Monthly Archives: April 2011

2011 Labor Dispute, Brian Schaefering, NFL, NFL Lockout, Rick Reilly

Where Is The Love?

Text from a friend last night:
“Dude, did you hear the lockout’s over! Sounds like football is back and so is our fantasy extravaganza!!!”
I still have not responded to the text.

Not because I am mad at my friend. (I actually did reply, I just changed the subject without acknowledging the lockout comment.)

Not because I am suddenly adverse to our fantasy football draft day. On the contrary, I’m always game for a 16-hour day of golf, fantasy draft, pizza, poker and whatever else we come up with.
It’s because, well, frankly, I just don’t care.
Something has either changed in me over the past 45 days since the lockout started, or I have been reading too many articles on our downtrodden economy.
Whatever the case may be, I’m downright furious this is such a big story.
I love football. I love the NFL. I love fall Sundays spent watching games and tracking fantasy stats. I love wearing my Chicago Bears hat like Clark Griswold when I put up my Christmas lights in December. I love playfully bantering with my wife’s family in Wisconsin about the Green Bay Packers, the Bears archrivals.
You know what I don’t love?
Billionaires and millionaires arguing over money for an extended period of time. They are the ones really engaged in a fantasy.
I don’t love media types like Rick Reilly, who makes a high six figures himself, writing about the poor players who made $680,000 last season and might have to get a “real” job supporting their family.
I don’t love the Reilly used Brian Schaefering of the Cleveland Browns as his example of someone we should feel sorry for. 
Schaefering made $200,000 after taxes last season from his $395,000 salary. He says his family is cutting back – watching their cable and cell phone bills, cutting out weekly date nights.
For dates, Schaefering says, “Now, it’s put the kids to bed and slap in a DVD.”
I don’t love how naive, egotistical and self-centered that actually sounds.
My wife and I do that all the time. $200,000 would be like hitting the lottery for us. We’ve watched cell phone bills and cable bills, grocery bills, and every other kind of bill for every year of our marriage. We’ve been crafty and creative at Christmas and haven’t bought a gift for each other in years.
There have been months we wondered if we would make it.
“If this goes into the season, my wife might start panicking a little,” Schaefering said.
Don’t worry, Brian. After six months of keeping your proverbial head above water, you stop panicking and just start doggy-paddling.
It’s called life. We just try to survive and advance to the next day.
At least, it’s life like 85 percent of America knows it.
Then there are those who don’t even have bills to worry about. Because they are homeless or jobless.
I don’t love the revelry that the owners and players treat this whole spectacle with.
“We can’t work out at the team facility! We can’t sign players to eight figure salaries!”
Meanwhile, the US dollar is falling like a brick from the sky. New estimates show that in 2016, China will surpass America in economic leadership. Gas is hovering near $4 a gallon, higher in some places.
Inflation keeps rising, but salaries for most normal jobs don’t. Unemployment hovers at 9.2 percent of the work force, a figure that has not been that high in nearly 30 years.
We do not really make anything in America anymore.  
I suppose that is not entirely true. We make reality shows and manufacture drama.
Mainly, we just consume. We’re obese and in poor health and then wonder why our medical bills are so high.
I don’t love billionaire owners arguing over more billions with millionaire players and I don’t love billionaire owners who scratch and claw for more money after fleecing cities for years by getting taxpayers to foot the bill for stadiums and arenas.
I don’t love the players pretending that this is the only possible profession in life and they are desperate.
I don’t love players who bemoan their medical care in a violent sport that leaves people seriously debilitated and that statistics show will shorten their lives.
Good sir, you chose to play this sport and are paid a lot of money to do so – even the Brian Schaefering’s of the NFL make more in one year than the President of the United States. Who has the tougher job? Deal with the consequences or get out of the line of work.
Miners and steel mill workers deal with some pretty serious stuff, too. They get probably a tenth of a percentage of the health care benefits an NFL player does. NFL players get treatment on their back, legs, arms, ankles, knees and hamstrings. My father has stood on concrete in a factory for 42 years. There’s no trainer ready with a heat pack at the end of the day.
Pensions are not high enough? Tell that to people who work at an auto factory for 35 years only to see it close and their told they have no pension anymore because it was paid out to some conniving CEO who won’t see any prison time but who was paid a 35 million dollars to go away and stop screwing up by lying and cheating.
I don’t love how our entertainment and sports are masquerading themselves as regular people with regular problems.
You are not us.
We do not understand you because you cannot possibly understand us.
You don’t love us. You just want to argue with yourselves about how to split up our money.
Our money is the money paid to companies when we buy their products at the grocery store, that in turn goes from those companies into advertisements during the long commercial breaks during your games encouraging us to buy more of their products.
Our money is the money paid to cable companies and networks to watch your games, which in turn is shelled out in 10-year contracts from those networks and cable companies for the rights to broadcast your games.
Our money is the money paid to go to games, paid to buy $7 hamburgers, $6 nachos and $10 beers at those games and paid to come home with a $100 jersey that was made in China.
Our money is the money that’s in your bank account, in your $10 million home and your $1,000 suits.
So sorry if right now, I don’t love you, NFL.
Sorry if right now, I don’t even care.
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Charlie Sheen, Dave Anderson, ESPN, Josh Hamilton, Major League Baseball, Major League II, Texas Rangers, Tim Kurkjian

