Its my own fault for listening to clowns like Mike and Mike or Colin Cowherd or the PTI guys, but all the hand wringing over Alex Rodriguez's announcement during the World Series, called 'tasteless' or 'crude' or 'disrespectful' from various wags, is my latest peeve. If Mike and Mike thought it so wrong to interrupt the Red Sox victory parade with news of A-Rod, why didn't they just ignore it? 'Its news, we have to talk about it', but so what? It'll still be 'news' tomorrow and isn't the World Series bigger news? If the World Series truly is more important then treat it that way, set everything else aside and talk Red Sox all morning. And if its not, then quit complaining that A-Rod (and his evil mastermind Scott Boras) brought that truth to light.
The difference between the A-Rod story and the Red Sox is that A-Rod is ongoing, it is new, whereas the Red Sox story is completed, it is past. Pat the Red Sox on the back--they were by far the superior team this post-season--and move on. I just don't see how the announcement that could've waited til Monday can be called 'tasteless' or a 'travesty' because honestly it just doesn't matter. These guys seem so offended by something that will be completely forgotten 2 weeks from now.
The real story is that news radio (notice I didn't say 'sports' radio) is all about speculation, its about imaginary news, things that haven't happened and won't happen. Speculation is more fun than reality. I make my NFL picks every week (and have since I was a little kid) because I'm fascinated by predicting the future. I'm usually about 50/50 and that's really about as good as it gets, my best pick' em season ever was about 60%--a ratio that a real honest-to-God gambler would be happy to hit. In the next year or so we'll get 10 tons of political garbage heaped on us from all angles but remember this: we can't predict the future! We can't know in advance who will truly be best able to deal with this country's future because it hasn't happened yet. And we don't know where A-Rod will sign because it hasn't happened yet. But talking about what might happen to Hillary or Guiliani or Kobe Bryant or Britney Spears is more fun though rarely more enlightening than what actually will happen and that's where the media sucks us in: by giving us the fantasy and not the reality. And as Americans are painfully poor with history (and geography but that's a totally separate rant) they never seem to remember how often they themselves have been hoodwinked by empty speculation. Or that getting all huffy over something so insignificant does little more than raise blood pressure for no reason.
Yeah, I know, its time to turn off the radio. But just once I'd like for our cultural commentators to actually give us something useful instead of sucking up to our bad habits and our consumerist tendencies. We like to think as Americans that months and months of public debate will bring us back to what is really important to us but generally it just sets the parameters of the corruption we buy into. And A-Rod's future business arrangements will be as misunderstood in the media-sphere as missile defense or the mullahs of Iran.
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