(above : documentary highly regarded in the Granderson household)
The 2015 rebound of Curtis Granderson is just one of several feel-good storylines for the NL East-leading New York Mets, but if you were hoping the outfielder would discuss something as benign as his auto insurance with the local press, you’ll be disappointed. On Sunday, the New York Post’s Steve Serby quizzed Granderson on a number of topics, including but not limited to the difference between the latter’s haircut and that of Jacob deGrom (“I wouldn’t go through the hat phase of it, so if I could wane up with a ’fro I would do it, but I don’t want to go through the in-between phase of it”), Alex Rodriguez’ unlikely comeback (” it’s a testament to how competitive he is”), bachelor life (“when marriage ready to happen, it’ll happen..no set time frame or timetable on that”), and most importantly, the phony fucking baloney Apollo moon landing!
Q: You’re one of the most polished, politically correct athletes I’ve ever dealt with. Now say something controversial.
A: Let’s see … I can probably go with … I had this conversation with people — if we landed on the moon, how come we’ve never been back? I think there might be some conspiracy stuff to that.
Q: You do?
A: We haven’t been back, it’s been [43] years, technology’s all gotten better, and I’ve actually looked that one up a little bit and saw something on the NASA website and it said something that that space shuttle that was made back then is no longer made any more. They’re making one now, but it costs $30 billion to be able to go there. And we’re constantly coming back, you always hear of spaceships landing: oh, so-and-so just got back from its mission … where’d they go, you know? No one else in the world has ever been, so…
A big part of that might be age and life and the way 518 losses in 5.5 years rewires your brain to spare you some pain. But a part of it is that we fell too hard for the idea that the right executive is all you need. That a General Manager can remake an organization, from top to bottom, relatively quickly and have everything just work out. We see this all the time – Cardinals fans believe in their org, and Astros fans will tell you more than you wanted to know about their vaunted Process. But the more you look into them, the more you see just how extensive change needs to be. The Cards aren’t the Cards because of their GM, they’re where they are because of dozens or hundreds of people. A leader can be vital in creating and nurturing a culture that works for player development or pro scouting, but it takes an entire organization to make it work. As fans, we thought at one point that Zduriencik was a kind of cheat code – his blend of scouting acumen and willingness to listen to newfangled metrics would blend the best of old school and new and make the Cardinals look like the St. Louis Browns in short order. Instead, what we saw was a front office that seemed to be at war with itself. Instead of creating a culture, the GM created a growing list of enemies. Nearly every group – from Pro Scouting to Player Development was overhauled, and nothing much seemed to change.
The M’s front office was incapable of building a team to reliably compete in the AL. The M’s realized this and made a change. Realistically, the M’s are further from their goal of competing in the medium term than they were before the year started, but even this helped clarify things and point a way forward. We knew before the year that the M’s had risks at the catcher spot, the bullpen and CF, and those risks have ended up sinking the season. The risks have turned into a shopping list or a player development challenge. Someone else will figure out what to do about these issues, and I’m excited to see what they do. I’ll just never be excited as I was in December of 2009 again.
“The more sports culture treats women as human beings with feelings and not as some caricature of what women are supposed to be, the more likely the space will become safer and more welcoming for everyone,” writes Vice Sports’ Stacey May Fowles, arguing, “as absurd as it might seem, the freedom to talk about desire without judgment and dismissal is definitely a part of that.” And she’s got a point — when have male fans been discouraged from expressing their true desires?
It seems that sports culture can’t reconcile female desire with knowledge, so if you’re admiring the finer points of Josh Donaldson’s unstoppable swagger—his “liquid hot sexual gold,” as certain aficionados have been known to call it—you can’t possibly understand the mechanics of his MVP-worthy work at third base. Logic would dictate that I can find him stunning and still understand how the game works, and even be an expert on it. Yet, for whatever reason, acknowledging that I notice how pretty he is somehow becomes a shameful admission. I am forever a guest in a man’s house, and am expected to watch what I say and police what I feel accordingly.
Quite frankly, I’ve grown real tired of pretending that Bryce Harper isn’t a scorchingly beautiful specimen of masculinity. I’ve become exhausted denying that Buster Posey has the most adorable, angelic boy-band face I’ve seen since perusing Tiger Beat as a teenage girl. I’m weary from saying that Justin Verlander’s pants look “uncomfortable,” or that Matt Kemp looks “like an athlete.” I’ve actually come to think that every time I deny my inevitable attraction to players—I’m only human, and you know what Matt Kemp looks like—I’m supporting that terrible notion that real fans don’t have crushes, or that crushes hysterically cancel out all other considerations, and finally that women should simply shut up about how they feel if they want to watch a game with everyone else. A more cynical observer might even wonder if this gag rule has more to do with a threat to the general fan base’s masculinity than any real “respect for the game.”
