American McCarver

It wasn’t supposed to end like this for Mariano Rivera.

No matter how you feel about the Yankees — and, believe me, I feel exactly the same way — it wasn’t supposed to end like this. One of the greatest pitchers — and certainly the greatest closer — in the history of the game, put down by a blown-out knee, shagging flies during batting practice? Oh, no. That’s not dramatic enough. That’s not glorious enough. That’s the ending of every weekend-league high-school-once-was, gone fat and forty, not for one of the best to every play.

It wasn’t supposed to end like this.

It was supposed to end with Rivera pitching a low-outside fastball that Matt Kemp puts out of the park for a walk-off win in game seven of the World Series.

The Yankees have numerous rivals. The Red Sox (division). The Mets (cross-town). The Dodgers (11 World Series matchups). But these Yankees — this particular squad — have a bigger rival. Father Time.

Derek Jeter is 37. Alex Rodriguez is 36. The team’s most-anticipated call-up from the minor leagues is Andy Pettitte, age 39, returning from a year in retirement. Their best hitter during last season’s postseason loss to the Tigers was the now-retired Jorge Posada, who turned 40 in August.

And Rivera. Mariano Rivera — the one who, until last night, seemed most immune to the effects of age and time — is the same age as the never-to-be-worn-again jersey number on his back: 42.

I’m a Yankees fan. I’d be rooting for these guys whether I were 10 or 80. But these guys aren’t just any Yankees. They’re my Yankees. I’m 39. Most of the athletes “my age” have long since walked away from their games. This is an age when you’re more likely to be a coach or TV analyst than an active player. But these guys play on, against the odds. (Jeter is hitting .404.)

To be a Yankees fan is to be greedy. We expect the Yankees to win far more than a fair share of World Series titles. We always expect to win. But last year, when it became clear that Posada was not going to return for another season, my desire to see them win felt almost desperate. I wanted not just another title for the Yankees, but something more: another title for my Yankees, the three remaining players from the glorious Joe Torre dynasty years. Guys “my age” winning it all, one more time. I convinced myself that it was meant to be. It was not.

When Pettitte announced his intention to return to the team this year, that same irrational sense of “Wouldn’t it be great?” destiny rekindled in my heart: three of these guys have a chance to win One More Ring. Now we’re down to two.

Time’s effects, even against Rivera — the most graceful and elegant ballplayer I’ve ever seen, the closest thing in sports to an ageless wonder — are ignominious. The Yankees often win, but in the end, time always wins — the one opponent against which even the Yankees will forever be underdogs. To struggle against time is to struggle against the inevitable. We all know you can’t beat time, but the joy of these aging Yankees is that sometimes you can get lucky and race ahead of it for a while. But now this.

I’m not writing him off. If anyone can return from such an injury at 42, it is Rivera. But no matter how this turns out for Rivera and the Yankees, the reminder is clear: everything is fleeting.

The Worst Person in the World is a flag football coach in the Los Angeles suburb of Westlake, in the San Fernando Valley. I know this because my son’s team played his last weekend.

The game was over, or it might has well have been. There was a minute and a half left in the fourth quarter and the Worst Person in the World’s team was up by five or six touchdowns. This was expected, even before play began, because they were an established tackle team that had worked together for years, and used flag football for off-season training. We were a helter-skelter collection of random kids who wandered into the league to have some fun on Sunday afternoons. The outcome was predetermined.

But we’d had some luck on what would be our last drive, and had completed two solid plays — a deep pass and a broken-field run. We were settling into scoring position for the first time in the half. A little more effort, another couple of flukes, and we could be in the endzone inside the time limit. It wouldn’t matter, of course, except to salvage some pride. Losing is part of playing, and so is never giving up.

The Worst Person in the World had just finished shouting at his team — “Come on! Come on! Stop him!” — and called a defensive timeout, gathering his players into a huddle. They took a long time and when they came out, they came out hunting.

At the end of the next play, three of our kids were face down on the grass, hurt, including mine. It was the single dirtiest play of the entire season. Forearms to the face, pushing from behind, straight arms. Stuff that’s not only illegal in neighborhood flag football, but illegal in the NFL.

The Worst Person in the World had ordered a hit. He’d told his experienced tackle players that they weren’t going to let these… pussies… score, that they were to go out there and hurt them. Put them down. Flag football? Rules? Sportsmanship? Bullshit. The ball is just as down if the player carrying it is lying on his back in pain as if you grabbed his flag. And he’s not as likely to think he can get away with scoring the next time.

The Worst Person in the World had told his players that it simply wasn’t enough to play hard, that it wasn’t enough to win, or to dominate or even humiliate. He told his players that they were to go out there and destroy. A grown man told 12-year-old boys put down other 12-year-old boys, just for the sake of preventing the possibility of a meaningless touchdown. Hit them. Hurt them. Kill them.

And the other sideline cheered. Parents high-fived each other. Players basked in the approval of their coach. They pumped their fists. We ran out onto the field to make sure our kids were OK, to help them to their feet. Our coach complained to the ref — a skinny high schooler in well over his head — and then to the league rep, while the Worst Person in the World held his arms out to his sides and mimed innocence. No fouls were called. No action was taken. The Worst Person in the World smiled a smug little smile, like the schoolyard thug who got away with it, his world-view reconfirmed, his ruthlessness rewarded.

And so we walked away. We packed up our folding seats and six-packs of Gatorade and walked away. A minute and a half left on the clock, we abandoned the game. Never giving up has its limits.

I love sports. I love the outdoors, the camaraderie, the exercise, the life-long ability to work at something until it’s totally natural, totally effortless. I love the fun, the reward for persistence, the essential fairness. I love the exhilaration of winning and the lessons of losing. I love coaching.

The look on a kid’s face when he connects with his first real hit, nails his first real swish, grabs his first real pass — it’s amazing. He may not remember the details, but I’ve gotten to see it dozens of times. It’s joy.

But sports has a dark side. There are winners and losers, determined both by the final score and by what the expectations are. To some people — the Worst Person in the World included — all that matters is being on the right side of that line, no matter where it is. Rules, sportsmanship, common decency — they’re all just things that get in the way. These are tiny little men, in tiny little kingdoms, their sense of self-worth so fragile that a group of 12-year-olds can threaten to take it away from them with a meaningless gesture. They’ll literally do anything to prevent that. This is where bullies come from, where they are made.

This is where the Saints’ bounty scandal starts. It’s how you justify eavesdropping on the visiting team. It’s why you thrown an elbow into someone’s throat.

I know why some people hate sports. I saw it. It’s when nothing matters more than propping up whatever delusions you have about yourself, when skill or accident or luck puts you in a place you don’t want to be, and you react like a cornered animal. The Worst Person in the World has never learned anything from sports but how good it feels to win, and that has trapped him into living a life where being a bully — where creating bullies — is not only accepted, but required.

My kid was exposed to an ugly part of the world last weekend, through the lens of something he loves. We had to talk about fair play and ethics and why winning ugly isn’t winning. We had to talk about when you walk away and why. We had to talk about how to deal with domineering assholes, and how the world is full of them. No parent wants to have these conversations, but each has to.

And like every other lesson that sports has to offer, he’ll use them again and again.

Just so we’re clear here: Ryan Braun — a player who should be serving a fifty game suspension — pops a weak sac fly into center field, where Matt Kemp snags it and instantly fires it home. The Brewer’s third base coach gives Nyjer Morgan the hold sign — because he knows who actually deserved the NL MVP last season, and he’s scared to death of him — but Morgan ignores him and goes for it. The throw arrives, the catch is made, the tag is easy and the umpire calls him…. safe?

Fucking safe?

Go and look at the picture at the top of this post. Safe?

But then maybe that’s how they do things in Milwaukee, where they race wieners, inject testosterone, and play baseball indoors, like degenerates and perverts.

This means Andy Pettite is a spring chicken, right?

At the start of the hockey season, I bet my Rangers fan son $100 that the Isles would end up with a better record than the Rangers. I knew in my heart it was a losing bet but when the season is new and the prospects look better than they have in while, your hope turns into something like stupidity. I was reaching for something, anything, to make me feel like this season wouldn’t be another one of despair and bitterness.

Of course it was. And I say was even though the season isn’t over because - let’s face it - the Islander’s season is over. After their OT loss to the Rangers Sunday night I felt deflated and sad and then spent a good portion of the night wondering why I let something like sports make me feel so awful. In fact, people ask me this all the time: “Why do you care so much?” I’m sure you’ve heard it. “It’s just sports.” “It’s only a game.” “It’s not like it matters in your life.”

These words come from people who get hung up on tv shows so I try to put up a comparison for them. Each hockey (or baseball, etc.) season is like an episode of a tv show. You become emotionally invested in it. You care about the characters and what happens to them. You wait for each subsequent episode and between those episodes you talk about the show, speculate what will happen and armchair quarterback what should have happened. When you devote that much emotion into watching all those episodes of a show just to have Shane get his zombie head blown off leaving you with no characters left to like, you feel a sense of disappointment. You feel let down. Empty. “Why bother,” you think. “Why watch the rest of this show when there’s just nothing left to care about?” Then you spend the next hour evaluating all the ways in which Rick and Lori and Carl can die. You just hope for implosion at that point.

Sometimes people will get it. They’ll realize why I feel sad when my favorite team sinks to the bottom and I’m left hopeless and sad. The people who mourn when their favorite person gets voted off American Idol now understand that sports is my entertainment, my escape, my moment to cheer for something awesome to happen between the bookends of my hours spent at a soul sucking job and hours spent watching people vote for Rick Santorum.

So yea, I’m sad. I’m sad the Islanders once again have failed me. I’m sad I have nothing left to cheer for. The only thing I can wish for now is a Walking Dead type vengeance, where Garth Snow and Jack Capuano are fed to the zombies and left jobless, if not walking around aimlessly looking for entrails to eat.

My son has forgiven me the $100 bet, sort of. I bought him MLB2K12 and told him to never talk to me about the bet, the Islanders or hockey ever again. Especially during the playoffs.

At least we’re both Yankee fans. We’ll have plenty of shared happiness, high fives and hopefully an ending which does not involve me thinking of the Phillies as soul crushing zombies.

Play ball.

Mike Lupica:

He wasn’t exonerated. He was acquitted. There’s a difference.

So Braun of the Brewers becomes the first positive test to win this kind of appeal in baseball. So he goes on with his career now, and his huge contract, no suspension, because a triple-sealed sample, one that no one ever suggested had been tampered with, didn’t make the last FedEx shipment on a weekend, didn’t go out until Monday morning.

Hats off to George Washington and Abe Lincoln, but today’s real national holiday was Pitchers and Catchers Day. But I’m not all smiles this year. It’s been a long time — we’re talking Bill Clinton still in his first term — since last you could say “pitchers and catchers reported to spring training” and have that not include two great players: catcher Jorge Posada of the Yankees, and pitcher Tim Wakefield of the Red Sox.

That’s right, I said Wakefield, a Red Sock (is that what you call one of those jerks in the singular?) was great. I’m feeling magnanimous.

The way I see it is this. He was a class act, a good guy, and a competitor who never shied from taking the mound in the clutch. His stats aren’t great, but no Yankee fan liked seeing Wakefield on the mound. Yeah, yeah, Wakefield’s the guy who gave up that home run to Aaron Boone. But more often than not, Wakefield did good work in tight spots. And if you want numbers, let me give you these two:

• 0: number of World Series championships the Red Sox won during the 77 years preceding Wakefield joining the squad in 1995.

• 2: number of World Series championships the Red Sox won during Wakefield’s career.

I’m not saying Wakefield was the linchpin of the 2004 and 2007 teams. But he was there, right in the thick of it, and year in and year out he was a dependable part of the Boston rotation. And before he got there, the Red Sox were dependable in only one way: they’d figure out a way to lose. Wakefield wasn’t like that. He always looked to me like a guy who expected to win.

Wakefield’s two championship rings are a few less than Posada’s five, but that’s still two more rings than all the Red Sox from 1912-2004 combined. I can’t help but suspect that many Red Sox fans have the same begrudging respect for Posada that I do for Wakefield. They’re both How can you not like the guy? guys. How can you not love a knuckleballer? How can you not love a hitter who never wore batting gloves, no matter how wet or cold the weather?

Their careers more than just coincided; they were intertwined, right up until the end:

The last HR allowed by Wakefield was by Jorge Posada. It also was the last HR Posada hit. Now they’re retired.

— Pete Abraham (@PeteAbe) February 18, 2012

It’s February. There’s a light frost on the ground and a promise of snow this weekend. Some of my neighbors still have their Christmas lights up. Yet I wake up this morning with my thoughts on baseball, as if spring has already arrived.

