On Grantland’s sports blog, The Triangle, Adam Moerder has a post today entitled “Don’t Make Me Hate You, Detroit Tigers.” The uninspired text-drop begins with what actually is a fairly bold proposition: “More than any other MLB team, the Tigers probably have the best odds of becoming a dynasty this decade.” Moerder quickly confesses, “that thought sickened me.”
Why? A Tigers’ dynasty, Moerder asserts, “would be a pretty boring, hollow accomplishment.” Because? Because Moerder thinks it’s likely, apparently. In other words, Moerder is bored (sickened!) by his own prediction. If he feels that way, why strike ahead with the rest of his post? Because sickening boredom is only a stop on the path to hate.
Most sports critics hate teams with neglectful, disinterested owners who do little more than bleed their organizations for cash and refuse to lift a finger towards making an effort to build a winning franchize. The trouble here is that Moerder hates the Tigers because their owner actually is willing to spend money to improve his team. He fashions the Tigers some sort of Rust-Belt Yankees who bought a lineup of expensive free agents (“there’s no elegance”!), except that that doesn’t accurately describe how this team was built, and he even admits that their farm system is strong (a weak one is hate-worthy in his book).
“Boring” also cannot be a characteristic of a team that includes Justin Verlander, Prince Fielder, Jose Valverde, Miguel Cabrera, postseason heroes like Don Kelly, almost-eccentrics like Delmon Young (and, by association, his more borderline-eccentric brother, Dimitri Young), and an entertaining manager in Jim Leyland.
Moerder closes by repeating that he finds the Tigers’ “roster be constructed in an aesthetically unpleasing manner.” He hinted at this earlier, when he wrote that “the current infield defense, led by Miguel Cabrera at third (!), is an abomination.” It’s an abomination because it reminds Moerder of an “amoral” (not immoral, mind you) video game world he experienced two decades ago. That’s really what he wrote. A virtual lack of elegance indeed. He also said the roster “reeks of hubris,” and only one of those words has been accurately used to describe Detroit in the last thirty years. Please.
Since Moerder can’t even express what he doesn’t like, attempting to figure out what he does like probably is pretty fruitless, but it seems to have something to do with an environment of baseball competition in which a down-and-out team can get its act together by building a winner through development of its prospects and some “elegant” acquisitions. If he were to grab a little perspective, he might really like this team out of Detroit.
What a waste of e-space.
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While reading Moerder’s non-sequitorious and circularly inconclusive chaff, Justin Verlander and the Tigers blew a 2-0 shutout in the top of the ninth against the D-Rays and suffered their first loss of the season in a game in which former Tiger Fernando Rodney got the save, so you can bet that I didn’t proofread the above, although I’d contend I still put more thought into it than Moerder put into his bit.
This was healing music, but it was in no way peaceful. Levon’s voice made sure of that. It was tough and sound and brooked no easy answers. (When, an album later, he voiced the story of Virgil Kane, a grunt in the Confederate army, he managed to push the story beyond politics. You swear by the mud below your feet and you make a pact with the land that nothing can break.) It was a Southern voice, certainly, but there was in it that universal sense that we are all in this great experiment together, that we hold a number of truths to be self-evident and the ones that Mr. Jefferson listed were only the very beginning of them. That there is a commonwealth that binds us, through the worst of what we can do to each other, and the worst of what we can make of our promise. For all the wild rhetoric and the political posturing, and for all the horror that extended from My Lai to the floor of the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel and back again, that we all had an America to come back to, no matter how long we were away, no matter even if we were half-past dead. Because that America was the America of the tall tale, the underground history, the renegade, buccaneer country that belongs to all of us. Levon Helm told those stories. He gave that history a voice that we could all hear over the din of the times.
ALDLAND 