Jobu's Altar: The Hyperreality of Baseball
Posted by Rob Rabies on 04.28.2007
Welcome...to the desert...of the REAL. Although Rob Rabies may seem like a contrarian troll, he's out to prove why Yankees-Red Sox is not what it seems...
The hyperreality of baseball
It's not often that someone tries to insert Jean Baudrillard into a baseball column. After I fail miserably in my attempt, you can laugh at me, but here goes:
Baudrillard was a Continental (read: French) literary/cultural theorist and philosopher. Now, as many Frenchmen are wont to do, he was often a boring, surly fuck. But he also had several interesting ideas—one of which is known as hyperreality.
Those of you who are fans of The Matrix have probably seen/heard Baudrillard's work. When Neo hands his hacked software to that dude who talks about Mescaline (I forget his name), he gives it to him in a hollowed out book, Simulacra and Simulation, a 1981 book written by Baudrillard. In it, our boy Jean theorizes that our actual lived physical reality has been replaced with symbols, signs, and or images of that reality, and as a direct consequence, that fantasy has replaced reality and thereby becomes the new reality. It's a heady concept, so here are a couple of brief examples:
1) Happy Days—This god awful fucking show becomes the 1950's not because it was an accurate representation of the 1950's, but rather because we invest belief in the fact that it was an accurate representation of the 1950's. Thus, the familial dynamics of shows like this and Leave it to Beaver are how society believes the 1950's were, when in reality they were a time of racism, homophobia, and persecution of socialism.
2) Disney Land—What a shithole. Disney Land becomes the American Dream because we conflate the American Dream with the media and sensory onslaught that is "The Most Magical Place on Earth." People are unable to distinguish the reality of a hungover 19 year-old in a mouse suit trying to score ass from the fantasy that Mickey Mouse represents for their children. This suspension of disbelief causes us to believe that the fantasy is Disney Land, and that our dreams can come true in this place, and because it ostensibly represents American Values, that our dreams will come true in America.
That's why kids are fucking retards.
Now, moving on. The real reason why I'm discussing hyperreality is not to impugn the wishes of some 6 year old girl who will later become a 26-year-old crank whore, hitting her kids as often as she hits the light bulb. I'm discussing hyperreality in this conext because that is what the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry is—hyperreal.
The fantasy of Yanks-Sox, and the associated cultural artifacts of it far surpass the tangible reality of what the rivalry is—a lopsided shitbath. Now, I believe that the Sox now hold a 47-46 advantage over the last 4+ years of games, which definitely refutes my aforementioned point. However, one should be careful not to associate a very short term series of close games with a long and storied rivalry.
Michigan-Ohio State is a rivalry, Chiefs-Raiders is a rivalry, Oklahoma-Texas is a rivalry.
Yankees-Red Sox?? It's much more like Lakers-Kings circa 2002 or Steelers-Raiders from the 70's. Now, that's not to say that this short term rivalry hasn't been exciting—it definitely has, but I also believe that people are quick to overestimate the passion of a relatively small subset of Red Sox fans (read those not on the bandwagon) as a protracted quest for redemption ultimately fulfilled in the 2004 ALCS. In reality, no one gave a rat fuck about Yanks-Sox in the 80's or the first 9/10ths of the 90's. It was largely absent from the 70's save for one monumental collapse thanks to a one Bucky F. Dent.
A recent Sportscenter commercial goes a long way towards spelling out this myth—David Ortiz breaks in All-Ugly catcher Jorge Posada's unused cap for him. While folding the bill and stretching out the cap with his gargantuan skull, the Red Sox mascot notices Ortiz in the Yankees cap and displays the kind of reaction you'd imagine the fat fuck from The King of Queens would give if he suddenly found his next door neighbor laying pipe in Leah Remini. "I can't believe what I'm seeing, but who the hell am I kidding anyway?" After all, they are the Red Sox. But what about Ortiz? Yes, I'm sure he wants to market himself, but you'd sooner have your average Chiefs player skullfuck themselves to death before putting on a Raiders cap.
Now, player loyalty is down across the board, so maybe this applies to all teams, but you don't really get the sense that the Red Sox hate the Yankees. But you would never hear that on Baseball Tonightt, The Boston Globe, or the back page of the Post.
Contrastingly, idiots like Dan Shaughnessy perpetuate ideas of a curse, which then causes an anti-curse backlash, which then leads to a discussion of who is correct. Furthermore, since the media is overwhelmingly biased to the coasts, we are bombared with all 19-27 annual games these two teams play on national television not because they play the highest quality baseball, but because they are the two largest payrolls and two of the largest baseball markets in the country. In order to further that interest, stories of rivalries are cooked up, Schilling's bloody sock is treated as though he was pitching with a javelin in his heart, and a stolen base becomes redemption for an entire geographical region of the country.
These ideas and images—books on the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry, Fever Pitch (by the way, fuck you Jimmy Fallon for desecrating Busch Stadium with your presence), dipshit HBO documentaries on the existence of the curse, pictures of blood seepage in the pattern of Oklahoma, become the rivalry—not the actual baseball on the field, and when the baseball games are actually played, the desire to make them more than what they really are leads to people talking about how dramatic a three game sweep was, when in reality it was littered with bad starting pitching and even worse performances from the bullpen.
Sometimes little league games have the most "exciting" finishes of all, but it's mainly because you can score a homerun on a walk and a wild pitch, not because the baseball is played at a high level. The investment that we have in the fantasy of Yanks-Sox replaces the reality of what it actually is—it's just like any other geographic rivalry in professional sports—the only difference is that the navel-gazing fans of the Red Sox nation get more media coverage.
The fact of the matter is that the Red Sox didn't win in '04 because of destiny, and it wasn't all that memorable of a playoff series—they got red hot, and the Yankees choked their bitch asses off. It happens all the time.
So please, before you sit down and watch the next three games of this drawn out, melodramatic "rivalry", at least acknowledge the fact that you are soaking up a simulacra of rivalry…which I guess these days is the real thing