The phrase “pitchers and catchers” has a way of confusing my brain into thinking winter is over. Even though the National Hockey League season is at its halfway point the first sign of spring training pushes me into baseball mode. It means it’s not too early to start thinking about opening day, about warmer days and longer nights and the hope that your team’s season will last well into October.

The arrival of pitchers and catchers sets off sonic, tactile memories; smells, sights and sounds that are entwined with both spring and baseball, memories that come from having spent more than 40 years (I won’t say how many more than 40) as a fan of the sport. They are memories I store in a small compartment in my head and at the first mention of spring training that compartment bursts open and it’s all there: the powdery feel of the gum in a new pack of baseball cards; warm spring breezes that smell like lilacs; Bob Sheppard’s voice reverberating in my head (for some reason, he’s always announcing Don Mattingly’s name in these memories), the sound of the television in my parents’ backyard echoing the call of a game into the neighborhood; the slow motion cadence of the game itself, signifying the laid back nights of summer.

Baseball season brings hope like no other. It’s a long season. Anything can happen. At least that’s what you tell yourself when your team starts off slow. April. May. June. So much time ahead of us and all that time is spent under the cover of warm weather and days free of snow and biting wind. Baseball season brings a freedom from the darkness of winter. It brings summer vacation and the promise of freedom and picnics and beach days. How can you not have hope when with the baseball season comes the release from winter’s grip?

Sure, it’s only February. There might still be snow ahead of us (heck, it snowed on Yankees opening day one year) and early darkness and the drudgery of sloshing through the rest of winter. But the mind works in mysterious ways. When I hear the words “pitchers and catchers” the fog of winter breaks and I’m ready to throw myself into baseball season. I want to hear the crack of the bat and yea, even Tim McCarver’s voice. I want to watch Gruber and Monteiro go at it on twitter. I’m anxious to hear my father’s taunts about the Yankees and give him back my good natured jabs about the Mets. I want it to be spring already, with warmer mornings and box scores and hot dogs and peanuts and Cracker Jacks.

In the season of pitchers and catchers, hope feels eternal. Spring feels like it’s already here.

Play ball.

Apparently, there was some sort of football game today. The more obscure sports sites covered it, if you care about that sort of thing. There was one funny play where a guy fell on his butt!

In actual news, pitchers and catchers report in two weeks.

Yes! Go ‘Bama! Roll Tide! Alabama is now the number one college in the country! Well, if you’re talking about football.

If you’re talking about academics or campus life, then it’s seventy-fifth, according the US News and World Report. The crown jewel of the Alabama educational system — turns out they have one — is an embarrassing bench-sitter when it comes to, y’know, the actual purpose of a university. But, wow, football. They sure got their money’s worth out of that $4.8M coach.

Maybe LSU shouldn’t have skimped on a mere $3.7M coach. Given that they’re hundred and twenty-eighth on the US News list means that their football program is ranked higher than their academics by, um… Ah. What’s the difference between 128 and two? Like, 90 or something.

The annual embarrassment of big-time college football is finally, mercifully over. Back to those communications classes, jocks!

I know this rant has been done before — will be done forever, apparently — but spiraling coach salaries, exploding TV contracts, relentless booster attention and the ever-increasing incentives to win at all costs — cheating included — just confirm that any realistic notion of “scholar-athlete” is as dead as LSU’s offense. Given: A well-rounded college experience involves athletics, especially sports. But when sports — big-time sports, hundred-million-dollar sports — overwhelms everything else on (and off) campus, the whole purpose of the institution as a school becomes laughable.

This is amateur sports, remember? All those ads during the nationally televised game sure can make it hard to concentrate.

Hundreds of millions of dollars changed hands (again), institutions of higher learning were turned into poorly-regulated professional farm systems (again) and — if they were lucky enough, and their boosters sneaky enough — the students who made it all possible were paid solely in blowjobs and free drinks. (Again.)

Given all this — plus the mercenary conference hopping that’s being driven by television contracts — why even pretend anymore? Why not just chuck the whole pretense — along with those pesky NCAA rules — and turn the big college football programs into the NFL Junior? The teams wouldn’t have to give up any of their money to the nerds, and schools could get back to focusing on something as mundane as making an education the reason that people attend a school. Oh, sure, the players would have to be paid, but I’ve got it on good authority that they didn’t focus much in math classes, so they’ll be available on the cheap. Heck, with an open market, you could probably get them for less than you’re paying them under the table and write it off.

The annual orgy of BCS championship football — of all big-time college sports — makes a mockery of the whole notion of amateurism, the purpose of universities and the idea that work should be rewarded with fair compensation. None of these observations are new, of course. And they won’t be new next year, when the situation is even worse. But, y’know: Roll Tide!

Roll right over everything.

The start of a new year is a time for reassessing, for correcting, for righting old wrongs; a time to do what you should have done in the first place. A time, say, for the stupid bastards at the Baseball Writers Association of America to fix the goddamned mess they’ve made. A time to give Matt Kemp the National League MVP for last season.

There are lots of reasons that Kemp should have gotten the award, not least of all because he earned it. Even a drooling simpleton with an Internet connection — say, a BBWAA voting member — can see that.

Kemp was 0.018 behind ostensible winner Ryan Braun in batting average, but ahead in stolen bases, home runs and RBIs. Also in total bases, total runs, total hits, and on-base-percentage. Also in tapping Rihanna. In other words, in all the important categories.

If your decision-making methodology prevents you from counting past the number of fingers you have — this is for you, BBWAA members — let me do it for you: Matt Kemp was the player in the National League responsible for more scoring than anybody else — number one in runs, number one in runs-batted-in. Runs, it turns out, are handy in baseball, and a player who can provide them is considered “valuable.” Oh, look, who was second in both those categories? The guy who got the “most valuable” award.

But wait: the Dodgers had already gotten a BBWAA award, the Cy Young for Clayton Kershaw. You can’t give both to a single team! Major League Baseball is all about making sure everybody feels good about themselves, like a kindergarden self-esteem exercise or the BBWAA bathroom, and just because one team has the two best players in the National League can’t possibly mean that they should get both awards. Just ask Justin Verlander.

Plus, the Dodgers didn’t make the play-offs. That, by definition, means that everyone on the team is lousy. They only had a winning season, after being subjected the the worst owner in the league, the stupidest off-field drama in living memory and freakin’ bankruptcy.¹ You have to make the playoffs to win the MVP! I mean, it’s even in the MVPTTMPO award’s name: Most Valuable Player on a Team That Made the Play-Offs. Here’s an ESPN poll, which BBWAA members apparently weren’t allowed to participate in:

And so once again, the administration of baseball — the management of what happens off the field — proves itself to be shallow and small and stupid. How good Clayton Kershaw is and who the Dodgers have in their division has nothing to do with Matt Kemp or his performance. He was the most valuable player in the NL last season, hands down, and any simpering chimp at a keyboard can see that. That this article exists is proof.

(Hell, the Dodgers didn’t even get 162 games last season. A rain-out against the Nationals — the Nationals! — wasn’t re-played, even though Kemp was one home run short of going 40-40. That game would have given Kemp a better than one-in-four chance to become the fifth member of the 40-40 Club, likely providing the BBWAA membership something shiny to be fascinated by. That it was never played is a crime.)

And all this — the stats, the other awards, the misunderstanding of what the words “most valuable” mean, the lost game — all of it ignores the lumbering, steroidal elephant in the room.

Ryan Braun is facing a 50 game suspension next season for coming up positive on a drug test. His people claim “highly unusual circumstances surrounding this case which will support Ryan’s complete innocence.” Which, of course, means he’s guilty. “Highly unusual circumstances” is shill-speak for “We’re working on it. Give us a sec. Maybe something involving a trained monkey? Or Nazis? What about aliens?”

Not that this upsets the BBWAA at all. Oh, no. They don’t make mistakes. Or at least they don’t undo them. “The voters used the information they had at the time of the election. I don’t see how we can change that,” said the BBWAA awards administrator, suddenly becoming Reggie Bush’s best friend.

Which leaves Ryan Braun in the company of “MVP”s like noted scumbag Alex Rodriguez — people whose most valuable skill is cheating. Enjoy your asterisk, Ryan! You should use those first fifty games of 2012 to rest up, since you’re going to have to work really hard to make up your stats in the next 112.

Matt Kemp was the most valuable player in the National League last year, if not the Most Valuable Player. He’s going to have to settle for that title this season, after another year of profoundly good baseball. All 162 games of it.

1. Fun fact: Buying a bankrupt team is how Bud Selig got into baseball. Go ahead — just try to tell me that Chapter 11 isn’t an institution-destroying disaster.

