Trouble in River City

("Trouble in River City" was the name of some kind of punk-rock zine I flipped through idly when I was in East St. Louis visiting a high school friend, Mariette. Do people actually call St. Louis that in real life, without feeling like a high school drama teacher is going to appear behind their shoulder and demand they hit their mark in the big "Seventy-Six Trombones" scene?)

Because I cannot escape being a self-parody, I'm in a fantasy baseball league. I did one in college, and then again two years ago. The latter league was run by some online friends of mine, who proceeded to mercilessly pound me into the dirt. I sort of stopped paying attention at the end and ended up feeling a bit bad about it, so I sat the next year out. This year, an actual real-life friend of mine, a man who was at my wedding, pleaded with me to help round out a league of his. I suspect I will be gifted with a dirt-pounding again, but I'm having fun so far despite the sucking vacuum that is my pitching. One of the reasons is that I my first-round pick, pick #2 of the draft, was Albert Pujols, the consensus best player in the game and a man whose name has launched a thousand PG-13 jokes. Pujols was hitting like a madman, leading the league in slugging and on a pace to break the single-season home run record.

This week, of course, he got hurt, straining a muscle while chasing down a fly ball. He's expected to be out up to six weeks. Pujols is, by all accounts, a stand-up guy: he and his wife do charitable work in both St. Louis and the Dominican Republic; they're heavily involved in Down's Syndrome fundraising (Pujols daughter has Down's); the biggest controversy surrounding him is the persistant rumor that he's older than his listed age of 26. He's a beautiful hitter, a decent fielder, fun to watch. He's a good a person as any to set the single-season home run mark, and record races are fun to watch, so it's a shame that he's hurt, but I'm moderately distressed. My fantasy season just went down in flames, I think.

I grew up an Orioles fan. When I discovered sabremetrics, I also started following  Billy Beane's Oakland A's, the more so since the Orioles apparently collectively ran over a gypsy's kid sometime around 1997. I'm sure Pujols is a great guy -- nice to dogs, a fabulous karaoke artist, sweet smelling like flowers after a rainstorm -- but I have no rooting interest in either the Cardinals or the NL as a whole. There are a host of reasons why baseball is no longer the national pastime. Football is manifestly better on television than baseball, which is best experienced at a daytime game or on the radio with Vin Scully (or maybe Jon Miller) announcing. Basketball attracts the best athletes these days; just ask Charlie Ward. But how much of it is the unwinding of tribal loyalties? One of the reasons that the opening scene of Underworld works so well is that it's understood that, for men of a certain age, particularly from the big East Coast cities that hand out literary awards, your rooting interest in baseball defined a sense of your place in the world. I can't imagine my grandfather, a die-hard Sox fan, ever turning off the television after a walk-off home run and thinking, "Well, at least Giambi was on my rotisserie squad."