The Microwave - A Rambling Confession of a Sports Bigamist

 What's this?  We have an actual blog from Mikey?
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“I Thought We Was Like Home Team”

My father is a Pittsburgh Pirates fan, the poor bastard.  Growing up in the late 60’s and early 70’s in rural North Carolina with no local team to take an interest in, he grew fond of Willie Stargell, Manny Sanguillen, Steve Blass, and the great Roberto Clemente, culminating in the 1971 World Series title.  Clemente died, Blass forgot how to pitch, and Stargell got fat, but Dad saw his favorite team win it all again in 1979.  Throw in a couple of other playoff appearances, and it wasn’t a bad run.

I was born three years later, an Air Force father stationed in his native Carolinas and a mother transplanted from the north.  MLB Extra Innings was two decades from becoming available.  Widespread cable options were slim.  I remember when I was about 4 that our TV would only go up to channel 36, and that was only thanks to the good ol’ CATV button.  Oh, how far we’ve come.  One of the few channels we did get, however, was the Ted Turner’s Superstation – WTBS 17 – out of Atlanta.  You could watch the Braves on channel 7 (it was 7 in Myrtle Beach – I still don’t understand why it wasn’t 17) or the Cubs on channel 9, WGN.  I remember being fond of the Cubs as a young lad, since watching the Cubs was better than watching The Young & The Restless when Mom was home during the day.  I particularly recall reenacting San Francisco’s Candy Maldanado’s freight train job on Cubs’ catcher Jody Davis with the couch cushions in the living room.  My father worked days, though, so while the Cubs were still playing without lights at Wrigley, he would come home and, with very little else in terms of sports on TV, flip on TBS to Ernie Johnson Sr. and Skip Caray.  And if Dad was watching baseball, that meant I was watching baseball.  There’s your birth of a Braves fan.

There were some AWFUL Atlanta teams during this run.  We had Dale Murphy, looking every bit the superstar that Josh Hamilton looks today, minus the whole drug and alcohol addiction thing.  And that was really about it.  A bunch of other over the hill guys or never would be’s comprised that group for the first five years I watched baseball.  I’d hear the announcers rave about the young prospects down in Richmond, but for a 6-7 year old kid, prospects don’t enhance my viewing experience at all.  But sure enough, in 1991, those new faces started to click.

By then, I was familiar with them.  Gant, Justice, Glavine, Smoltz, and a kid named Avery who blossomed out of nowhere.  And I wasn’t the only one.  The kids in my school were all the same way: their dads came home from work and flipped on the only baseball game on TV. All the classes in the 4th grade hall at Woodland Park School were buzzing about the Braves.  It culminated on the first Saturday of October, when the Braves capped off a last week rally to pass the Dodgers for the NL West title.  I remember the bowling alley there on base literally stopping business when John Smoltz took the mound in the 9th inning to finish the game, everyone crowding into the snack bar to watch the end of the game on a 13” TV, and the place going bonkers when the Braves won the game to clinch a tie for the division… and then again shortly thereafter when the Dodgers lost to give Atlanta the division outright.

You all know the story from there.  Avery in the NLCS, Kent Hrbek, Mark Lemke, Kirby Puckett, Lonnie Smith, Jack Morris.

Ironically, my dad wasn’t around for the Braves to beat his Pirates in the NLCS.  He had just been sent to Turkey for a one year tour of duty.  Of course, that meant he was freshly home the following year when they met in the more famous rematch.  With Myrtle Beach AFB in the process of ceasing operations, we were due to move to (remember this for later) Montgomery, Alabama the morning after Game 7 of the 1992 NLCS.  We watched the Pirates stake Doug Drabek to an early lead, and then the cable went out.  I woke up the next morning to the ridiculous highlights of the inexplicable finish in Atlanta and the heartbreaking beginning of my dad’s Pirates being a relevant object in Major League Baseball.  The subsequent chokejob in the World Series sucked, but hey, the team was young and loaded with talent, particularly with the Braves landing reigning Cy Young winner Greg Maddux in the offseason.  Atlanta was the best team in baseball in 1993, yet still needed final day heroics to hold off the 103 win Giants in “the last great pennant race.”  Despite this group’s summer dominance, they got tripped up in the NLCS by a gritty Phillies bunch that I believe, to this day, had NO business being competitive in that series.