Thomas Knauss, the author’s sports-stat obsessed 12-year-old son, contributed greatly to this article, both analytically and in his sense of righteous outrage.

I was all set to do some kind of year end sports list, a nice wrap-up of my favorite sports moments of 2011. Then I remembered the Yankees bombed out in the playoffs, the Islanders sucked and really, there were more lowlights than highlights this year.

Instead, I’ve culled together a list of my favorite sports broadcasting calls. Why? Because I was having a conversation with someone a few days ago about our favorite sports moments and I realized that I remembered the call for each one of them; whether I heard the call live or listened to it over and over in replays, the fact is the play-by-play of pivotal moments in sports history is the soundtrack that brings the memories to life.

Note that these are not the Best Calls Ever. They are, however, my favorite (and I only went with six because I just as easily could have gone with 20 and that would interfere with my intended nap). The calls that I can recite by heart, the ones where I can hear the announcer’s voice in my head as if the play is going on right now. Sometimes the call is about the play. And sometimes the play is secondary to the call.

That there are three hockey calls in the list of six is, well, it’s why I’m the token hockey writer here.

6. World Cup, 1986. I’m not a fan of Maradona. In fact, I hate him. And the fact that this goal came on the heels of his infamous “Hand of God” goal just makes it harder to admire but damn if this call doesn’t do perfect justice to the moment at hand.

5. Kirk Gibson. Jack Buck. 1988 World Series. “I don’t believe what I just saw.” Every baseball fan knows this one. If you love the game, you love this moment and you love this call.

4. 1980 Stanley Cup finals. A very personal choice: “Tonelli to Nystrom..” and that’s all I have to hear, just that two second sound clip before I’m transported back to 1980, crowded in my den with about twenty other Islander fans when bedlam erupted on the ice, in the stands, in my house and later, on the streets of Long Island. “Tonelli to Nystrom” became the sweetest phrase ever uttered for a while.

3. 1994 NHL playoffs. Yes, I am an Islander fan. But I’m a hockey fan first and foremost and there’s no denying that Howie Rose’s call - “Matteau! Matteau! Stephane Matteau! The Rangers have one more hill to climb, baby, but it’s Mount Vancouver!” when the Rangers sealed their entry in the Stanley Cup finals in 1994 was exhilarating (I was watching with a room filled with die hard Rangers fans, it was hard not to get swept up in the moment).

2. 1980 Olympics. I remember what I was wearing. I remember the way my mother’s living room was set up at the time. I remember the game and the seconds ticking off the clock and the glorious chaos and Jim Craig. And I remember screaming back at Al Michaels “YES! YES!” when he asked “Do you believe in miracles?”

1. October 2, 1978. It’s only natural that my favorite call is from my favorite sports moment of all time. Bill White’s narration of the moment is locked in a vault in my mind, in that place where I keep my “happy place” memories. It’s filed under “Bucky Fucking Dent.”

“Deep to left! Yastrzemski will not get it — it’s a home run! A three-run home run for Bucky Dent…”

I once thought about getting that tattooed on my back. 

Not really.

Honorable mention: Any time ever that Marv Albert said “YES!”

Dishonorable mentions: Any call I remember for the ensuing heartbreak. Bill Buckner. The 2004 ALCS. 

Dallas is going to win the Super Bowl.

— John Gruber (@gruber) December 18, 2011

Ten-year, $250 million contract with the Angels. What a proud day for the St. Louis Cardinals and their fans.

NBA owners and players have reached a tentative agreement and if all goes well, play should resume on December 25th.

It’s a Christmas miracle!

The Dodgers may be bankrupt, the Lakers and the Clippers may have had their season cancelled, the Kings may be… whatever the Kings are. But there is one bright spot on the Los Angeles sports scene: the Galaxy!

No, seriously, look it up. The Los Angeles Galaxy. They’re an MLS franchise.

MLS. Major League Soccer. It is too a real thing.

The Los Angeles Galaxy won the MLS championship yesterday, 1-0, over the Houston Dynamo¹.

Goddammit, yes, Dynamo. Like “Oilers” was any better. What the hell is wrong with you, Houston?

The point — you were totally expecting a plural there, weren’t you? — came an hour and a quarter into the game, when someone apparently kicked the ball into a net or something. Someone probably did that “Goooooooal!” thing and the players probably ran around a bit, like there hadn’t been enough of that nonsense over the previous 72 minutes.

