Weekly Reader: Headlines and reflections

Last week's post on this blog was a public regrouping in order to put forward a small part of the Christian ethical foundation underlying this ongoing project. Today's post will be similar, except framed in a reading of some of the recent headlines directly or indirectly pertaining to the subject and seeking to tease out where these ethical concerns may intersect. It is an excercise in developing a methodology, or trying to do so anyway. So, on with it.

ITEM: The NFL is considering dropping or severly curtailing its schedule of Thursday night games in future seasons.
REFLECTION: I see two particular concerns that are revealed by this piece of news.
The NFL is considering this move for one reason, and one reason only: poor ratings. Others connected to the game have certainly raised other concerns about the package -- bad games, over-saturation, and even player safety on occasion. However, these have been the case for a while -- really, is it not clear that playing a game on Sunday and turning around and playing another game four days later could make it difficult to get every body, or everybody, healed even to a minimal degree? Nonetheless, only the middling ratings for the games seems to have gotten the NFL's attention. So...
1. Why are we so confident that a league that has ignored safety concerns so far in inflating the NFL's Thursday presence, from Thanksgiving Day to a few late season weeks to half a season and, this year, to a full season, can truly be trusted to give enough of a damn about player safety in any other context, absent the pressure of losing not making enough money? To presume that a non-ethical actor is suddenly going to act ethically is, well, not very ethical, is it?
2. The flip side of this realization is that FANS DO HAVE POWER to cause the NFL to change its ways. Withhold your money, or even your attention, and look what can happen! This realization makes it a lot more difficult to cling to the notion that an individual's turning away from the game, for example, "won't make a difference." It apparently can effect the league when people don't watch. So fan responsiblity really does matter.
Sidebar: Some of the same concern will need to be directed at college football as well, in which some teams and leagues play some truly bizarre schedules -- Tuesday and Wednesday nights, even -- and Thursday games have been in place for some schools for as much as twenty years.

ITEM: A study from Harvard University recommends, among other things, substantial changes to the structure by which medical personnel are deployed in the league; the league responded with predictable staged outrage (predictable if you've been paying attention to the league for a while).
REFLECTION: Aside from yet another case of academia being out of touch with the real world, this story points to the mania for control that also contributes to the NFL's untrustworthy nature where player health is concerned.
The study proposes that doctors monitoring health not be employed by the league. The logic is simple; doctors who answer to the league or to an individual team are inherently in a position in which the interests of the team or league (i.e. get the star back on the field as quickly as possible) and the interests of the player (don't die, or don't hasten your own death unnecessarily) do not align, despite the NFL's vapid denials of conflict of interest. (The incredibly fatuous statements attributed to NFL spokespeople in the article suggest that the NFL is either unbelievably ignorant of what "conflict of interest" means, or desperately trying to muddy the waters on the subject.)
And as to claims that the proposed system is unworkable? Then are you serious about the health and safety of your players? It really is that simple.

ITEM: Zander Diamont, a backup quarterback for the University of Indiana Hoosiers, has decided to forego his final season of eligibility after "a lot" of concussions in his career (dating back to high school), summing up his decision with the pithy and on-point comment "I need my brain."
REFLECTION: As has been noted in previous blogs, not everybody would necessarily agree with that last comment.
Of course, as Diamont openly admits, he didn't have an NFL career ahead of him, and he is set to graduate from IU this spring. The lure of a pro career does often interfere with good judgment, it seems. (He's also the son of a soap-opera star, and perhaps that lessens the financial pressures that may cause some to press on in the game and hope against hope for that pro career.)
Also noteworthy is Diamont's acknowledgment that his particular playing style was such that he was more prone to head shots, and that his relatively small size made it hard to have any success without putting himself at greater risk. What is rare here is Diamont's apparent ability to see through it all and come to a decision to step away from the risk before it becomes harm. Hopefully.
What becomes a concern is the degree to which young men, who have been playing football since elementary school in many cases, are terribly good candidates to come to such conclusions more often than not. And this comes back to the root concern of this blog: just because young men are free to put themselves at such risk and to choose the harm, are we Christians ethically or morally free to participate in it with our dollars or our presence or our adulation? And if you've read much of this blog, you'll know where this blog stands.

ITEM: A lawsuit filed on behalf of 142 former NFL players calls on the league to acknowledge CTE as an occupational hazard that should be covered by worker's compensation.
REFLECTION: As much as I would typically be sympathetic to the plaintiffs, some shifty stuff is going on here.
The article states that the lead plaintiff was "diagnosed with CTE in 2015." Um, what? Since the article also seems to indicate that said plaintiff is also still alive, something is wrong here. If some doctor is "diagnosing" former players with CTE (and naturally, this is in South Florida, or Flori-duh), then either some amazing breakthrough has been made in complete and utter isolation and with absolutely zero publicity, or somebody's scamming somebody. Considering that, despite some progress, CTE cannot be definitively identified except posthumously...yeah, ethical dubiousness isn't acceptable on either side of this struggle.

ITEM: Liberty University has hired Ian McCaw as its athletic director.
REFLECTION: While there are about a million things that can be said about this subject, for this case (sticking with the football/CTE issue) we are again forced to consider the issue of trustworthiness, but this time from an explicitly Christian (or nominally so) perspective.
McCaw, of course, was previously the athletic director at Baylor University, at a time when the institution failed spectacularly at dealing with revelations of sexual assault among its athletes. Apparently Liberty's desire to become the Notre Dame of evangelicalism is not about to be sidetracked by mere concerns about the safety of women on campus.
The Washington Post's headline on the article places the stakes pretty high, but not inaccurately so, I'd say. If the term "evangelicalism" hasn't taken enough abuse as a result of the presidential campaign, items like this should help push that over the top.
Of course, one of the principal evangelical leaders involved in that campaign was none other than Jerry Falwell, Jr., the president of Liberty University. The juxtaposition of those two tidbits is juicy enough to warrant a larger concern about just what evangelicalism means anymore. Can an evangelicalism that wants to portray itself primarily through athletic success -- at any cost, apparently -- be trusted with the health of the players who are supposed to bring that athletic success? And a school that is so little concerned with what happened on McCaw's watch at Baylor is not that likely to care for the long-term health of its athletes, either.
The win-at-all-costs mentality of college football is sad enough among the largely secular universities who enjoy most of the success in it these days. Seeing schools who shout loudly about their "Christian character" be so cavalier about such costs, and prioritizing athletic success to the degree that it calls that character into question, is profoundly hard to swallow. It's hard not to wonder if grappling with football and the harm it does to some percentage of its players is going to have to go forward without much participation from the evangelical wing of Christianity, or whether that wing is capable of forming a Christian ethical response to the harms (as opposed to risks) of football.

Zander Diamont says "a lot" of concussions is enough.

What is "fun" in modern sports?

About four years ago I read and shared on social media this article, written in the face of a near-beanball brawl, about the "unwritten rules" of baseball. In the wake of the donnybrook between the Texas Rangers and Toronto Blue Jays earler this week, it was humorously ironic to see that old story burble up from the dark recesses of Facebook.

Baseball has been having a rather strange season in at least one respect; it seems, this season more than most, to be torn over what seems an odd question to be asked about grown men playing games: is baseball fun?

This is primarily the work of Bryce Harper, young Washington Nationals outfielder, reigning Most Valuable Player in the NL, and self-appointed provocateur of Making Baseball Fun Again. His early-season push on "fun" has garnered the kid a pretty striking amount of attention for a sport that hasn't quite known what to do with outspoken players whose production on the field has backed up and surpassed their mouths off of it, mostly because there have been so few such players.

