Sports, Politics, Religion and you

[Gordon B]

There is a strong tendency for adults to like the same sports teams they rooted for as a child, namely the home teams from their childhood. Most people also identify with the same political party as their parents and are of the same religion as their parents.


I've only defected on 1/3. I root for the same NY teams I rooted for as a child, although my secondary teams are completely different. I was raised by non-observent Jewish parents. No change there. My parents were liberals; I abandoned ship when I was 30 in 1984.

I'm curious to read how true other JC'ers are to their childhood views.

Today's children are less home-team loyal than their parents, IMO, due to the proliferation of games televised nationally due to cable TV. Most of my son's friends here in Baltimore do not consider the Orioles to be their favorite team. They like the Cubs for Sosa, the Giants for Bonds, the Yankees for Jeter, etc.

[crawjo]

I was born and raised in a Catholic household, as a fan of the Baltimore Orioles, and as the child of a father who was a die-hard Reaganite and a mother who voted for Walter Mondale.

The discussions around the dinner table were interesting ping-pong matches. Perhaps this explains my inability to identify strongly with either party: growing up as a kid I heard all sorts of bad things about Democrats from my father and all sorts of bad things about Republicans from my mother.

I'm still a Baltimore Orioles fan, though I now live in upstate New York. As for religion, I left the Catholic Church years ago, and no longer consider myself a Christian, though I do believe in God and undoubtedly attending Catholic schools for 12 years influenced my thinking on religious matters, both for the good and for the bad.

[Tanager]

I suppose Crawjo and I have had similar experiences: I was raised an Orioles fan (and a Redskins one, perhaps even more so, since we had season tix for a period), and I spent much of my childhood in church (Episcopalian) and at an Episcopal prep school. Like Crawjo, I wouldn't consider myself particularly Episcopal (or even Christian in many ways), but I still believe in God, and many of my views are doubtless shaped by interactions with priests and church over the years.

Mom worked on Reagan's campaign in 1984, I don't remember Dad expressing any strong political views growing up, but he's unquestionably a Dem now (which I think any thinking North Carolinian almost has to be, since the GOP here is mostly in the Helmsian mold). Mom moved to the left as she got older, I don't know why, particularly, but she felt pretty strongly about supporting public education and women's rights in her later years, so maybe that was part of it, I don't know. I never got into strong political discussions with either of my parents.

BTW, I might care about the Orioles in particular or baseball in general when Peter Angelos is banished to Siberia. Or maybe he has been, and I just haven't been keeping up. I haven't watched much football in years, although I did mildly care about this year's Superbowl.

Dad was a Duke alum, and I also attended Duke - that *definitely* had a lot to do with parental influence, for better or (largely, IMHO) worse.

[Pete C]

Originally posted by Gordon B
I abandoned ship when I was 30 in 1984.

Never trust anyone over 30.

[moneyp]

Yes on the sports teams, for the most part. Still root for the Cardinals in baseball and the Chiefs in football. Went to a few Spirits (ABA) games as a kid, I could recognise that placing your lot with Marvin "Bad News" Barnes was a very limited prospect. Moved to L.A. just in time for Showtime, but as time passed I came to realise I was rooting more for the players than I was the team. In hockey, I was a Blues fan (Bernie Federko!) up until I adopted the expansion Ducks, and I've stuck with them ever since.

Religion? No, definitely not. My mom used to vacillate between Catholicism, Christianity, and something called "New Christian Science." She doesn't practice any of that anymore, yet still maintains a relationship with the Big Guy.

I tried Christianity and found it terribly lacking, although at the time I wasn't able to articulate why. Too many questions with no answer or very unsatisfactory answers. I guess you could say that I never really had "faith." There are things that have happened in my life that suggest that something somewhere is (benevolently, I should hope) keeping me around on this Earth and out of ruin. And while I'll happily thank that benevolent whatever-it-is, I don't see the reason to worship it. I don't know if this makes me an agnostic, an atheist, or merely an ungrateful wretch.