Soccer may be the most popular sport in the world, but saying “American Soccer” is a lot like saying “Croatian Basketball.”

To me, as a suburban white guy who was last interested in soccer twenty-five years ago when I played AYSO, the end of the MLS season means two things:

It means that David Beckham will be leaving L.A. Beckham is a soccer player who last made news five years ago when, um, he came to L.A. Oh, sure, he’s also Mr. Sporty Spice, a model and the reason that Keira Knightley exists, but ultimately the loss of a one rich, chiseled guy in Los Angeles isn’t statistically significant.

More importantly, it means that L.A. has a championship, and it’s for a game that’s pronounced “football” more often than not. We may not have a football team, but we’ve got a football championship.

Suck it, Green Bay.

1. It has been brought to my attention that the name of the MLS team in Houston is “Dynamo,” not “Dynamos,” and the article has been corrected. My assumption was that “the Houston Dynamo” was part of the civil infrastructure, and not a sports team. The article also makes the assumption that “soccer” is an actual sport, and that claim is currently being researched.

I went to the Islanders game last night at the Nassau Coliseum. I thought it would be great night. They were playing the Stanley Cup Champion Bruins, it was Eddie Westfall night and the team had just come off a much needed win against the Canadiens. I expected a packed house, lots of noise, a good time.

I ended up being a stranger in my own home. The Coliseum was packed with Bruins fans. Everywhere I looked, black and yellow. Bruins jerseys, Bruins jackets, Bruins t-shirts. We went up to our seats (last row, a section away from Loudville) and were immediately swallowed up in the sea of Boston fans around us.

The “Let’s go Bruins!” chants started early and when Patrice Bergeron scored the first of Boston’s six goals at about seven minutes into the first period, the arena exploded in cheers.

I was mortified. It was an awful feeling, to be sitting in your own arena watching your local hockey team and the visiting team’s fans have more of a presence than the home team fans. I expect this at Islander/Ranger games. That’s a New York/New York game and there are thousands of Ranger fans living on the Island. But a Boston game? To be drowned out and overwhelmed by their fans felt disgraceful.

I love the Islanders. I’ve been an Isles fans since their inception. I’ve been with them through awful times and amazing times. Basement finishes and four Stanley Cups. Recently, I’ve stuck with them through the threat of the team moving. I campaigned for a new arena, I got people to go out and vote in a referendum to build a new Coliseum and keep the Islanders here. I shed tears at the thought of losing my team to Kansas City or Quebec or even Brooklyn.

Now? I don’t care. Let them go. Long Island does not deserve a hockey team. Not even this losing team. If your team has so little support that the visiting club’s fans outnumber your own fans, you don’t deserve a team. If you can’t get off your ass and get to a game against the Stanley Cup champions on a mild Saturday night in November when they are honoring a local legend, then don’t cry to me about how the Islanders are going to leave Long Island.

There are reasons teams desert their cities. Lack of support is a big one. When people don’t show for games, when there are empty seats or seats filled with the colors of the opposing team, when you don’t give a crap that the arena is a crumbling embarrassment, that’s when team owners start to seriously look at other options.

I wonder how the Islanders players felt last night when the Coliseum sounded like it might as well have been TD Garden. I wonder what it’s like to be on your home ice and feel like a visiting team. The Islanders may not be a great team right now. They may not even be a good team. But they are a young, promising team and if the fans can’t come out and show their support and give the team a little morale boost, then we might as well give up the hope that the Islanders will stay here right now.

I never thought I’d say this but, let them go. Let them go to a place that’s starving for hockey. Let them go somewhere the fans will come out at night to cheer their team on. Long Island doesn’t deserve an NHL team. Not even a 5-9 team.

[image from nesn.com]

Two months is a long time. A lot can happen. Your favorite ball club, for instance, can be humiliated in the playoffs by a team that would barely go on to win — if the term can be used — the most error-prone and quickly-forgotten World Series in living memory. Your much ballyhooed bullpen can fall on its collective face. Your spectacularly inaccurate predictions can be forgotten.

Thank God for Twitter.

Clayton Kershaw, of the sad-sack Los Angeles Dodgers, is the National League Cy Young winner for 2011, receiving 27 of 32 first-place votes, and scoring 74 more points in the balloting than an also-ran named Roy Halladay from some mascot-driven novelty franchise back East.

