Unofficial Sports Holidays

We love our Holidays in America. It's a time to eat, drink, be merry, see family and friends, and take extra days off from work so you end up screwing all the people you work with who didn't take off and have to cover for you (ok, this post is going in the wrong direction. Recalculating route. Please wait one moment.)

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So like I was saying before, there are certain days out of the year that universally ring out as sacred on the sports fan's calendar. Super Bowl Sunday. New Year's Day. Thanksgiving. The first weekend of the NCAA Tournament. The Kentucky Derby on the first Saturday in May. Memorial Day Sunday and the Indianapolis 500. Baseball's Opening Day in April. Even the NFL Draft has gotten big enough to warrant a mention in this conversation. Surely there are more, but you understand what I'm getting at. But there are several other, slightly less ballyhooed days or weeks out of the year that provide a comparable amount of intrigue and action. In this piece I'll offer my 7 Unofficial Sports Holidays, events that you really look forward to or take enjoyment out of, sometimes without even really knowing it. (Why 7? Because it's Mickey Mantle's number. And it could also be a great name for a boy - or a girl.) And before any of you fans of the Ryder Cup or any other periodic international competitions object, only events that happen once per year were eligible.

7. NFL Schedule Release
I must first say that I'm not the biggest fan of this day myself, because it's become way too much of an event in recent years. What used to make for an interesting, break-up-the-boredom conversation piece in the newspaper (remember those?) is now Exhibit 1A in how ESPN can ruin anything by turning it into an hour-long prime time special (see "James, LeBron"). Nevertheless, there is a certain magnitude to the NFL schedule release. It provides a road map through the autumn and winter months for many Americans. Vacations and road trips are planned immediately thereafter for specific weekends to get out and see your favorite team. Conversely, you cross your fingers that weddings, family reunions, and other certain events fall on your team's bye week. StubHub sees traffic that would crash many a website. And, last but not least, we all play the asinine game of "ok, Kansas City at home - that's a win. Minnesota on the road - that's probably a loss" trying to predict our team's final record 3 months before training camp even opens. Honestly, none of us can resist doing it, but I learned to take any April predictions with a shaker of salt way back when I predicted the 1997 Cowboys to go 13-3, only for them to come in slightly under that at 6-10.

6. The Day of Nothing
Also known as the day after the MLB All-Star Game, this Wednesday in mid-July is the answer to the popular trivia question of "what is the only day out of the year when none of the major American professional sports are in action?" I've always taken some sort of solace in the Day of Nothing. Being a sports fan can be a bit of a grind sometimes, especially if you're a day-in, day-out baseball seamhead like me and the pennant races are just starting to bubble. The Day of Nothing offers a nice little chance to recharge your mental batteries, especially after staying up the night before to see the end of the All-Star Game because MLB is still trying to pull off the gimmick of having it decide home field in the World Series about 4 years after the novelty of it wore off, but I digress. A big part of being a sports fan is maintaining perspective on the rest of life, and the Day of Nothing is a day to remind yourself of all the other crap there is to do out there in the world.

5. Big East Tournament
I've spoken several times in this space about how I despise the period of time from early February to mid-March. The regular season in the NBA and NHL are lost on me, and I'm not enough of a college basketball fan to even try to really sink my teeth into it until well after Presidents' Day. While the Big East Tournament is not the official end to the Winter Doldrums, it is something of a wake-up-and-smell-the-coffee moment. It's probably the first sporting event after the Super Bowl that I make it a point to watch. Of course, it does help that in the past few years the Big East has become the premier conference in college basketball, so its tournament is now a clash of titans who are very likely to be making hay in the Big Dance, all under the bright lights of the Garden.

4. Michigan/Ohio State - the Saturday before Thanksgiving
For Kevin, it's quite possible that this day supersedes Christmas, New Year's, and July 4 put together. But I put the annual Michigan/Ohio State football game on here because even the casual college football fan makes it a point to tune in, and the fact that it takes place on the same day every year can really give it holiday status. The tradition and history surrounding this rivalry is college football at its best, and for my money it's still the best rivalry out there despite the downturn that the Big Ten has taken in the past few years. For years, this game would not only decide who the Big Ten would send to the Rose Bowl, but it would also considerably narrow down the National Championship picture, given that the Wolverines and Buckeyes would very often be two of the top 3, 4, or 5 teams in the country when they'd line up across from each other in Ann Arbor or Columbus. Add in the unfortunate fact that this game now also marks the approximate anniversary of Bo Schembechler's passing on the eve of the 2006 matchup, and you have a day that remains significant regardless of the two teams' records.

