“…you win the race.”

-MASN Commentator, 9/29/18

This past weekend I viewed Baltimore Orioles baseball, three games in their entirety, for the first time in a few years. These were the last three games of the season and I barely recognized the team.

Over the course of the last three years the team released two of their three best hitters, who both went on to top five major League homerun hitting for other teams. They had also released their best all-around player, a man named Nick Markakus, now on a World Series bound team. They were also in the process of losing a series to the World Champion Houston Astros [no World Series bound], a rare occurrence, as championship teams have not repeated in almost two complete decades.

I have not looked into the economics of this game anymore than to note that it is possible to rent a championship team for a year and then let them scatter to the four winds of baseball. Surely the causes are economic, even in the last family-oriented sport in America—for MLB does make family value noise at every turn. In fact, the Baltimore Oriole Stadium—half-filled, was crawling with children admitted for free under a special child’s program. At least three family programs were featured and announced during these games, in light of which, it is significant that social gravity and economic gravity have determined that only 1 player of a repeat playoff team from 4 years ago will remain on the team, even though a number of these players will still be highly sought major league players and no less than three had purchased major assets in the Baltimore Metropolitan Area with a stated aim of making it their home town. In fact, Adam Jones, the 83 million dollar captain of the team, a very classy African American, even married what most people regard as the prettiest black girl in town and bought actual hometown hero, Cal Ripkin Junior’s house.

Since I would like to see all team ball sports replaced by combat sports and understand the culpability of these phony endeavors as ritual distractions for the mind chattel of this sick nation, I am neither surprised nor bothered by these trends, but rather impressed by the total success enjoyed by the franchise in convincing the benumbed fans that they are still cheering on a home team of fellow Baltimoreans, with Adam Jones receiving dozens of standing ovations and various ritual send-offs, like a victorious warlord even as his gutted team finishes second worst in major league history.

As I view the deluded baseball fans clapping for the departing millionaire athlete like he was a Viking chief sailing into the moonlight in his burning funeral ship, nothing but positive sentimentalities beamed from the televised faces at the park and the faces of the family surrounding me as their assiduously cultivated false loyalties are blatantly eviscerated and they are told it is otherwise, that all they really cheer for on game day is the uniform worn by the players and that their human identities are merely passing shadows in a collectivized and uniformed journey to nowhere. In this managed dehumanization is reflected the bleached racial identity of a nation where even the most astute observers of the ongoing subtextual race war are able to contextualize the concept as nothing more than “your skin is your uniform.”