A Tale Of Two Contract Disputes

Ah, Labor: the virtue of the working class; the sufferings of a mother bringing another future worker into the world to compete for resources; the source of hundreds of thousands of sports fanatics around the world. And typically, the side I would choose in any dispute.

A Bay Area Rapid Transit Union is calling a strike as of the end of service on Sunday night, which would shut down the central spine of the local public transit hub, overloading the other transit agencies and leaving thousands of workers free to worry less about whether their own jobs are secure, because they will be worrying about just how they will get to those jobs in the first place.

Keep in mind, we are also approaching the Labor Day weekend, when the Bay Bridge will be shut down for construction efforts. That could be interesting.

Why am I talking about a labor strike in a sports blog? Well, every story of a dispute needs a good cop/bad cop angle, and in this case, the BART union is the good cop. Even though the average BART worker salary is more than twice what I make.

The bad cop, sadly, comes from the world of sports.

The bad cop is San Francisco 49ers top draft pick, Michael Crabtree, who is threatening to hold out for an entire season. He wants to be paid 'top 5' money, commensurate with what someone drafted among the top five selections would earn, even though he was drafted at number 10.

A few disclaimers on this before people doubt my sympathy for the 'laborer': yes, as far as the BART union goes, it would be a hard job; they deserve to be well paid; and historically, management has been known to use economic downturns to stick it to the worker. As far as an athlete goes, yes, they can be considered labor, and have had legitimate labor issues over the decades--watch certain episodes of Ken Burns' excellent Baseball documentary; and yes, sports are physically demanding, with many consequences for the athlete in later years, so they do need to be well paid to take care of themselves and their family in later years.

But Michael Crabtree, regardless of wanting top five money without the rationale of, you know, actually being in the top five, seriously, can you really not live with whatever you are certain to earn as a top draft pick in the NFL? Every year the trend has been for players and agents to ask for more and more money. This is not a cost-of-living sort of trend; this is nothing to do with inflation. If Crabtree gets the sort of money he is looking for, according to SI.com's John Lopez, he would earn $3 million more per season than Jerry Rice ever made. Michael Crabtree is not yet Jerry Rice.

Michael, if you think you're going to struggle to make it in this admittedly expensive city, I can tell you where the cheap sushi and the good happy hour deals can be found.

Here's the thing: Crabtree's holdout may be a negotiating ploy, but it sure seems tactless, to say the least. Assuming you want to be a success at the game, and assuming you want fans to love you, don't you think you should avoid pissing everyone off as to how much money you think you deserve?

Sports are simply sports. This is a country where socialism is considered a dirty word--it's considered this mostly by people who don't pay attention to what socialism really is and whether it might be beneficial to them, instead relying on the advice of people with a vested interest in capitalistic trends. Nevertheless, until our currency becomes useless for anything except kindling, I don't think athletes should take our 'free market' spirit for granted, because it isn't like they are short of cash.

How much do you really need to live well?

Narrating a World Into Being

Tonight I finished American Gods by Neil Gaiman, another novel in the recent string of novels I've polished off, a sudden resurgence of reading productivity of late that has swallowed up a bit of Star Wars brain candy, You Suck! by Christopher Moore, Kafka On The Shore by Haruki Murakami, and The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night Time by Mark Haddon. Something has rekindled the love of narrative in me, which might have had something to do with the five hour flight either side of the trip to Hawaii, which allowed me to put large dents in Kafka and American Gods.

There is something doubly creative about a good work of fiction, which is why, in my opinion, the novel is always going to be better than a movie adaptation; the reader engaged with the novel creates in his own head the world invoked by the narrative. It feels substantial.

It is here that one can find a parallel between reading a novel and following a sports season. And this leads me to a dilemma: I have lost the main protagonist for the upcoming English Premiership season, as Newcastle United were relegated.