3. Saturday at Augusta
They call it "Moving Day." The third round of The Masters is obviously not as big as the fourth round, but it is arguably more compelling because Saturday is the real chance for those in contention to make their run at the green jacket. Why Saturday and not Sunday, you ask? Because the traditional pin placements for the third round are much more conducive to scoring than they are in the fourth round. If you're behind in The Masters on Sunday and need some birdies, you're going to have to make some of the trickiest approaches and most delicate putts of your life. To come from more than a few shots down on Sunday essentially requires either turning the back nine into a video game the way Phil Mickelson did in 2004, or having the extreme fortune of the guy you're chasing being Greg Norman. The M.O. for Sunday is mostly to play for pars and not implode. However, Saturday is the day. Saturday is the day when a guy barely above the cut line can fire a 66 and find himself within 3 of the leaders. It's also the day when any two-round flukes get put to bed, because you can't handle Augusta on luck alone for 72 holes. In addition, Saturday's round is also the first chance that many of the working population get to sit down and watch a full round, when you consider that the first two rounds are mostly over by the time the average person gets out of the office on Thursday and Friday.

2. MLB Trading Deadline
You may be a bit surprised that I have the MLB trading deadline so high on the list, given how much we have all spoken out against the overload of hype, rumors, and speculation. But baseball's trading deadline has a bit more to it. I thoroughly enjoy the "should we go for it this year, or build for the future?" dilemma faced by teams teetering around .500 in late July. In a certain respect, the trading deadline is where seasons can really get started (see the 2004 Astros and Carlos Beltran) or end in a hurry (see the infamous 1997 "White Flag Trade" executed by a White Sox team that was only 3.5 games out of first). It's also where one team can trade for a veteran player and be giddy that they've just found their missing link to the World Series, only to look back years later and lament the fact that they traded away a future Hall of Famer. My favorite example of this is the 1990 trade where the Red Sox got reliever Larry Andersen (yes, that Larry Andersen) for the stretch run, and all they had to give up was some first baseman with a weird batting stance named Jeff Bagwell. Oops. Since baseball in so many aspects is an individual sport, a player switching teams midseason has much, much less to learn in order to be a productive member of his new team. Unlike football or basketball where a new player needs to be taught a ton of plays and progressions, baseball is little more than "ok, pal, here's the bunt sign, here's the take sign, here's the steal sign, and Eddie the clubhouse guy over there will tell you where the best places are to eat. Go get 'em." This, plus the absence of a salary cap, is why baseball is the only sport whose in-season trade deadline consistently provides meaningful trades.

1. FCS Semifinals and Finals
There is a big part of me that likes to call these two weekends the most enjoyable football you'll watch all year. Taking place around the third and fourth weeks of December, they fill that void between the end of the FBS regular season and the beginning of the bowl season. Obviously the talent is not at a BCS level, but as recent I-AA triumphs over high-profile Division I programs have illustrated (sorry Kevin), it's not garbage either. Guys playing I-AA ball (as the FCS was formerly known) are mostly tough SOB's who lack either the size or the 40 time to play at the top level, so what you end up getting is pure football played by evenly matched teams. And not to mention, some of these games turn into absolute beauties, the kind of 31-28 battles that have plenty of scoring but enough defense to keeps it from taking on a video-game cheapness. Watching these two rounds was especially a highlight during college, since they'd coincide with reading days (aka sit around and not study) right before finals.

Honorable Mention: Pitchers and Catchers, National Signing Day for college football and basketball, the Army-Navy game in December, Wild Card Weekend, the NBA Slam Dunk Contest (when the best players participated), the Home Run Derby (ditto), and the Mike and the Mad Dog Super Bowl Trivia Contest (it's not nearly the same since Mike and Dog split) the week immediately following the NFL Conference Championship games.

A Fan of Fair Weather

Surely you've heard some of the talk lately about the Super Bowl being played at the Meadowlands in 2014. It was somewhat of a big deal that the New York/New Jersey area was even allowed to submit a bid to host the game. I get the appeal of the greater New York area hosting the Big Game - after all, it is the media capital of the country, if not the world. And while I'm hardly averse to the Super Bowl spreading the jing around in terms of host cities, it would be in football's best interest that the idea of a Super Bowl in East Rutherford, NJ stays an idea and does not become a reality. A cold weather or foul weather Super Bowl, especially one in North Jersey, would be a cluster(rhymes with truck).