The "fun" campaign has manifested itself in many ways, some of them regrettably like a certain presidential candidate who shall not be named here, others rather more conventional (appearing on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon). Other players have been joining the campaign, entire teams have had their opinion solicited, and so forth and so on.

In the meantime, the un-fun parts of the game have also manifested themselves, as in that knockdown drag-out brawl between the Rangers and Blue Jays. Here is where Serious Baseball rears its head with ugly-looking consequences. When Toronto's Jose Bautista unleashed a hard take-out slide at the Rangers' Roughned Odor (RO-ned O-door, before you get confused), threw a punch at Bautista. Not the usual baseball "punch," which is more of an ineffectual shove, but a real, prepared and premeditated roundhouse punch. Odor got eight games' worth of suspension for the punch, and Bautista for the attempt to deposit Odor in the left-field seats.

Baseball (unlike, say, the NFL) has come to the conclusion that it would rather not see its players (particularly its expensive ones) end up mangled on the field, as has happened to a few catchers (see Posey, Buster) in the past couple of decades and now seems to be an issue among shortstops and second basemen. Late last season it was Jung-Ho Kang of the Pittsburgh Pirates getting wiped out by the Los Angeles Dodgers' Chase Utley, suffering an injury from which he is still recovering. As a result the Pirates were missing one of their most important offensive weapons in their wild-card playoff game against the Chicago Cubs. One can argue that MLB manages to care for its players and their health at least to some degree, or one can argue that owners want to protect their investments, or one can argue that the league would like to have its stars on the field for important things like the playoffs. And all of those three probably contain some truth.

But the business of "unwritten rules" plays into the Rangers-Jays affair, if only because of what happened in last year's American League Division Series between those two teams. Bautista, one of the more dangerous hitters in the AL, connected for a home run that gave the Jays the winning margin in the decisive game of that series, and unleashed an epic bat flip upon doing so.

Bat flips are of course evil incarnate, an invention of Satan himself.

Or that's what you'd think based on the reaction at the time.

Admittedly, Bautista's bat flip was at least as much a bat fling as flip. Pretty severe. But then, in the situation, that's not as surprising as it would seem. In the previous half-inning, due to a bizarre confluence of events, it appeared the Jays were going to be eliminated because of a catcher's return throw to the pitcher that somehow struck the bat of the Rangers' hitter before it could get back to the pitcher. That would have been far and away the most bizarre and crushing way to lose a playoff game and series in the history of history itself.

It is my opinion (probably an unpopular one, but that's hardly new in this blog) that for Bautista to be unemotional in that situation would have been incredibly dishonest and false. That was a huge emotional moment, with tons at stake.

Somehow, though, Sam Dyson, the Rangers pitcher, decided that the bat flip was all about him.

Pro tip, pitchers: when a batter hits a climactic home run to win a ballgame and especially a playoff game and series, the last thing that hitter is thinking about is you. You simply are not important enough to "show up."

Now I don't think that anybody was exactly having "fun" in that moment back in October. And this goes to my concern with Harper's "fun" campaign. And also this goes to why I consider this story worth blogging about in the place of the usual subject matter of this blog.

Part of the problem with football and its traumatic effects on too many brains is that football, along with other sports, has assumed a position in society way beyond what it can or should ethically sustain. It's too big and too expensive and too much of an idol.

And idols aren't fun. Not even American Idols.

Also: fun is a nice part of sports, even on the more individual non-professional level, but that's not quite everything that there is to sports.

There are far stronger forces at play in games -- like catharsis, probably what was happening with Bautista back in October.

But there are things missing, almost as if by design, in big-time sports that can't quite be solved with a call to "make baseball fun again."

When the title of my blog applies so broadly across sports ("it ain't a religion, son, it's ... ), "fun" just isn't strong enough to be the answer to the question.

First of all, you have to figure out what the question is.

(To be continued...)

The Flip.

Waiting on science our savior, cont'd: No spear, but Magic Helmet!

One recent post covered a development in the quest for technological solutions to football's brain-trauma woes: a mobile tackling dummy designed to reduce the chances of injury in practices. Today we can look at yet another potential technological development in that quest: The Magic Helmet! (Sorry, spear not included.) (Note: go to the bottom of the article for the classic cartoon referenced here, around 2:10.)

No, it isn't really called a "magic helmet," but the hopes of its developers have a certain magical quality to them. The researchers in question are trying to develop a football helmet that will give off a visual signal that its wearer has suffered a concussion or severe blow to the brain. The idea, of course, is to be as certain as possible to get the affected player off the field before there's any opportunity for further damage. A concussion is bad enough; further injury while still under the influence of a concussion is exponentially worse.

The researchers on this project envision this technology being useful not only (perhaps not even primarily) for football players, but also for soldiers, a class of citizen that also faces severe brain trauma thanks to improvised explosive devices and other battlefield dangers. It's possible that the technology may be more useful for them; for football players, this might be at best a partial solution if it ever becomes any kind of useful tool.

To repeat: the concussion itself is not the only damage that places a football player's brain at risk.  Subconcussive blows to the head are also capable of causing both short-term and long-term damage to the brain. It isn't clear that a test geared towards major traumas is going to be much help with discerning the damage caused by more routine hits.

I'd also suggest that some of the questions raised in the previous technology blog entry (linked at the top of this article) apply here. In particular, the perils of "waiting on science our savior" most definitely apply. How many players will get damaged in the interim, even if this helmet device actually becomes viable?

Another point is worth mentioning, though. Note the source of the "magic helmet" story: an insurance website. (Another provocative story from the same website, here, is worth a read.) Here is a major player in the ongoing saga that most people don't think about.

Somebody is going to have to come with insurance for the game of football. Leagues, teams, players...somebody is going to have to pay for it.

What happens when the insurance industry says "no more"? What happens when they decide it's no longer worth the risk?

I've said before that only fans, specifically fans no longer spending money on football, could affect entities like the NFL or NCAA. A balky insurance industry might just be an exception to that claim.

Image from "Invisible Killer," 

http://www.propertycasualty360.com/2013/09/04/invisible-killer

Also, if you've never heard the song from which I'm stealing this title, you can hear it here.

Waiting on science our savior

As the evidence for traumatic brain injury connected to football forced its way into the sporting consciousness over the 1990s and 2000s, one of the occasional yet persistent responses to the concern was to insist that technology would eventually provide a solution that would preserve football in something like the form we have come to know. In most cases this technological salvation was expected to come from improved gear for players on the field, most particularly the helmet. League of Denial, the book that has advanced the story on CTE and brain trauma in football most successfully, includes a section on a particularly egregious example of such promotion of a new helmet model, a case of unjustified hype fairly early in the course of the crisis.

A more recent development in technology against football injury, though, seeks to address other factors. A pair of engineering students at Dartmouth University developed what has been called the MVP, or "Mobile Virtual Player." The students, one a former member of the Dartmouth football team, developed the MVP, essentially a robotic tackling dummy that simulates the movements of a runner to allow a defender to practice tackling.

MVP was a response to a maverick move by Buddy Teevens, the head coach at Dartmouth. Teevens, who also had head coaching stints at Tulane and Stanford in his career, returned to Dartmouth in 2005, where he had previously coached from 1987 to 1991. Five years ago, in response to his own rising concerns about concussions and other injuries, Teevens had decided to eliminate tacking drills in Dartmouth practices. The counterintuitive move didn't seem to hurt Dartmouth's defense; as the NPR article notes, the team's rate of missed tackles dropped by half in the first full season after the protocol was implemented, and the team sits at #2 in the preseason rankings for the Ivy League, mirroring Teevens's success in turning Dartmouth around from his earlier coaching stint. Teevens, though, still perceived that the team couldn't get experience with moving targets.

