Calvinball Tuesday

"You wouldn't have won if we'd beaten you."

-Yogi Berra

Turning away from the fall of the Republic and musing on my own personal eschaton for a few moments to focus on a couple sports stories in the news this morning.

Why do I pay so much attention to sports, to the Dawgs and the Bills and the Braves? P is fond of saying that if they all had to rely on her to support their lifestyles, they'd collectively starve to death. None of our sons gives a flip about football or any other non-digital form of competition (well, there's the one who manages a store that stages Dungeons & Dragons tournaments, but still that's a far cry from staking one's emotional health on whether Josh Allen can rally the team one more time).

Not sure why I've always cared, but I've always cared. I wept when LSU stomped Notre Dame (loyalties change, if the fanaticism doesn't) on national TV in 1971; declared the "worst Christmas ever" the following year, despite getting an amazing slot car set from Santa, when the Chiefs lost to the Dolphins in the longest playoff overtime ever or since; threw an empty wine bottle at the television (thankfully, the former contents had degraded my aim) when Vince Young scampered into the end zone and led the Longhorns past the Trojans in the 2006 Rose Bowl. So yeah, always sort of an immature fixation on things over which I have no control.

But I've gotten better, maybe because I'm happier in my own life than I was when I was seven or eight or 42. I shrugged when Georgia lost to Auburn between the hedges last Saturday, took it in stride when the Bravos fell once again to the Dodgers in the playoffs. I can laugh at my past excesses because they are, well, past. And all that without needing the sports fan equivalent of AA.

So, the first interesting bit of sports news came from the Trop last night, where the Rays defeated the Guardians in Game Six to advance to the World Series against the Brewers.

You have to love the Rays, a plucky little franchise with one of the lowest payrolls in all of baseball (#28 out of 30), playing in a division with two of the top six (the Yankees and Red Sox). How great is the disparity? The evil Dodgers top the list, with a team payroll of $415 million. The Rays made it to the Series with a payroll of $108 million, while playing in the third smallest market in MLB.

And their opponent on Saturday will be the Milwaukee Brewers, hailing from the number 27 market. Two teams that play with a great deal of heart and intensity, battling the Goliaths to make it to the biggest stage in the game. The Rays have never taken themselves very seriously, and I have to say their radio play-by-play is the best in baseball, almost a two-man stand-up routine. Meanwhile, the Brewers have given the baseball world chicken ice cream and bratwurst wontons. celebrating their Wisconsin identity, sort of. You have to love baseball for all that quirkiness. It's what's good about this country, or was.

What's not so good is the Jalen Hurts story emerging from the Eagles' trip to London to play the Jags a week ago. The story goes like this: Jalen Hurts, the sensational quarterback and genuine superstar of an otherwise mediocre team this year, was cleated in the calf in their game on week four. No big deal, except it turned out it was. Hurts limped his way through practice the following week, then flew to London for that week's NFL international game, a weird feature the league instituted several years ago to introduce whole continents of befuddled football fans to our stranger, better, variation on the sport. Once he arrived, he sought medical attention and was diagnosed with deep vein thrombosis, a condition that could result in instant death if the clot or clots broke loose.

So his doctors did the most responsible thing possible. No, strike that. The team's medical staff advised him not to go to sleep, for 36 hours, because he might wake up dead if he threw a clot. And then they let him limp out onto the field to give the fans their spectacle, losing to the Jags 19-17 mostly because of an idiotic decision to allow a kickoff to be returned, rather than kicking through the back of the end zone and forcing a touchback. After a huge kick return, the Jags won on a game-winnning field goal. Some stupid coaching there.

Hurts played through the whole thing, and then remarkably flew back to Philly from London. Peg makes me move my legs and wiggle my toes every hour or so in the Columbia for fear I might develop a blood clot in my leg and throw it during the flight. These guys knew Hurts already had blood clots, and sent him on the flight anyway.

And then, once he was home, they figured out the clots had progressed into pulmonary emboli, meaning (I think) the clots had started migrating into his lungs. A great way to suffer an instant death, or debilitating stroke.

What the hell, Eagles staff? How did this happen?

You'd think the league would be a little more sensitive to optics when it comes to players' health, here in the wake of a whole generation (or three or four) of players suffering from CTE after repeated blows to the head over the course of a career, a condition the NFL politely ignored until it no longer could. This is more an individual episode of collective stupidity, I like to think, possible in part because football players are conditioned over their whole sentient lives to play through pain. It wouldn't surprise me if Hurts insisted on going out there after not sleeping for nearly two days (anyone care to conjecture about a little amphetamine use?). And I'm sure with TV revenues dependent on these international showcases on the line, no one from the commisioner's office down did anything to discourage what could have led to the viewing planet seeing a star quarterback lie down and die at the fifty yard line.

The two sports, baseball and football, are a study in contrasts, from the absence and presence of a salary cap to the often-noted pastoral versus industrial feel of the games. They each say something about us as a country. It makes me feel a little guilty about my excitement when the Bills pull one out, but maybe I can wash all that sin away with some bratwurst wontons and the exhuberance of two underdog teams taking the big stage in St. Pete this weekend.