First, let me tackle the issue of playing the Super Bowl at the still-unnamed new Meadowlands Stadium. If any of you have ever been to that area, it is an absolute horror show when it comes to traffic and congestion. One of the most densely populated areas in the country, the New York suburbs on the Jersey side would overflow like a popped zit if the thousands of media members and fans that tend to show up during Super Bowl week were to descend upon the area. Even if a fair number of people avoid the shitstorm that is North Jersey roads by taking public transportation, we're talking about yet another system that is essentially already used to full capacity, plus I can't imagine many ego-driven media talking heads being willing to slum it on NJ Transit. Hotels would be a mess, with many media outlets not wanting to pay the higher rates to put its employees up in the city, thus leaving the relatively fewer amount of hotels within acceptable driving distance on the Jersey side booked to the gills. I can go on, but I think we get it. These are largely the same reasons that New York got denied the 2016 Olympics as well.

Putting the specific city aside, an outdoor Super Bowl in a cold weather city brings game-integrity issues into play. I know there is a faction of people who would love to see a Super Bowl played in snow or howling wind, but it's just not fair. This mainly comes into play with pass-first, speedy teams like the Cardinals and Saints of the past few years who would be expected to struggle in poor weather. You can throw the "but a team should be able to win in all types of conditions if it wants to call itself a champion" argument out there, but I have one problem with that. If you make it through the conference playoffs, you deserve your shot at the Lombardi Trophy in as even-keel a setting as possible, because you've already proven you can win in adverse conditions (if your team won a road playoff game along the way) or, you did well enough in the regular season to secure home field throughout the playoffs and thus the right to play "your type of game" all along. I love the elements in football as much as anyone else, but not for deciding the championship. The weather and field conditions should not tilt a Super Bowl matchup to the degree that it very well could if it were played outdoors in the North in early February.

Peter King made a point in his SI.com column this week (the first item on the linked page) that sealed the deal for me when it comes to this issue. Making an exception so that the Meadowlands can host the Super Bowl sets a precedent for all the other cold-weather NFL cities to lobby for a Super Bowl of their own. Do we really want to hear all these cities and owners clamoring for a Super Bowl? OK, I can see having one in Washington, that wouldn't be terrible, and maybe in Baltimore if for nothing other than the two weeks of references to The Wire it would provide. But how about Green Bay or Chicago? No, too damn cold. Pittsburgh or Philly? No. Denver, Seattle, or Foxboro, MA? No, hell no, and f*** no.

The NFL has to toe a line to to award the Super Bowl to a city each year that will not only present optimal playing conditions for the game, but also provide a nice setting (new, modern stadium, agreeable vacation-type weather, or at least a good party city) for the sport's biggest $howcase. There's a reason New Orleans and Miami seem to get one every 3-4 years, and Los Angeles would too if it still had an NFL team. It's for the same reasons that Jacksonville, Houston, and Minneapolis shouldn't hold their breaths waiting for another one to get thrown their way. Hate to say it, but hosting the Super Bowl is a party that us northern cities are not invited to, and it's for everyone's own good.

Say It Is So, Joe

I'm a proponent of free agency in all sports. Curt Flood didn't do it all for nothing. It gets dangerous in baseball due to the absence of a salary cap, where the rich teams wrestle away the lesser-heeled teams' homegrown stars, needing to use little more than the almighty extra zeroes on the contract. I root for a team that is hated for doing just that, over and over again. However, the Yankees and all of the other big-market teams are merely playing the game by the rules that are written. And in my mind, a team like the Pittsburgh Pirates, who consistently produce talent only to consistently trade it away for dimes on the dollar, have much more to answer for than a does a team that exhausts every resource it has in the name of winning.

Despite all that, I come to you this evening with this declaration: Minnesota needs to keep Joe Mauer. Baseball needs the Twins to keep Joe Mauer. I do not want to see him go to another team after his contract is up at the end of 2010. Yes, you are hearing this from a guy who roots for a team with the biggest checkbook in the game and happens to have an aging catcher that will be knocking at the door of "Full Time DH" come the end of the 2010 season. The bloodlust of a Yankee fan in me wants Joe Mauer in 2011 just like he wanted Mike Mussina, Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon, CC Sabathia, and Mark Teixeira in years prior. He wants to see him in pinstripes as much as he doesn't want to see him wearing a horrendous red or green Red Sox alternate uniform. But the rational baseball fan in me says he'll be happy to pass on the reigning AL MVP. In fact, he'll be happiest if he never even gets a shot at having him on his team.

Baseball has become top-heavy, and even worse, top-heavy in the markets that ESPN and mostly all other national media like to jump through hoops for. If I were a baseball fan in Texas or Florida or Michigan and had to listen to as much Yankees/Red Sox/Cubs/Mets/Phillies (albeit only more recently for the Phils) fodder as they produce over the course of 162 games, I'd develop a pretty strong disdain for those teams too. The game thrives on the everyman's hero who plays to an All-Star level, keeps his mouth shut, gets his uniform dirty, cares about his teammates, shakes hands, kisses babies, the whole bit. It makes you stop caring about how much money he's making or how much you paid for your ticket. It already has a few of them (Derek Jeter, Albert Pujols, and Chase Utley pop into mind immediately), but it needs a few more who play for the lower profile teams. The Kansas City feel good story of Zack Greinke can fit that mold with another solid year. Adrian Gonzalez would already fit that role if San Diego hadn't fallen so far off the baseball map that you'd think the Flat Earth Society were on to something after all.