While it's encouraging to see people coming up with creative solutions, there are still concerns about relying on technological advances to fix football's problems. What problems, you ask?

1) Technology doesn't come cheap. Each of the MVPs Dartmouth is now using cost about $3500 to develop. A third MVP is on order at Dartmouth, and you might guess that a well-heeled Ivy League school can afford it. That's not a number that would deter an NFL team from ordering up a whole offensive platoon of them, and your Ohio States and Alabamas would have no trouble enticing a donor to pay for them as well. For Compass-Point State College, though, that could be a steep price, and for, say, a poor rural high school, that would be prohibitive. The ethical quandries abound. Who gets to play safely, and who has to put their brains at risk in practice as well as games? The divide between rich programs and poor programs would be cemented.

2) While the use of MVPs as a practice aid seems promising so far (it certainly seems to be working just fine at Dartmouth), it's too soon to say that for certain. A hit is still a hit, after all. In theory hitting a mobile dummy that wobbles like a Weeble should be less damaging than hitting another human being. It's still necessary to keep track of just how true this turns out to be.

3) Football has its own particular culture. It is a culture that more or less routinely expects its players to do, shall we say, rash things to prove their manhood. Can a sport that so reveres the "Oklahoma drill" seriously be expected to talk away from regular tackling drills?

4) Even if the MVP does prove to be beneficial in reducing injury in practice (and all you have to do is observe NFL preseason injury rates to know that this would be no small thing), there are still games to play. And very large and very fast people are still going to run into each other over and over again, and brains are still going to slosh around in skulls. And so far technology doesn't have any answers for that.

4a) And that becomes a problem that is pretty much always in play in any crisis where those affected in the crisis look to technology for answers. Continuing efforts to find technological answers to problems have a bad habit of both leading to unintended consequences, and delaying the actions that will inevitably be necessary to bring about real change. And people continue to get hurt, while the football world is "just killing time, with our eyes to the skies/waiting on science our savior..."*

*from "Murder in the Big House," from the album Chagall Guevara.

M-V-P! M-V-P! (photo credit: AP)

Stadium subsidy blues

While it may have slipped the notice of many in the rush of historic court decisions and crazy-popular sporting events of the last weeks, a possibly surprising development in the news this week might have long-term ramifications for the relationship of sport and civic life.

In his budget proposal for the forthcoming fiscal year, President Obama floated a proposal to eliminate the use of tax-free government bonds for the financing of sports stadiums or arenas. Given the lumpish behavior of the trolls of Congress over anything proposed by the president, it's pretty unlikely the proposal will ever see the light of day. Nonetheless, it's an interesting proposal to see at a time when public frustration over sports stadia expenditures is closer to boiling than it has been in many years.

It's not hard to find pretty grotesque examples of ludicrous amounts of public money being lavished on the fields in which teams owned by the 0.0001% play. Marlins Park in Miami is probably the gold standard for most recent stadium financial obscenity, a case in which notorious tightwad Jeffrey Loria basically got handed the keys to a crazily expensive monument to a team that has sandwiched a whole bunch of losing seasons around two of the flukiest World Series titles ever won. In forthcoming stadium spending, the impending move of the Atlanta Braves to a new park in Cobb County, leaving behind a former Olympic Stadium that will barely be twenty years old at their departure, has caused a bit of carping from this blog and other sources, although not all the issues in that case (at least for me) are necessarily about public financing of the stadium. Stadium deals for the Minnesota Vikings, San Francisco 49ers, Seattle Seahawks and other teams resulted in massive transfer of public funds into the pockets of people who already have plenty of money. It doesn't just extend to stadiums proper; the now-convicted-of-corruption former governor of Virginia gave a boatload of public money to the Washington Racist-Mascot-Not-Protected-By-Copyrights to put a summer training facility in Richmond, for example.

As the Slate article linked above notes, this isn't the first time Congress or the executive branch have tried to thwart such money giveaways; perversely, those attempts only seemed to encourage even more stadium giveaways. So perhaps a direct ban is the equivalent of a last-ditch attempt to curb the excesses of public financing for stadiums. Something tells me, though, that states or municipalities won't take kindly to being told by Big Gummint evildoers in Washington how they can and can't give away public money.

For the moment, I am actually withholding an opinion, mostly because I have an active and virulent allergy to even the possibility of agreeing with the Koch brothers on any subject (read down a little ways to see what I mean). I do think there are a couple of points that need to be made in relation to the subject, here on the direct relationship of such spending and civic responsibility on the part of the mindful faithful fan. Specifically, to raise your voice in opposition to public spending on sports facilities, you morally obligate yourself to be equally vociferous on two highly related subjects.

One: if you're going to get agitated on this subject you are morally obligated to get equally agitated on other giveaways of public funds for corporations that don't involve sports teams. Here I am speaking of the gobs of tax breaks and other financial giveaways used to lure things like automobile building facilities or other presumed "jobs deals." There are a couple of reasons for this; (1) the job-bringing capabilities of these deals are more mythological than real. Expecting that the bulk of the jobs in such giveaways to be filled locally is about as wise as expecting the entire lineup of the team playing in your city's stadium to be made up of folks actually from that city; and (2) the giveaways combined with the exaggerated job effect render the newly-lured factor a net revenue loser for your municipality. You've given a rich guy a big gift to very much the same degree that Miami or Minnesota did for the Marlins or Vikings, with virtually nothing coming back to you and/or your city.

Two: you are obligated to be proactive about how those dollars that don't go to the sports owner are spent, up to and including punishing politicians not just for sports giveaways but for all of their financial sins. One of the most often-cited reasons for opposing stadium giveaways has been the claim that such giveaways "took away" money that should have been going to education, or poverty alleviation, or (insert your pet cause here). It sounds very noble, and often gives the person making the argument a sheen of moral superiority. The trouble is it's seldom actually true. In most cases the monies in question never were going to education or poverty or whatever in the first place. In other cases, as with the Wisconsin story above, the funds were going to be cut anyway. Scott Walker didn't cut education funding in Wisconsin to give money away to the Milwaukee Bucks; he cut education funding because he's a hateful jackass who thinks any education beyond high school is an elitist scam. If you haven't already been creating whatever civic unrest is necessary to get that money into education before your governor or mayor wants to redirect it to the NFL or MLB or NBA, that's on you.

And yes, I do mean civic unrest if that's what it takes. These clowns give away such monies because on some level they believe their careers or their futures depend on doing so; if you don't make their lives miserable they'll never believe otherwise.

Got it?

Marlins Park under construction, 2011; crazy amounts of public money involved

Land of opportunity?

If you like baseball, it's hard not to like Andrew McCutcheon.

McCutcheon (or "Cutch") was the National League Most Valuable Player in 2013. His performance last year was perfectly worthy of another MVP award, but Clayton Kershaw had an insane season for the Dodgers and won both MVP and Cy Young awards.

It's hard not to like McCutcheon because, unlike some players, he does everything. Dude can hit, field, throw, and do all of them really well. To top that off, by all accounts he seems like a thoroughly decent human being. He's the type who, earlier this year, let his trademark dreadlocks be shorn off for charity. He's the face of one of the good stories of major league baseball the last couple of seasons, a Pittsburgh Pirates team that hadn't won diddly since 1992 (the infamous Sid Bream slide, for those with such memories) before breaking into the playoffs year before last (in other words, the Kansas City Royals of 2013) and followed it up with a return trip last season. He is a thoughtful and articulate man, not given to the shoot-from-the-lip blather of so many athletes. His mom is a pretty proficient singer who belts a mean national anthem, for pete's sake. How do you not like?

