First up is Cathal Kelly, with a deliciously bitchy screed on Toronto FC’s not-so-glorious 4–1 drubbing of D.C. United. Saving their pros for a bigger game on the docket later in the week, United “trolled the bus station for ambulatory humans and signed them to two-hour contracts,” writes Kelly. But the home team still managed to concede the first goal before answering back with more offensive prowess than they’ve ever displayed. “It was a franchise highlight, in the same way that an anthill is the highest peak in Saskatchewan,” Kelly observes. It’s a biting assessment of nearly British proportions, and proof that the most dysfunctional teams can be the most fun to write about.
In a similar vein, but with a much happier plot-twist, Will Leitch reminds us exactly how much more Pittsburgh Pirates fans have suffered than any other sports constituency in recent memory. “When you watch your team play, outside of any context, you merely want them to win. Pirates fans watched their team lose more often than it won for 21 straight years,” he writes. “It is cruel and wrong what Pirates fans have been through.” They emerged victorious and ecstatic from their wild-card game against Cincinnati, and now, no matter your allegiance, it’s pretty hard not to root just a little for the team and fan base that’s suffered so. And if you’re a Yankees fan gnashing your teeth and rending your garments after the season you just lived through…maybe get a grip?
Jonathan Mahler offers an elegiac take on the possibility—sagging TV ratings provide hard data, but it’s really more just an overarching feeling—that baseball’s hold on the public consciousness is loosening into something more like lovely irrelevance. The exact things that make baseball a sport about which it’s impossible to be too nostalgic—the slow and quiet unfolding of the plot, ubiquity of games, regional tribalism, the gauzy throwback quality of it all—make it a tough sell in a quick-cut, million-channel universe, Mahler writes. But then he questions whether the game is actually on the decline or we’re just running up against the reality of our own fantasies. “That may prove to be a good thing for baseball,” he concludes. “Maybe a new generation of fans won’t grow up thinking the game represents something more than it is. Maybe baseball can just be baseball.”
The 2013–14 NHL season was only two hours old when it claimed its first casualty in Montreal’s George Parros, who smacked his face on the ice and sustained a concussion during a fight with Toronto’s Colton Orr. During the game, Sean McIndoe, better known as Down Goes Brown, makes some solid points in a series of tweets. McIndoe speaks as a fan who once was rabidly pro-fisticuffs—his site is named after a fight play-by-play call, after all—but changed his mind over the last few years. “So will you write your anti-fighting column/blog post tomorrow to change minds, or to get high-fives from people who already agree with you?” he asks. He looks at fighting and the league’s apparent reluctance to put a stop to it like a political issue: Fans are the voters and league brass their representatives, elected with ticket sales and jersey purchases. “It will never change as long as majority of fans like it. Which they do. So change minds, or nothing happens,” he argues. All you have to do is read the bellowing comments below the many anti-fighting columns written this week to see how right he is—and to wonder if someone has to die before anything changes.
And then there’s Jay Mariotti with the sports column equivalent of a toddler openly searching for a reason to throw a tantrum. The whole thing is so sneering and circular and illogical, it acquires a certain demented beauty. He starts by deriding the Yankee ethos of glittering stars and bronzed history, then jeers that with retiring icons riding into the sunset and former superstars declining to mere mortal status, “their starpower dims to its lowest wattage in memory.” He says Robinson Cano lacks the charisma to sell tickets, then demands to know who will be the face of the team if the Yankees don’t pony up the money Cano wants. As for Jay-Z announcing in lyrical form his ambitions as an agent, Mariotti coughs up this zinger: “Seems he wrote it without knowing baseball’s winter meetings are set for Dec. 9–12 in Florida, the same week Jay-Z has California tour dates in Los Angeles, Fresno and San Jose.” Mariotti spends 1,600 words crapping on his version of Yankeedom, then concludes with, “The Yankees as anything but the Yankees, as we’ve known them, would not be good for baseball or sport.” I feel like I just found out about another Kardashian book deal: bewildered and yet also enraged.