Joe Mauer and Minnesota are just right together. He is a Minnesota native, the face of a franchise that has been to the postseason 5 times since it was under serious consideration for contraction in 2001. He is a 26-year-old, .327 career hitter at a position where 75% of teams would happily sign for .260, and has now developed his power stroke. The Twinkies are moving into a new ballpark this season (translation: REVENUE) and would surprise no one if they win the AL Central again. They consistently make the most of their talent despite looking like a 75-win team on paper most of the time. They could be on the tier of the Yankees and Phillies if they had been able to sign Johan Santana to a long term deal a few years back.

I hope that does not happen this time. Baseball can really use another consistently good team with a likable superstar. It helps people associate the game with bats and gloves and dirt again, rather than associate it with Scott Boras, salary arbitration, and the Mitchell Report. You get a generation that grows up being taught the many things there are to love about our national pastime and fewer of the things that are wrong with it. You get TV networks having no choice but to divide up the coverage more equally. To the Twins and to Joe Mauer: if you sign it, they will come.

Towel Off

I have been a Yankee fan since 1993, the first year that I was old enough to follow baseball day-in and day-out. Living in South Jersey, I still go to 4-5 Phillies games a year, and I've gone on the record multiple times to say I have the utmost respect for the Phillies organization and their ballclub. My sister and most of my friends are Phillies fans. I'd only root against them in the case of a series like this one, or even better, this one. But I must take one issue with the Fightins: the rally towels.

I thought the rally towel was a great touch back in 2007 when the team made the playoffs for the first time in 14 years, as well as in 2008 when they won their first World Series since 1980. I was at a game during the last weekend of the '07 regular season when the towels were first handed out at the gates, and I made it to a Phillies playoff game in both '08 and '09 as well - so I can say from experience that a rally-towel waving Citizens Bank Park was a great sight to behold in those days. To appease the pro-Phillies faction that may be cursing me already, enjoy this example of what I'm talking about.

But those days are over with. October is not a novelty to this team anymore, and it should not ask its fans to treat it as a novelty. Rally towels scream "thrilled to be here!" like a married guy who's allowed a night out with his single male friends without his wife. I thought it was especially curious that the rally towels were brought back out for the division-clinching game last year - even though the NL East had been pretty much a formality since the end of August (they won the division by a healthy 6 games).

Here's the deal. The Phillies are far and away the best team in the National League. It's very very hard to imagine them missing the playoffs this coming year as long as they stay healthy. Once you reach the point that they have now reached, the fans' "rooting aides" have to be left out. You don't see rally towels in New York or in Boston. You didn't see them in Cleveland when the Indians were in the playoffs every year in the Thome/Manny era, and that team had sucked for decades prior to that.

You know where you did see them? You saw them in San Diego in 1998, where the Padres were one of the most "just thrilled to be here!" teams in World Series history. You see a stupid Rally Monkey in Anaheim that has to tell fans when it's time to put their iPhones down and slap together their Thunderstix, because they're still largely oblivious to the baseball nuances and have to make noise with inflatable sticks so they can pretend to know what's going on in front of them. And in Tampa in '08, you had cowbells. Cowbells. Let that stew for a minute or so.

And all of that crap is great if you're a team or city that is new to seeing a modicum of success in baseball, or any sport for that matter. But franchises and fan bases should outgrow that phase after a certain amount of time. It's like when you first get your driver's license and you'll volunteer to do every monotonous errand imaginable just because the idea of driving a car by yourself is so new and cool. This is why sports fans in the Northeast have little respect for sports fans on the West Coast - because the West Coast fans never surpassed that "Oh, we need milk? I'll go! I'll run out and get milk! I don't even care that it's 11:30 on a Wednesday night and I just shut my light out to go to bed. I'll go get the milk!" phase.

So, I leave the Phillies and their fans tonight with this. You're already a hard nosed East Coast sports town with some edge. You want Philadelphia to become an honest-to-goodness baseball town? Show us you can make the place rock without the rally towels. Show us all you need on a chilly October evening is your two hands, your voice, 3 or 4 domestics in the parking lot, and your passion. That, and cease with the damn E-A-G-L-E-S chants when you're at a baseball game. But that is a topic for another day.