Politics: My mom is mostly liberal, although she voted for Reagan. She's dead set on voting against Bush, but overall she doesn't really care about politics. I was a reactionary anti-authoritarian growing up, and although I've mellowed as I've grown up, I still believe in guarding against oppression at every turn. I'm growing terribly Draconian in my opinion when it comes to economics and world affairs as I've come to learn how the wheels turn, but it's better than saying that I believe in global Socialism as long as I don't have to give up my ski trips or my DSL connection. It's bullshit, so why lie about it?

I've always voted third party, having yet to see a two-party candidate that I've actually liked.

[vibes]

I was raised in a Mormon family and was a Mormon missionary, but in the last three years have pretty much abandoned the religion and my interest in religion as well. It's possible that I may become interested again, but at this point in time it doesn't seem very likely.

My parents and relatives are, for the most part, extremely conservative and are staunch Republicans. While I definitely lean to the conservative side of things and am registered as a Republican, I'm a lot more moderate than everyone else in my family. I think my abandonment of religion has a lot to do with this. I think many of my parents' conservative leanings come as a result of their religious views.

While my three brothers were very much into sports (we grew up in LA and they were big Dodgers/Lakers/Kings fans), my parents were not at all into sports and neither was I. While they watched games on TV, I read books and focused more on my intellectual pursuits.

[Dr Dave]

My parents were fair-weather Christians. I'm a militant atheist.

My father rooted for the NY Giants football team. I don't do football.

My parents were Republicans; I'm not one.

[SinginSumo]

Originally posted by Pete C
Never trust anyone over 30.

[Enforcer]

I idolized Jim Palmer and Earl Campbell as a kid. So, I rooted for the Orioles and Oilers for a few years because of them. Actually, I was a *huge* Baltimore Orioles fan as a kid. When I got older, it was Detroit teams all the way. I've lived in Michigan my whole life, so there have been no torn loyalties since. My folks followed sports casually, but I was a freakin' maniac for sports.

My parents let me make up my own mind politically. I heard political arguments, but mom and dad never tried to convince me of anything but to figure things out for myself. My mom has always been big on civil discourse. She loves to argue for the challenge, but always liked to be able to debate without hard feelings emerging. I've never been comfortable with either political party. I just don't fit the party lines. I disagree with too many issues on either platform to check the box and make a few concessions.

Both my parents are Christian, but I rejected religion at some time during my teens, I guess. My dad's family is Catholic, but I was never baptized. When people draw strength and sustenance from religion during trying times, I think it's great. When religion fosters conflict, oppression or guilt, I get pissed off. I don't rule out the possibility that something I can't perceive or comprehend exists. But the overriding truth in my analysis is that people need answers to almost impossible questions, and they also have an appetite for power and control. That those reasons could explain the existence of religion is hard for me to get past.

Larry

[john williams]

What the good Doctor said, except we don't have a Republical party but my stupid father was a conservative.

[Lazy River]

My parents were Episcopalian, so that's what I am.
They were Democrats, so that's what I am.
The only sports my dad went after were hunting and fishing. I do that, because I was raised on both. However, I really dig the Red Sox. (Yeah, I'm one of those.) Because I live in L. A., I like the UCLA team and the Lakers (thanks to Kareem and Magic). When Wilt was a Laker, I was a Celtics fan. Bill Russell was my favorite basketball player in those days. That was some team to watch. I still like the Lakers, even with all their probs, and I follow the Dodgers and Angels. Can't say I'm too interested in football. Just not my thing, I guess.
LR

[stonemonkts]

My father was a New York Giants fan and a Yankees hater. When they moved to San Fran he adopted the Mets. I was a Mets fan until a few years ago. I don't care very much about sports these days, mostly because I can't stomach the presentation of it on tv. He was the same way. I grew up with a man who railed at the tv every chance he got like some deranged Archie Bunker. He was a fallen Jesuit (attended a seminary almost to the point of ordination but backed away thankfully when he met my mother). Back to the topic...my family were big fans of both the Knicks and the Rangers. My sister had season tickets to the Rangers so I went frequently. I also played hockey all through my youth so I appreciated the chance to see the greats up close. My favorite sports team was the L.A. Rams. When they won it all a few years ago I decided to stop bothering with football.

