No Hope

It has been coming for a while now, but this weekend signaled the final, swift closure on a false period where my little girl joined me for soccer outings in the region.

"I don't like soccer, daddy."

No Everton-D.C. United Saturday night, in spite of how excited I was about the scheduling of the friendly.

No Real Maryland - Fredericksburg Hotspur PDL season finale this evening. I'd planned to head to the game on my own, but being told by the little one that all she wanted to do is stay home with daddy isn't that bad an outcome.

Unfortunately, my change in personal fortune is due to baseball. The tide turned with an innocent trip to the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs' Regency Furniture Stadium. One evening at the stadium -- and its playground, inflatable slide, bounce house, sand pits, and bumper boats -- combined with regular trips to the playground and Build-A-Bear at Nationals Stadium and the carousel and bounce house at the Bowie Baysox's Prince George's Stadium was enough to paint soccer in sharp contrast.

I grew up at Wrigley. Perhaps because of that I failed to fully appreciate the threat posed by these stadiums. These parks concede that baseball is boring (at least for long stretches of the three to four hours spent at the stadium).

The long, dull stretches of baseball games was something I appreciated as it was conducive to conversation or fixation on details about players that might otherwise have been missed or pondering important/spurious concepts under a beautiful sun. I disliked Comiskey, in part, because it tried to draw attention away from the competition on the field.

But William Louis Veeck has unquestionably won the war for baseball's soul.

The last soccer game I was able to take my daughter to was a Real Maryland match shortly after the birth of her little sister. My wife needed a break, so the trip was over my eldest's strongest objections. On the way into the stadium she looked up and said "I don't like soccer. Baseball has bouncies. Baseball is more better."

In almost any other year, this would not bother me terribly -- in point of fact, she asks to go to baseball games and this, in and of itself, is great. But it had to be this season.

When the Cubs were in town at the beginning of July, my daughter was asking to go to baseball games and I refused, holding out until the Thursday finale. We bought tickets outside the stadium and immediately went to the playground. It took a while to get to our seats, but shortly after sitting down I wanted to get back to the playground.

The Cubs won the game eventually (following the Nationals' epic collapse), but what we saw was horribly depressing baseball. I'm happy to say it was the most I've seen of this awful Cubs team in several months.

And when they are blowing plays or cut down trying to stretch singles into doubles while down seven runs, the thought I cannot evade is what Jim Hendry did to Ryne Sandberg. Hendry's done many remarkable things for the franchise at the helm, but the decision to go with Quade over Sandberg was pure ego -- there was no legitimate baseball justification for the choice -- and it is, finally, an offense that merits relieving him of his position.

Removing Hendy won't fix the Cubs problems. But for the reasons that Phil Rogers outlined in an inspired column in the Chicago Tribune on Friday, hiring Pat Gillick would not only restore competence to the front office, it might also facilitate the correction of the grave error made this last offseason.

Months...

March turns to April, April to May, and now May to June and I failed to muster the self-absorption necessary to add even one more missive into the echo chamber of the blogosphere. It is not as if sports have become any less important in my life. Before failing to make the effort to catch the most recent woefully inadequate performances by D.C. United at RFK, I had gone to nearly every home game. The season began with the promise of a squad that was head and shoulders above the rest of the MLS and has now collapsed to the cold reality of a passionless, uninspired, underachieving group of players sporting VW logos on their chest. In April, I ended up at a baseball stadium in six of nine days: first, enjoying the Cubs post 13 runs against a reeling Bucs squad on consecutive weekend games at Wrigley; next, appreciating the impressive skills (both on the mound and at the plate) of Johan Santana now in full display with the New York Metropolitans; and finally, watching the Cubs drop two of three to the woeful Nationals at their great new park here in DC. Coach Pinella may not want Chicagoans to get all "giggly" about the North Siders, but it is difficult not to be impressed by a team that storms back from an eight run deficit in the sixth inning featuring one of the team's relievers shutting down the Rockies on a ten-pitch, nine strike, three strikeout inning (Marmol is very, very good). My wife and I caught most of the three game series against the Dodgers on television and after having spent a significant part of my three decades on this spinning globe at Wrigley, that small patch of land in Chicago looks to be a great place to be at the moment.

In this part of the country, Nationals Stadium is not such a bad place to be either. The stadium is a beautiful place to watch baseball, easy to get to by metro, and currently features a moderately interesting assemblage of malcontents and can't miss prospects (that missed). As comes with the territory in the District of Columbia, the people attending the game can ruin the experience. The opening game of the Cubs-Nats series was marred in our section by a group of sixteen year olds screaming profanity laced epithets at the opposing team and others sitting in their section. Friends that have sat in the same (relatively nice) seats have endured other fans, intoxicated by the first half inning, drowning the joy out of the experience of a baseball game with x-rated vitriol screamed over the heads of young boys and girls in the rows before them. A consequence of the Nats inability to draw well in spite of the new stadium and the team's lack of interest in preventing ticket brokers from buying up significant blocks of season tickets is that woe befall all those fans who actually bought season tickets for themselves (I declined to renew mine). The ticket brokers have been drastically cutting the prices for their tickets (I bought four field tickets that sell for $58 a piece from the team through individual game sales for a little over $20 a piece from a broker looking to mitigate his loss for one of this week's games against the Cardinals) meaning that any lout can act like an ass without repercussion in your section without any fear of any meaningful consequence other than being asked to leave the stadium in the seventh inning when surrounding fans can no longer endure the pathetic, inebriated, offensive tirades. In two-thirds of the games I have gone to this year, I have experienced no problems. But those are not great odds for the casual fan looking to find an enjoyable way for the family to wile away an evening.