The Braves got a mulligan with the ’94 strike, as they were DOA, 8 games back of a great Expos team when everything stopped.  And what’s the best way to get pissed off fans to return to the park after the biggest dick-waving contest in the history of organized sports? WIN A BUNCH OF GAMES! That’s what Atlanta did in ’95, running the table in the NL, cruising to the pennant, and finally getting their title in six games over Cleveland, fittingly, with Justice’s homer being the only run in a masterful one hit shutout from Glavine.  (And that lone hit was a total bullshit cheap ass, bloop just beyond the infield by 90 year old Tony Pena, let me tell you.)  They were the best team in baseball again in ’96, and lo and behold, Mom got playoff tickets!  And WORLD SERIES TICKETS!! We saw Maddux bail out the Braves vs. St. Louis in Game 6 of the NLCS (the crème in the Oreo to the epic beatdowns in Games 5 and 7.)  Beyond that, well, let’s not talk about Bernie Williams, Paul O’Neill, John Wetteland, or Jim Fucking Leyritz, ok?

1997 and 1998?  More of the same.  Best team in the National League, chokejobs in October.  I know that bought Marlins team was pretty good, especially when Eric Gregg was behind the plate, but I’m still perplexed as to how that Padres team managed to beat the ’98 team.  Moot point, considering whoever won that series was getting blasted by the ’98 Yanks anyway, but it’s still a pisser.  ’99 saw the Mets challenge Atlanta for NL supremacy and gave the Braves everything they could muster.  I’m also still befuddled that a team with this roster could almost win the pennant, but damn if they didn’t come close, culminating in the infamous Kenny Rogers Special, with the NLCS being decided in extra innings of Game 6 on a walkoff HBP.

You’re not gonna believe this, but the Braves were handed their panties again in the World Series, swept by the Yankees.  See a trend?  In an unrelated note, MLB awarded Tampa an expansion franchise during this period.  Called it the Devil Rays.  And they sucked.  More on this in a bit.

From here, the Braves got into a pattern of even more pathetic October showings than what they’d already been turning in.  A NLDS sweep at the hands of St. Louis, an NLCS beatdown by Arizona, and then back to back to back 5 game losses in the NLDS to San Francisco, Chicago, and Houston, before winning the NL East for a 14th consecutive time and dropping an NLDS rematch to the Astros in the semi-famous 18 inning game. 

Of course by now, a brand new wave of Braves had arrived and it was a fun bunch to cheer for. The Mets finally broke Atlanta’s long run of division title in 2006, but watching the “Baby Braves” from the underdog role was a breath of fresh air, and it’s not like the team completely sucked.  They were still competitive.  Thru player attrition, some minor tweaks to the front office, and the rest of the NL finally catching up with them, the Braves had assumed a new identity.  They were perhaps even a more fun bunch to cheer for, a mix of old vets like Tim Hudson, Andruw Jones, and – well, for most of the fans – Chipper Jones, and youngsters like Brian McCann, Jeff Francoeur, Yunel Escobar, and Jair Jurrjens, a combination not much different than the young and old guys on the ’91 and ’92 teams that won my heart 15 years prior.

So naturally, about this time, I became a Tampa Bay fan.

This is an unspeakable sports sin.  You don’t cheer for two teams: it’s cheating.  I can’t excuse this behavior, but I will explain it.

See, back in ’98, the Devil Rays were awful.  Unlike their expansion sisters to the west, the Arizona Diamondbacks, they got off on the wrong foot, trying to make a splash with a bunch of high-priced, yet over the hill, veterans.  It backfired terribly, and the team instantly found itself in the AL cellar for several years.  Perhaps due to this, their AA minor league team in Orlando struggled to fill, what was at the time, a state of the art ballpark.  Due to attendance issues, the team moved… to Montgomery, Alabama for the 2004 season and rechristened itself the Biscuits.