Politically speaking, my father was a true independent. He never developed set-in-stone views; he pondered everything. He was a great reader, devouring 6-8 books on a weekly basis, so discussions were pretty lively around the dinner table. My mother has always been unconcerned about politics and religion. "Eh, who cares?" is a phrase I've heard a million times.

I'm an atheist. I was raised a Catholic but never had much if any faith. It seemed like a massive hoax or contrivance so I rejected it all very early on. I wanted to make sure so I read and studied the Bible before making up my mind once and for all. My parents never attended mass so it was easy for me to stop. I never brought it up so it never became an issue with them, at least not until the nuns started calling my father at work to complain about me. I had issues with authority (expelled from both grammar and high school).

[Tom Storer]

I was a Mets fan when I was a child in White Plains, New York. I now live in Europe and don't follow sports at all. Can't be sure what would have happened if I still lived in the US.

My parents were Kennedy democrats all the way. I was raised in an atmosphere of polite horror regarding Republicans. If anything, I'm now more liberal but also more skeptical than my father. An academic, he values education and intelligence above other things; his blanket condemnation of Bush no doubt stems just as much from Bush's lack of verbal skills as from his politics. He now prefers Wesley Clark because Clark was a Rhodes scholar and is "bright": the same reasons he loved Clinton, really. I know how he feels, but I'm not willing to depend solely on that criterion.

My father is a lapsed Unitarian for whom religion has no importance. If it did he would have been like the Episcopalian minister in the film "The River Runs Through It" who scoffed, "Methodists? Huh! They're just Baptists who can read!" I was never baptized, never had any religious education, and am a plain vanilla atheist.

So no, I haven't exactly redefined the boundaries I was born into.

[Gary Sisco]

My mother was (and is) deeply Christian, protestant, having been raised in the deep south, Alabama. My father didn't give a shit about it, even when he was dying (the local Congregational minister visited to ask if he wanted help getting straight with the lord and he declined), except when I was a child, when going to church on Sundays was socially expected in our class and neighborhood -- and because my mom of course demanded it, so we know how that turned out. My grandparents didn't think about it at all, to my knowledge. In fact, I can't recall anyone on my father's side of the family who did. My paternal grandfather didn't like Catholics, but he was a stone racist and didn't like anyone, really, but Reagan, whom he adored, probably because they had the same kind of brainpower, and his own family.

I never bought any of it, though I was forced to go to church every Sunday as a child until about the age of 12, when I just flat-out refused to go anymore -- my first act of overt and insistent disobedience -- which caused a lot of family trouble but my mom gave in in the end. She had little choice, as I wasn't going to go anymore, no matter what. None of it took, thankfully. I always thought the whole thing to be absurd and stupid, even as a child. All it did for me was fuck up a perfectly good day off from school, and make me where clothes that would get my ass kicked in the neighborhood on any other day. I used to be an atheist, but, like Pete C, my inspiration, I've moved now out of political necessity to anti-theism.

My father was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan, so I didn't inherit a baseball team, as I was too young. He was football Giants fan (all his life). When I cared about such things, which was many years ago, before I went into the service, so still a teenager, I was a Packers fan, and then a Steelers fan. Never cared about any other competitive sports. Don't care about them at all since a teen, although I like to go to a ballpark and watch a baseball game now and then, just for fun. Once every few years is enough. And I used to like listening to Red Sox games on the radio in the early 80s, because I found it relaxing and an interesting use of the imagination, because I knew what Fenway looked like and etc. Any way, not a sports guy at all.

Politically, my parents were conservative as conservative can be without shading over into the radical right, which masquerades as conservatism today. My father, I don't believe, ever voted anything but Republican in his life, nor his parents, even in Depression years. And he never voted anything but "no" on a tax issue at town meeting. (I've inherited that attitude, now, at 50, and will take his stubborn place at town meeting, until they come up with a reasonable way to pay for the local schools that doesn't cost Bronwyn and I thousands of dollars every year in property taxes.) My mom is less strictly partisan but still conservative as all hell, and she's been known to vote "yes" at town meeting, though not often.

