollar, and baseball is nothing if not one of the most purely American artistic creations we have come up with as a culture, albeit now an international phenom. So the rule of the dollar means the teams that spend are the ones that succeed, so it is believed that until a team like the Pirates (or Orioles or Royals or Brewers) learns to spend, it will not sustain success. Or you must learn to maximize dollars, as in the sabermetric nerderies of Billy Beane and his philosophical disciples. But it is still based on dollars, not intuition, not magic.
Am I sad Pittsburgh is eliminated from this year's MLB post-seasonal possibilities? Sure, why not. But I am more saddened that the regional ways of Pittsburgh - a sort of cultured hillbilly people, full of Old World influences and New World dreams - has been eliminated. Not this year though, but somewhere along the way while none of us were looking. The ways of the Pittsburghs and the Baltimores and Oaklands and so on and so forth have been replaced by the false gentrification of our western society, which is actually taking the old flavors, sterilizing it "clean" and replacing it with new gaudy facades that look the same whether you are in a city here or one there. It is lifeless and robotic and predictable. That above all is the worst part - so predictable. I did not entertain wild notions of Andrew McCutcheon carrying the torch lit by Dock Ellis and Dave Parker into the October boxes on the 2012 calendar, because I knew better. Spirit like that has already been extinguished, and usually is bought out by piles of dollars, to go play in predictable ways in predictable places, so that nothing gets too wonky or off-kilter. We are not a place of wild spirit and shocking euphorias any more; we are a place of predictable facades and standard orders.
No comments:
Post a Comment