So when Andrew McCutcheon threw up some red flags about the Chicago Little League team that got stripped of its titles after their much-publicized run, I guess I was a little more inclined to listen than if the words had come from a more average, hotheaded type. McCutcheon poses these questions not by charging bias, but by pointing to his own story.

It's sad and scary to think that one of the most successful, accessible, and popular players in baseball right now (and one of its most marketable players, if MLB could ever get its act together) would have been playing football if he hadn't torn his ACL in high school. But you have to wonder if his story is all that unique, except that those potential stars do end up lost to the game.

McCutcheon recognizes the tremendous hand-ups he got in being picked up and largely funded through the system of "travel teams" that increasingly rule the roost as far as those kids with baseball talent who get drafted or make it on to prime college teams. For McCutcheon, as he notes, college baseball was really not an option; with even the best baseball scholarships only covering 70% of tuition and costs, and McCutcheon not coming from a family that could even pay 30%, it was pro ball or bust.

A similar story with a different track belongs to Giancarlo Stanton, the man-mountain power hitter of the Florida Marlins. While McCutcheon got lucky coming from a poor part of a small town in Florida, Stanton flew under the radar in another baseball hotbed, southern California, where he was overlooked by the travel teams abounding in that region. (You need to get fairly deep into the story to get to Stanton's high-school experience.) Old-fashioned high-school success, and one scout who saw what nobody else saw, were his ticket to pro ball, and even he allowed that if he weren't well on his way by his third year he might well have turned around and tried for college football.

As it happens, both Stanton and McCutcheon are black. And, to be honest, most of the kids whose parents can afford to pony up the costs of those exclusive travel teams are white. On one level, this looks a bit like yet another example of the unspoken, systematic exclusion of blacks from equal opportunity, in this case opportunity in the chosen sport of Jackie Robinson, of all things.

There are, though, other cases that cut against this particular grain. McCutcheon's teammate, shortstop Jordy Mercer, came out of a rural Oklahoma background, one in which if you played sports, you played all of them; his high school no longer fields a baseball team.

I'm not a parent. I can't claim to understand the motivations of parents who direct their children towards whatever sport as an extracurricular activity. (I was a band geek myself.) One presumes that part of the encouragement has to do with physical activity, with learning to play with others well, teamwork and camaraderie and all that. One also suspects, though I can't know this, that if you play a sport or sports (much like playing an instrument or painting or acting or other such endeavors), if you apply yourself and develop your talent, you can go as far as that talent and desire takes you. Basically, this sounds like what we tell our children about what endeavor they choose, be it high school activities or choice of major in college.

To the degree that sports turns out to be another venue for disappointment in that respect, I guess it simply starts to reflect the larger society in which it is situated. To the degree that a sport like baseball increasingly draws its players from a pool determined even in part by who can afford it as opposed to who is good enough; and to the degree that a sport more generally accessible -- like, say, football -- comes with the caveat that it might well destroy your brain; what, then, are these games teaching the young people that play them?

In this regard I'm extremely curious to see how this proposal plays out.  Sporting Kansas City, one of the more successful franchises in Major League Soccer, is seeking to develop what's called an "academy team" in the far west Kansas town of Garden City, as a part of its ever-expanding academy system.

Unlike other sports franchises, soccer clubs tend to develop extensive youth programs, including affiliated academy teams as well as youth teams more directly connected to the team. (Several of SKC's direct youth teams were big winners in one of the more recent tournaments for the different age brackets.) These teams and affiliated academies are very nakedly all about developing players for the major-league franchise; any other benefits are decidedly secondary. Still, it might lead to a college scholarship here or there, and even if your team eventually doesn't put you on its pro roster you're in a decent spot to catch on elsewhere. (SKC has several such "homegrown" players on its current roster, including Erik Palmer-Brown, who skipped his high-school graduation to play on the US under-20 World Cup team.)

The interesting thing about the Garden City potential academy is its very deliberate targeting of a demographic that would not fit into the profile of privilege suggested above. Garden City, and other nearby towns like Liberal and Dodge City have very large Hispanic populations, attracted in previous decades by opportunities in the meat-packing industry. SKC coach Peter Vermes alludes obliquely to the same kind of privilege tending to dominate soccer in the US in a way that perhaps it did not in his native Hungary, while directly wanting to work against that with the Garden City academy.

Let's be clear here; SKC is looking for players for SKC. Their principal hope is that some streetwise soccer kid from Garden City or Liberal will make SKC better in five or ten years. And yet, if this project comes off, that naked ploy to grab better players might just take some kid places he might never have dreamed of going. I have no idea what kind of life that becomes, or if there's even a sliver of education that is even possible in such a context.

What we ask of sports for our young people, or of our young people for our sports, is deeply due for examination. As a pastor you might be expecting me to complain about traveling teams taking kids away from Sunday morning worship services, but frankly my interests and concerns go a lot deeper than that. It's a huge topic, and one that could be a blog all to itself. But nothing is beyond questioning here, so questions will get asked when the need arises. Hopefully I'm not the only one asking.

The NFL's tobacco morality

So the news on the NFL-and-brain-trauma front has been a little slow of late, at least since Chris Borland decided he didn't need an NFL career more than he needed a functional brain for the rest of his life. In the last couple of days a story has come out, though, that -- while disturbing itself -- contains one quote that is in itself extremely revealing and disturbing, at least about how the NFL still doesn't get it even as it digs a spare billion out of its seat cushions to buy off bad publicity.

Awards in the long-awaited settlement of the "concussion lawsuit" against the NFL will be delayed until some time this fall. About ninety former players have lodged appeals against the settlement, and awards will not happen until most or all of those appeals have been heard and settled. In the meantime, a number of former players now showing signs of dementia, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, or Lou Gehrig's disease will have to wait a bit longer for cash awards to be disbursed.

Sad enough, although the appeals process needs to be heard out fully. But what gets particularly disturbing is the pretzel logic that seems to have governed one key omission from this settlement.

You'll notice, if you've followed this story or if you've read League of Denial, something missing from the list of conditions former players are suffering while awaiting this legal action. There is no mention of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, the condition uncovered in a legion of deceased former players (many of whom committed suicide) not only with NFL experience, but also a number of former players whose football experience did not extend beyond college or even high school in some cases.

This is where the NFL starts sounding more and more like its predecessor in crime, the tobacco industry. The first sign of "tobacco logic," an anonymous quote attributed only to "negotiators," claim that "the science on CTE is still evolving." (Actually here the NFL actually sounds like the climate denial industry, to be honest.) Unless the NFL is going to claim that these numerous players had boxing careers on the side, it's going to be a serious stretch to claim that the relationship between football and CTE will somehow "evolve" to be nonexistent. That the judge in the case seems to have fallen for this shady bit of sub-logic is disturbing enough.

The real bizarrerie, though, comes a shade later in the article. Those same "negotiators" go on to claim, concerning CTE, that "many of the behavioral and mood conditions claimed to be associated with CTE are prevalent with the general public."

Say what?

Because people who didn't play football have memory lapses, claims about CTE are invalid? Seriously, if someone really said this, their name and address need to be published purely for harassment purposes. The sheer immorality of this statement is mind-blowing. It is as if the tobacco industry, back in the day, had suggested that because some people who didn't smoke got cancer, tobacco can't possibly be blamed for any cancer in anyone.

