Letters to the Editor
Dawggone
Published Letters: 451 Editor's Choice: 69
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Books about curses
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Hi,
Long time reader first time writer. If you want to write a book (and you should I enjoy your writing style enough to fork over the money less discount, plus free shipping, offered by Amazon.com) you might want to consider a study on how much the sport is dictated by a story that has nothing to do with the players and everything to do with the audience. Baseball is a spectator sport in more than just luxury boxes. The curse of the Bambino, the goat, the Black Sox; none of this means anything to the players or to their play on the field.
Dissect the last four games of the Red Sox-Yankees game of 2004, or even the first and only four games of the Red Sox-Cardinals World Series. What you will see is some amazing plays by players who did the same throughout the season. What we get from the media has nothing to do with the plays or the players. Instead it is how they broke a mythic folklore (had Salem burned an accused witch right before game four of the 2004 ALCS to excise demons and urge on a Red Sox win, do you think anyone would remember Oritz or Damon? Well maybe, had the sportscasters alluded to Damon's similarity in name to Demon and how his long locks brought to mind the devil incarnate or Jesus resurrected (depending on the sportscaster).
It is bread and circus, but it wasn't always this way. Frank DeFord will probably lull you to sleep explaining the difference, but with enough white crosses you could keep an ear open and grasp that maybe there was a time, or at least should have been a time, when we enjoyed the game, the play and the talents of the players. Sadly, this does not seem to sit well with ratings. This is not a game of skill, luck or strategy, but a game of pluck, of underdogs of curses and of triumph over evil. The sport of baseball has been turned into the sport of redemption. The spectators are now the signal callers and those on the field are their to re-enact past glories that have nothing to do with what is going on in the field, but what is going on in the minds of the audience. The are gladiators re-enacting the sacking of Alexandria. They are excising the curse of lost battles, of Vietnam at a time when we wonder if our forces in Iraq will really hit one over the fence, with the insurgents humbled, head hung low like a chastised pitcher.
The White Sox and Red Sox are great for the World Series. Two scrappy teams who finally made it to the big top and have good reason to claim the right to be the best of the leagues. Sadly, that is not what our media will recognise. For them we need a message, a sign. If the White Sox or Stro's had some ghost to exorcise then we too could understand for our world is filled with so many ghosts to exorcise.
If these teams had a defeat to avenge, we could understand because our mouths are bitter with the taste of defeat and we ask only vengeance.
But that is not what baseball is and should be about. It is just a sport, to be taken seriously only in the way we take seriously Greco-Roman wrestling, synchronized swimming, and the sport where people ski lots of miles and then shoot at something. Something to appreciate for the drive and the skill of the players.
Shame on all sportscasters complicit in using people who barely got a highschool degree to act as stand ins for our own moral political and military malaise.
Chris Montgomery
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Cheney and this godawful war
[Read the article: Report: Fitzgerald may keep Rove waiting until Libby talks]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Cheney goes on TV today to call war critics dishonest and represensible. No, Mr. Cheney, what is dishonest and represensible is the way you used a very tragic circumstance, 9/11, to pursue a very unnecessary and irrelevant war. Osama murdered almost 3000 Americans. Right now you are guilty of murdering over 2000 Americans and tens of thousand more Iraqis and other foreigners. I wonder who is the real terrorist; and so do 63 percent of Americans who no longer buy your bullshit.
Chris Montgomery