The Free Agent Fan – Part One
Though I was born in New Jersey, I only lived there for a few months. My father worked for Westinghouse, and for several years that meant frequent moves to the next plant location that opened up. From my older brother’s birthplace in Vicksburg, Mississippi to my point of origin in Denville, New Jersey to my little brother’s first home in Grand Rapids, Michigan to Catonsville, Maryland, and finally to College Station, Texas when I was six years old.
My earliest memories are of Grand Rapids, where I lived until I was five. And my earliest sports memories are of my parents, who both grew up in Texas, watching the Dallas Cowboys on TV. My first entry here was all about how I’ve always gotta be different, so it shouldn’t be surprising that I decided quickly to like a different team than my parents. I can only imagine that my parents watched the Cowboys play the Oakland Raiders, because that’s the team that I decided was my favorite. I don’t know if I just liked the shiny silver and black colors or whether they just happened to be the team playing the Cowboys when I decided it was important enough for me to pick a favorite team, but for whatever reason, the Raiders became my first favorite sports team when I was four years old.
As it turned out, I picked a good year to become a Raiders fan, as they would go on to win the Super Bowl that year, defeating the Philadelphia Eagles. Of course, you could hardly say I was a diehard fan at that point. I rarely saw a Raiders game for the next several years, sports just weren’t all that important to me at that point in my childhood and I didn’t exactly keep up with the results of what was going on in the pro ranks.
That would change in 1986, when for no particular reason, I decided sports were the MOST important thing to me. And that school year of 1986-87, my 5th grade year, would be the time I really started to become aware of the greatness of professional and college sports. I started reading the sports section of the Bryan-College Station Eagle newspaper, which featured mostly articles about Texas A&M University sports.
In those early years of sports watching, it was less about rooting FOR a particular favorite team and more about rooting AGAINST the teams that were locally popular. So I decided right away I was in favor of whoever was playing against the Aggies, and against the Texas sports teams that were featured on local TV.
Before I really got into sports, I had gotten into radio, and the first sport I really listened to on the radio was baseball. In those days, the Texas Rangers games were broadcast on the booming radio signal of WBAP 820 out of Fort Worth/Dallas, and I listened to the team of Mark Holtz and Eric Nadel describe the sights and sounds of Arlington Stadium. I loved it. From the crack of the bat to the organ music, the sounds of the crowd, and even the heat itself which I could almost feel through the radio on those hot Summer nights in Texas.
The thing is, in those early days of listening to Rangers games, I wasn’t rooting for or against the Rangers. I was just enjoying the sound of the game, whatever happened. At that time, the Rangers home games were on television only on cable, and were on a channel called Home Sports Entertainment (HSE for short) which, for our local cable at least, was a premium channel you had to pay extra for, something my parents obviously didn’t do. However, many of the Rangers road games were broadcast on KTVT Channel 11, which was on our cable system on Channel 2, so I could actually see some of the games on TV.
This created a kind of paradox scenario, because I would watch Rangers road games and root against them and root for whoever the home team was on that particular night, but listening to the radio, I grew to like and favor the home Rangers. So for a short time I actually, in my odd childhood mind, considered the Texas Rangers to be two different teams. The mystical white and shiny blue Home Rangers, which I only occasionally saw in brief highlights on the news and instead listened to on the radio – and the boring gray Road Rangers, who I would see on TV and root along with the crowd for their opponents! Yes, I am aware that I’m a weirdo, you don’t have to inform me. 
Next time, I’ll take you through my initial allegiances in each sport and how they almost all changed. Stay tuned! 
The Voice in the Wilderness
“You don’t wanna get mixed up with a guy like me. I’m a loner, Dottie. A rebel.”
– Pee Wee Herman
I’ve always been a rebel. A non-conformist, a contrarian, a dissenter, an iconoclast, a renegade. Whatever term you want to use. A few years ago, I re-discovered temperament theory , and learned another word for it: Artisan.
But whichever word you use, the meaning is the same. I believe every person is an individual, capable of his or her own personal thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and opinions about anything and everything. Now, having just told you that I put credibility in temperament theory, obviously it’s clear that I believe that people definitely have common patterns to their behavior and can be classified in many ways based on that, so it’s not that I believe that every individual has completely unique ideas and opinions that no one’s ever expressed before. But I believe every person is capable of thinking for himself or herself, and a subscription to “groupthink” is not required to function in a society.