As for myself, I don't know or have any way of knowing how I might have turned out, politically, had I not been radicalized as a teenager by the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, and, more specifically, watching on the tv all kinds of people who looked just like me getting the shit stomped out of them on the streets of Chicago in 1968, outside the Democratic Convention, which did not object. A lesson learned then and never forgotten.

I have a feeling, though, that had it not been for the times, I'd have probably become an essentially apolitical, though antiauthoritarian, hipster of the old school (50s models). One of those rootless hustlers and buskers of the type romanticized by the Beats. I think I'd have probably continued playing music, as well, and writing, both of which went out the window after I shipped out for Nicaragua, in 1984, at 30.

In the end, what I inherited from my parents was a fighting spirit and sense of social obligation to go along with one's rights. Which also included doing time in the service, and believing everyone should, as part of family tradition but moreso an aspect of that inheritance. As I grew older, and they mellowed with age, they came to understand pretty well that, though they of course never expected to have their first born become a pinko commie, my commitment and fighting spirit about my ideas came from them, and they could live with it. I might have been a commie, but I was their commie.

[Brian Olewnick]

Like Stone, my Dad was a big NY Giants fan, though he continued to be when they moved to SF. My first ML ballgame was SF vs the Mets at the old Polo Grounds in 1962. Neighborhood friend Ronnie May apparently exerted greater influence on me in this regard, as I became a Yankee fan in that glorious year of 1961. Dad was actually a bigger hockey fan (he played until he was about 65), sneaking into many a Ranger game in his youth. I can't stand hockey. fwiw, two of my three other brothers (younger) are also Giants fans.

Dad was born Catholic but was a practicing atheist. Mom was Lutheran, so the kids all attended the local Lutheran church while Dad got to stay home. Happily, in this instance I've followed his footsteps, refusing church attendance by the time I was 15. I did, admittedly, continue playing for the church softball league (the best one in town) for several years. I recall one night at dinner when Dad suggested we start our own team, the Polish Atheists.

Both Mom and Dad were (still are, I guess) registered members of the Liberal Party. I remember having the only parents on my block who were voting for Kennedy in 1960. Dad (he'll be 81 on the 22nd) wouldn't fit in too well with contemporary liberalism however, being something of a tough old cuss when it comes to the death penalty and other stuff. Not sure there was much direct influence in this regard aside from their relatively live and let live workaday philosophy that's fairly hospitable to nascent libertarianism.

[Root Doctor]

My folks are active Episcopalians, as am I. They're also Republicans, which I am as well, although far less of one since the knuckle-draggers and snake-handlers took over the party during the "Gingrich Revolution."

My dad is a Boston partisan when it comes to sports, and so am I. My son, although a Vermonter, has been inculcated with the same pro-Boston attitudes.

[Chris D]

I inherited my blood-curse White Sox fandom from my father, who in his childhood attended the first ever All-Star Game on the South Side of Chicago. To his death, he still rooted for the football Cardinals because they once inhabited Comiskey Park. He could not abide my Bear fandom -- they used to play in WRIGLEY FIELD! -- even with my protestations of, "Dad, they're the only team in town!"

He was a Wobbly, a card-carrying IWW member whose idea of America dove-tailed with that of John Dos Passos. Mom was a Kennedy (especially BOBBY!) liberal, whose Italian immigrant father had hooked up with the Dem Party after building his house in Cook County. My love of newspapers was fueled when she and I waited in line (I was all of 12 or 13) for "The Pentagon Papers" and later our inhaling of anything Watergate.

Raised Catholic, since flipped to Lutheran to join my wife's clan.

[shrugs]

Growing up in a warm climate like New Orleans, I never could understand why people would sit inside on Saturday and Sunday afternoons and watch sports. I was outside whenver possible so I never really got into any major league sports. I did like going to Baton Rouge to see the Tigers play but that was about it.
My parents are both Republicans and both Catholic. I was raised to be be a Republican and a Catholic. I stopped going to church sometime around my sophmore year in high school. Never been a Republican.

