Yessir's a Baseball Fantasy

A crazy day in baseball...

1

Prince Fielder, only 32 years old, will no longer play baseball due to a life-threatening risk of severing his spinal cord after successive neck surgeries...

Interesting statistical note: Cecil and Prince, father and son, both end up with 319 career homers.

2

Ichiro passes Clemente with hit 3001...

3

And King Felix toes the slab against Los Tigres in a matchup with enormous fantasy implications in that lovable on-line league known as The Danish Spliffs and Denver Stiffs ...

 

4 

But it's the Pads vs. Pirates game I've got on the machine now. And some disturbingly intrusive camera surveillance on the part of the SD broadcast: Solarte was benched for dogging it up the line on a sure pop-out, or so the commentators encourage us to speculate, and the dugout camera persists in pointing its gaze upon the player from behind, over his shoulder, as if eavesdropping on his conversations with coaches and teammates. He does look a bit sheepish and bewildered, like any kid busted for something lame, so...are we meant to laugh or cry upon hearing old Dick Enberg pronounce, "it doesn't matter if you're the star or not, you gotta show some punishment and make a point...You hear about a young guy being the son of a military man and automatically say: 'Oh that's why'...'yes sir!'... and, 'oh that's why he seems to carry himself a little differently', and so on." 

 

I'm sure the players union will come to regret having ever even allowed cameramen in the dugout in the first place, there to ostensibly advertise the player's corporate brand, but also to better "promote" each player who earns attention by giving the audience a sneak peek into all the fun and fury and foibles of dugout life as a baseball man. The more screen time a player gets, the more familiar he seems to the viewers, the greater his popularity becomes, which he may argue gives him greater value to the franchise or to the sport in general. All this attention most certainly doesn't hurt the player. Or...? That is, until the camera's critical eye exposes its negative bias by lingering through uncomfortably long looks into the very souls of these young men, ultimately inverting the innocuous image of an everyday athlete into an exposé on the essence of what it means to be a man. In this case, it means a military man who busts his ass up the line on every infield pop-out, no matter how trivial, even on a last-place team in mid-August, because he is the kind of man who says, "yes sir."

Hilariously, old Dick Enberg later runs on about his disdain for the lack of honesty (integritty?) in public American pleasantries, like, "how we all go around asking each other how we're doing --  'Oh, I'm fine thank you' -- when in fact I'm doing awful. I'm cranky."

And suddenly the stereotypes converge: the cranky oldwhiteguy broadcaster bitching about life and the dejected latino ballplayer who lollygagged his way up the line are one and the same in having exposed similar shades of their vulnerable, human frailties and failures in front of thousands of strangers who probably couldn't care less.