The logical leap behind this claim becomes even stranger when one remembers that the conditions covered in the settlement -- Alzheimer's, Lou Gehrig's, Parkinson's, dementia and the like -- are also experienced by many people who never set foot on a gridiron in their lives. Why, then, is the NFL so willing to fork over the dough to cover diseases that need not have any relation to football?

Because this is nothing more than a public relations dodge. And shame on Judge Anita Brody for going along with it.

Why are they so adamant about excluding CTE? My surmise: to "give in" on CTE, more than any of these other diseases, exposes football, as it currently stands, as a fundamentally unsafe sport. Remember that CTE is not expressly about the effects of concussions on players (although concussions certainly don't help); rather, CTE -- chronic traumatic encephalopathy -- is traced to the regular, almost routine sub-concussive hits a player experiences. The kind of hits a player, particularly a lineman or linebacker or defensive back, might experience on any routine play. Even I wouldn't claim that the NFL thinks concussions are a good thing (they'd dislike them if only because of the player-hours lost because of them). But the looming possibility that the basic nature of the game itself has such devastating and traumatic effects on players' brains would potentially be an existential threat to the game. Therefore, no matter how base or amoral the league looks, it is never going to give on the CTE issue until it is forced to do so.

In the end this is hush money. And because these players suffering the above maladies are in many cases desperate for the financial assistance, they have little option but to take it.

Please don't try to impress me with the amount of the settlement, around one billion dollars. The NFL takes in about nine billion dollars a year. The above line about squeezing out change from the sofa cushions isn't as much of a stretch as it should be. And as the NFL has stated as its goal annual revenue of $25 billion, a disbursement of one billion over many years just doesn't have the same impact.

This blog attempts to approach sports from a Christian ethical viewpoint, if not in a terribly rigorous or scholarly way. Frankly, though, I'm really trying to think of any religious or moral ethical system that can look at the NFL at this point and find its ethical compass to be anything but grotesque. It is a horrible stretch to look at the NFL's record on the health concerns attached to the modern game, not just those around brain trauma (consider, as I must eventually, the NFL's track record on painkiller abuse); how is it at all reconcilable with a claim of a league that cares one whit for the welfare of its players?

Again, a thousand player suicides will not budge the NFL. Nor will a thousand lawsuits, a thousand player wives cold-cocked in elevators or shot to death by husbands who then shoot themselves, or a thousand confirmed cases of CTE. The NFL knows, having weathered what it has already, that it is too big and to strong to be bothered by any of those things.

The only thing that can ever have any hope of changing the NFL is the disappearance of those billions of dollars of revenue.

This would mean that advertisers are no longer falling all over themselves to be associated with the NFL.

This would mean that television outlets are no longer salivating to throw wildly exorbitant contracts at the NFL.

This would mean that fantasy-league operators aren't forking over dollars for permission to invoke the NFL and use player names and stats.

This would mean that merchandise with NFL logos and trademarks is no longer flying off shelves at a dizzying rate.

In other words, this would mean that people are no longer watching or spending money on the NFL.

And that's up to...well, people.

I reiterate that this book is worth your time to read. Beyond the stories of some of the earliest cases of CTE and the sometimes-byzantine work of tracing the condition, it puts to rest any notion that the NFL is at all concerned with anything other than what Roger Goodell has sometimes called "protecting the shield."

Don't take me out to the ballgame

Today we got an answer to an age-old philosophical question: if they play a baseball game and no one is there to see it, does it make a sound?
Answer: yes, but only if it's televised (or on radio, I suppose).
Because of the civil disturbances in Baltimore, the Orioles had the first two games of their series with the Chicago White Sox postponed. Presumably because of a desire not to lose too many games (that would likely require making up, considering that the Orioles and White Sox are both likely playoff contenders), today's game was moved up to 2:00 p.m. and played in a stadium with no spectators. This weekend's series against Tampa Bay, scheduled for Camden Yards (still one of the best stadiums in baseball), is being moved to Tropicana Field (not as bad as people make it out to be, but still one of the worst), although Baltimore will still function as the "home" team, batting last. (This I don't understand; these two teams are division rivals and had at least four more series to come; it seems like it should have been possible to swap out a future series at St. Pete rather than have the Orioles totally lose the home dates. But I'm no expert.)
It is not unprecedented for sports to be disrupted by civil unrest (the term used for events in Baltimore by Orioles announcer Gary Thorne, who did not use the term "riot"; his broadcast partner Jim Palmer floundered a bit, referring to "a riot or whatever"). Watts, the Rodney King unrest, the MLK assassination and other examples of civil unrest in the past have caused serious disruptions in baseball schedules. Baseball seems the most subject to these disruptions, possibly because more of these events seem to happen in the hot-weather months of baseball season, and maybe more because the everyday schedule of baseball is more susceptible to disruption (unless the unrest happens the morning of a football game, such a once-a-week event may be less likely to be affected and have more opportunity for the situation to be calmed by game day, for example). The NBA has known some disruptions in the past, however.
As for today's game, though there were no spectators admitted, the game was in fact televised. (I didn't watch it live, but I -- as an MLB.TV subscriber -- am able to watch it after the fact.) It was by all evidences a strange experience. The broadcasters were doing their usual professional work, but on occasion were clearly distracted by the circumstances. A Chris Davis home run in the first inning was met not by the cheers of a home crowd, but by the surprisingly noisy clattering of the home run ball in the right field seats. A clutch of spectators gathered to follow the game at one of the stadium's (closed and locked) gates, occasionally being shown on camera; exactly how much of the game they could actually see is questionable.
Nobody's idea of an ideal situation, to be sure.
But then, what would have been the better answer?
Adam Jones, the Orioles' center fielder and acknowledged "face of the franchise," spoke to the media before the game. Unlike a lot of athletes (or fans, for that matter) Jones seemed to get that a game in such a situation has only limited "healing" powers. "This game needs to be played," Jones said, "but [Baltimore] needs to heal first." Jones's background, growing up in a troubled part of San Diego, seems to have influenced his view of the events around him, even as he performed the publicly-mandated straddle of condemning the violence while understanding the conditions that provoked it; Jones knows those conditions better than most.
This is a place where baseball (believe it or not, given my sporting predilections) actually falls well short of its professional competitors. Football, for all its depredations (and I have chronicled them obsessively here), still has a reach among poor youth (an opportunity to get out of the ghetto/sticks/sugar cane fields and into college if nothing else). Basketball has an extremely prolific tradition of providing a way out for inner-city youth, even if that reputation may slightly exceed the reality. Baseball, on the other hand, has on the youth level increasingly become the province of pricey travel teams and programs that are a stretch for middle-class kids to afford, much less the poor of either urban or rural residence. Jones is an exception, increasingly, at least among US-born players (those who hail from Caribbean or South American countries are a quite different case).
Back to the game at hand; was it possible to play a game today (with the curfew in place, a game tonight was out of the question) and trust that it could be carried off safely with crowd in place?
I don't know. I have my doubts. The dynamics of a situation boiling with mistrust simply would not have given me any confidence about a game going forward without incident.
On the other hand, it's not hard to find a TV carrying the game. And I wouldn't be surprised if there were folks in the city starving for exactly that kind of distraction or relief for a few hours amidst the cleanup.
I have no answers. Nothing is ideal, nothing is going to turn out the way anybody would want.
For what it's worth, the Orioles won 8-2.

(p.s. one bit of humor; at one point the announcers decided to announce the very silent game in the manner of golf announcers, with the appropriate "golf whisper" voice.)