[bostontricky]

My grandfather was attending Detroit Lions games as far back as the Lions go, 1934. Thanksgiving dinner in our family was (and in a bow to tradition, still is) traditionally served late, around four-thirty, as this would allow my grandfather and others enough time to take the streetcar home from the game.

And the Tigers! My grandmother recently gave me a financial ledger that she kept during her first years of marriage. Under October 2, 1935 is the folllowing entry:

World Series game, program, field glasses, streetcar fare, two sweaters; theatre and eats after show

All for the grand total of $5.58.

Needless to say, the Detroit genes run deep in our family, we are fans of all the Detroit teams except for my youngest brother, who wound up rooting for the Yankees, Bears, Bulls, but still the Red Wings. My college roommates and I were part of the largest crowd (almost 62,000) to see a professional basketball game at the Silverdome in 1987-88. We had bad seats for football - almost two-thirds of the way up the upper deck; but it was rather interesting to see the teams operate as a whole. You couldn't make out any of the players, except Laimbeer, only because he was slower than anyone out there. And Larry Bird, because he was so ugly, even from a quarter of a mile.

- - - - - - -
Of course I root for the Red Sox now; it was an easy transition for a couple of reasons.
First, we moved to Boston in 1992, when the stench of the Tigers was really starting to become objectionable. Secondly, I hated the Yankees anyway, and if you move to Boston and hate the Yankees, you are a de facto Sox fan.

In '92, the Patriots struck me as the AFC version of the Lions: overachieving when you'd expect them to stink, and vice versa. I don't think of myself as a diehard fan, but it's nice when the team is cruising. Plus Brady went to Michigan, anyway.

- - - - - - -
Politics: Lefty, with libertarian and anti-corporate leanings. Small is beautiful, baby. My family is notorious for not talking. My dad was pretty conservative (coming from the banking and accounting side of things) but most of his news came out of the Wall Street Journal. I think he's had his fill of Bush, though...Mom was quiet on this front. I still have my John Anderson button from 1980...

Religion: Recovering Catholic with Buddhist and surrealist tendencies. Mrs. Tricky raised Episcopalian, but always viewed her experience there as more social rather than spiritual. Now hanging with the Unitarian Universalists at the Arlington Street Church in downtown Boston. That's a hell of a biiiiig tent there.

[GoodSpeak]

Sports: When I was a kid, I was an Angels fan and a Giants fan [mainly because I absolutely hated the Dodgers...used to take a lot of grief from kids who were Dodger fans since I rooted for the Angels] Now, I just pull for the Giants...the Angels just broke my heart one too many times. As for football, I started out as ambivolent then, my Packer Backer cousins from Madison, WI got me to root for Green Bay. The Rammies would always beat them, so I hated them, too. I figured I needed to root for a California team and so I picked the Rammies' natural enemy: The Forty-Niners...I still root for them. In round ball, I rooted for the Lakers [it was one of the first pro teams I ever got to see in person, back when Jerry West, Elgin Baylor and Gail Goodrich were playing] and I still do.

Politics: My "Archie Bunker" republican father, the death of John and Robert Kennedy, the Watts Riots of 1965, Martin Luther King, the Free Speech/Civil Rights Movement, Nixon/Watergate and the Vietnam War/draft shaped my politics. I am proud to say that I am a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat because of those events.

Religion: I was raised, baptised and married in the non-denominational First Christian Chuch, Disciples of Christ. I attend the Methodist Church today though not as regularly as I used to...the Evangelical movement has caused the church to lose it's way and the "turn-or-burn" types have stepped in. I will be back in earnest when this ugly phase of religion finally flames out. Uh...no pun intended.

TimMc

[Al in NYC]

Similar to Tricky, I inhereted the curse of the Detroit Lions from my parents. My folks have been season ticket-holders of the Lions going back to 1951, and still have a picture on their wall of themselves at the team's last championship celebration at Briggs Stadium in 1957. They've been waiting ever since for the good times to come back... In all other sports matters I am a hometown and alma mater loyalist through and through -- Tigers, Pistons, Red Wings, and the Michigan State Spartans -- although after 15+ years in NYC I have taken on the local teams (Yankees, Giants, Knicks, Rangers) as a strong secondary rooting interest.

My father is descended from Eugene Debs socialists and my mother from the christian communitarianism of the Mennonites. Both of my grandfathers were auto workers and were deeply involved in the early organizing in the factories. Like so many folks from those various capitalism-resistant strains who grew up in the depression and WWII era they became strong pro-labor New Deal Democrats. Although the conservatives around here probably wouldn't recognize the shades of difference, my politics have diverged quite a bit from those of my parents. My parents truly believed that the modern era meant that the power of reason, generosity, community, freedom, equality, and compassion would inevitably gain the upper hand over the forces of dogma, greed, venality, domination, inequality, and selfishness, and that a strong peaceful international order could be built upon these values. The civil rights era, and their participation in the movement, served to strongly reinforce these beliefs, but the years since have weighed on them as a major disappointment.

I think my parents, along with a lot of other people on the reformist left, underestimated the power of the sort of emotionally reactionary spirit shown here by folks like Scott and Monte. A reactionary spirit that pushes millions of Americans to consistently vote against what would seem to be their best interests in the name of preserving a largely specious "tradition."

An even bigger underestimation in my view, was of the sort of view espoused so strongly here by Gordon, which takes the small-scale logic of profit and elevates it to a sort of large-scale pseudo-religious dogma backed by the highly abstracted "facts" of the economists' trade. All of which is bought and paid for by corporate interests and dressed up and paraded around as inescapable logic whenever the need arises (like when their state subsidies aren't quite enough to protect their power), but is really nothing more than the ideological horrors of state communism turned on their head and used to support the same sort of control and dominance over the lives of those who work for a living. I don't think my folks ever took this simplistic dogma seriously enough intellectually to see that it would be used to roll back the social and economic progress made in the preceeding century, and would be the force used to beat back welfare state gains world-wide in order to completely reassert the power of the wealthy few.

So what appeared to my parents to be a self-evident and obvious progression to a better world for all, appears to me as a rather desperate battle for our own self-preservation as caring individuals, and (to use some dangerously old-left sounding phrases) a struggle for the conciousness of the people. The problem is that, for the forseeable future, the people have largely been lulled into unconciousness by the visions of material wealth and personal power that are constantly projected to them, even as that wealth and power becomes more and more impossible for them to actually reach.

My parents viewed the Democratic Party as the vehicle of a humanizing politics for this country, and saw them as the guardians of the vision of a more equitable distribution of the national wealth. To some large extent my folks still feel this way, but I most emphatically do not. The Carter and, even more so, the Clinton administrations have killed off any faith I may have had in the party as an agent of progressive change. While I will definitely vote for the Democratic candidate in order to end the current horror, I no longer view the party as anything more than a slightly gentler version of the same big screwing of the vast majority of Americans (and, indeed, the world).

Not being convnced of the overall goodness of people and of the power of the present institutions to affect progressive change has left me more politically cynical than my parents and with a life built much more on self-reliance (it has also made me much more misanthropic, which is probably not a good thing). I have also become far less certain of the view that capitalism, as it currently exists, can be meaningfully reformed to benefit and empower the majority of the population on anything more than a transitory basis. Unlike my parents, and most others in my family, I have not been dependent on the state, the unions, a polical organization, or an academic institution for my income for many years now. In my view those things have either become full-out tools of the present order, or have been rendered so marginal and powerless as to be insignificant. No, I run my own affairs, and actually count many large corporations (and thoroughly obnoxious capitalists) as my clients. I figure that anything I can do to remove some of their surplus from them and use it to politically and socially subvert their dominance is on balance a good thing.

Oh, and I was born and raised without religion, and intend to remain without it for the rest of my life. Although there was no religious split in my wholly athiest family, we were divided by a particular Detroit phenomenon that was almost as strong -- my father's family are Chrysler people, while my mother's family are Ford. Oh, the holiday arguments and the fights THAT split provoked!!

