The Perspective Lecture

Nearly every sports fan has heard the Perspective Lecture. You know the one – “how can you care so much about the Mets/Giants/NASCAR/women’s lacrosse when we have a $3 trillion national debt, nobody has health care, and there are starving children in Kenya?” And nearly every sports fan hates the Perspective Lecture.

I even remember the last time I received it. It was the Yadier F’n Molina night, and I was pacing around the office before going out to Shea. When one of the partners asked me why I was pacing, I explained that I had never been to a Game 7, and I had World Series tickets, and I had never been to one of those games before, and Braden Looper didn’t belong in a World Series, and so forth.

And then it began – “Don’t be so nervous about that. Nervous is watching your loved ones lie in a hospital bed with inoperable cancer. This is just a baseball game.”

Right. Just a baseball game. You’re just annoyed because your Yanks lost before the Series yet again. Pshaw.

And none of that cheered me up after Beltran got caught looking. As most readers of this blog were, I was reasonably useless and angry for days thereafter. Listening to Braden Looper mock the "Jose Jose Jose" chant, I became marginally homicidal. Towards Looper and nobody else, but the point remains.

Flash forward to the Super Bowl a few weeks back. Moss scores to put the Pats ahead, and it’s sad, but it’s okay. Manning and Tyree make the greatest play in Super Bowl history, and it’s awesome, but in that way that you know you just witnessed something unlikely to be duplicated. Plaxico is wide open, and the Giants win, and the fist pump is there, but it’s just a fist pump. And then my wife and I went to a bar – I had never seen any team I root for win the title while I was actually in the City – and I got a beer, and she got a Sprite.

I’m going to be a father in August, and nobody buries the lede quite like I do. But when Virginia loses 22 conference games in a row after wasting a double-digit lead, I just bury my head deeper in “What To Expect When You’re Expecting”. When the Mets signed Johan Santana, I just smiled and noted that I’d be able to watch a bunch of his biggest starts while on paternity leave in the late summer. And when Roger Clemens testified on Capitol Hill, I, well, seriously, who the hell cares about Roger Clemens any more? Did we really need a congressional freaking hearing? (Note: that has nothing to do with any baby).

In the end, I figured out why the Perspective Lecture never works and just breeds irritation. Nobody needs the Perspective Lecture. Instead, one just needs something, anything that really gives Perspective. And when that happens, sports sure become a whole heckuva lot easier to deal with on a daily basis. Especially when your favorite team comes off blowing a 7-game lead with 17 to play to The Team To Beat.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s back to convincing the wife that Eli has a nice ring to it.

--Cousin Dan