What games show us about ourselves

We don't have cable.  We keep a Netflix account so we can watch mostly British shows and some old Star Trek shows, and my annual anniversary gift is a subscription to mlb.tv, plus we have a whole heap of DVDs and Blu-Ray discs, so our entertainment needs are plentifully met in our house.
There are losses, though.  I don't get to see The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon.  I didn't expect to find that such a loss, mind you.  To me, Fallon was the guy who kept cracking up during Saturday Night Live sketches, and one of the perpetrators of one of the worst semi-baseball-ish movies of my lifetime, Fever Pitch.  (I would go so far to say that that particular movie was the one that convinced me not to be such a completist about baseball movies -- it's o.k. to miss some of them.)
Thanks to the miracle of YouTube, I'm starting to think I might be missing something.  Having Idina Menzel sing "Let It Go" accompanied by The Roots playing children's classroom instruments was inspired and will be hard to top.  Another of his stunts, though, while funny in so many ways, makes me think a bit about how we treat our sports heroes.
Robinson Cano, longtime second baseman for the New York Yankees, made his first appearance in New York recently with his new team, the Seattle Mariners.  Fallon convinced Cano, who signed a crazy megabucks contract to make the move, to go out into NYC and get booed before he even took the field.  Watch the video here.  Go on, I'll wait.
You've seen it?  No cheating, now.
Now you've seen it?  Good.
You see what happens.  Fallon's lackey persuades each jaded cynical New Yorker to boo at the big glossy photo of Cano, which some do with more vehemence than others.

Booooooooooooo!

When they turn to boo again, all of a sudden Cano's there.

Boooo -- oh, hey, Robinson Cano!

In not one case does the fan continue to boo.  Some react with a bit of shock, one with something that looked like fear -- "oh, crud, he's gonna kill me" -- and some manage to slip seamlessly from booing into glad-handing and merriment, which would seem a little psychotic to me if the whole situation weren't so lighthearted from the outset.
None of the fans really hated Robinson Cano, when facing him in the flesh, no matter how angry their sentiments might have been when Cano signed that contract.  About the meanest thing any of them managed to say to him in person was to hope he played well, but didn't win, which is about as fair a wish as can be made for a player whose team is playing against yours.
Interesting how suddenly being face-to-face with Cano made such a difference.
Of course, Fallon's little experiment isn't exactly scientific.  The passerby involved were specifically being encouraged to "boo" the Cano picture, which is not at all like being in a stadium in the heat of the moment.  Still, the difference between anonymity and presence does show up rather strikingly.
Of course, I'm not entirely sure that booing in the stadium is the best example of how anonymity liberates the lesser impulses within.  While you can still get some serious demonstrations at the ballpark or arena, it usually takes something more than leaving for a fat contract to get them to happen for more than a few at-bats.  The Internet, on the other hand...
Of course, that doesn't apply just to sports.  Perhaps it reaches its worst depths on the subjects of politics or religion.  Maybe this is a case where fan behavior at games should have been a warning to us all, rather than being the end-all of human depravity.
The fat contract itself, of course, would be a worthy topic of discussion.  But as always here, I'm a bit more fascinated with the ethical choices fans make, and what degree the Christian faith tradition (I'm certainly not qualified to speak from any other perspective) can or should inform that choice.
That said, I'm not going to be as down on one good boo as you might expect.  Note that: one good boo.  You've expressed your disappointment with, in this case, Cano's choice to leave with one good lusty boo; fine.  Now move on.  Get back to cheering for the players who are actually still on your team.
Which to me makes it interesting that none of the fans in the Fallon clip, given the opportunity to ask Cano directly why he could leave the Yankees, did so.  Most turned basically into fumbling starstruck fans when confronted with Cano's presence.  Either (1) these are raging hypocrites, or (2, the more charitable option and the one I'm taking for now) they really don't hate Cano, even for leaving their team; the boo is more of a societal expectation than a genuine measure of hurt or anger.  Then again, the in-stadium experience is likely to be rather different.
It's as if they know it's really not right or ethically justifiable to disparage a player (who is, after all, a human being) that way.  Being in a crowd in the bleachers provides a nice little mask of anonymity and distance from the offending player, so that moral twinge is harder to feel.
Still, based on totally unscientific observation (i.e. watching sports for many years), I can't help but feel that in-crowd behavior is not nearly as awful as it used to be.  (Outside the stadium, on the other hand, it can still be horrific, as Bryan Stow can tell you, or maybe his family can on his behalf.)  I suppose that may be tested this coming NFL season if Michael Sam makes the St. Louis Rams roster. I'd also notice that this characterization probably does not apply to European soccer.
Still, there's something there that should have been a warning, a source for concern rather than an occasion for jokes about Philadelphia fans booing Santa Claus.  It's not always about the game.  Sometimes it's about what the game shows us about ourselves.

Don't hate the player...hate the system

Aaron Rodgers's season ended much earlier than he hoped.  After a return from injury for the Green Bay Packers' final regular-season game -- a win that got the Packers a playoff spot -- he was unable to  pull off the first-round win against the San Francisco 49ers in the NFL's latest version of the Ice Bowl.

I'm certainly in no position to know what Aaron Rodgers does with his time in those first days after the season's over.  Rest, I'd guess.  But at least on occasion, it seems he uses such fame as he has for good things.

Rodgers has made appearances for an organization called Raise Hope for Congo, an organization that points to the desperate situation in that country in which what one might call "conflict minerals" are found (think "blood diamonds," but with items like tungsten, tin, tantalum -- materials for the manufacture of electronic devices, like your cell phone or maybe even the MacBook on which I'm typing out this blog industry).  Warlords, financing their war machines with profits from those minerals, using rape as a weapon of war; it's all there.  And Rodgers, who turned out to have a teammate from that troubled country, put his Cal education to use and studied up on the conflict, and now seeks to use that learning, and the fame that comes with being a Super Bowl-winning quarterback, to motivate college kids to do, well, something about it.

Good.

You didn't think the whole NFL was evil, did you?  (And before you ask, no, I didn't believe the whole NFL was evil, smarty pants.)

Rodgers is hardly the only pro athlete to use fame and/or fortune for good.  Clayton Kershaw, Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher, went so far as to establish an orphanage in Zambia with his wife, and to write, presumably with some help, a book about it (one which also gives expression to his faith).  For his charitable work Kershaw won baseball's Roberto Clemente Award, named in honor of the Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder and humanitarian who lost his life in a plane crash trying to deliver relief supplies to Nicaragua after an earthquake in late 1972.  The latter simply goes to the point that athletes doing good isn't a new thing.  Your favorite (or least favorite) player might just be doing that kind of good right now without your even knowing it.  

So there is all this good being done by people whom we pay money to watch play games.  Why, then, does someone like me feel compelled to tilt at the windmill of how sports cuts against the grain of serious faith all too often?  (As usual, I do feel compelled to point out when others with more audience than I seem to grasp this; I only wonder if #9 is too low.)  

For one, there are certainly bad apples in the games we watch -- the Richie Incognitos of the world -- and they often grab our attention.  But many of the most difficult problems that sports cause to the person of faith, those things that give pause no matter who much we don't want to watch, are not that easily attributable to the doings of any one individual or group of individuals.

C.S. Lewis, in one of his prefaces to The Screwtape Letters, offered the following take on how that book's concept of Hell took shape:

I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of Admin. The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid dens of crime that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.

Something probably akin to what Hanna Arendt called "the banality of evil," it points to the degree in which the evils of much of the twentieth century -- or those we see -- have their origins in hidden, 'clean' places like shabby offices or gleaming corporate towers.

I would also add that these sources may not even intend evil in the world.  