It was a ridiculous name, but the town immediately took to its new residents, and for the first time since the Blue Jays operated their Single A team out of Myrtle Beach back in the late 80’s, there was an honest to god professional sports team in my city!  As a sports fan, this was a HUGE deal for me, and I threw my support behind the local club.  If the team was interesting, it made my day to day interactions with the people of Montgomery fun.  I had common ground with the locals now, and didn’t have to get invested in Auburn or Alabama football, which is of course religion there.  My marriage fell apart just as the Biscuits started to boom, so as a diversion from the stress of all of that, I found myself at the ballpark on a weekly basis.  It was fun, it was cheap (especially the beer on Thursdays), it was family friendly.  And the on-field product was pretty good, too.

Those first four years of Biscuits teams featured a bunch of guys that baseball fans might know pretty well.  B.J. Upton, James Shields, Evan Longoria, David Price, and at least a dozen other bit players who would go on to have MLB success played roles in leading Montgomery from the Southern League basement to back to back league titles in 2006 and 2007.  I ended up with season ticket packages every year until I moved at the end of 2009.  For someone who had only been able to follow his favorite teams from afar, having a hometown club – even if it was just a minor league team – was pretty cool.

As it happens with minor league ball, and especially a good AA team, the guys you see come thru your city move on to bigger and better things.  Most of the players moved onto Durham, where the Bulls have made the playoffs in each of the past five seasons, winning the International League crown in ‘09.  With all that success, many of the same guys I cheered in Montgomery found their way to the big club.  Quickly counting right now, at least 16 players from Tampa’s 2008 AL pennant-winning team had played for the Biscuits, with the same number (though not all the same players), continuing with the Rays thru the present day.

There’s some variant of an old sports fandom rule where you can cheer for other players, but not other teams.  But what happens when the other players you want to cheer for ALL play for the same team? How can I root for 16 individual players to find great success without simultaneously wishing that the team they play on also finds success?  These are the guys who represented my city as they came up thru the minors; I can’t just stop rooting for them.  (Unless they’re total asshats like Delmon Young and Elijah Dukes.  That’s a totally different story.)  They’re my guys!

And let me shoot down the whole “love of the game” argument that was tossed out on a recent episode of Wait Til Next Year.  I’m a competitor.  As Herm Edwards wisely educated us: YOU PLAY TO WIN THE GAME.  YOU DON’T PLAY TO JUST PLAY.  I’m a firm believer of the fans being part of the game.  The way the fans react to big plays and polarizing figures is one of the most enjoyable parts of sports. It’s ingrained in me that I have to have a rooting interest in a game to be able to enjoy it.  Sure, some games have a greater rooting interest than others, but I can’t sit idly by and root for a few players but not care about the outcome of the game. 

And maybe it’s the underlying “only root for one team” deal, but I admittedly am not as much of a Braves fan as I used to be.  I know, it’s ridiculous.  I know it also conveniently coincides with the Rays’ emergence as a legitimate baseball team – I’m positive that has something to do with it.  It’s also not a coincidence that the same guys that have led and continue to lead Tampa to prominence are the same guys that did the same with the Biscuits back in Montgomery.  Last year’s wild “Game 162” night was a fabulous contrast of my new fandom.  Simultaneously, the Braves were imploding at Turner Field while the Rays were imploding at the Trop.  I was passively disgusted at Derek Lowe’s incompetence in Atlanta, while I was pissed off at what appeared to be a no-show by the Rays against a bunch of glorified spring training guys for the Yankees in a must win game.  Sure enough, the Braves lost in embarrassing fashion, and while I was disappointed, it didn’t really affect me.  Tampa, on the other hand, staged an improbable rally to tie, saw Boston choke away a sure win, and won the game in extras when Longoria homered to left – the same thing he did in the playoffs with Montgomery five years prior.  I was ecstatic, doing the “Willie Mays Hayes dance” all over the living room.  And I’m sure had the roles been reversed, with the Braves winning and the Rays losing, my response would’ve been tempered.  My access to the Braves, particularly now that I’m no longer in their TV market, is now limited, and going out of my way to follow them isn’t particularly high on my to do list.  I keep up with the scores, I follow a couple of Braves feeds on Twitter, I hope they win every game, but I can’t jump into the Braves’ season.  That is directly related to my next point.

