The Fantasization of Sports
When everything becomes a transaction
The Pip has developed a serious interest in the NBA this year, which has indirectly led to a shift in my podcast-listening habits. I’ve always listened to both the Bill Simmons podcast and the Ryen Russillo podcast, but in years past, I could skip past a lot of the episodes devoted to heavy NBA discussion, which I didn’t really care about. Nowadays, though, our Little Dude wants to talk about the latest in pro basketball news, so I find them essential listening. Which makes for weird conversations, as neither of us really watches the games: he consumes the NBA almost exclusively through YouTube clips of games the next morning, and nearly all of my NBA knowledge is from those two podcasts. But, you know, we bond, and it’s great.
As I said, I listened to these shows anyway, because I enjoy the hosts and their banter. They’re of a similar age and background to me— both from New England, Simmons a little older then me and Russillo a little younger— so I find their style and sense of humor very congenial. Having to actually listen to the NBA segments is a minor problem in that it displaces some other podcasts from my regular rotation, but it’s not exactly a huge burden. And, anyway, there are long stretches of these that I can kind of tune out, because they reflect an approach to sports that just completely misses me.
That is, every time they talk about the league there will be a long stretch that devolves into hypothetical transaction scenarios— whether Team A could trade Player B to Team C for Player D and a couple of picks, or whether Team E should re-sign Player F for Amount G. This is much more a Simmons thing than a Russillo one— they both do it a bit, but Russillo will go through really extensive breakdowns of game action with minimal discussion of potential trades, where every five minutes of actual game talk from Simmons seems to be followed by eight minutes of who the players in the game in question could be traded for. Even in the middle of the playoffs, this can get taken to extremes— Simmons just released an episode about the NBA Draft Lottery that runs two hours. Not the draft, which won’t happen for several weeks yet— just the lottery to determine what order the worst teams will pick in. That one, I skipped.
Because, in the end, I could hardly care less about any of that. I enjoy the game analysis just fine, but while games are being played, I have essentially zero interest in speculating about who might be traded during the offseason, which doesn’t arrive for a couple of months. I don’t even really care about the draft, though the open of Russillo’s latest episode makes about the best case you could make for why some people care so deeply about it, particularly in the context of Victor Wembanyana, who everybody says is a generational talent. I’ve just seen too many highly touted prospects wash out through injuries or poor decision-making to put much stock in even the actual draft results, though, let alone speculation about what might happen with the seventeenth pick.
This is a wildly popular line of sports commentary, though, and to some degree I think it’s of a piece with the fantasy sports craze, which is another wildly popular thing that basically misses me completely. In both cases, the sport gets divorced from the actual game play, which is the thing I care about, and abstracted away into this bloodless numbers game. What interests me in any sport, but particularly ones I really love like basketball, is the playing of the game— the way a given set of players faces off against a different set of players, and how they challenge each other, and rise to (or fall from) the challenge of competition. I don’t find the idea of assembling stats from an imaginary group of players who aren’t actually playing together all that compelling, and I really don’t see the attraction of imagining what might happen if some completely different version of a given team were assembled at some point in the future. Even in the offseason, I’m out on that, but especially not when there are playoff games going on.
But man, that shit sells. I could do nothing all day long but listen to sped-up versions of podcasts about hypothetical trade talk, and still not get them all in. There seems to be a boundless appetite for this stuff, and I really just don’t get it. It’s not limited to the NBA, either, though the number of games and the portability of talent make it a bit more intense there than, say, in the NFL, where there are only a handful of games and the elaborate schemes and systems employed make it harder to move players mid-season. Baseball might well be the worst, because of the way players can move back and forth between minor and major leagues, but none of the podcasts I listen to spend all that much time on baseball, thankfully.
The dominance of transaction talk doesn’t really lessen my interest in the actual sports, but it really does a number on my interest in sports media. I’m way less likely to flip on ESPN as background noise at home, or flip to ESPN radio in the car, because it’s basically all become CNBC. There are endless conversations about salary caps and player options and how many draft picks would you need to package to get this guy, and my eyes just glaze over. Even the teams that are actually playing games right now have become 75% fantasy, at least on the airwaves.
Yes, I know, I’m an old man yelling at clouds. If you want to revel in the pageantry of me screaming at some cumulonimbus next week, here’s a button:
And if you feel you simply must offer me a hypothetical scenario where the Yankees move Aaron Hicks to another team for a competent reliever, the comments will be open
I've got a half-baked concept on sports coverage that's about degrees of separation from actual games. So - play-by-play is 0 degrees of separation. Game narrative ("The comeback fell just short as Smith tired down the stretch") is maybe one degree of separation. Then things like player injuries or playoff seeding are maybe at a second degree. Talking about potential draft picks are way down the list - maybe just as far as things like contracts, potential free agent signings, and the like. And even farther are the inane 'narrative' things like discussing what players said in a press conference.
LIke I said, it's not a fully formed idea, but it's useful as a reminder to myself to keep track of when it's about the actual sport and when it's not. Sometimes it's easy to get caught up with smart or charismatic commentary, and it always feels like empty calories when I do - like I've just binged through a bag of chips that I didn't even really enjoy.
This has happened in politics too. Instead of focusing on the issues - taxes, subsidies, income distribution, industrial policy, justice - they focus on which team is going to run which player in which race and what trash talk has who upset about it. The actual point of things, the playing of the game or actual legislation enacted, has become a side show. I read the Washington Post, so I expect a certain amount of side show. DC is a company town. On the other hand, I have to read a variety of bloggers to get coverage of what's actually happening.