They say that sports are an on-going story, that that's the thing that separates our games from other forms of entertainment. A movie is over and done with in two hours, but today's ballgame is informed by yesterday's game, and its outcome will inform tomorrow. This ongoing story is only sexy from the outside.
I believe there was a time when the act of being a professional athlete was perceived as glamorous, but by now most of us know the truth. The average pro career lasts about three dingy years-and that's three years of payoff for a lifetime's work.
Most of these players will not become household names, they will work in anonymity, and retire into obscurity. "I used to play a little ball," being the colloquial way of putting it. They are just part of the machine of sport, no different than any other part.
An athletes' days are long and often hard. They're hurt much of the time, they're afraid most of the rest. Fear of injury, lack of job security, competition from below, disagreements with management, the list is endless. There is no predictable future and little control. Psychologically, the toll of this sporting life, is often worse than the physical abuse. And that's the other thing one learns as a sport's reporter: the physical abuse is astronomical. So many aged athletes are crippled for life, it's amazing that anyone still play our games.
It is for this reason, we are often told, that the true superstars deserve exorbitant salaries. I have, especially in this column, pointed out how ridiculous these fees appear. At least some of the time, I think, that is still the case, but I recently spent a few days in Los Angeles and those days told a different story.
For most of my adult life, I lived in California. I did thirteen years in San Francisco and another seven in Los Angeles. I left about two years ago. I moved the middle of nowhere New Mexico, to a tiny farm town in the mountains, for no other reason than my wife and I wanted to help dogs.
My wife has been doing dog rescue for the past decade in one form or another-running a no-kill shelter down in Mexico, operating a smaller scale rescue in Los Angeles around the time we met. We came to New Mexico so we could have a little more land and help a few more dogs.
It was something of a risky move as a reporter. I was pulling myself away from the city, away from the seeming heart of the story. There were very real concerns about could I make a living in the country and those concerns remain just as critical today.
Not two hours ago I met with my accountants to discuss how my year had gone. Not so well, according to them. My wife and I, each working mostly fifty and sixty hour weeks, had earned a combined total of $4200 dollars worth of taxable income for the past year. We did manage to save a few dogs though, so I'll take the trade.
I mention all of these things not because I am looking for pity, in fact the opposite. I am mentioning these things because I just returned from that trip back to LA—the first time I've been back in over a year— and news there isn't good.
I had a good year by comparison. Friends of mine who had to foreclose on houses back when the economy first tanked are now trading down into a diminishing return of smaller and smaller apartments. Very few of them have the same jobs they had when I left. Fewer still are actually employed.
I know award-winning editors who were charged with the running of major papers—the kind that come with over a million readers—who are now unable to find general reporting jobs. Meaning they not only lost their 100K + jobs, they now can't find 25K jobs to replace them.
I have friends in their late 40s who are now sharing apartments with kids in their 20s because there's nothing else they can do. Others, once very successful others, have had to move back into their parent's houses. A few more have become strippers. I don't think it's different in other cities.
Since nobody has much money right now, instead of going out for meals, we took a lot of long walks. It's a myth, by the way, that no one ever walks in LA. These days, everybody walks.
There was a little bit of talk about the economy, the fears of total poverty, questions about where is the bottom, about hitting that bottom, and about drinking oneself to death along the way, but very little of it. Mostly, in Los Angeles, people were talking about baseball—specifically talking about Manny Ramirez.
Maybe you don't know about Manny. Not too long ago he was a member of the Boston Red Sox, but "salary problems" forced to him to behave badly and be traded. Los Angeles took him last year, and the result was that the Dodgers got a lot farther than anyone had expected when the season began. They took the National League championship.
After another highly-publicized and highly-unorthodox courtship, the Dodgers just resigned Ramirez: two years, 45 million dollars. Another ridiculous sum, but oddly one that no one I spoke to seemed to resent.
The repeated refrain was that Manny Ramirez brought people something they were sorely missing right now. Their lives were in shambles, their country perhaps not far behind, but the ‘God-damn Doy-ers' as Fox Analyst Petros Papadakis likes to call them, have got Manny, so they've got a shot.
They're not spending 45 million on a ballplayer. Ballplayers, after all, are interchangeable parts of the machine. They're breaking the bank on hope.
And these days, hope is the only thing most of us are running on. And yeah, that's actually why we play the games.