Complicating matters for me is the whole growing up thing.  I turn 30 this week.  I’ve got a good job.  I’ve got kids.  I’ve got a great girlfriend who allows me to consume my sports at my leisure – but I’ve got an actual life now.  I think any sports fan would agree with the statement I’m about to make: baseball is the toughest sport to dive into and follow for a season.  It’s 162 games, basically every night.  It’s six months, seven if you’re lucky.  The season breaks into several sub-sets of storylines, most of which are ultimately irrelevant come October.  For a guy who has to prioritize his spare time now that he’s old, MLB has lost its slot on the priority list. 

I can justify going in on 2 games a week for five months with college basketball.  Carolina basketball was the first thing beaten into me as a young lad.  They’re my team – if I can only pick one sport to follow for the rest of my life, that’s the one.  Second place isn’t close. I classify myself more of a Carolina Hurricanes fan than a hockey fan, and love the ride the Canes take me on every year – even if it more often than not ends in pitiful fashion in early April.  And the Canes don’t require a 7 night a week commitment from me, and of any major sport, I find hockey the best to DVR and consume non-live.  I know what I’m getting going in: two and a half hours of programming, with two 18 minute intermissions at roughly 6:50 and 7:40.  It’s a joy to watch, and on the DVR, I know I can blow thru a game in just over an hour. 

Can’t say that with baseball.  The games have gotten slower over the years, three hours often isn’t enough time to finish a game.  I know every game counts, but it’s hard to amp up the urgency in April/May when I know there’s 120 games still to play.  I’m not staying up late for a west coast swing in June.  And that July matinee?  I’ll check in on the phone every hour while I’m at the pool.  Not until late-August or September will I go out of my way to actively care.  I just don’t have the time.  And because of that, my level of fandom for both Tampa and Atlanta COMBINED probably isn’t as high as when I cheered for the Braves in the 90’s.  If the Cubs win the World Series, I know Pun is going to buy 7 shirts, 3 hats, 4 books, a commemorative ball, and the 10 disc DVD set.  If the Rays or Braves win the World Series, I’m probably buying the shirt – but only if I like the design.  It’s just not as important to me anymore.

And that’s the sad part.  Baseball is still a beautiful game.  Hockey might be a more exciting sport live, and football might be a better TV sport, but nothing is communal as baseball.  No sport is also as momentarily dramatic as October baseball.  March Madness is the most exciting three weeks in sports.  The Stanley Cup Playoffs is the most intense theatre in sports.  But the late innings of a playoff baseball game are always heart stopping, because the season rides on every single pitch.  But life has sort of taken over, and, as outlined above, that’s by choice.  I’ve chosen to focus on the Tar Heels and the Hurricanes.  I’ve chosen not to invest as much time in baseball.  I’ve got my teamS now, but if they don’t win… I’m rooting for the best story.  For fans like Solly and Pun, their team winning is the ONLY story, so it means more to them.  And that’s the way it should be.

Hell, I even find myself passively cheering the Rangers now, just because them winning makes everyone else around me more pleasant.  (They’re a fun bunch to watch, too.)  I’m sure that sometime in the next couple of years (or months) someone will accuse me of also being a Rangers fan.  And if so, I don’t care.  It’s the same reason Solly gives me grief about being “Cowboy Mikey,” because I have apparently become a passive supporter of the Dallas Cowboys.  Hey, the Cowboys being interesting makes life here for me more fun.  They need to suck or they need to make the playoffs.  8-8, 9-7 doesn’t cut it.  Besides, I hate his Giants anyway. 
And if the Cowboys aren’t cutting it, I can always cheer for my Dolphins AND Panthers instead, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.