Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
Salon's new columnist looks at what the upcoming baseball strike and "Sex and the City" tell us about the looming one-year anniversary.
Jul 25, 2002 |
Editor's note: Salon welcomes its newest columnist, Keith Olbermann. Apart from what is widely known about Olbermann -- his work at ESPN, Fox, MSNBC, hosting the World Series, winning a Murrow Award for covering Sept. 11 for ABC Radio -- he would like readers to know about his hidden past. He began writing columns for sports memorabilia magazines at age 12, edited one of them at age 16 and was senior editor of Baseball Magazine at 19. He spent a summer as a baseball columnist for Sports Illustrated, has reviewed sports magazines for Contentville, covered the Oscars for the Los Angeles Times, ruminated on Monica Lewinsky for Time and written almost as regularly as he has broadcast, and for far more employers. He walked away from his "Big Show" at MSNBC after one too many days of covering Monica, famously saying, "And I thought sports was shallow." He believes in the Gold Standard, continues to root for the Washington Senators baseball team even though they moved away in 1971 and expects Judge Crater to turn up any day now.
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By Keith Olbermann
July 25, 2002 | That this country truly has never experienced a time of memorial like the one coming in September was underscored this week by Major League Baseball players, who showed they believe nobody will be thinking about last year's attacks as the anniversary approaches, and by the producers of HBO's "Sex and the City," who evidently believe everybody should be thinking of them, even while they're watching the bare breasts of Kristen Davis. Baseball is trying to tell us nothing changed Sept. 11; "Sex and the City" is saying that everything's changed, and those of us who like our entertainment to entertain us are trapped with little in between.
As baseball players march obliviously and self-righteously toward a strike that could bankrupt several franchises and eliminate 20 percent of the jobs in their industry, they are, from all evidence, wrestling only with exactly when to threaten to walk out. Sources disagree on the logic patterns, and even the process of selection. But they are uniform in reporting that the players are terrified of the public reaction should they actually be out on strike on Sept. 11.
The players are not, however, terrified of the public reaction should they be playing on Sept. 11 while preparing to strike just a few days later.
The distinction is as cagey, and as farsighted, as Tony Perkins playing the loony Jim Piersall in "Fear Strikes Out." The Red Sox want to move Piersall from the outfield to shortstop, and he wants no part of it. So, with great satisfaction, and to his blissful relief, he simply hides his infielder's glove.
That baseball fans -- even those labor-savvy enough to recognize the old management ploy the cognoscenti call a "forced strike" -- are spoiling for a fight should've been evident to any player who attended, or watched, the All-Star Game fiasco in Milwaukee two weeks ago. Possibly only in Milwaukee would the missiles that cascaded upon the field after the players gave up on this vanity license plate of a sports exhibition have been as relatively harmless as plastic beer bottles.
Presuming the strike deadline is imminent, anybody want to guess what the fans in St. Petersburg will be throwing at Nomar Garciaparra when his Boston Red Sox play the Tampa Bay Devil Rays on Sept. 11? Garciaparra recently announced that he'd hate to see the season interrupted or abandoned (Hello, Central? Send over a few dozen metaphors about that tied All-Star Game!). But he has a kid brother just starting out in the minor leagues, in the bowels of the Seattle Mariners' organization, and he has to do this for little Michael and all the others to follow.
Michael Garciaparra got a $2 million signing bonus from the Mariners. He's 19.
Nomar Garciaparra's salary this year is $9 million.
John L. Lewis and Cesar Chavez would be proud.
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