Party like it's 1979

When people ask me about how I got to be a sports fan, or how I decided to go into sports media, I tell them about growing up in Pittsburgh. Really, I'm too young to remember the city's best of times. The Pirates were one of the best teams in baseball during the 1970s, though they only managed to get to the World Series twice in six trips to the playoffs during those 10 years. The Steelers ... were the Steelers, plain and simple. But in 1979, when the Steelers won their third Super Bowl and when the Pirates won the World Series, I was only 7. So I barely remember. What I recall is the hype, the way the buzz from all that winning seemed to be on everyone's mind. And I suppose I ended up wanting to be a broadcaster or a writer because those were the people who told me about what was going on. I spent more time hearing about the games from them than I did actually watching the games being played.

The Pirates teams of that time period will always hold a special place for me. I don't want to wax too dramatic about it, lest I start to sound too much like Bob Costas or Thomas Boswell. OK, nobody is ever going to confuse me for either one of them. But I do think I got caught up in the romanticism of baseball's every-day presence in the lives of its fans. As Boswell has said, it's not that you have to watch or listen to the game every day. You can miss a few and when you go to come back to it, you know it's there and available every day. Baseball players seemed larger than life because of that daily presence. To me, none were larger than Willie Stargell, who had moved from left field to first base in the late stages of his career by the time I grew to know who he was. Willie Stargell was my boyhood idol. At the time, it was because he was the Pirates' leader on the field. But then I came to understand his meaning to the team off the field. His quiet dignity, his leadership. I actually got to interview him once, when I was working in Morgantown. I sat in the Pirates' dugout in Three Rivers Stadium, talking to my boyhood idol. Man, I was scared shitless. I'm fairly certain he had no recollection of me at all after that conversation, but it meant the world to me.

All of these memories have come flooding back the last few days because I just got my hands on a boxed DVD set of the 1979 World Series. Major League Baseball has done something I've long wished for all the leagues to do by releasing DVDs of the TV broadcasts of historic games and series. Actually, baseball and the NBA have been doing it for a couple years now. The stodgy, crusty old NFL will never do it. They don't call it the No Fun League for nothing. But baseball is releasing a few World Series a year over the next few years. The '79 Series is just out, all seven games in their entirety from the ABC network feed.

It's wonderful nostalgia for me, since I didn't actually watch the games when they were played. I knew the players and their statistics by heart from their baseball cards. But now to see them come alive in living color -- a lot of color -- is really something. In the late 1970s, the Pirates sported a gaudy color scheme -- nine possible combinations of black and gold and pinstripe tops and pants, which they would mix and match indiscriminately in a practice Sports Illustrated referred to as "multi-hued anarchy." Some of the combinations were just flat out hideous, like the getup Dave Parker was sporting on the cover of a 1977 issue of Sports Ilustrated. In the 1979 World Series, the team wore four different uniform combinations in seven games.

Despite all of those difficult uniform decisions, the Pirates managed to come from 3 games to 1 down to win the series, 4 games to 3. Stargell redeemed himself for a horrendous performance eight years earlier in the 1971 World Series by hitting three homers in 1979 and winning the Series MVP. I know all of the facts. I've known them for years. But watching it happen, seeing the old stadium and the shots from the camera they had in a helicopter above the city, it all made me think back to that time and that place. I tried to picture myself at 7 years old and what I was doing that October while those games were being played. Even now, even though I don't live in Pittsburgh anymore and probably never will again, whenever I tell someone I'm going home there's part of me that's thinking about that place -- thinking about a cool, bleak autumn day and the rivers and the bridges and the rolling gray hillsides, a place where everything was black and gold and sports were still larger than life. That will always be where home is to me.

There is no justice

Just when you think there might be such a thing as hope -- just when you think that sometimes the little guy can topple the big guy every once in a while -- something happens that makes you realize life is all about getting kicked in the balls and laughed at by the big guy while he watches you writhe around on the ground in pain.

OK, that's overstating it more than a little bit, considering what prompted me to write this. But as a baseball fan I'm so goddamn sick of the New York Yankees I can barely see straight.

Tonight, the Yankees were tailing the Texas Rangers 10-2 at one point. Yes, of course, I know the Rangers pitching staff is notoriously pathetic. And so it was that you could have easily predicted what was to come. The Yankees made a comeback and Jorge Posada blistered a two-run homer over the right field fence in the bottom of the ninth to give New York a 14-13 victory.

I'm so sick of the Yankees. I'm so sick of their limitless payroll and the way they go out and buy whoever they need -- often getting the team they rape in the deal to agree to keep paying a good chunk of the salary of whatever rent-a-player they pilfer. I'm sick of their YES Network and the ungodly smug Michael Kay ... the other day I listened to him bitching about how some team the Yankees were visiting set off a bunch of fireworks before the game and it made the stadium smoky. And he kept whining about it and said, "the Yankees drew four million fans last year and they didn't have to set off fireworks." Well, you know Michael, maybe if every other team in baseball could afford to field an all-star at almost every position nobody would ever have to put on any promotions of any kind. But until that day comes, the rest of the groveling little peasant teams still have to figure out some ways to put asses in the seats. So, we're sorry if we annoy you with our circus-geek freakshow routine. Why don't you leave the peon teams alone and go buy a few more all-stars?