We see phrases such as "systemic evil" or "systems of oppression" used for this phenomenon in more contemporary times.  I would also submit that many of the most oppressive or degrading aspects of sports these days are also systemic.

Football locker rooms are intense places; keeping dozens of high-charged personalities in any sort of cohesive order is probably a task too tall for any one coach, maybe even for a whose staff, so the coach counts on team "leaders" to keep watch over the younger players.  So, when a bad apple manages to get himself counted among those "leaders," who's going to keep an eye on him?  

Or let's pick on baseball.  Some of the most outstanding talent in the game hails from one or another corner of the Caribbean, especially in the Dominican Republic.  With sometimes-inconsistent control of such things as birth certificates or other medical records, it becomes easy for a player, under the guidance/exploitation of a buscone, to present a false name and fake documents to MLB scouts (the younger the arm, the more valuable the prospect) in order to enhance his prospects for getting signed to a rich contract.  Hence Roberto Hernandez becomes Fausto Carmona; Juan Carlos Oviedo turns into Leo Nunez; and more.  That's if you're good enough to have a chance, and if you can withstand the culture shock of relocating from the DR to some small minor-league town that's colder than you can imagine.  If not, you just go back to your life, probably a poor one.

These are hardly the only examples.  Systems that drive you to lie about your condition when you've been found to have a concussion, so you can get back into the game -- even knowing what the world now knows about concussions; the college basketball phenomenon of the one-and-done player, loosely connected at most to any kind of academic endeavor; the corruption that has been known to seep into bidding for Olympic games or World Cups; name your favorite example.  

Systems seem to thrive on depersonalization; it's easier to ignore the mounting evidence of the damage football can (repeat: can) do to the human brain and send out a damaged player to resume play when he's a jersey number or position abbreviation instead of a person; when the kid in the DR is a sixteen-year-old with a 90-mph fastball instead of a person with a name; when people become simply cogs in a machine, before they are people.  

And therein lies the rub.  Where do we, the ticket-buyers, fit into the system?  

Let that one roll around in your head for a while.

Ryan Freel and the sorting point

I have admitted, in this space and others, that I can't really watch football anymore.  I just can't.  I keep up, to some degree, and I know that my Ph.D. alma mater is in the alleged national championship game for college football's Football Bowl Subdivision, and that the NFL franchise in the nation's capital is having a rotten year, but actually sitting and watching a game is beyond me at this point, when all I can do is wonder how many years that hit took off a player's memory or cognitive function.

I have also admitted, in this space and others, that I'm a big baseball fan.

Therefore, specifically because I know my own biases, I am compelled to devote this column to the first confirmed case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in a Major League Baseball player.

Ryan Freel was a utility player.  He played for several teams, the Cincinnati Reds for six years and spent shorter terms with the Baltimore Orioles, Chicago Cubs, and Kansas City Royals.  According to his own account, he suffered "nine or ten" concussions across the course of his career, from being hit in the head by pitches or other thrown balls, from collisions with opponents, teammates, bases, walls, and all sorts of other things.  A sentence from the ESPN.com report linked above offers a pretty good description:

Freel showed no fear as he ran into walls, hurtled into the seats and crashed into other players trying to make catches. His jarring, diving grabs often made the highlight reels, and he was praised by those he played with and against for always having a dirt-stained uniform." 

He was the prototypical "scrappy" player, one who didn't necessarily have the natural gifts of other players but hustled relentlessly and played with reckless abandon, without regard for his own body -- a phrase which rings eerily prescient now, after Freel committed suicide one year ago Sunday (December 22).

Like so many football players after their careers ended, Freel's life after baseball was increasingly consumed, apparently, with symptoms like headaches, loss of attention or short-term memory, and swings from depression to explosive emotion, not to mention a family increasingly wondering what had happened to their son, husband, father.

Freel is somewhat of an atypical case for baseball.  While players hit in the head by pitched balls can and do suffer concussions -- Justin Morneau (now of the Colorado Rockies), Brian Roberts (just signed by the New York Yankees after years with the Orioles) and Corey Koskie (once of the Minnesota Twins, Toronto Blue Jays, and Milwaukee Brewers) are examples of players whose careers were derailed by concussion-related symptoms -- most of baseball's concussion-sufferers have been catchers.  Possibly the most well-known example is Mike Matheny, who actually had to retire from baseball due to ongoing symptoms.   Matheny may also offer some hope; he is now manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, taking that job five years after his retirement, and having pretty respectable success in it (the Cards made it to the World Series this year, in case you've forgotten).  Possibly the highest-profile catcher to see his career affected by concussion symptoms is Joe Mauer, the All-Star catcher of the Minnesota Twins, who is moving to first base next season (the position occupied by Justin Morneau, when health allowed, until he was traded this past season) in hopes of avoiding any more concussions.

Catchers are easily put in the most situations that might lead to concussions and their complications.  In addition to the risks any batter faces of taking a pitch to the head (rare, and frowned upon), catchers also face particular risks associated with the position they play.  When a fastball upwards of 90 mph (sometimes even 100 mph or more) tips just slightly off the bat of a major-league hitter, it is physically impossible for a catcher to react quickly enough to keep the ball from slamming into his face mask or helmet, if that's where it's headed.  More rarely, the end of a hitter's swing just might slam the bat into the catcher's helmet.  These are not intentional; they happen nonetheless.

More dubious is the home-plate collision.  If a runner happens to be approaching home plate at about the same time a throw is reaching the catcher in an attempt to get that runner out, a collision is a frequent result.  Sometimes a catcher is attempting to block the runner from the plate even though the ball hasn't arrived yet, sometimes the runner is attempting to knock the ball loose from the catcher's mitt or hand.  Either way, the result is typically the most violent play in baseball (though a few accidental collisions between fielders come close at times).  All the padding in the world can't necessarily stop the catcher from sustaining a head injury in that situation.

Of course, Major League Baseball, like its companion league the NFL, has taken a head-in-sand approach to the issue, moving to deny any responsibility for such injuries and claim that the problem is a distinctly minor . . .  .

Wait, what?  Actually (and amazingly), MLB has done quite the opposite.

Even before the results of the tests on Ryan Freel's brain were announced, MLB had already taken steps to cut out one of the major contributors to baseball head injury; the elimination of those home-plate collisions.  Already MLB had instituted a seven-day disabled list specifically for head injuries -- an opportunity for a player to recover without missing more time than might be necessary if the problem is diagnosed quickly and accurately.

This is frankly mind-blowing.  The same league that turned a blind eye to drug scandals in the 1980s and performance-enhancing drug use in the 1990s is actually being shockingly proactive.  MLB and its owners can be profoundly corrupt, whether it comes in the form of holding municipalities up for glossy new stadiums or ignoring some of the horrifying practices involved in the development and signing of baseball players from the Caribbean region.  In this case, though, there seems to be genuine sorrow when a player like Matheny has to retire, a sorrow which in this case seems to be prompting genuine and surprising willingness to address the problem, even if the rules of the game are affected.



One of my least favorite parables in the Gospels is the so-called parable of the sheep and the goats, Matthew 25:31-46.  It is probably familiar to most folks with much church experience at all; the nations are gathered before the Son of Man, who separates them as a shepherd separates sheep from goats, sheep to the right and goats to the left.  The Son of Man then praises those on the right (who are now not sheep but "the righteous") for their responses to him when he was in need; feeding the hungry, clothing those with no clothes, visiting the sick or imprisoned.  Those on the left, the "accursed," are upbraided and even cast away, for exactly their failure to do those things the righteous did.  In each case, the rationale is offered that what you did to "the least of these," you did to Christ.

