Red Hat

WARNING: The following may contain baseball-related content. Among certain segments of the population, it is known to cause drowsiness, upset stomach, vaginal dryness and cancer. No, not cancer. What's the other thing I'm thinking of? The one that's like cancer, but isn't? Bah, this is going to bug me all night.

Anyway.

I know things have been looking slightly better in the last few months, but I still know enough people out of work to keep things to myself if they start going really well. It's not that I'm ashamed of the fact that I'm one of the fortunate ones who have managed not only to remain gainfully employed but actually prosper during what I'm told has been a particularly brutal downturn, it's just that I'm sensitive to the feelings of my fellow human beings in this time of difficulty. Plus, if I start throwing money around, people are going to start asking where I got it and nobody wants to hire a high-profile drug mule. It's a contradiction in terms. I just remember there are a hundred other guys with spacious colons and dignity made flexible by crippling gambling debt dying to take my place.

Sports culture has always enjoyed a strange detachment from ordinary social strictures in this country, though. I think it's telling that Americans as a culture are absolutely allergic to any kind of monumental architecture, but we will pony up hundreds of millions in public money to provide enormous stadia for sports franchise owners, the 1% of the 1%, the only fractional fragment of the country with the capacity to pay for the goddamned things themselves.

The total experience for a family of four to visit a baseball game, depending on where you sit, probably ranges from $200 to $300 anymore. It seems like a lot to pay for the opportunity to be struck in the face with a speeding projectile, but people still go, in the millions every year, GDP growth rate be damned. So powerful is the allure of visiting one of the few places left in this country absent the social pressure to throw away your own trash before you leave. It's the same reason I visit national parks.

Still, you like to see some modesty, some kind of sensitivity to the situation. Yes, we keep spending on tickets and merchandise and concessions and parking, even on teams that are cosmically prohibited from winning or teams populated entirely by evil douchebags, but we don't really want anyone's recession-proof largesse rubbed in our faces. It's not that we're unwilling to have largesse rubbed in our faces, it's just that we want to get paid for it, just like the porn stars do.

So when I read that the newly renamed Miami Marlins had offered St. Louis Cardinals free agent 31-year-old first baseman Albert Pujols a 10-year contract worth $250 million, I was mortified on their behalf. Yes, I understand they're about to move into a new stadium in a really shitty area of Miami,* so they want a big-name draw. And he's not just a big name, he's a big name with an ethnic pronunciation, so he'd be an especially big draw to the Cubans or the Dominicans or Puerto Ricans or whatever they have down there where regular people would otherwise have Mexicans. But still. Come on. A quarter of a billion dollars. Not in pesos, but in real money. And this in the time when Sesame Street just added a muppet who may--just may!--starve to death. You know, to teach kids a lesson. About, I think, starving to death.

But then I thought about it some more and no, it still seemed like a wrong-headed dick-move.  And then I thought about it again and changed my mind completely. Part of it was my concern for my fellow man. Sports are a welcome distraction in a world full of unwelcome ones, like bills and healthcare costs and the Republican presidential primary process. Why begrudge people the preoccupying whiff of associative glory through the abstract triumph of accumulating more successes within the construct of arbitrary scoring methods in athletic competition associated with a nearby city or metropolitan area when the alternative is more time thinking about how Starbucks isn't hiring anyone with a master's degree at the moment? Celebrating the gaudy expenditure of money on people paid to play games for a living while school teachers are being laid off in droves isn't just OK, it's compassionate. It's right.

I think the last thing that sold me was that it was my childhood team's almost identical offer that Albert Pujols finally accepted just today. I recognize the lack of coincidence here.


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*I haven't been, but I've heard the entire neighborhood exists inside the state of Florida. Gross.