205 Drop: Top 11 fan mistakes

Today's list was inspired by a recent piece by Joe Posnanski for Father's Day, in which he talked about how his daughters don't share his interest in sports, and how he's (mostly) OK with that, because, well, there's more to life and to him. Like everything Joe writes, it was thoughtful, long, resonant and well-crafted, and made me want to (a) read more of his stuff, and (b) stop writing, seeing how he's got an audience for quality work and I've got the roaring void, foreign porn enthusiasts and nitpicking grief trolls. I'm sure that Posnanski has all of that, too, but it is amazing what a few dozen intelligent comments can do for the will to fill the bloghole.

Anyhoo... today's list is basically distilled down to the old baseball adage of staying within your game. We watch sports because it's fun, or at least, should be, and an escape from the Real World of pandemics, recessions and doom... and yet, that Real World of salary manipulation, labor stoppages and crime is always ready to intrude.

I don't see how that stops, or how to even make things not get worse. Last night, the Bucks sent away a reasonable small forward asset (Richard Jefferson) to San Antonio for two pieces that shouldn't be part of anyone's rotation (the washed-up Bruce Bowen and Kurt Thomas), mostly to be free of salary. Minnesota moved Randy Foye and Mike Miller to the Wiz for Etan Thomas and Darius Songalia and a pick, and I can only assume that was a salary dump as well, seeing how Miller is a poor man's Hedo Turkoglu, and Foye still has a chance to be more than fodder. (Oh, and there's also the fact that the T-Wolves now control three high picks in what most people were calling a terrible draft two months ago, before the Hype Machine kicked in). There will be another half-dozen deals like this in the next two weeks, and then the same thing will happen in baseball in July. If you can tell a difference between real-world sports GMing and slash-and-burn fantasy sports GMing at this point, you've got sharper eyes than mine; the simple integrity of trying to win games for the benefit of winning games is a game that only suckers, and the general public who still goes to a regular season game, plays.

So it's a business, and it's always been a business, and knowing it's a business will not make you happier... but once you've tasted the fruit from the tree of knowledge, you can't toss it back up and go on about your day of root, root, rooting for the home team. Which is honestly the biggest mistake any of us make in our fandom... and gets me back to Posnanski with his daughters.

At the close of the piece, his eldest, who is the same age as mine, gets wrapped up in that terrible ABC show "Wipeout", and asks if, well, this is sports. Sure, honey, sure. As much as anything else, really.