To me, what has lately jumped out at me about this passage (a troublesome one to me and others) is that, even as a sorting is portrayed at the beginning of the story, the "righteous" and the "accursed" had actually "sorted" themselves well before coming before Christ, by their actions towards those they encountered in need.  They fed hungry people or didn't.  How we respond to needs, to crises, to harms, to injustices in the world matters.  Those responses reveal us.  Further, they shape us -- ignoring one injustice or one need makes it easier to ignore the next one.

Grantland writer Brian Phillips penned a column this week pointing towards the particular quality of the sporting year 2013 as one in which the fan's increasing and unavoidable awareness of the corruptions of sports (the CTE horrors of the NFL being only one of many addressed) somehow failed to intersect or connect with the sports watching experience.  Baseball had a frankly amazing season, even as the Biogenesis scandal unfolded; the NFL continues to thrive even as the increasing tide of CTE stories vies with murder, bullying, and who knows what else conspire to stain the sport; worldwide soccer is as huge as ever even as it becomes clear that next year's World Cup will take place in a deeply dysfunctional (and yes, fatal) atmosphere.  Somehow fans simply keep the two separate.  Fans do care, Phillips claims, about CTE and match-fixing and murders and suicides and murder-suicides, but kept watching as if unaffected.

To which I have to ask, how long?  How long can the two be held apart from one another?  How long can the two go on, coexisting, before the fan sorts himself or herself in among the sheep or goats?  Another scripture, Matthew 6:24, points out that serving two masters doesn't work out so well.  You end up serving one or the other.

Eventually a fan will serve one master or another; his or her attentions (and dollars, the stuff that actually hits sporting leagues or players where it hurts) will turn away from unrepentant exploitation in sports towards other pursuits, or he or she will keep on watching, less and less fazed by the mounting toll in bodies or brains or children in poverty in the shadow of flashy new stadiums.

I can't help but wonder if we -- not just the NFL or MLB or FIFA or whatever league you care to name, but we -- the people who put down the money to buy tickets or subscribe to cable to get ESPN in its various guises, or buy the merchandise or devote eight Sundays or six or seven Saturdays to tailgating, who buy product X because King James endorses it instead of product Y endorsed by Kobe Bryant, we -- are at a sorting point, slowly aligning ourselves with the sheep or the goats when it comes to the excesses and the abuses that are intricately bound up in the sports-fan experience.

This may require people of faith to make a leap many are not willing to make: to realize that one who may be an exploiter in one circumstance may well be the exploited in another.  For example: male athletes have, to put it mildly, a reputation as being sexually active, taking on groupies for pleasure (witness the claims that the late Wilt Chamberlain bedded at least 2,000 women in his lifetime).  An athlete who buys a prostitute? Clearly not paying attention to the women waiting in the hotel lobby.  By no means does every athlete do so, but many do.  When you're on the road, have plenty of money to blow, and plenty of women to enjoy, it's easy to do both.

Exploitative behavior?  Sure.  But does that make the athlete any less the exploited party when, after years of his league telling him concussions were no big deal, his brain ends up on an examining table in Boston or Pittsburgh?  I don't think so.  What are those millions of dollars (if they haven't been squandered by then) worth in that case?

Athletes are at a sorting point, too.  Are NFL or NCAA players going to stand by and continue to participate in their own brain damage?  Just how much are major-league baseball players willing to pump themselves full of chemicals in pursuit of a competitive advantage?

The tricky part is, one of the options requires an active choice.  You have to choose to walk away from your sporting passions, or at least to scream like Howard Beale in Network.  If you don't, you eventually go numb.  Of course, you can choose to let the corruptions pass unobserved, and go numb voluntarily.

Either way, you will go numb, eventually, unless you choose not to.

The Pope agrees with me!

If you thought it was a dubious enterprise for me to start blogging about sports and faith, the joke's on you!  I just got a big-time ally on my side!  No less than Pope Francis agrees with me!

No, not exactly, but he did make an interesting statement on the subject of athletes and exploitation to a group of officials connected with the Olympics.  It was not at all inconsistent with the public profile the Pope has projected so far, but perhaps issued in a venue to which some might not pay attention.

What I find interesting (and sympathetic) about the statement is that Pope Francis kept his focus on the potential for exploitation of the individual athlete in the name of profit, to state it simply.  The Olympics "movement" was an interesting realm into which to venture, as one in which high-stakes commercialization and potential profit for individual performers in the form of endorsement deals is a recent development, in my lifetime at least (I'm not that old).  Given the tone of his remarks, I'd imagine the Pope could have a field day with the system of intercollegiate athletics in the United States (just think how many people are attending or watching college football games as I write this on a Saturday afternoon) and its labyrinthine rules about financial benefits mostly being denied to the athletes (once described as "student-athletes," mirroring the "amateur ideal" that used to rule the Olympic movement, in theory) participating in sports that move dumpster-loads of money around.  Talk about a system that "reduces athletes to mere trading material," to borrow Francis's words.

This is not a plea for paying college athletes.  I have a dumpster-load of doubts that any such system can be achieved with anything like equanimity and justice in the divine sense.  For example, somehow I doubt that the field hockey team, even a national-championship level team, is going to benefit much from a system of paying collegiate athletes.  American systems of remuneration just don't work that way.  While athletes may well be easily exploited by large financial systems in just about any sport (read this long-form piece on the financial travails that beset most boxers to get an idea of such systems at their worst, abetted by the athletes' own failings in that case), athletes are also capable in some cases of playing the system.  What are the chances that Johnny Manziel, just to take one example, will be at all content with receiving the same stipend as a reserve point guard on Texas A&M's women's basketball team?  I'm not seeing it.  From there you get into quagmire pretty quickly.  And if Alex Rodriguez (and his agent, Satan) aren't engaging in a massive game of playing the system right now, you can eat my hat.

Of course, the athletes are not the only potential victims of exploitation in any system.  The previous post on this blog delved into the machinations behind the Atlanta Braves' sudden announcement of a move to suburban Cobb County (Part 2 of that post is still going to come).  Stadiums of course don't build themselves, and at least for now Cobb County is apparently on the hook for about two-thirds of the projected costs of construction.   While I'd be deeply pleased if those Cobb County politicians who ran this deal to get the team were going to reach into their own pockets to pay the county share, I'm not holding my breath.  Somebody is going to pay for it, whether it be Cobb residents in the form of whatever taxes are imposed, or visitors to the area in the form of hotel taxes or meal taxes.  I suppose it is possible that Cobb is the ultimate suburban paradise with no poor people, no hunger, no struggling schools and underpaid teachers and such, but I've never heard anybody describe it that way.  Somebody is going to get stuck with it.

Indeed the whole system of remunerated athletics depends on somebody being willingly stuck with it.  Collegiate athletes at least get the chance at a (quite expensive these days) college education as part of their deal, though an awful lot of them seem to find that unimportant.  Pro athletes take on a lifetime of pain in many cases as the payoff for their years of participation (and I'm not even talking about the CTE issue in football); playing any sport at a high level extracts a toll on even the healthiest of athletes.  Fans get, I suppose, an outlet for emotional investment, a sense of tribal identity, a steady diet of unscripted drama with the ending unknown, or an experience potentially shareable by the whole family, among other things.  If either party decides the price is too high, they do have the option of walking away,  or (as fans) not walking up in the first place, i.e. not buying tickets or merchandise or watching games.  (Fans of the Tampa Bay Rays excel at the former.)

Still, I applaud Pope Francis for recognizing the impact of commercialized sport and its moral implications in society.  Perhaps I'll talk to him about a guest blog post in the future.