Fear and Loathing on the Internets

The interwebs are a funny thing, aren't they? I mean, you get on your big rig and start driving through this series of tubes, and suddenly you discover yourself in strange neighborhoods looking at things you've never seen and hearing sounds you've never heard and you find your thoughts drifting further from whatever it was you set out to think about when you started your virtual journey.

I'm trying to write this piece about, well, heck if I know what it's about, but it has something to do with famous people from Southwest Ohio and reading On the Road because I shamefully never read it and also because I am on the road in search of some of the same things Sal a.k.a. Jack Kerouac was looking for, and well, one thought led to the other and suddenly I find myself staring at a column about baseball written by Hunter S. Thompson in 2000 which is quite funny, as so much of his work is. He wrote some suggestions for speeding up baseball games. Some highlights: eliminate the pitcher, all base runners may run to any base, and the CATCHER should be the highest paid hero of the game. My favorite part:

No, there will be no such thing as a base on balls. Each batter will get five "pitches" from the robot -- only FIVE (5) and if he doesn't get a hit by then, he is Out. ... And the CATCHER will control the kind of drop or curve or speed he wants the machine to throw. And it will obey.

Thompson grew up in Louisville - Reds country! He excelled in baseball but was constantly in trouble so it never amounted to anything.

I think Gonzo was a bridge between two worlds, a bridge that crossed from literature and baseball to television and the NFL. He said the NFL "blew the sacred institution of baseball off its 'national pastime' pedestal in less than 15 years." Baseball had been a part of the soul of the country; the NFL became a faster, more violent pastime. American attitudes were changing towards everything. That flag started whipping in the wind faster than we could see it, and America started to run out of breath just trying to keep up with the pace of life. I think in the end Thompson just couldn't take in any more air. The generation under him, my generation, felt it better just to use biting sarcasm about everything to cope. Seems to me better than a shotgun, but then again, what do I know about being a brilliant writer? I operate a Blogger blog and post poorly done photoshops of things that are funny for about, oh, five minutes, if ever.

I guess that's why I hate these winter meetings (that occur in autumn, mind you.) I hate the business side of the game, which has grown to be bigger than the game itself, bigger than the take-your-family-to-the-ballpark-on-a-Sunday-afternoon experience. I can't figure it out, what has changed, what has brought something that was felt in the hearts of Americans to get lost in the labyrinth of corporatism, but I have to tell you, I like Bob Castellini. He's reached down into his soul and pulled out his love for the game, a game that is intrinsically part of an America that sometimes seems lost in all the fast-paced madness of the information age, an America that probably never existed except in the romantic ideas in the minds of the emotionally literate. He's going for it; he's making decisions that don't stick to the corporate formula. Cincinnati fans suffered for years under swiftboater businessman Carl Linder, who was only concerned about coming out in the black rather than winning. It's nice to have an owner that is a fan of the game and grew up loving his team!

Baseball isn't just a business. I hate thinking about it that way, thinking about how human beings that I've come to adore as sort of real life fictional heroes could just slip from my heart with a trade. I know, I know, baseball has ALWAYS been this way, with teams trading players as if they were just cattle waiting for slaughter. There seems something inherently inhumane about it all, you know, the players BELONGING to the owners and all. When people ask why players such as Ryan Freel are able to don Major League uniforms, it's their love for the game. I sometimes feel I was born at the wrong time, too late, perhaps an incarnation of someone else because of my love for the game. Or maybe I just long for life to slow down, slow to the pace of a baseball game.

I don't know if Thompson grew up a Reds fan in Louisville - could have been the Deadbirds or the Cubs - but I do know he recognized that baseball had been desecrated by the greed of modern America, where both owners and players are at fault. As I sit impatiently awaiting the verdict of the winter meetings, I can't help but have all of this on my mind.