I haven’t posted any “content” in a couple of days, so I thought I might embarrass myself by confessing to another of my unpopular opinions. (For those not keeping track, among them are The Playoffs Are A Crapshoot, The All-Star Game Is A Horrible Idea, The Modern Extra-inning Rules Are OK, The Only Thing More Boring Than Track Is Field, and Neil Young Is Overrated. If you agree with my new confession here, feel free to take on one of the others in the comments.)

We have just completed an Olympic Games and I am tonight watching Mexico play Italy in the World Baseball Classic [I’ll put comments as the game goes along in brackets] to see whether or not U-S-A will advance or return to spring training or obscurity as the case may be, I am always up to watch televised competition and I’m often not particularly concerned about whether or not I understand the contest in front of me and I am unusually unmoved by the personal backstories that are apparently deemed necessary to induce people who don’t understand the contest in question to watch,

But what I hate, detest abhor and am made really uneasy by is the fact that these events are deemed to represent countries. I am not making the commonplace argument that a lot of the players in the WBC have pretty tenuous connections to the country they are deemed to represent — actually, that’s a part of the process that I like. What I object to is the notion that the success of your country in such a contest should be a source of vicarious pride.

[Nacho singles!]

In explaining my view here, let me start by owning up to my obvious hypocrisy: I am completely invested in the success of the Atlanta Braves and every Yale athletic team, and everything I’m about to say could be used against my own enthusiasms. I do not claim consistency. But there is something about National Tournaments that make me sad.

First, population differences make them dramatically unfair. You have to adjust for national interest, so that Norway will punch above its population weight in ski jumping, but it is unsurprising that a rich large country that loves golf will produce so many great golfers that transnational teams have to be formed to take them on. When the USA manages to beat Canada in ice hockey, it simply means that, subject to The Playoffs Are A Crapshoot truism, we’re so much larger a country than Canada that we can have one-eighth the interest in hockey and still be competitive with them.

Second, the conviction that this vicarious joy is important leads countries to cheat. If you’ve seen the documentary Icarus or watched East Germany in the Olympics of the 1970’s and 1980’s you know what I mean. Sports that use professional athletes are less prone to this, since they don’t require gigantic programs of national subsidy, and most sports use pros now, but the effect is still real at the margins.

[Boy, there are a lot of double plays in this game.]

Third, there is a tremendous amount of uncompetitive and unwatchable competition. Even with the internationalization of basketball at the highest levels, the depth of talent means the creation of a Serbian team requires every great Serbian player, while the US can be very competitive with a fairly random collection of our top 200 players. The famous Olympic Basketball Dream Team of he 1992 Barcelona won their games by an average of 44 points. What it didn’t do is (a) make entertaining, competitive basketball. or (b) teach anyone anything about the superiority of American players in basketball in 1992.

Fourth, while I am fully on board with using sports to exorcise simmering international grievances, I am not completely positive it doesn’t amplify existing grievances more than it serves as a release. The football war of 1969 is the obvious example here, fortunately not repeated since, but popular grievances can have what look like trivial origins, and Canada-US relations were surely not improved by the mens’ and womens’ hockey performances in the recently concluded Olympics.

Fifth, what is great about athletic endeavor, whether individual or team, is that it is rooted entirely in sporting characteristics. It comes closer to pure meritocracy (while of course not quite reaching it) than almost anything else. I am not naive enough not to acknowledge that these differences are socially contingent, as the academics would say: how a kid becomes a great baseball player depends not just on his twitch reflexes, but on a panoply of social support like travel teams and coaching, and there is a long, terrible history of manifestly talented people denied opportunity to compete. But compared to almost any other human institution, open sports competition is, well, fair. And those people who complain that the World Series is hilariously misnamed obviously hasn’t looked at the geographic distribution of people on the team; but much more importantly, I think there are no great baseball players who would be denied a place on an MLB roster because they weren’t American enough. There are idiots who bemoan the fact that there are baseball players who require translators for post-game interviews. In whatever way the WBC gives those idiots talking points (talking points they will no doubt express in English) it should be discouraged.

[Italy now up 5-0. Elmer Dessens, the Mexican pitching coach, looks really old. Wasn’t he a Brave twenty minutes ago? No… it was 18 years ago. I hate getting old.]

Sixth, vicarious fan joy can be earned. Just as the loyal Braves fan is entitled to scoff at the bandwagon-joining Buckheadian, there is no real investment in these national teams… at least US ones. (It is my understanding that I am wrong about this when it comes to soccer and cricket in which the national teams are genuinely constantly discussed.) No fans are going to think about Team USA in baseball or hockey two months from now. And they won’t until a year or so before the next Winter Olympics or WBC. So the pride here is unearned.

[Mexico looking terrible. Where are Vinny Castilla and Armando Reynoso? Oh, yeah… Old.]

Seventh, and this only appplies to the Olympics, whatever the merits of international competition, the metric of adding together gold medals, or creating some weighted sum of gold, silver and bronze is the sort of completely meaningless statistic that gives Reliever Wins a good name. Adding together a gold medal in figure skating with 1/3 of a bronze medal in skeleton makes no sense. Norway is a great winter sports country, and they will be whatever their medal count. But the fact that there are 11 gold medals in biathlon and two in hockey is a little unbalanced.

Eighth, while my love of Yale athletics is a source of personal pride, even I’m not idiotic enough to use Yale’s glorious 45-28 victory over Harvard as an indication of the obvious fact that Yale is a better school than Harvard, any more than their loss in the playoffs two weeks later to ultimate FCS Champion Montana State suggests any comparison between those two universities — although I have to say the bars in Bozeman are first-rate, and the residents there are really. really nice. I think Mets and Yankees fans are benighted individuals, but I don’t hold it against the Tristate Area. (Well, maybe New Jersey… but that’s another story.)

[Victor Vodnik now in for Mexico. The fact that I can’t watch this game without thinking about former Braves players is a sign of just how unimportant these “national” matchups are. Another unearned run makes it 7-0 Italia.]

Ninth, and probably least, the pageantry of the anthems and the flag-waving leaves me completely cold, mostly as a result of the eight preceding reasons. This is one of my best examples of rank hypocrisy, as I sing Yale fight songs and the Alma Mater with great enthusiasm, as those around me at a Yale game have come to regret. But these things are at least partly spontaneous. Anthems and Medal Ceremonies are anything but. (And I commented a few months ago about how the unspontaneous nature of Rocky Top is similarly obnoxious in Knoxville.)

Those are my top nine reasons. To be fair, I’ll throw in the fact that the weird nationality rules do create things I do like, things that upset the Herrenvolk notions of national superiority, like when a high school kid in Atlanta who’s the son of a Cuban player plays for Brazil. Also, I’d love for baseball to be more international than it already is, and if Italy’s success causes an actual bambino to become a future Bambino, that’s great; and if this helps that cause, I’ll put that on the positive side of ledger. But working the other way, the breaststroker just left off the US team despite the fact that she’s the 30th best breaststroker in the world undermines that impetus in sports like swimming that are almost entirely Olympics-focused.

[Pasquantino hits his third homer to make it 8-0. I’m done, and so is Mexico. US-Canada on Friday, apparently. Goody. I hope the Canucks start Fergie Jenkins with Claude Raymond in relief. I’ll be waiting for Yale-Cornell basketball on Saturday.]