[crawjo]

Originally posted by GoodSpeak
Sports: When I was a kid, I was an Angel fan and a Giants fan [mainly because I absolutely hated the Dodgers...used to take a lot of grief from kids who were Dodger fans since I rooted for the Angels] Now, I just pull for the Giants...the Angels just broke my heart too many times. As for football, I started out as ambivolent then, my Packer Backer cousins from Madison, WI got me to root for Green Bay. The Rammies would always beat them, so I hated them, too. I figured I needed to root for a California team and so I picked the Rammies' natural enemy: The Forty-Niners...I still root for them. In round ball, I rooted for the Lakers [it was one of the first pro teams I ever got to see in person, back when Jerry West, Elgin Baylor and Gail Goodrich were playing] and I still do.

Politics: My "Archie Bunker" republican father, the death of John and Robert Kennedy, the Watts Riots of 1965, Martin Luther King, the Free Speech/Civil Rights Movement, Nixon/Watergate and the Vietnam War/draft shaped my politics. I am proud to say that I am a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat because of those events.

Religion: I was raised, baptised and married in the non-denominational First Christian Chuch, Disciples of Christ. I attend the Methodist Church today though not as regularly as I used to...the Evangelical movement has caused the church to lose it's way and the "turn-or-burn" types have stepped in. I will be back in earnest when this ugly phase of religion finally flames out. Uh...no pun intended.

TimMc

It's interesting to think about how different political perspectives are based on when you grew up. Goody's generation was defined by all of the things mentioned above, all of which happened before I was born.

At least so far, for my generation the transformative event has been 9/11, and nothing else comes even remotely close. The 80s and 90s were mostly defined by political inertia, as the two parties quibbled over relatively insignificant domestic proposals and so forth.

[Al in NYC]

Whoa, I just reread my post and realized that I kind of went off there. I sometimes get a bit emotional when I think about my parents' politics and what has happened to this country. Sorry for derailing the thread with such an overly verbose post.

[Chris D]

No apologies needed, Al. That was priceless stuff.

[GoodSpeak]

Oh, and BTW...I throw right, bat right.

But the scouting report on me is: "All bat, no glove, no arm."





























Is it baseball season yet...?

[crawjo]

I'm a lefty. Throw left, bat left. The scouting report on me was the opposite: All glove, all arm, no bat. When I played in a league a couple of years ago, I had the strongest arm on the team, but I couldn't hit for shit. Sometimes, during the summers, I try to get outside and do some throwing. I have delusions of becoming a pitcher in an adult baseball league. I've been working on a curve ball for the last couple of years, but I have yet to figure out how to throw one without hurting my shoulder.

[crawjo]

Originally posted by GoodSpeak
Is it baseball season yet...?

Isn't now about the time that the Cuban baseball league has its championship?

It's always baseball season somewhere, my friend.

[bostontricky]

Originally posted by crawjo
I have delusions of becoming a pitcher in an adult baseball league. I've been working on a curve ball for the last couple of years, but I have yet to figure out how to throw one without hurting my shoulder.

I was a twelve-year old knuckleballer - that'll get you nowhere fast...bats right, throws right. I've been playing first base since Little League, so I've become stuck there in the twilight years of my softball career (pushing 40). I've become quite adept at scooping and picking balls out of the dirt: it's amazing how much your infielders appreciate this trait. My softball career is living proof of Bill James defensive spectrum, as I've slowly slid from shortstop, to centerfield, to second base, to first base...

Al - forget religion and politics: that East Side/West Side divide in Detroit bigger than all that other stuff put together.

[Al in NYC]

How true Tricky (as is the city/suburb divide, but on a different level). Actually, the Chrysler/Ford divide in my family, as you might expect, splits precisely on east side/west side lines.

[GoodSpeak]

Originally posted by crawjo
Isn't now about the time that the Cuban baseball league has its championship?

It's always baseball season somewhere, my friend.

Yes.

Yes it is, Crawjo.

The Mexican Leagues have helped me through the Football Season, but I'd just like to hear the game called in English for a while.