The New Enthusiast

August in the Rose City can sometimes feel like the eternal Sunday.  Poetess Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles once referred to Sunday as her “fun day” her “I don’t have to run day”.  Growing up Catholic and schoolgoing, Sundays always represented a curious mix of Hoffs’ fun and Woytek dread (not the name of my family’s dubstep group).  Along with the day off from school, there was homework, mass, going to bed early, my mother watching Masterpiece Theater (or was it theatre).  For a prepubescent boy (which I was until about 15), Sundays weren’t all funning and no running. My point being that there was always the inevitability of Monday on the horizon to kill some of the sheen of the weekend enthusiasm.

August takes on some of these qualities in Portland because the inevitability of drear and soppiness of the rainy season sometimes holds sway over the end of summer.  While my blogmates here at the New Enthusiast have moved or are moving on to better things including wives, prestigious lawyering schools, or writing well received arty things on baseball nerdbone websites, one is left to wonder about the sporting life right here in Portland OR.

As I have taken the assignment of co-covering a Portland Beavers v. Iowa Cubs AAA baseball game later in the week for the Portland Sportsman I can not help but to project some of these lingering  feelings onto some of the forgottens still playing AAA baseball this time of year.

Having attended some 15 professional baseball games at different levels this year(from independent league to MLB) it seems as though this upcoming late August AAA game represents fully this Sunday evening feeling.  The metaphorical Monday being another season of players not realizing their goals of making The Show.  The Portland Beavers roster in particular, being an affiliate of the lowly San Diego Padres, has been raided of nearly all their top prospects.  What is left are some older, more marginal prospects, roster fillers and journeymen.

This is the inevitable nature of AAA baseball especially late in the year when the parent club is no longer competing for a pennant. The Kyle Blanks’s, Cesar Carillo’s, Everth Cabrera’s and Will Venable’s of the organization have been called up with varying degrees of success.  Watching these kinda guys represent the excitement of watching minor league, especially AAA baseball.  Without them, the enthusiasm can be hard to muster.  Luckily for some of the remaining Beavers, roster expansion happens in two short weeks.  The cups of coffee will be dispersed and some of the current Beavers will get a taste of the MLB good life, if potentially only for a month.

For reasons unknown and unknowable, the New Enthusiast is experiencing an unprecedented groundswell of new readership of late. First off, we’d like to say, enthusiastically, “Welcome, likeminded ladies and gentledudes!”

Second, and we have this on very good authority, when it comes giving the crowd what they want, the best way to keep laissez-ing la bon temps to roulez is to post more frequently than semi-fortnightly. Unfortunately, we don’t exactly have anything of substantial substance ready to share, so instead here are a few unripened fruits plucked from our idle minds:

IDLE! The Red Sox recently celebrated their Major League record 500th consecutive home sellout. That’s great! Strangely, the fans celebrated it, too. Huh? That seems a bit…perverse. Now, revenue from ticket sales is (for the most part) funneled back into player salaries, so good attendance is tied to continued on-field success. But something tells me that isn’t exactly what the team is thanking the fans for, since it’s the sellout which has allowed the Sox to raise the price of an average ticket for 14 straight years until 2009, hiking the cost to the highest level in the majors*. Now that’s an impressive streak!

*Pre-Yankees Stadium and Citifield data.

IDLE! Ronny Paulino…Ron Paul. I’m just saying…

IDLE! The harshest decrescendo of awesomeness possible in a three word span? Vacation Bible School! If you’re a kid hearing it, that phrase starts off real, real good, but gets real sucky in a hurry.

IDLE! So there is a bit of a kerfuffle about Manny Ramirez playing in the minors before his 50-game suspension is up. While it does seem like this loophole is letting Manny skirt around his punishment, TNE is more curious about whether Manny will be eligible for the Triple A All-Star Game on July 15th in Portland’s PGE Stadium.

IDLE! Speaking of Portland, howzabout a “Portland Stadium Financing Debacle Update”? In case you need a quick recap, lemme sum up:

1. Way back in 2007, megasuperrichdude Merritt Paulson buys the Timbers, a United Soccer League* team, and the Beavers, the Triple A affiliate of the San Diego Padres. The teams currently share PGE Park in lovely downtown Portland**

1. Paulson uses the promise of unimaginable windfall from a Major League Soccer team*** to extort tens of millions of public dollars for his stadium upgrade.

