American McCarver

A couple of weeks ago I was at a Dodger game, in the left-center bleachers. Late in the game, a short pop-fly over second base landed in front of Matt Kemp — he dove, but it got under him and hit the ground, bouncing into his glove. He recovered well, came up throwing, and held the batter to a single.

Good hit, good hustle, good baseball.

But somewhere behind me — back in the seats even worse than mine — someone shouted, “You suck, Kemp!”

This happens a lot in the left-center bleachers, usually between the fourth inning (when people have had enough time to get a few beers in them) and the seventh (when they stop selling alcohol entirely to let the fourth-inning drunks dry out).

Kemp turned around, casually pointed a finger in the direction that the shout came from, and then pointed it to the ground next to him: Come down here any say that.

Of course, that was never going to happen. Some drunk idiot doesn’t get to go down to the field and get beaten to a pulp by the guy who ended up being named starting center fielder for the NL All-Stars for a reason. First, Kemp’s hand has better things to do that punch a loudmouth in the face. Second, the loudmouth would never actually go. It was a criticism without a return address — slurred, angry for no reason, very probably misspelled. The bleachers are the YouTube comments section of baseball.

But I wonder if Kemp turned around at all because the shout stung a little. Maybe he could have gotten off his heels quicker. Maybe he could have gotten under that ball. Maybe.

And maybe it stung just a little when @McCArch tweeted this:

The problem w/ @mericanMcCarver is it’s not a sports blog. It’s people cheering their favorite teams. That’s not sports, that’s fanaticism

And while I’d question the moral equivalence of writing a handful of blog posts about the Dodgers (or the Yankees or, oh geez, what’s-their-names, with red caps?) and blowing up a marketplace full of innocents, @McCArch may just have a point. Perhaps our range is too limited. I mean, this site is taking up one of the six or seven domain names that the Internet has allocated to sports blogs, so we’re obligated to cover everything, right? Somebody has to be responsible for the caber toss.

And here at American McCarver Industries, we take our responsibilities seriously. We want to get under those pop-flys. We want to make sure that our readers are getting every cent of their money’s worth.

So, @McCArch, you tell me what I should write about: Pick a team, or a sport, or a particular issue, and I’ll give you a thousand words about it. A thousand angry, angry words.

Come down here and say that.