Why were they my favorite? For the simple reason that they were Alan Shearer's hometown and final club. Why was Alan Shearer the key to my allegiance? I'm not sure, but when I first saw televised Premiership football, I saw Shearer playing for Blackburn Rovers, and he made an impression on me, much like a totem from the Pacific Northwest might if it showed up unexpectedly in your living room one day.

There's no real rhyme or reason to it: I have no geographical affiliation with Newcastle, other than passing by the city on the train from London to Edinburgh on our family vacation in 2008, and geographical affiliation is really the most sensible basis for sports fan allegiance--if there can be said to be anything sensible about sports fanaticism. And even the path of the talisman, that of Alan Shearer, if he had ended up playing for a different team, Chelsea or Manchester United, I might have cheered for them; more on this question in a separate blog, as I won't torture the non-sports-fanatics with a breakdown of my quest for a new favorite team.

But here's the best metaphor I can find: the football season with Newcastle not playing in the Premiership will be like reading a Sherlock Holmes story without Sherlock Holmes in it: sure, stuff might happen, but it just won't feel the same. It feels wrong.

Bear in mind that as I have no real stake in the matter, my British friends who actually cheer for various football teams have good reason to consider me an impostor, but oh well.

The point is, for a narrative to work as best as it might, you need a filter, a viewpoint that pervades the entire work and that appeals to the reader. For instance, following one sports team establishes a stake in the results of what unfolds on the playing field; this is why I enjoy writing about the baseball games I'm attending this year.

Establishing this filter is key to writing fiction successfully, I suspect, and it may be why I have such a problem writing fiction. So, an experiment. I have an actual blog on which I post many of the same entries I post on LiveJournal; I think I ought to narrow the focus of my blog, or separate the blog into multiple blogs to handle the different subjects that appeal to me: pop culture, sports, reading, etc. The more precise the voice in each blog, the better the chance of developing a readership, perhaps, or learning how to tell a coherent story.

On the other hand, I could be completely wrong about everything ever.

Hmm.

When The Game Is Over

Last night, Nick Adenhart, a 22-year old rookie pitcher for the Angels, pitched six scoreless innings in Anaheim with his father watching, succeeding at a game that requires motivation and practice in addition to talent. His career on the grand stage, for money that could help him take care of his family for doing something he loves, was blossoming.

Oakland rallied to win in the late innings, but that would not diminish how proud his father must have felt.

In the early hours of Thursday, a driver ran a stoplight and broad-sided a sports car in which Adenhart was riding. Adenhart and two of his friends died; a fourth remains in critical condition.

What words could possibly express what his parents must have felt on getting that phone call?

There is nothing to say that can do justice to this tragedy.

Life changes so abruptly, predicated on such small details as which street they chose, when they turned the car on, when the game ended and how long Adenhart took to leave the ballpark.

And another example: tonight in the Giants game against the Milwaukee Brewers, the Giants absolutely dominated the Brewers, winning 7-1. But in the top of the ninth, a line drive off the bat of Milwaukee's Mike Cameron caught pitcher Joe Martinez in the head. Martinez is resting comfortably in a hospital tonight, alert and apparently stable. But the subtlest change in the ball's trajectory or how Martinez reacted or where his stride took him, and the results of that line drive could have been much worse.

Are these tragedies or near-tragedies that afflict athletes and other celebrities any more heartbreaking than any of the thousands of other heartbreaks across the world every day? Of course not, but they are a stark and very visible reminder of the fragility of life and the importance of savoring the moments of happiness, companionship, love, joy, beauty, etc.

Tonight I walked home from work in a light drizzle that gave way to a typically-San Franciscan air, not raining but definitely damp. The umbrella I carried was almost yanked out of my hand a couple of times by bites of wind. Work had been long, but I felt light and refreshed by the air; I went into the comforting chaos of Green Apple Books, spent money, walked home, bought a hot drink and cookies.

Inconsequential details compared to the pain suffered by Nick Adenhart's friends, family, and teammates today, but real nonetheless.