Personal essays
Changing the rules at the last minute
Hometown advantage
Denver, Colorado is known as the Mile High City as its elevation is a mile above sea level.
I used to teach there several times a year and participated in project there going even further back. I learned to drink a lot of water on landing or suffer painful headaches.
On an early visit, my hosts pointed out folks training for 100 mile-long ultramarathons. The idea was that they will then find it easier to compete at a normal elevation. Some Olympic athletes trained there for the same reason.
You can see the same effect in more typical American sports. The place where I used to teach would host the Denver Broncos during the season. During breaks we could look out the window and watch them walking through some of their schemes for the week. I’d watch the game and be more struck by members of the visiting team sucking down oxygen in between plays.
In baseball, the Colorado Rockes play in Coors field which is known as a hitters park because of the altitude. To even things up a bit, the home run fences are set back a bit so there tends to be more caught fly balls.
“Daniel,” you say, “we’re a week away from the most consequential U.S. election in our lifetime and you’re talking about fly balls and feet above sea level?”
The point I’m making is that there’s nothing the Broncos or Rockies are doing to tilt things in their favor.
You go to Denver, you know the way things are.
Snow games
Back when they were always winning - before there even was a Super Bowl - the Cleveland Browns were built to be a cold weather team.
It snowed here during the later part of the season. You couldn’t count on nice weather needed to play a finesse passing game. You built a dominant line of blockers and running backs who could grind out yards on the ground.
That was just part of the deal in playing in Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, or even New England.
But then there was a famous game in the early ’80s where the Miami Dolphins traveled to play the New England Patriots in the snow.
There should have been an advantage to New England and no one would have complained about that.
Pictures of that game show a snow covered field with the snow brushed off the field every ten yards so that the players and official could see the yard markers and know what their goal was.
This game wasn’t famous because of the snow.
It was famous because it was time for the Patriots to attempt a field goal and they were going to place the ball in the snow for the kicker to kick.
But then the brush guy drove the brush to clear the ten yard marker and as he got close to the center of the field he veered left and cleaned off the spot where the ball was to be placed to be kicked.
All of a sudden there was a huge home-town advantage.
According to Wikipedia, Miami Coach Don Shula complained that this was against the “unfair act” clause of Rule 17 which said the commissioner could overturn the result of the game because of “an event extraordinarily outside the realms of accepted practice, such as “non-participant interference,” has an effect on the outcome of a game.”
The commissioner, Pete Rozelle, agreed that this was such an event but refused to overturn the result.
This is how I feel now and how I’ve felt for the last ten years about the media coverage of Trump.
There’s no explicit rule about many of the things that he does - just so much of it is outside the realms of accepted practice that we almost don’t know how to react.
Darkness
There’s nothing wrong about the air being thin in Denver or the weather being cold and snowy in Cleveland.
My dad used to tell me stories of groundskeepers who would study the other teams coming to town to play baseball and let the grass grow longer in certain spots because it took away some of the other teams’ tendencies.
Is that cheating?
I don’t know. Both teams had to play on the same field for the entire game.
Imagine a baseball game where the grounds crew makes the home run fence higher only when the other team is coming up to bat.
That, to me, is what we witnessed this week with the LA Times and the Washington Post.
If either publication had announced a year ago that they wouldn’t be endorsing anyone, then I would have been ok with it. That’s placing the home run fences for both teams before the season even starts.
Everyone plays on that same field and we didn’t actually know exactly who these rules would apply to.
But you don’t decide, “hey, we no longer endorse anyone” after your editorial board has voted to endorse someone and drafted that endorsement.
That’s the owner - and in both cases it was the owner - raising the fences in between innings.
You can imagine the objections if those endorsements would have been for Trump. We’d hear class of “fake news” and “liberal media” and there would be threats of violence and retribution.
But on the left? Editors stepped down and some people cancelled their subscriptions.
With the Post I would say, there’s no need to cancel that subscription to punish Bezos. He’s just let you know he doesn’t really care about that property. If you want to punish Bezos, cancel your Amazon Prime account and spend your hard-earned money on local businesses.
For years we’ve looked at the Post and believed that they believe in their slogan that “Democracy Dies in the Darkness.”
This week a light went out.
The light went out just as one of the best candidates in my lifetime stepped up to the plate for her shot at becoming the first female president in US history.
And there’s no rule that says you got to turn that light back on.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 240. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe