Work has been overwhelming of late, and I have been ignoring my blog and my friends. Sorry about that.
I have been following baseball more closely this summer than I have recently–its my lunch hour obsession. In addition to maintaining a fantasy team, I’ve been reading up on some of the new statistical analysis over at Baseball Prospectus. I find it really interesting stuff–and indicative of how complexity theory complicates traditional methods of assessment, but I’ll save those posts for another day.
Today, I just wanted to share an email I sent to a former student and Cub fan. I had earlier expressed my empathy for the Cubs slow start this season, to which he responded that it was nothing new, and that losing builds “character.” My response:
To think this word “character” a bit differently– as a Red Sox fan, it is striking to me how much their World Series victory rocked Red Sox nation. Of course there was jubilation, but there was also a profound sense of loss, I think. And the second victory only punctuated that sense. At a psychologically unconscious level, I think winning the WS was quite disturbing for Sox fans since it robbed us of our identity, our character, our way of relating to the world.
Eventually, I firmly believe, the Cubs will win. They have grown into one of baseball’s exclusive “large market” teams, providing them with a considerable financial advantage. As with the Red Sox, this will translate into a World Series victory. It will likely take a figure of Curt Schilling’s stature–a leadership personality who commands the locker room, in the face of all that losing tradition, to envision and capture victory. Someone needs to wack a figurative bloody sock upside the billy goat’s face, and the Cub’s just don’t have that guy–especially not when their best player can’t keep his cool. But in the ESPN era, money does tend to translate into success (though sustaining success is a different matter).
So, to conjure up a quote that just doesn’t mean to me what it used to, “keep the faith.”
I might use this example later this summer–I am teaching a section of Introductory Composition and plan on using Jim Corder’s “Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love.” Losing the narrative of the “lovable losers” has been difficult for me–and I think traces of this difficulty can be read across Red Sox nation. All I can say is that, while I still watch baseball, something isn’t there anymore, the experience feels uncanny, and I believe, in that moment, I am experiencing the withdrawal of what I thought was myself, so that, what is really missing is the me I thought myself to be.
