What's Wrong with Baseball

To me, Johnny Damon is the poster boy for everything that is wrong with Major League baseball.

I'm a lifelong Detroit Tigers fan and I'm disgusted that they signed Damon for the 2010 season.

Damon may not be a cheater in the way Mark McGwire or Barry Bonds is, but to me, he is the symbol of the conditions in Major League baseball that led to the steroid controversy.

In a 15-year career, Damon has played for the Royals, Athletics, Red Sox, Yankees, and now the Tigers. This isn't a rant about players switching teams or free agency, this is about the way Damon did it.

In 2004, Damon was part of what could be the most dramatic World Series championship in history. As a member of the Red Sox, Damon was a key part of the League Championship Series victory over the team's arch-rival, the Yankees. You probably know the story: The Red Sox had not won the World Series since 1918, which was the year the Red Sox sold the contract of Babe Ruth to the Yankees. In the intervening years, the Yankees had won 26 World Series titles. The Red Sox were down three games to none in the best-of-seven Championship Series and mounted an historic comeback that will live in baseball lore as long as the "Curse of the Bambino" has.

The mythic proportions of the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry are not lost on any baseball fan, and even modern players recognize it, and Damon is no exception to that. But when his contract was up in 2006 - one season after the miraculous defeat of the Yankees - Damon signed with the Red Sox's bitter rival.

When Willie Mays' career was winding down with the San Francisco Giants, he was offered a contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers. He said he couldn't sign with the Giants' biggest rival after trying so hard to beat them all those years.

"It's just business," is the rational answer to my objections, but Major League baseball isn't a business to fans. It's a game, an inspiration, a tradition, a passion, and more.

So now Damon is on the Tigers. It really makes it hard to watch.

Hating the Whos

I've had a theory for a few years that Dr. Seuss intended How the Grinch Stole Christmas (published in 1957) to be an allegory of the Holocaust.

Now that I've written that out, it seems really stupid.

Anyway, the Grinch lives up on Mt. Crumpit looking down on Whoville and hating the Whos. A large part of the tragedy of World War II had to do with Germans hating the Jews.

Now here's where my theory completely falls apart (I know, it falls apart pretty near the beginning). The Whos love Christmas, and of course the Jews don't (traditionally speaking). Of course the Germans - generally speaking - would love Christmas, being a predominantly Christian country (Klaus is a common German first name, based on a shortening of Nicholas). So I guess what happened is Dr. Seuss turned the whole thing around to turn the book into an panegyric on Christianity. The Grinch hates the Whos like the Germans hated the Jews, if the Germans had held onto their Christian beliefs, they would have loved their fellow beings, just as the Grinch learns to love the Whos by accepting the magic of Christmas. Far-fetched as this is, there is a book called The Parables of Dr. Seuss that proposes many of his stories, including that of the Grinch, contain a Christian message.

Completing this entry makes me think it would be a bad idea to write - as I was planning to - on the connection between J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books and William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch.