The Oppenheimer Report - 10/21/13

It’s almost World Series time again and, as always, I don’t care. As any of you who know me can attest, I do not enjoy the game of baseball. An avid Blue Jays fan, my mother-in-law assures me this means I am un-American. I realize that my aversion to baseball places me in a very small minority of sports fans, and I wear my shame proudly. I simply have never been able to embrace the game of baseball, or football for that matter, and I find them excruciatingly boring to watch. The aversion to football may be more a result of following the Buffalo Bills for about thirty five years. I admit any live sports event is more exciting to watch in person, but give me hockey any day. I heard a statistic on the news the other night which made me chuckle, and the general fact applies to both baseball and football. Basically it stated that in the average 3 hour baseball game there are less than 15 minutes of actual playing, and the rest of the game is close-ups of guys in the dugout, spitting out tobacco, or managers looking worried, or discussions on the mound about whether to yank the pitcher, or some other non-action nonsense. Shauna assures me that I don’t like baseball because I don’t understand the intricacies of the game. That’s probably true, and perhaps if I was more in tune with why this or that pitch should have been a curveball, I’d be more into the game. Nevertheless, I go back to that troubling statistic: fifteen minutes. That’s a lot of waiting around for something exciting to happen. Give me hockey any day. Even if it’s a lousy game, there is a lot of action, the players move around for at least 60 minutes per game, and there is likely to be at least some blood. I’ll likely watch the last game of the World Series, but will probably only pay attention to the last few innings.

The one time I actually got somewhat excited about a baseball game was during a World Series, back in 1993. I was in a sports bar watching the game with my future wife and avid Jays fan Shauna, and I saw Joe Carter knock in the legendary winning home run to win the Blue Jays the World Series. That was fun to see. The city of Toronto exploded in fandamonium for the next 24 hours and it was something I had never before experienced. I was in downtown Toronto on Yonge Street that night along with one hundred thousand Blue Jays fans and it was quite a celebration. At one point I actually feared for my life, not because anyone was violent, but because I found myself in a crowd surge and was pushed up against a car with nowhere to go. Toronto fans are very enthusiastic. I also attended one of those Yonge Street fan parties when the Leafs uncharacteristically made it to (I believe) the semi-finals, over a decade ago. I cannot imagine what the city would do if they became Stanley Cup contenders. They may be knocking on the door soon, because they looked strangely competitive at the end on last year’s abbreviated season. That is something Leafs fans have not seen in a long time.

Big earthquake in the Philippines. Typhoon Wipha hits Japan, the worst one in ten years. They recovered that Chelyabinsk meteorite from a lake in Russia - the one that landed recently and from which the shock wave injured about 1600 people. All those injuries were caused by a chunk of rock that is about the size of a coffee table. This leads me to wonder, what happens if a really big one hits? While the odds are low, it often strikes me as amusing and ironic that human beings assume it will be a manmade disaster that takes out planet earth, when in fact it might be something uncontrollable, like a seismic catastrophe, or a big meteorite, or a cyclical shift in our climate. Certainly, we can and probably should rethink poisoning our water supply by fracking, or invent some more earth friendly solutions to ozone-depleting energy production, but come on, we are one cosmic burp away from annihilation. Won’t all those pandas, and rhinos, and snow leopards, and Appalacian snail darters be laughing in heaven when the big one sucker punches mankind. It’s the cosmic Darwin Award waiting to be presented. And speaking of the laws of natural selection …

Stateside, financial crisis has been averted, that is until February. Everyone in Washington has agreed not to agree and they have kicked the can down the street a few blocks, raising the debt ceiling to some newly ridiculous level. We live to procrastinate another day. Did any of you catch the 60 Minutes segment last night, dealing with the onerous issue of campaign finance reform in the U.S. government. I leave you with my righteous indignation – in what universe is it ok for elected officials to abide by a set of rules that would be considered criminal behavior in the civilian sector? I guess none of this will matter when the cosmic hammer comes down. I hope it happens during a baseball game.

Go Leafs.

Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2013 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED