I'm Going Crackers!

I have to disagree a little there, dtro. The Giants season was not quite Metsian in that they actually made kind of an effort, and for a while deserved to be called one of the better teams in the league (shit, in Week Five [do we capitalize the weeks now? Is the NFL that important? I say yes] I would have told you they were the undisputed #1). Also, the Giants front office managed to get to work every morning without accidentally slitting their throats shaving. But looking closely, the parallels are obvious. Both teams seemed to expect success and then had absolutely no idea what to do when it didn't come. At the first sign of real resistance, both teams decided that they weren't at fault, but it was the cruel whims of fate that were punishing them and they simply needed the skies to open up and provide them with the winning performance they deserved. Now, I look at both teams from the point of their last great success. The Mets making the NLCS in 06, and the Giants' run in late 07 leading up to their Super Bowl win. These events were where this sense of "this is a winning team" came from. There is generally a consensus of who the better teams are, and thanks to ESPN's power rankings we can see this quantified every week. And for those moments, we saw our team at or near the top of the heap. All the time we saw the Patriots, Steelers or Yankees (teams we hate because we have hearts and brains) at the top makes it all the more sweet to see our team heading the list. It makes us happy, makes us more enthusiastic fans, and redeems the stress and frustration we put ourselves through watching millionaires play kid's games. The effects of this on the team themselves seem to manifest itself in catching breaks, getting lucky, and winning through sheer determination. Our guys are the best, ignore anybody who says otherwise. And why shouldn't we feel this way? It's a diversion, after all. Our lives are not so invested in this thing that we should worry about the pressure we put on them when we say theyre the best. They'll never hear us, anyway. That's the way it's always been, at least. But really, these guys don't work in a vacuum anymore. The interaction with the public goes much deeper than signing autographs before the game. Now Twitter and Facebook and such means we can stalk athletes better than ever before, and they can tweet funny pictures or recommend shitty comedians directly to their fans, but that's not really anything that'll effect their performance. The big effect of the media I would have to say is the nonstop analysis, and observation of their work, through the wonderful efforts of that Pravda of sports hegemony, ESPN. We are at the point where ESPN has almost become sports. It's the channel we instantly turn to when we even think of sports. Television, internet, even that terrible magazine, ESPN's dominance in sports media means what ESPN says, goes. Now, there are other forms of sports media, sure. Sports Illustrated was once the paragon of sports information, but we are now at the point where a weekly magazine cannot possibly cover everything we deem to be important, or at least worthy of our attention. And it's in the pages of SI, which manages to maintain some charm by simply being the printed word, that we see the most obvious sign of how these athletes are effected by media. In every issue, SI features a little info box with athletes sharing their favorite foods, music, what they think of trivial current events, and such. In these little nuggets of semi-information, we really get somewhat of an insight into how these athletes really think. Unshockingly, their tastes in music and movies gravitate toward what's popular at the time. Whatever. We don't expect them to be men of high culture, they play games for a living (except Adonal Foyle, a sports outlier to end all sports outliers). But whenever they are asked their favorite TV show, with the exception of the odd soccer or tennis player, every answer, down the line, is Sportscenter. The implications of this are big, and depressing. Sportscenter, as we all know, is the propaganda arm of ESPN, and by extension, the whole sports media. Stories' importance is decided literally by how much coverage they get on SC. And when they lump an inordinate amount of coverage on an issue, like Terrell Owens or Brett Favre, then that very saturation becomes the story. We're more self-aware as people right now than we ever were in history. We get nostalgic for things that happened less than a decade ago. Every minor event seems to require some kind of recognition. Now, pro athletes have a daily TV show that is completely about them and the little world they inhabit. SC has made fans out of the athletes themselves. Read any player's survey of who, say, they think will win the NBA title this year. They invariably will say Lakers or Celtics. Can we really pretend that this is trenchant insight, shared by the men who understand the game far deeper than we ever will? Or are they just parroting the hype of the media? When athletes become ESPN fans, their opinions are as worthless as that of the idiot at the end of any bar, parroting whatever Mark Schlereth said as statement of unvarnished fact. Which brings me back to the Giants and Mets. The Hawthorne Effect tells us that the act of observation by itself changes performance. These men are continually observing themselves, watching highlights of their games, seeing appraisals of their performance. When they are playing at their apex, they are lionized as the gold standard of the sport. When they begin to fail, to make mistakes, they are just as dumbfounded as we are! There's barely any gap between our assessment of their performance and their own (though we are of course much harsher). The Giants are the best team in the NFL, the media says, and the worst thing the Giants can do is begin to believe it. This goes for coaches, too. I had the pleasure of listening to Jerry Manuel repeat himself on WFAN after every single loss, every team failure. It was the same thing we were used to hearing from Willie Randolph as his team trended downward. "We need to get hot." "We need to start playing winning baseball." What the fuck kind of thing to say is that??? How does that even begin to address the problem? Now, I don't doubt that they were giving this line to the media as they attempted to really fix problems within the team. But what was the end result? They never "got hot," as they did in 06. The Giants of 09 sure "cut down on mistakes" but that didn't mean they could do a goddamn thing to stop DeSean Jackson. ESPN makes us treat these rote responses as the actual issue at hand, since that's all they have to work with. But when the line between athlete and fan as observer of the sport is blurred, they're just as ignorant as we are.