What They Really Need is Fantasy Baseball

Like Harry Potter or Twilight before it, The Hunger Games book and movie are sweeping the nation. So last night, when two guys from my fantasy baseball league asked if I wanted to go see it, I accepted the request for three reasons.

1) I really wanted a chocolate shake and they agreed to stop on the way.

2) I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

3) The third, and possibly most important reason I went was because I wanted to explore what the trade market was like for Yankees slugger Mark Teixeira.

In our fantasy baseball league (Trash Talkers Unanimous Fantasy Baseball), you can keep a player twice. This being the third season of the league’s existence, many players have now been kept twice and are in need of dealing. Teixeira and Felix Hernandez are my two keepers that I can’t keep anymore and I need to get something back for them before the season ends.

Usually, I’d post something on the league’s message board, but who better to bounce trade ideas off than the co-commissioners who also happened to be the gentlemen I was going to the movie with?

In the car, I steered the conversation toward Teixeira (whose 32nd birthday is today), how great he is, and who I could get for him in a trade. When we sat down at the theater (one empty seat between each one of us…) all I wanted to do was talk fantasy baseball.

And when the movie came on, all I could think was, WOW! If these people in this future world had sports and fantasy baseball in their lives, there probably wouldn’t be the need for them to kill like 23 teenagers a year….

Sports are a cultural mirror and outlet for people around the world. Long ago, gladiators fought to the death in front of thousands of adoring fans (or was that just a Russell Crowe movie?).

Natives to North and Central America played an early version of basketball where the loser was sacrificed to the Gods.

While our sports and games have become less lethal over the years, what they represent is the same. Fans get a sense of belonging, somewhere to yell and express emotion with far less judgment than in real life.

Fansmanship’s Luke Johnson waxed poetic on the subject in describing riotous, beer-guzzling gangs of fans, gagging on trash talk and name-calling, in order that as they victor, they might swell with superiority.

In other words, a collective experience of victory, emotion, and the rush of combat without the consequences.

Many of these values are identified in The Hunger Games as a means of political control. When one of the districts riots about the game in the movie, images of Detroit or more recently Lexington are evoked. The viewer realizes that, while we don’t kill the losers of our sporting events, the fans of the events have a shockingly similar amount of emotion entangled in the outcome. For evidence, all you have to do is search YouTube for “soccer riots,” or search the news for “Brian Stow.”

Despite these too-common acts of social discord, I am thankful that I live in a time and place that lets the “acted out” violence or adversity take place on the field, court, or gridiron and that generally people do not get killed on or off the field.

And maybe, someday soon, someone will make me an offer Mark Teixeira.