A few thoughts about Karma…

Instant Karma's gonna get you
Gonna knock you right in the head
You better get yourself together
Pretty soon your gonna be dead
What in the world you thinking of?
Laughing in the face of love
What on Earth you try'na do?
It's up to you
Yeah, you
-John Lennon

I am not a superstitious person generally. I think of myself as set in my ways, unwilling to change routines unless I have to, a bit routinized but sometimes I wonder. This comes up right now because of the start of the baseball season, my favorite time of the year as related to the NY Yankees. Living in Massachusetts, heart of Red Sox nation, has led to lots of teasing as related to this. However it always leaves me a bit queasy to do so and I generally only partake of the tease with good friends, and gently.

Two stories…

It is 1978 and I am working to save for graduate school in a group home on Lon Island. Most of the kids are inner city kids from the Island, hard core. The program director is a die-in-the-wool Staten Island born, Yankee fan. All through the spring and early summer we lived through a disappointing season fraught with injuries and underperformances. Then in mid summer, with the New Yorkers 14.5 games behind, the fortunes started to change. We began a ritual where each night all the kids and staff watched the games together and the well behaved during the week got the special treat of watching the Friday night game in the director’s office and got to stay up late to do it. By early September the lead was 4 and they faced each other in a four game series, with NY winning all four by a combined score of 42-9. Kids were running around the house squealing about the “Boston Massacre” and the Yankees returned to and won a second consecutive World Series. Even until the very end of the Boston series, I never assumed the Yankees would win and did not rub this fact into others.

In 2004 the Yankees collapsed in the playoffs against the Sox but only after I had confided to my son that I felt bad for the Sox after game three, a rout by the Yankees, putting them up 3-0. They lost the next four games and went to the series themselves. I blamed myself for this moment of weakness. There is nothing more to say. The karma got me, I don’t know what I was thinking.

So this year the Yankees are off to a good start and the Red Sox have yet to win a game in this young season. They play each other today. I have been very careful about my chiding of certain Red Sox fans, friends, but making no attempt to stir up the karma. I do not want to get knocked right in the head…

On The Streak

Please indulge me a sports moment…

When does a streak stop being about the dedication and start becoming just about the streak? How does one manage to balance the desire to help your team win with being a slave to the numbers. When should a streak end? How should a streak end? Well Bret Favre is showing us the down side of starting consecutive games, when a streak takes on a life of its own and ends up starting to effect his legacy.

This is not about Favre retiring and un-retiring so many times that we lose count. This is not about the controversy related to cell phone pictures or getting back at the Packers or using the NY Jets or any such folly. This isn’t about him or his career jumping the shark. This is about when a player needs to see that he is no longer helping the team he plays for and moves on with the rest of his life.
Unfortunately we are a sports fan nation that is over indulgent of streaks. A baseball player hits in 10 or 15 straight games and DiMaggio’s 56 game streak is brought up. A player hits 10 home runs in the first month of the season and we are inundated with “on a pace to break Maris/Bonds” claims for weeks on end. We honor streaks that can “never” be broken like Gehrig’s until Ripken comes along and does break it. Then his becomes a “never be broken” too.

I can’t help but think that SOME of Ripken’s legacy was affected by being enslaved by the streak. Yes, it is honorable to want to be in their every single game but what to do when your performance is no longer up to the accepted standards and yet you are enslaved to the streak. This is what the Yankees and Derek Jeter are going to go through this winter as he looks at a new contract. Although there is not a “streak” per se to be enslaved to, the fact that he has been with one club for so many years, going against the grain of free agency and the norm in baseball now a days and that this contract is said to represent not only expected performance but a reward for what he has done for the team, bring about the same sort of feelings.

Bret Favre is on the down side of his career and has been for a while. Because his week to week appearance is so tied to the streak, it has lost the meaning of what he can mean to the team’s chance of winning. We just spent the past week wondering if Bret was going to be able to keep his streak alive. If you are a Viking fan, you are probable more interested in can the team win this week, not can the streak win this week.

I guess the real question will be “when will this stop being about Bret, or the streak, and start being about the team again?”

Thanks for the indulgence…

PenguinPolozza: A brief history of music in my life Part 1

(On the right hand column is a Playlist music player which has some of the songs I will mention in this series. Feel free to play them in the background as you read, for the very popular multimedia effect)

When I was a kid, I didn’t listen to much music at all. My transistor radio, under my pillow at night, had either the Yankee baseball game with Mel Allen at the mic or WINS, news radio. Every once in a while we would listen to WABC and Cousin Brucie but that was it. It wasn’t until the early 1970’s, high school age, when music started to become a bigger part of my life. This is going to be a series, three distinct eras, when different people introduced specific music and musicians into my life. I hope you enjoy reading about it as much as I enjoyed thinking about it and writing it all down. I begin with the early years.

The first time I heard it on the radio with my friend Tom and brothers Mike and Anthony, I was captured. The guitar, the story, the haunting tune, all made Don Mclean’s American Pie my first musical crush. It was the first album I bought at the local Woolworth 5 & 10 store and cost as I remember about 2 bucks. It got hundreds of plays on the ol’ Victrola, and still today brings up emotions of losing something, even though then, I didn’t know what was lost.
Tom also gets credit for introducing the Beatles and later, Steely Dan to me. As for the Beatles, yes, they were popular (there is an understatement) but they didn’t have meaning to me until Tommy would bring over the White Album for our Saturday night penny poker and pizza nights. (Yes CollegeBoy, my first V I Pizza reference; more on that in another blog in the future). Tommy was really into his music and as his taste matured, by the time I was going to college, he was listening to some Jazz. The music that I think sort of helped shape his taste and influenced me was Steely Dan. Their jazz influence is obvious and most of their sound is much more than just guitar and drum.