It's getting to be that time of the season that the Yankees start giving serious thought to their next player personnel conquest. I mean, you've got Hideki Matsui on the DL until at least August. Gary Sheffield is supposed to be back in the lineup soon, but he's been hurt. Randy Johnson is looking every bit of 42 years old, finally. They were so proud of themselves for getting Carl Pavano last year and they threw a bunch of money at him on the basis of one good season, and he's done just about nothing for them. So, while there may truly be no justice, Yankee haters can take a certain sense of satisfaction from the fact in spite of all their vast resources and continued acquisitions over the last few years, it all seems to have been for naught. They still haven't won the World Series since 2000. They lost to the freakin' Diamondbacks and Marlins. The Marlins! Of course, it should be quickly pointed out that the Marlins won their two World Series by demonstrating every bit of the championship-by-cash arrogance that makes the Yankees so incredibly distasteful. I guess we should be thankful for such poignant irony.

There's a long way to go in this season and the Yankees are easily playing in the toughest division in baseball. The Red Sox aren't going anywhere, and if A.J. Burnett can get healthy, the Blue Jays might have something to say. But it's only a matter of time before the Yankees buy themselves an outfielder to take Matsui's spot in the lineup. As miserable as my beloved, star-crossed Pirates are, I'm halfway hoping the Yankees talk them into giving up Jason Bay -- which would be just enough to put Pittsburgh out of its misery. It would be a mercy killing. And perhaps that might just be baseball's cruel way of delivering a little justice after all.

Farewell

The final episode of The West Wing aired earlier tonight. There are few television shows that reach out and grab you, and even fewer that do so because of their intelligence and their wit. The West Wing was a seven-year ride of brilliant dialogue and story development and easily ranks among the best political fiction of any kind. Unfortunately, many of us wished it could have been more than fiction. When Bush won the White House, the weekly look at the Bartlett Administration was a refuge from reality.

There is no disputing that The West Wing took a downturn after the end of the fourth season when Aaron Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme left. It took the show a good two seasons to find its footing after that, but this last season it became a great show again. Deadlines, of course, have a way of bringing out the best in everyone, and with the series ending, there was a rush of energy in the last dozen or so episodes. It would have been great to see the early days of the Santos Administration.

The West Wing, no doubt, took shape from the remnants of Sorkin's film The American President. The similarities between the two are unmistakable. There is no equal for the dialogue of Aaron Sorkin. The thing about The West Wing was that it seized your attention right from its first minutes on the air. By the time the opening credits of the pilot episode roll over John Spencer's arrival and walk-and-talk through the White House, the show has you moving at breakneck pace, and it kept up that speed for four seasons. When the first episode ended, you couldn't wait for the next one to air. You knew you were seeing something unlike anything else.

It's easy to nitpick, to make disparaging remarks about what happened after Sorkin left, or to complain that the timeline of the show skipped a whole year in between the end of season 5 and the start of season 6. But even at its worst, it was still better than anything else on network TV. It will be a long time before we see anything like it again.

No phones

In spite of my devotion to technology, I am not a fan of cell phones. I was the last human being on the planet to get one -- funny what being stranded along the side of I-95 will do to a person. But it's been two years since then and I still barely use the thing. I'm about to downgrade my plan to fewer minutes.

I don't get people who insist on using their cell phones everywhere. I don't get these people walking around with headsets, talking to the wind. They look like idiots, and they're the only ones who don't know it. They have these Bluetooth things now that are tiny and mostly unobtrusive, but a few weeks ago I was in the Target and saw a guy wearing what looked like one of those headsets the football coaches use on the sidelines. I wanted to walk up to him and tell him, "call a draw play -- the defense won't expect it."

But what happened today took the cake.

I walked into the restroom in the building where I work and another guy came in just after me -- one of these guys who you can tell is trying a little too hard to be Mr. 21st Century Man. He's a multi-tasker, always on the go, always connected, can't take a minute of downtime in the dog eat dog business world. So basically, the kind of guy who makes you sick to your stomach.

Anyway, he goes into a stall, drops his newspaper on the floor, takes a seat and proceeds to, uh, let's just say he made a lot of noise. And then, seconds later, he's on the phone!

"Yeah, it's me, I just sent that fax, so it should be there. No, I've been in the office all morning. I'll ask them about it....."

The entire time he's talking, he's continuing to take just about the loudest shit I've ever heard in my life. I guess I should credit him with one thing, though. As he's talking and shitting, he's also working in an impressive number of courtesy flushes. So he has no regard for what the person on the other end of the phone is hearing, but at least he's not so crass as to make the rest of the folks in the bathroom endure his byproducts. Who is this guy and where did he learn that it's OK to engage in a business call while taking a dump? Because that's a job I want. I want the job where you can subject people on the other end of the phone to the sounds of explosive bowel movements and the repeated "Bawooosh" of the toilet. That's for me. Nothing like a casual workplace attitude.

So Mr. Mystery Shit finishes his very important call, and just before he picks up his newspaper off the floor, I notice it's The Washington Times ... which goes a long way toward explaining how he got so full of shit in the first place.