In fact, you could combine Halladay’s score with the third-place finisher (Cliff Lee — didn’t he used to pitch baseball?) and they’d just barely edge out Kershaw.

A lot of hype has been directed at various strutting bullpens this past season, but in the end the guy who got it done was a 23-year-old from a barely-.500 team that nobody was paying attention to. He beat Tim Lincecum four for four, pitched a perfect All-Star inning, and won 12 of his last 14 starts. But you could mention his name to some random blow-hard and they’d fire back, “Who’s that?”

Really looking forward to that Super Bowl win, once we get a football team.

Monteiro asked if I would write an article helping him understand hockey. I said “understand it or enjoy it?”

So now I’m going to teach Mike how to enjoy hockey. Because you don’t really have to fully understand something in order to enjoy it. I mean, no one understands what “Wake up the cake, it’s a lake, she’s kissing me” means but they still for some reason buy Chili Peppers albums. So I believe Mike can learn to enjoy hockey without me going into the intricacies of offsides and icing and plus/minus ratings.

All you really need to know is this: There's a puck and there are five guys on the ice (not counting the goalie) for each team and it is the job of those guys to work together to get that puck past the opposing goalie into the net. When they do that, the red light goes on and everyone cheers and some ten second clip of an awful rock song plays on the PA system. 

Just like the beloved sport of baseball, there are beer and hotdogs and players with giant egos and teams in financial distress. But unlike the beloved sport of baseball, hockey is a game that needs to be watched. You can read a book while you are watching baseball. You can vacuum the living room, play Angry Birds or enjoy the intimate company of a loved one while a baseball game is on. Chances are, you won't miss much. You can't do that with hockey because it moves too fast. And therein lies the enjoyment.

Hockey is breathless. Oh sure, there are stops in plays (see the aforementioned icing and offsides, as well as tv timeouts), but when the play is on, it's a blur of motion. It's speed, finesse and grace peppered with dashes of brutality and violence. Not necessarily the violence of two grown men dropping their gloves to pummel the crap out of each other (made to happen less often thanks to Brendan Shanahan's inglorious hunger for power and might), but the ferocity of checks against the board or the brutal beauty of a mid-ice check. It's the sound of a slap shot. The thrill of seconds winding down in a close game as your team buzzes around the net. It's the shorthanded goal. The sound of a puck hitting the crossbar and the collective gasp of the fans. 

But that is what you are supposed to enjoy. How do you enjoy it? You go to a game. Don't start trying to get a feel for a game by watching it on tv. You need to be there. You can sit up high with the rowdy fans chanting insults in between gulps of watery beer or you can sit down low, close enough to the action to see sprays of ice flying around. Doesn't matter. Whatever makes you comfortable. 

You just watch. The puck drops and you follow the action. You watch the sticks, the skates, the rush of players all headed in the same direction. You watch the defensemen hang back or play the point, you watch the forwards skillfully maneuver their way around the net like a biker weaving around traffic on the Long Island Expressway. You keep your eye on the goalie, all padding and painted helmet, contorting himself like a gymnast to keep that puck from going into the net. 

There's a lot going on in hockey. You're not watching one player at a time taking a swing at a ball and missing when the bases are loaded and the game is important  - sorry, having an A-Rod moment there - you're watching everyone on the ice. At once. You've got to keep up with the action. There's no time to be bored. There's no time to be social while the game is in play. You focus, you follow and you become one with the game. 

 Pick a team. Wear a jersey (Sharks, perhaps?). Get yourself a beer. Forget about rules and regulations for now. Follow the play and if you get lost follow the crowd. Watch what they are watching. Cheer when they cheer. Chant when they chant.You get the hang of the rituals of the game if you just watch everyone around you. It's almost like going to Catholic church; sit, stand, sit, stand. And your will find yourself invoking God and Jesus everyone once in a while. "Oh my god, just shoot the puck, already" or "Jesus Christ, that was a shitty call, ref." But I'm not going to get carried away with the church analogy or you'll never go to a game. 

It's easy for me to tell you the things to enjoy about hockey. But I can't make you enjoy it. It has to be in you. That need for something fast-paced, for hyper kinetic action mixed with grace and agility, for the punishing hits and wicked shots. It's not a game for the laid back. Hockey is not a game for someone who thinks a lazy fly ball is exciting. But I can ask you to try it out. 

Grab a beer. Just sit back and watch the action unfold. And don't look away until the whistle blows.