Robin Williams

So apparently Rain Delay has become a blog crazyfool. He posts 2-3 times per day and suddenly my once or twice a week posting seems horribly inadequate, not unlike my penis. I shall attempt to post more but as I am on vacation next in hurricane-ridden Florida, I doubt I will have the wherewithal or the electricity needed to post on the Interweb. We shall see. This could all just be a passing thing.


Taking a slight inspiration from RD, I wanted to expound on the subject on sports. I like them. It seems in our culture that liking sports places one in the jock category, the meathead, 350 pound hick who loves to watch men tackle/bump/slide into other men. The artistic community (and by this i mean the fru fru wine and cheese snobs who love Kubrick but hate Bruckheimer) look down upon sport as mean, crude or just plain uninspiring. Whether this comes from a lack of athletic ability in themselves (imagining their frail buliemic bodies playing a pickup game of basketball makes me smile) or a supreme distaste for all things outside the intellectual realm, I think these poor bastards have got it all wrong.

To paraphrase Mr. Keating from Dead Poets Society, "Sport is a chance for other human beings to push us to excel." In every sport, you are locked in a struggle to be the best. The only thing that prevents you from that goal is that other humans are trying to do the same thing. Some say that it's not whether you win or lose, that the struggle is just as important. In that case, style and expression in a game mean just as much as the final result. Hmm, sounds a lot like art.

Take baseball for example. Baseball is a deceptively simple sport that has been likened to strategic games like chess or poker. There are moves that a manager can make which can be called brilliantly effective or devastatingly stupid, depending on the swing of a bat. One of the most common is the having left-handed pitchers throw to left-handed batters. But one must also consider that some left-handed batter do better against left-handed pitching, but only during night games. It gets complicated, there are some players and managers who pore over stat sheets and study trends and patterns in the opposing players. But then there are others who don't even know the basics of pitching and do incredibly well by just swinging the bat intuitively. In both extremes, the player is putting their personality on how they play the game.

Baseball has become a passion of mine in recent years as I've watched the Sox overcome 86 years of failure. This is a franchise which has so much history and character associated with its years in Boston. From their eternal struggle with the Yankees, to their self-destructive nature on the field, to their notorious fans, through it all, the Boston Red Sox have a certain style. These past few years, their character has been described as idiotic. They are baseball's crazy bunch of overacheivers. The long hair and the handshakes only point to how much they love the game, how much they love pitting themselves in the struggle of sports every night. The roster reads like a playbill, with characters like the Sad Clown (Manny Ramirez), Big Papi, Johnny D., the Texas Yokel (Millar), the quiet, skillful Mueller, Rock Star Arroyo, Big Mouth (Shillling), and Explosive Renteria.

How can you not be inspired by a team like that?