The Parable of the AL West

"There's always someone younger
someone with more hunger
don't let em take the fight out of you"
-Ben Harper & the Innocent Criminals, Fight Outa You

If you've been reading for a while, you know that sports are important. We really need to look no further than Noam Chomsky for proof. Noam Chomsky doesn't like sports. And Noam Chomsky has a medical condition that is known, scientifically, as Chronic Sad. Yes, being on a high school football team probably does suppress the part of your mind that questions authority, and you should probably care about the plight of the Kurds instead of the Kansas City Chiefs, and your money would benefit human culture better if it were spent on an NPR tote bag instead of a Drew Brees jersey, but no one likes a chess club kid who pats himself on the back for "activism" and "raising awareness" for the Kurdish people and spends his evenings listening to Terri Gross interview important Jewish figures in the media. And who knows. If Noam Chomsky had joined his high school football team, he would have suffered a concussion and never would have come up with Universal Grammar and X-Bar Theory and all the other misguided ideas he had. (Maybe some of you are drinking the UG Kool-Aid. Most of you don't know or care. That's fine because for the rest of this post it won't matter.)

For someone who talks about psychological nativism, Chomsky doesn't seem to understand that all of us want and need to move, and to compete. I've said this before and I'll say it again: There are no more mastodon to hunt, no more saber tooth tigers to run from, no more plains of the Serenghetto to cross on foot with only a handful of dried berries and an animal skin filled with your own piss.  In post-industrial America, we don't have anything to physically test us anymore.  Things weren’t always this way. To feed myself and my caveman family, I would have had to grab my spear and my piss skin and run around the desert for at least a day until a wildebeest or a deer or something dropped dead from exertion, then carry it all the way back to my hut, which I built myself out of sticks and mud and the bones of my brother who got his head smashed in by a neighboring band of hunter gatherers, and come home to an entirely new member of my family, because the homely yet powerful woman with whom I had chose to procreate solely based on genetic potential, had to give birth all by herself while I was gone and then made a dust and placenta pudding because in the three days it took me to drag back a smelly, picked-apart squirrel carcass that was supposed to feed the three of us through the next twelve years of drought and then the subsequent locust swarm, she got a little hungry. And this would have been my day job. Now my day job consists of trying to get kids to put together coherent sentences and moonlighting as an unsuccessful wordsmith. This is all sitting down. I don't need to move, or even exert myself. Sports allows us to exert ourselves as God (or Jehovah or Allah or Ahura Mazda or the evil demiurge Yaldoboath) intended. The biggest fear in my arsenal of first world problems is the fear that I’ll never really be tested. I’ll never have to rise to the occasion to save my life, the life of my family and loved ones, the life of my tribe or my people, the proverbial life of the gene pool. I believe that spectacle is something that we need as humans, just like we need community and meaning for our lives. The more technologically advanced we get, the more physically useless we will become.  (Except of course if that technology leads to some great catastrophe and we're once again fighting to survive as a species against psychotic crocodile-buffalo hybrids that some R&D asshole thought would be a great idea to start manufacturing.) We’ve awkwardly been retrofitted into cubicles. We don’t move the way we evolved to move, we’ve been retrofitted to sit in cubicles and push pencils. And that's why we have sports, and that is why sports are important.

But sports can also teach us lessons. Baseball has been used to explain love, war, and everything in between. In fact, here's a real political cartoon from the Civil War:

Notice how back then, every figure in a political cartoon got to make a little speech. Lincoln also looks a little bit like the homeless man who lives in the alley behind my apartment.

Anyway, for those of you paying attention, baseball just taught us another lesson.

The last few seasons for A's fans have been a little bit like being an orphan on Christmas. You're really excited, because maybe Santa will bring you your real live parents, who were actually racecar drivers or explorers or wizards who totally loved you this whole time. But deep down you know all you can expect is an extra helping of gruel and a day off shoveling coal. This season though, at least one of our parents showed up, and, as I write this, it's still up in the air as to whether or not mom died of TB, we'll see how game 3 goes.

But losing is a part of winning. For the A's to win the AL West, someone had to lose it, and that was the Rangers, who were up, I believe, by 13 games in June. For the Rangers, it would come down to a 3 game series where all they had to do was not get swept. The lesson: never let up, no matter how far ahead you are. Because someone is gunning for you.

Since they didn't take the AL West, the Rangers, the team that had been leading their division all season, usually with a comfortable margin, had to play a one game wildcard play-in game, where the winner went on to the ALDS and the losers went home. This format is new this year. I'm surprised that it happened. Baseball is a sport that seems the most resistant to change. I thought the purists calling the shots in the MLB would reject such a change. And some purists don't like it. The whole city of Atlanta is ready to stab someone over it.

In baseball, more than any other ball sport, statistics mean something going back decades. Batting .300 might be just a step below the 4 minute mile in immutably significant sporting benchmarks. But the world needs to stay the same in order for statistics to mean something. The NBA lockout was the worst thing to happen to Chomsky's straw-man "Joe Six-Pack." You think we want to deal with a wartime cancellation. "Gee guys, I really would like to overthrow the government* but the game is on. Maybe tomorrow. Actually, let's hold off until after the playoffs, my team might win it all this year, and I would hate to have it cut short by a violent coup, filled with atrocities, damaged infrastructure, and hell, maybe even a genocide." It might not be the LA Philharmonic, but it keeps the kids out of trouble.

But I digress. The point is, I'm glad we upset the traditionalists so that we could witness this life lesson played out. And I'm really glad to be on the winning side of it.

*These are only meant to be the words of a fictional character, and I have no intention of, nor do I advocate, overthrowing any government, including but not limited to the United States Government. If you want to change something, write your congressperson.