I was just watching "The Naked Gun" on HBO, and during the baseball sequence I had a random thought and reminiscence about how quiant Baseball used to be in the 1980's and before. Our ESPN culture, where even the remotest of sports fans has an instant pipeline into a sports player subculture that could care less about the actual existence of anyone outside of their inner group of family and friends, has produced its own subculture of superfans. We live in an era where the eternally Average Joe Sports fan can live out their almost lifelong sports fantasy about being the hot dude hero with the hot chick wife and more friends than not, through watching sports. With the internet and entertainment at our instaneous request, we sometimes forget when the sports equation was 70 percent sports and 30 percent entertainment, instead of the 80 percent entertainment and 20 percent sport.

Some time, I don't know when but I'm guessing it was in the early to mid-nineties, sports viewing made an almost astronomical switch from glorified little league sports, to mega billion dollar Multi-national corporations. We went from a relatively even level of athletes, into these huge monstrous men that believe more in the domination of another opponent, and sometimes of their own teammates, than with being great sportsmen.

I'm not one of these George Wills who believes in this pseudo mythological past of American sport, but it would take a fool not to see that sports did used to be more civil and geared towards the sport than to the entertainment that surrounds it.

I remember going to games in the Astrodome, or watching the Cubs on WGN and the Braves on TBS, and seeing nothing more than a team filled with people who looked exactly like the people sitting next to me, only in slightly better shape. And if you weren't looking at the game, all you'd see were the peanut selling ushers and the cheesy scoreboard in the outfield. All you'd hear would be the snap of the glove when the ball hit it, the crack of the bat when the batter made contact, the dull sound of 45,000 people mumbling conversations, and the looped opening bars of hand clapping to John Fogerty's "Put Me in Coach."

But now when you watch games, instead of getting the cheesy organist playing the cheesier sounding organ, you get to hear about 30 seconds of the players favorite "hair metal" or "frat boy turned rapper" song. Instead of hearing the announcer call the name, and looking to the scoreboard for their name, their batting average, and their home run total, you now get large jumbotrons that have better picture quality than your plasma screen television and give you the player's complete bio as taken from the Encyclopedia Britannica. Instead of stadiums being literally nothing more than larger versions of little league fields, including having nothing more to eat than hotdugs, beer, cotton candy, and peanuts, you now have these huge, mega-structures that are basically like Air Craft Carriers in that they are self-efficient cities within cities complete with banks, numerous restaurants, sushi bars, and the occasional spa or hotel. I remember when the Astrodome Scoreboard, which was basically nothing more than a series of high powered lightbulbs that were programmed to make out the shape of fireworks or a Yosemite Sam like figure shooting his gun into the air, was considered state of the art.

I hope this post doesn't come off as someone who sees one era as vastly superior to another era, since I think that there are good and bad sides to both. I don't really go or put much effort into sports these days, but I have at one time enjoyed sports in both the old and new eras. I guess it's like comparing apples to oranges, or in this case, organs to cd players.

matt out