Tag: hate

Fenway Park: Never Going To Die

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Yes, This is an actual seat at Fenway. Probably cost an arm and a leg.
Yes, This is an actual seat at Fenway. Probably cost an arm and a leg.

I’m a fan of Red Sox baseball. I travel from New York to Boston to see a few games a year. I grew up in a Red Sox Baseball household. What I’m getting at is that I love almost everything about my precious team. What I don’t love (and by don’t love, I mean HATE) is Fenway Park.

I hate having bruises on my knees from the closeness of the rows. I hate having a stiff neck because the seat is not actually pointing toward the infield. I hate getting excessive physical contact from the person next to me because we both don’t fit in to the not wide enough seats. I hate that the park is so small that even though I wake early and spend almost 8 hours online, I’m only able to get scattered single seats with obstructed views. I hate that it’s impossible to get from one side of the park to the other because the only way to do this is the third base concourse. That concourse is more crowded that Paris Hilton’s bedroom and smaller than her brain. And I hate anyone who is too in love with the park to see the benefits of a new one.

All this hate can be erased with a plan for a new park, but that’s not likely. How unlikely? A new Red Sox ballpark will probably not happen during my lifetime. This is what CEO Larry Lucchino said:

I think a result of the investment that our ownership group has made is a Fenway Park that will be stable and solid and with a normal maintenance will be around for another 50 years

Gah! Well, I guess now that I live in New York City, and the Mets have a new stadium, I should go check those guys out. I hear they have this familiar ability to do well and then fail in the end that I grew up with.

[Business Day One] The Pavano Grudge

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Sports fandom is filled with hatred. If you love a team enough, you hate that team’s rival. Really, truly hate. Irrationally hate. Dallas Cowboys and Washington Redskins fans hate each other and have for a long while. Ohio State and Michigan fans hate each other because of how intertwined their storied histories are. India and Pakistan cricket fans hated each other… due mainly to decades of horrific war. Such is the way of sport, really. We give ourselves so willingly and so fully to our club that anything that attemps to defame or diminish it becomes the target of our burning rage.

I consider this a price. Fandom isn’t free. You need to invest a lot in it – money, time, love, and hate. Only when you are fully invested in this way can you truly experience the impossible highs and devastating lows that sport was created to evoke. I do my best to keep this in mind when I discuss my intense hatred of Carl Pavano.

Carl Pavano, the Yankees’ 4 year, $40 million dollar mistake, just pitched in (and won) his first Major League game in over a year. And I couldn’t be more disgusted. I hate Pavano. I hate him as much as I hate Manny Ramirez. I hate his attitude (poor), his health (awful), and what he represents (the blind spending of the early 2000s Yankees). He is a great weight hanging around the neck of the organization – a reminder to the owners and the fans that mistakes like him have given us nearly a decade without a championship. I wish I could direct some of this hatred outward, away from my Yankees, but I can’t. Everything that is wrong with how that team did business is encapsulated in one man, fairly or unfairly.

In my mind, Carl Pavano has been worse for the Yankees playoff chances than any other player on any other team. Accordingly, I have a Pavano Grudge. And I know I’m not the only one.

If there can be a lesson taken out of this, I suppose it would be that it is alright to hate something in sports. We’re all imperfect humans, and our body gives off a lot of hate. So we might as well direct it at something harmless, like a wretched, consistently injured jerk. Like Carl Pavano.

[Business Day One] Hate With Me

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It is my solemn promise to never miss a Business Day One post.  I hold this vow so sacred that I will write an entry even after the internet loses the original one that I put three hours into writing.  Such is the indomitable nature of my will.

 

So here is a post of rage, of frustration and of hate.  A list of everything in sports that I cannot stand.  That makes me question why I even follow the exploits of men playing a game.  Come, hate with me.

 

The Business Day One List of Things I Hate About Sports:

 

-Players Thanking God – God doesn’t care about you, or how crisp your cutback move was on that fourth and short at the goal line.  God didn’t give you extra quicks, nor did he somehow divinely smite your opponents, causing them to misjudge the snap count.  It was you, Bible Thumping Fullback.  Not God.  Just you.  You were in the gym, not God.  God, or any other power you believe in, has no interest in the game you play.  And if He does, He’s no more interested in you than He is in your opponent.  You’re the one that wins and loses, not God.

 

-The Coach “Losing His Touch” – Coaches don’t somehow forget how to coach between one season and the next.  It is the job of the sports commentator, however, to write garbage like that to sell papers and get traffic to their website.  Sure, over decades, if a coach doesn’t change, then the game passes him by.  But in the offseason?  No.  That’s now how the human mind works.

 

-The Fan That Screams At A Player – Do not boo a player on your team, and do not ask “how can you miss that shot?”  Not ever.  You can’t dribble, balding guy with the Garnett jersey.  You can’t throw a tight spiral, Packers hat wearer.  You can’t get slam-tackled by a linebacker and then get to your feet, shake off a car accident’s worth of trauma and get back in the huddle.  You can’t, fans.  You can’t do that, nor can you understand how difficult it is to do.  Sure, they get paid millions.  But they get paid millions because one time out of three, they can put a ball in play off one of the 200 best pitchers in the world.  They get paid millions because they can hit a jumper with a hand in their face in front of twenty thousand people at the buzzer.  They get paid millions because they can do what you, your friends or anyone you have ever met in your life cannot do.  So don’t boo your own, people.  And don’t sit on your couch and say “even I could’ve gotten a yard there.”  You clearly have no idea.

 

-Screaming Children At The Ballpark – You spent $200 per seat for the game, dude.  Spend an extra $50 and get a babysitter.  I mean, please.  Please, you jerk.  Don’t bother everyone in the section.

 

-The Sports Website Post Upload System With Technical Difficulties – Thank you for ruining my day.