So what do I mean by “groupthink?” Basically, any time that people allow others to form their views for them, without actually using their own brains to examine the evidence for themselves. Groupthink is not the same as teamwork. Teamwork is separate individuals working together for a common goal. Each person has determined that a certain goal is most desirable, and combined with others who share that goal, setting aside differences in background, philosophy, etc. Teamwork is what propelled the 1986 New York Mets to the World Series championship, despite having a lot of individual egos and dynamic personalities that were often at odds with each other in the course of a long baseball season. Teamwork is a positive thing. Groupthink is not.
Now, groupthink is prevalent in many areas of society, but since the intention of this blog is to focus on sports, baseball specifically, then I will keep most of my comments about it related to baseball. By way of comparison to start, though, I think about all those VH1 specials like “I Love the 70′s”, “I Love the 80′s”, etc. and all of those countdowns such as “50 Worst songs of all-time” and other such productions. These types of shows were portrayed as nostalgic romps where various celebrities (and celebrity-wannabes) would reminisce and discuss the joys of their experiences with these periods of time or songs or whatever. The problem was that the VH1 producers were lazy in their presentations by basically putting forth the idea in these shows that virtually everybody had the same experiences/opinions about all of these things. I don’t know if the VH1 bigwigs had a specific agenda to push certain ideas through these shows, or whether it was just a feeling that portraying all of these views as being universal simply made for a more coherent presentation, but whatever the reason, they left me feeling very annoyed with the one-sided portrayal that the subjects always received.
One example was in the 70′s shows or Behind the Music programs that focused on acts most popular in the 70′s or early 80′s – one music journalist term that kept coming up was “corporate rock.” “Corporate rock” was a disparaging term made up by writers to lump together any rock act that was successful commercially but that the writer didn’t feel was artistically significant in any way. As I’ve already said, classification itself is perfectly valid, but the problem becomes when this terminology becomes an accepted mantra of people who never have even looked at the subject with a critical eye themselves. Thus, you have conversations like this one:
Person A: I love Journey! They had that great song “Don’t Stop Believin’!”
Person B: Ugh. I hate Journey.
Person A: Why?
Person B: They’re corporate rock!
Person A: What does that mean?
Person B: uhhhh…it means they suck!
So you see, somebody told Person B that they were supposed to hate Journey, because they are “corporate rock” and thus automatically suck. Not Person B listened to a song and didn’t like it, but that they actually feel an obligation to hate Journey because they have been placed in a category by someone else. That’s groupthink, and it’s one of my biggest pet peeves.
So, how does all this relate to the sports world? I’m so glad you asked! 
Sports is an area where groupthink sometimes rises to a boil, as players, coaches, owners, referees/umpires, teams, and even stadiums are insulted or completely torn apart due to what amounts to nothing more than the same kind of peer pressure that we all experienced in junior high school. The mass media, in this case, mostly sportswriters, are the absolute worst at spreading this sort of thing, because people follow the word of writers blindly as if they are some sort of gods, when they often spout nothing but tired clichés and erroneous facts that they made up themselves to try to get attention for their stories.
I don’t think this past offseason’s drama over Michael Young’s status with the Texas Rangers would have even been any kind of public news at all if it weren’t for these overzealous sports reporters pushing it at every turn. MLB.com even featured a “story” by T.R. Sullivan which could have been summed up with “There is absolutely no news to report about Michael Young, but I feel like speculating about what Young might be feeling in order to stir something up.” This article then gets spread around the net, and the water coolers, and everywhere else, and then Joe Schmoe on the street is saying “I can’t believe Michael Young is such a malcontent crybaby, he’s demanding a trade and threatening to quit!” Never mind that Young himself never actually said any of that, all that matters is that’s the news that spread, and too many people aren’t willing to take the time to actually look at the facts themselves, rather than just take what they hear/read as gospel.
The area of sports stadiums is an especially sore one for me when it comes to groupthink, because the ballparks and stadiums of my childhood have largely been torn down and disused all because it was trendy to do so, and people are spoiled and greedy, not because there were real legitimate reasons to kiss the arenas of yesterday goodbye. I plan to post quite a bit more about that subject specifically but I figured I’d mention it here as another good example of my overall subject.
So, in life in general, and here in this corner of the web, I am content to be the “voice crying in the wilderness” as even if I am all alone, I will defend the things and people that I believe in, stick up for the torn down, and be the champion of the ridiculed when the massive weight of groupthink comes down on their heads. If you’re interested, by all means, keep reading. And if you’d rather read the prevailing wisdom, and not the lone crank at his keyboard deep in the heart of Texas, then by all means, seek out the many places to do so. Either way, I hope you’ll come to your conclusions of your own volition and not because somebody else told you to.
More to come…
Jeffster
Jeffster
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