Sports: The reason you're like this

A fresh off the boat immigrant I was quite some years ago, and with no prior exposure to the uniquely American sports of football and baseball.  No athlete I ever was, nor pretended to be one, yet, practically from the first day, I took to baseball and football, as the proverbial fish to water, which is a hilarious metaphor to employ given that I swim like a rock!

To follow baseball without ever having played it perhaps fits in well with how the game appeals to nerds.  As I would find later in the essays by Stephen Jay Gould--ah, I miss his writings--there was quite some poetry in the game and in the statistics.  Lord Kelvin famously declared that to measure is to know and anything that could not be measured was not worth knowing.  Baseball offered a gazillion measurements, but the beauty of the sport was how all that measurement often meant nothing.

I fell in love with baseball (A dangerous sport characterized by long periods of daydreaming, punctuated by intense bursts of unmanageable violence, panic, and people screaming at you.)   The love was cemented because the worthlessness of all those measurements was spectacularly demonstrated in my early, early years as a green graduate student.

source

I had picked up enough about baseball to follow the box scores in the Los Angeles Times as a daily ritual.  Even more exciting it was to scan through the detailed numbers in the Sunday edition.

And then came the 1988 season.  What glorious inning after inning! (The amount of time left before afternoon snack, divided by nine.)

Kirk Gibson was the story from the beginning.  The Dodgers signed him on and commentators worried that his attitude would not resonate with the team.  Surely enough, he had problems with his new teammates from the get go.

As the season progressed, the Dodgers  weren't picked by many to win it all.  The statistics did not favor them.

But, there was something happening.  Like Orel Hershiser's unhittable pitching.

The Dodgers won the division title.
The statistics favored the Mets in the league championship. Again, all the numbers pointing to the Mets' superiority became irrelevant.
And thus it was the ultimate all-California final, with that famous hitting duo, whose later drug-enhanced performances at the plate produced some towering home runs. (Something that you genuinely believe will happen when you swing. Every single time you swing. Even though it has never happened, you still think it will. You are so funny sometimes.)

All the numbers made it clear that the Dodgers were the underdogs among underdogs.

It couldn't have been any more of a Hollywood storytelling than that.  Nobody could have predicted that there was more Hollywood drama to come.

It was the bottom of the ninth.
The Dodgers were trailing with two outs.
One more out and the teams would meet again.
The injured and hobbling Gibson was sent in as a pinch-hitter.  (Something that you and your teammates request for you but cannot have.)

The rest, as they say, was history.



(The title of this post and the italics in parenthesis are all from this wonderfully humorous piece in the New Yorker on a glossary of baseball terms.)

On the death of Pataudi, and of cricket itself

As one who grew up in India, I have tons of memories rushing through my head after reading that Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi is no more.

Pataudi was the the charming player and captain, with a famous film actress wife to boot, when I started following the game in what feels like several lifetimes ago.

Those were the years in Neyveli before television.  Test matches were of the old style--five days with a rest-day in between, after the second or the third day of the match.  Listening to the radio commentaries, with expert comments by what always sounded as a senile Lala Amarnath, then reading about the day's proceedings in The Hiindu the next morning, and finally talking about it with classmates at school provided way more excitement than I could have ever wanted.

All these despite the fact that I was no good at sports!  I was one of those kids who was reluctantly picked last to be on a team in schoolyard or neighborhood games.  But, that didn't matter one bit--cricket was exciting.

The much talked about West Indian team came to India to play.  I was ten-plus years old and this was my first serious test match series as a cricket-crazy kid.  I had read about them: Llyod, Richards, Holding, Roberts, Greenidge, Julien ... as a kid rooting for India, I was convinced that "we" would lose, and lose horribly. 

Those were also the years that mom sent us lunch through the maid, "Thayee."  Along with the lunch that was packed in "tiffin carriers" mother always included a note on the latest score in the test after play began at about ten in the morning.  Perhaps, like most mothers, my mom too followed the game only because of the kids.

