Sports vs. Real Life

What with my whole becoming a professional journalist over the summer and having been a professional sports writer since last November, my whole life perspective has significantly shifted in the past months.

Yeah, “Duh,” right?

It’s Tuesday. The American economic world is reeling from the “failure” of the government’s $700 billion proposed bailout that would have bought out all this bad credit created by too many fancy financial people for me to fully understand at this juncture. I know enough about it to know that the overall market plummeted 800 points yesterday. And I think I know that a 60 point drop is considered a “bad day,” which I guess would make Monday’s plummet something like a financial apocalypse.

Unemployment is skyrocketing, and the odds of college kids like me finding jobs next June are looking about as much fun as wading through a field recently traversed by a herd of incontinent Chik-Fil-A mascots.

And yesterday in hanging out with some dudes from the baseball team, I come to find out that I’m probably one of the only college athletes at Barton that must have an inkling of what’s going on.

“What, the economy’s bad right now?” one guy asked.

No, I thought. Gas companies are just testing high prices to see if we’d notice.

“So how does that affect us?” another asked.

Well, seeing as how some of us are engaged and the others of us graduating are kinda in our twenties, the whole getting-out-of-the-house and being all-self-supporting would, I guess, be a noble goal. But then, there are always the afore-mentioned fields that farmers might need cleaning when we can’t find jobs in our major.

Totally second-guessing the whole print/electronic journalism major nowadays, by the way.

So I did my meager best to fill them in, one of whom responded, “Man, I’ve been watching too much SportsCenter.”

He continued to point out in stand-up-comedic fashion that psh, so the market might be down, but hey, Tiger’s still out for a solid year so the field’s wide open for the … whatever big golf tournament coming up might be.

Who watches golf anymore these days, anyway?

So tonight it was refreshing to watch half the city of Chicago rally behind their White Sox in the American League Wild Card playoff game. The home crowd, determined by coin flip after the jilted Twins had a stellar regular season, created a “blackout” in the face of the failed governmental bailout. U.S. Cellular Field was overflowing with White Sox-supporting Chicagoans adorned in all black, a psychological ploy as the White Sox faithful typically go for a whiteout.

And it worked, as the Sox rocked the Minnesota Twins’ world with a 1-0 win.

I’m not a fan of either team, so I didn’t care at all about the end result, but what I loved was the pure baseball going on within the three-hours-ish nine-inning affair. The fans. The plays. The eight-inning Johnny Danks performance on three days’ rest. The not-so-junior-now Ken Griffey, Jr. gunning down Minnesota’s Michael Cuddyer in the fifth. The equally-less-spry-than-he-was-ten-years-ago Jim Thome simultaneously launching stitches-bound-sphere and Chicago dreams with a bomb in the seventh.

What I loved was the utter absence of anything economical in everything going on in that two hours and twenty minutes. Which was, for the ballplayers, more like a full day’s work, and for the fans, at least five hours including pre-and-post-game festivities.

And in this I find the beauty and reason of sports. Of baseball.

What other job in the world depends so little on anything else than sheer performance? In what other line of work can one invest solely in themselves and be so in control of the end result?

I look at the old guys like Griffey and Thome, giants in their peaks, not yet completely fading but far from what they once were, and think of the work career they’ve experienced. Not only are their jobs, for the most part, devoid of any relation to the nation’s economic status, but their job is to provide an escape from that stress for those who watch.

Athletes are the layman’s superhero, their rescue from their days of despair. The market may have dropped in record fashion on Monday, but the records in baseball took no such hit.

The green grass of baseball is the only green one can count on many days, for surrounding that green will always be bases 90 feet apart, crisp dirt adults get to play in in ways that would elicit scolds from any mother, and front-row seats forever superior to the thrones in skyboxes from which one may watch the action.

Baseball isn’t life, but then, neither is the economy, good or bad.

So bring on both of ‘em, baby, because the MLB postseason is here, the economy will improve, and Chik-Fil-A’s cows will forever remain completely regular.