Them’s The Breaks

Sometimes, things just happen and it’s no one’s fault.
While we can blame certain people for certain things – like, say, Charlie Sheen for brining “warlock” and “tiger blood” into the American lexicon – it’s not quite so easy to place responsibility at any one person’s feet.
It’s important to remember this when the topic turns to Texas Rangers star outfielder and 2010 MVP Josh Hamilton’s recent injury.
In the first inning of the Rangers Tuesday game against the Detroit Tigers, Rangers third base coach Dave Anderson told Hamilton no one was covering home on a foul-ball pop-up that both the Tigers third baseman Brandon Inge and catcher Victor Martinez moved over to catch.
Detroit pitcher Brad Penny just stood on the mound – never really even moving towards home. That left the base wide open.
Anderson repeated the fact twice. Suddenly, Hamilton tagged up and began making the 90-foot journey to home – which prompted Martinez, who was about 50 feet away, to break towards home as well.
As you might guess, the guy with the 40-foot head start got there first.
Hamilton went in all Pete Rose-ish (headfirst) and Martinez applied the tag.
And then Hamilton felt a bit of pain. Turns out, he had a small fracture develop in the humerus bone in his upper arm because of the play.
Now, Hamilton’s on the shelf for six to eight weeks. He can’t touch a bat for a month.
Then Hamilton went all crazy ex-girlfriend on Anderson after the game, calling the play “stupid” and “dumb” in the past few days and in not so many words, blaming Anderson for his injury.
He also kinda, sorta implied that he was an innocent bystander just doing his job by listening to his coach.
“I listened to my third-base coach,” Hamilton said at the time. “That’s a little too aggressive. The whole time I was watching the play I was listening. [He said] ‘Nobody’s at home, nobody’s at home.’ I was like, ‘Dude, I don’t want to do this. Something’s going to happen.’ But I listened to my coach. And how do you avoid a tag the best? By going in headfirst and get out of the way and get in there. That’s what I did.”
Come on, Josh. That’s comical in and of itself.
We all know that no one is the pros really listens to their coaches.
Apparently Hamilton is clairvoyant. He just knew that something was going to happen.
Well, if you feel that strongly about something, if you just know you’re going to get hurt, then don’t run.
And maybe don’t go in head first.
How quickly Hamilton forgets that last year he scored from second base on an infield hit. As ESPN’s Tim Kurkjian pointed out, Hamilton called it his proudest moment at the time.
Anderson referenced that as well yesterday.
“You think about in the past what we’ve done,” he said. “He’s scored from second on a groundout to the infield twice. He’s scored from first on a long single. We’ve done double steals with him. That’s a part of our game is being aggressive and taking advantage of situations. The unfortunate part is that he got hurt. But if you go out and play the game and play hard, those things are going to happen.”
So if you are Josh Hamilton, what you can do is show two sides of a coin: you’re either aggressive and hungry enough to want to score on weird plays like that, or you’re more of the cautious type. But you can’t be both.
This whole saga got blown a little out of proportion on Wednesday, with sports radio dials everywhere dissecting the play 30 different ways.
Headfirst or feet first? Was it important to even try in the first inning of a game in mid-April? Was it Anderson’s fault because he kept repeating it like he wanted Hamilton to go? Was Hamilton just a good soldier? What does this say about the future of baseball, in youth ball or the pros – will players start thinking more for themselves on the basepaths?
Seriously, fellas? I know it’s a little slow these days – NFL lockout dragging on, NBA playoffs not yet started, no real attention grabbing headlines – but to spend nearly two hours of your show on subplots in this one play that really don’t exist is a bit much, even for a guy like me.
I shudder to think what the current media would have done with Roger Dorn when he was told to get out there and take one for the team in “Major League II.” We would have heard Dorn was a company line-toeing stooge, or that Jake Taylor’s old-school ways had gone too far this time.
We ruin so many moments in sports and life by over analyzing them.
Just let it be.
Hamilton tried to score – and if he would have, people would be talking about what an amazing, gutsy, heads-up play he made. That plays like that are the difference between great and good.
So he got hurt, so what? Yes, he’s out six-to-eight weeks. Yes, he can’t even swing a bat until mid-May. But let’s look at Hamilton’s track record for injuries:
April 2011         Fractured arm
Sept. 2010        Fractured ribs
June 2010         Hamstring tightness
May 2010          Knee
Sept. 2009        Pinched nerve (neck)
June 2009         Torn abdominal muscle
April 2009         Strained ribs
Face it, the guy was going to miss some games at some point. Since getting into the majors full-time in 2007, Hamilton has played in 133 games or more only once in a season (2008).
“I can understand that if I was pulling things like hamstrings or quads and it was not actual high-intensity things like hitting walls,” Hamilton said. “I’m making plays that the game calls me to make and I’m getting injured that way. That proves to me that I can get hurt anytime doing anything. I’m tired of talking about it, to be honest with you.”
But he said he wouldn’t change the way he plays.
“How else would I play?” Hamilton said. “You can get hurt by doing anything.”
Bingo, kid. Them’s the breaks, as they used to say.
It took him a few days, but at least he understands what most of us already did. You can’t prevent the Sports Gods bringing the pain. Ricky Henderson once got frostbite from falling asleep with an ice bag on. People fall down stairs, throw out their backs bending over to pick up their kids’ toys.
Um, how shall we say, “stuff” happens.
Thankfully, Hamilton did apologize to Anderson publically and privately yesterday.
“I let my emotions get ahead of thinking things through,” Hamilton said. “The more I think about it, the more I understand that I take responsibility for what happened because I had the choice not to go or the choice to go. I just appreciate Dave having confidence in my ability to think I could make that play.”
Hamilton also added, “The object is to score and if you go feet first, that gives them all this up here to tag. It is what it is. It’s over. It sucks it happened, but it happened. We’ll deal with it.”
Exactly.
And hopefully you’ll deal with it better next time.
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