Big-league sports can’t figure out what to do with their all-star games. The NFL’s Pro Bowl is a dog because when football players go through the motions the game is unwatchable. The NBA game gets by because top basketball players entertain when they showboat. The NHL seemed to change its all-star format annually before last year turning to a choose-up-sides approach straight from the playground. And baseball has tried to rescue its game by using it to decide which league gets home-field advantage in the World Series.
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Meaning in sports is up to us. The rapture of victory is wonderful, but to get that giddy rush it’s necessary to close our minds against everything we normally know about irrelevance.
The difference between a Super Bowl played before 90,000 fans in the stands and 111 million watching on television and a rock climber inching up a precipice in total solitude isn’t in the athletes. It’s in the audience. It’s in who knows and who cares. Which brings me to the role journalists play in determining what we know and how much we care. I’ve long thought that role was largely ridiculous, but I’m beginning to see things differently.
Texas Ranger slugger Josh Hamilton fell off the wagon. Patrick Rishe of Forbes addressed his remarks to Shayne Kelley, hired by the Rangers to try to keep Hamilton clean.
This yammering brings me to where I want to get, which is to journalists as guardians of sporting legacies. As you know, the keys to Valhalla have been placed in the hands of baseball writers; they are the ones who decide who enters baseball’s Hall of Fame. And though the voting is secret, most believe in sunshine and dutifully enlighten their readers on how they voted and why. Some discourse at length on their high-mindedness.