As tasty as the food was, it was the cricket score that I waited for whenever the tests were played.  If the score indicated that India was not doing well, or if the West Indies were doing great, then it was quite a sad afternoon.  I would race back home after school ended in order to catch the final few minutes of the radio commentary.

Thus began my cricket-mania.

Caption at the source:

(From left) Bishen Singh Bedi, Pataudi, B. Chandrasekar, Anshuman Gaekwad and G. Viswanath run towards the pavilion with joy after India defeated the West Indies in the 1974-75 series

But, soon, the game started changing.  It became increasingly competitive. Players engaged in acts that were no longer cricket.  As exciting it was when television made cricket matches wonderfully visual spectacles, perhaps it also quickly transformed the game for the worse.

Meanwhile, I, too, was changing, and found intellectual ideas to be way more fascinating than being a passive spectator for the five days of every test match.

Slowly I drifted away from cricket.

Slightly over a decade after that memorable first cricket series, I headed to the US, where I quickly fell in love with the local baseball team, the Los Angeles Dodgers.  I had barely figured out the basics of this game, which was so similar to cricket, and yet so different from it, when Kirk Gibson hit that memorable home run, Orel Hershiser was simply unhittable, and the Dodgers won it all. 

Hello baseball, and goodbye cricket.

Two more decades have passed by, and now I couldn't care for baseball either.  Every morning, while reading the newspaper over breakfast, I do look up the box scores and the standings out of sheer habit, and it makes my day if the damn Yankees are not on top :)

Cricket?  Up until a month ago, I didn't even know that the rest-day concept had been abandoned a long time back!

But, Pataudi I remember. And I thank.

Finally, sports world back to normal :-)

Three events on the same day--a phenomenal trifecta of sorts--that make me feel like it is time to relax because the "old friends" are back with wins.

• First it was Roger Federer at the French Open
• Then it was Tiger Woods charging from way back to win it
• and, finally, the Lakers restoring order in the NBA.

Way back, in the summer after completing my first year as a graduate student in a new country, I headed to Venezuela with a few fellow-grad students to work on a research project. It was a learning experience for me in a number of different ways--including appreciating the finesse and poetry that Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul Jabbar displayed on the court, with some fantastic support from their teammates: James Worthy, Byron Scott, and AJ Green, in particular. I don't care much for the hanging by the rim, and would much rather watch intelligence and real team approach on the court.

Anyway, soon after, I fell hook, line, and sinker for the Dodgers thanks to Kirk Gibson's too-good-to-believe homerun while hobbling on a worthless leg, and the sheer superiority of Hershiser's pitching. So far, this year the Dodgers are doing well, despite Manny Ramirez's antics with drugs.

Is it too early to sing "happy days are here again?" :-)

Baseball. Steroids. Manny. Dodgers.

Highly stimulated :-)

Stimulus package will pay Manny Ramirez, too!

Scott Boras, the agent known for representing the highest-paid players in baseball, set another record for the game's largest contract when he finalized Manny Ramirez's $20 billion agreement with the United States federal government on Thursday. "Manny's .396 batting average last season with the Dodgers, as well as his playoff performance, proved that he is as important to this country as infrastructure projects, health care, and renewable energy development," Boras said during an interview, adding that Ramirez is especially satisfied with the indefinite length of the contract. ... " A clause in the contract states Ramirez could receive an additional $6 billion if he successfully saves the American auto industry.

Well, that is not true--this is a satirical piece from, who else, The Onion :-)

The real story on Manny Ramirez' salary?

owner Frank McCourt and General Manager Ned Colletti made their latest pitch to Ramirez's representatives in a meeting at Dodger Stadium: two years, $45 million.

The proposed deal would pay Ramirez $25 million this season and includes a $20 million player option for 2010, according to baseball sources familiar with the negotiations who weren't authorized to speak publicly on the matter. Ramirez would be able to void the second year of the contract and re-enter the free agent market next winter.

Ramirez's agent, Scott Boras, was said to be informing Ramirez of the offer Wednesday evening and told the Dodgers that he could tell them of Ramirez's response as soon as this morning.