North Star Writers Group - Syndicated Commentary: Opinion, Humor and Features

November 3, 2008

In 2008, Politics Like Sports Seems a Sucker’s Game

Enough about politics. Let’s talk something really important.

Baseball.

(OK, OK. We’ll bring it back around to politics later.)

The immortal Branch Rickey – the baseball innovator best known for signing Jackie Robinson – once said that “luck is the residue of design.”

I guess that makes the sport’s recent run of bad luck and general silliness the residue of . . . Bud Selig.

Take this year’s just-completed World Series. Please. It ran like one of those good news/bad news routines. The good news: The series didn’t involve New York, Boston or L.A. The bad news: It featured Philly and . . . Tampa Bay. (Another Florida expansion team? Argh.)

The good news: The teams nevertheless seemed well-matched enough to provide some compelling competition. The bad news: In the East, that competition started late and ended early – in the morning. Compelling? Hard to tell when you’re sawing wood. And talk about late – Game Seven could have been been played in November. The good news: The horror of that prospect was diminished somewhat by the fact that the game would have been conducted in domed splendor in balmy St. Pete. The bad news: We never got there, but did witness a comedy of errors in drenched, raw late-October Pennsylvania.

See the shortstop drop a windblown popup. See fielders overthrowing bases with balls soaked by stinging downpours. See an embarrassed – and embarrassing – commissioner suspend the potentially decisive game and then further suspend the suspension a day later. See the game finally finished in bone-chilling 30ish-degree temperatures by players in Elmer Fudd earflaps.

The good news: The completion of the suspended game actually resulted in a series winner being crowned before the delivery person showed up with the next morning’s newspaper.

I’ll leave it there, but really. A rain-sodden, wind-gusted, weather-interrupted “Winter Classic” with bouts possible after Halloween? Solely night games, mostly completed after curfew? Home-field advantage decided by All-Star games?

Pretty soon they’ll have someone hitting for the pitchers.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one – but it seems like pro sports in general are being played for everyone but real fans today.

Need another example? I recently went to see my Cleveland Browns play the local NFL squad, the Washington Redskins, and found myself walking two-and-a-half miles round trip to return two empty canvas bags to my car. The reason: Owner Dan Snyder’s strict “no bags” policy – the better to ensure you render his king’s-ransom $7 for beer or $14 for a cheeseburger.

Tired and irritable, I arrived to discover our eBay-procured seats in a dank, cave-like setting well underneath an overhang. And squarely behind a pole that obscured 75 percent of the action. It seems Mr. Snyder, to squeeze every available ounce of revenue from Redskins Nation, has installed seats in areas intended to be walkways. Oh.

Want a real view? Well, Snyder has front-row “dream seats.” Face value: More than $400. For regular-season games!

My excursion to FedEx Field reinforced that attending any professional sports event in this day and age is a sucker’s game – in which a fool and his money are immediately and continuously parted. And the World Series drove home that in the owners’ and players’ paradise presided over by Bud Selig, even watching the games on TV is no great shakes.

I’m hoping the parallels to current political doings are becoming obvious.

Did it ever, for one minute, seem like this endless campaign – four tiresome years of wall-to-wall county fairs, caucuses, conventions, commercials, debates and “defining moments” – was “played” for you? That your real needs or priorities were spoken to? That despite all the platforms and programs and promises, Washington is going to be more responsive or effective in addressing the pressing issues of the 21^st Century?

Or was it all about the “horse race?” About who could convince a cadre of activists in unrepresentative locales and cobble together a patchwork of swing states? How many polls could be pushed by how many organizations in how few days? How many pundits could dance around their talking points on the head of a pin? How many distortions could be dumped into a 30-second ad, and how many constituencies pandered to in the space of a stump speech? All in pursuit of another pointless, Pyrrhic victory largely for ego-driven, hired-gun strivers headed back to their day jobs lobbying?

How appropriate that the campaign’s high point was a $700-billion bailout of the very types who occupy those “dream seats” – on top of “rescues” of Fannie, Freddie and AIG that could clear half a trillion buckaroos. All underwritten by you and me – and rubber-stamped by both candidates.

I’m not saying the election doesn’t matter. I have supported John McCain and share most of his positions. Still, as the 2008 contest has drawn mercifully to a close, it’s produced plenty of residue, none of it remotely related to luck. And the one inescapable lesson is that politics, like pro sports, is more than ever a sucker’s game.

Yep. There will be change in Washington – and just as at FedEx Field, it will still be coming out of your pockets.

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