2. In exchange, he promises to build a new baseball stadium in the city, contingent on the city securing the land.

3. Due to civic resistance, negligent oversight, and general nincompoopery, the city drops the ball on finding a location for the new stadium.

4. Paulson keeps all the public money for the soccer stadium, doesn’t have to build baseball stadium, and…

5…is now free to shop the Beavers around the “Portland area” to see if any suburb might be willing to foot the bill for a new stadium. Hello, Hillsboro!

Well played, trusted civic leaders!

*Wikipedia informs me that this is the second tier on the American Soccer Pyramid. That is a much cooler nickname than is warranted.

**Just ask the New York Times.

***Sarcasm.

So it seems some other sports blogger has noticed the recent aesthetic abasement of the NBA.

Simmons ties a lot of the game’s woes back to poor officiating, and in many ways he’s right. As he points out, many of today’s prominent officials are, well, old. Kinda really old, in some cases. He suggests that these officials might have difficulty following the action of the game, a problem which would only be exacerbated during the playoffs, when the NBA prefers to assign its most experienced, and therefore most senior, refs to the games of greatest importance.

While senescence may account for some of the problem of consistently enforcing the rules, also think about this: the rules have changed. Like, for instance, it’s hard to imagine any 1975 vintage player hacking it in the NBA of today. Doesn’t matter if that player was as kinesthetically wondrous as Dr. J or an immobile wall of sopping manflesh like Billy Paultz, any player from that era would have difficulty adjusting to the current game, and one reason is because the rules are subtly but vastly different. The three-pointer, 8-second backcourt violations, the crab dribble–it takes a lifetime of practice to perfect and embody these things at a professional level. Yet the NBA expects Dick Bavetta, whose been an official since 1975, to call the game the same way as Zach Zarba, who was born in 1975. Fans who grew up watching Oscar Robertson have a different view of what constitutes a traveling violation than those who accustomed to Michael Jordan–might not refs harbor the same sort of biases?

Another issue Simmons notes is the seeming paradox that, despite the league’s specific measures to do so, there hasn’t been an apparent reduction in excessively physical play. There are a couple of reasons this might be true, though Simmons uses a faulty analogy to highlight the league’s failures:

Finally, the logic behind “flagrant fouls” was that it was supposed to prevent … (drumroll, please) … flagrant fouls! Do you feel like that mission has been accomplished? Imagine your local police force telling you, “Since our crackdown on home robberies, home robberies have doubled in the past three years. We couldn’t be happier!”

Well, no, these aren’t exactly the same scenarios. It might be more apt to say that the police had previously dealt with burglaries by pretending they didn’t occur, and are now more aggressively combating the problem–which could plausibly result in a greater number of reported incidents.

Also, it shouldn’t be surprising that a strict prohibition actually results in an increase in the activity targeted by the prohibition. For instance, take the NBA’s new rule that if a player accumulates a 7th technical foul during the playoffs, he is suspended from the next game. As many commentators have pointed out, this puts the league in an awkward position–having to suspend, say, Lebron James or Kobe Bryant during the finals because of something they did in an earlier round. Dwight Howard was assessed his 6th technical on a call that was pretty weak sauce–and the league agreed, rescinding the technical foul after reviewing the game. Still, the NBA couldn’t be real pleased with the prospect of having to suspend one of its marquee player during the playoffs.

This is reminiscent of the illogic at the heart of nuclear deterrence. When Eisenhower and his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles unveiled the “New Look,” they placed massive nuclear retaliation at the center of America’s foreign policy, the thought being that the Soviets would never instigate hostile activities in the face of total annihilation. As smart dude John Lewis Gaddis pointed out, this wasn’t a credible policy–the U.S. would never follow through on “less-than total challenges,” which left the U.S.S.R. free to do as it wished, like intervening in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. It’s argued that in some ways the threat of massive retaliation emboldened the Soviets, as they increasingly raised the stakes while calling America’s bluff.

The NBA finds itself in a situation similar to the U. S. of A. in the ’50s. The league really, really doesn’t want to have to follow through on its threat, and one way to avoid having to do so is to be much more lenient in assessing technical fouls. Players probably realize this, too–Kobe Bryant, et alii basically have impunity from the refs throughout the playoffs. That’s one way in which stricter policing of an activity can actually increase the activity’s frequency.