May I Label These Envelopes Please

Did you know that there’s only three days in the year that North America’s “Big 4” team sports do not have any games? Okay, probably, because we’ve just had them: they’re the tree days around Baseball’s All-Star Game. In recent years, ESPN used this break as an opportunity to have their annual award show, the Espys. But for some reason, they had it a few days early this year, so I was unprepared to publish another instalment of suggested awards. Previous suggestions are here from 2014 and here from 2015.

Baseball

• Most creative way to point out a no hitter without actually mentioning it
• Least embarrassing ceremonial first pitch
• Least confusing score bug
• Most nonchalant front row spectator
• Most sweat-stained cap
• Most elaborate hairstyle hidden under a cap
• Most gratuitous old-time ballpark feature in a new stadium
• Best performance by a player asking the dugout to request a review

Football

• Best performance by a player introducing himself and his college
• Most innocent-sounding explanation for not signing Colin Kaepernick
• Most gratuitous use of cable cam
• Best performance by a coach angrily taking off his headset after a bad play

Basketball

• Best performance by a fan in the front row berating a player without provoking a fight
• Most subtle way for a commentator to question officials' competence
• Best wood floor pattern

Hockey

• Best performance by a league official pretending to care about concussions
• Most consecutive questions asked of John Tortorella without him losing it
• Most dramatic announcement of a goal-review result
• Most gratuitous pre-game ceremony (separate divisions for original-six and expansion teams)
• Best special effects in an animated virtual board ad

Soccer

• Most miraculous use of the magic spray
• Best performance by players wasting time taking a corner, throw-in etc.
• Best performance by in-studio analysts hyping a relegation game
• MLS fan group that looks most like it could win a riot against European fans
• Best interpretive dance moves while running up to a penalty

Tennis

• Best attempt to have a McEnroe-style tantrum despite the existence of review technology
• Best performance by a player packing up their bag and leaving after a loss
• Subtlest grunting

General

• Most money conned out of local government for a new stadium
• Least-awkward in-stadium marriage proposal
• The Ref-Cam Award for best dumb-sounding idea
• Highest office job given to a retired player with no experience
• Roughest play at an All Star game
• The Broken Clock Award for best prediction by a loud mouth debater. 
• Fastest performance of The Star-Spangled Banner
• Saddest story of a veteran dealt away from a championship team as part of a deadline deal
• Most realistic superimposed ad
• Most compassionate "oooh" by a crowd watching an injury in slow motion on the jumbotron
• The St. Joseph’s Cancer Center Award for strangest thing advertised on a sports broadcast
• The Eric Lindros Award for highest expectations placed on a prospect who hasn’t played in the big leagues yet.

20,000 Leagues All Over Me

In many ways, I reject traditional masculinity, but in other ways I embrace it. One obvious way is sports. I counted it up, and I now have items of clothing to indicate my team of choice in no less than seven different sports leagues. (MLB, NBA, NHL, CFL, NFL, MLS, and the latest addition, the National Lacrosse League.)

That's nearly all of my teams. Okay, there are some leagues where I have a favourite team based on something like a weird name. (Forced to choose a team among Indian Premier League cricket teams I'd go the Kolkata Knight Riders, but I can't pretend to be passionate about them.) Among teams I truly care about the only ones missing would be the family soccer teams, Aston Villa or Birmingham City. And I point that out not entirely as a gift idea for friends and family. 

But now I realize that this manifestation of my masculinity is about to get even more complicated. And ironically, it's because of the rise of women's sports. I jumped on the bandwagon of the Toronto PWHL team, but since they don't have a name yet, I have a reprieve before buying any merchandise. But as soon as they become the Toronto Narwhals or something, I'll be heading to the stores. And now Toronto is getting a WNBA franchise, so that will need another piece of clothing with their presumably non-plural name splashed across it. 

The fact is that we're entering into a more complex sports world. The days of just hockey in Canada and just baseball in the US are long gone. We've even moved beyond a Big-3 or Big-4 team sports. I'm wondering how that's going to change fandom in the future. Because at the same time, the ways of spending on your team has increased too; clothing is just one aspect of it. Above, I was just talking about cheap t-shirts and hats, but if you're going to go for the replica uniform route, you could be spending a thousand dollars on your full collection of teams, before we even get to the jackets, lamps, novelty home scoreboards, etc. And that's before we consider how much you might bet on your teams of choice. 

So I'm thinking that sports fandom could get watered down: The days of looking into the audience and seeing half the fans in the team uniform could be numbered. After all, it wasn't that long ago when such fans were a lot less common.  Maybe we'll return to those before-times of more casually-dressed spectators, and the current era of monochromatic crowds will seem like an awkwardly-obsessed outlier.

Or, we could see fans concentrating more on individual sports. Instead of just automatically maintaining fandom of all the teams from the local metropolis, fans may choose to specialize. That would be odd, because now we just assume that teams from different sports in one town are kind of allies, since their fans are mostly the same people. But if they have to fight to be the object of local fans' obsessions, that could get ugly. You think it's hard to back a team between Lakers-Celtics or Dodgers-Giants, how about when it's Dodgers-Lakers? Rich teams fighting over entitled fans? That's no fun. I'd be willing to keep buying sports merchandise just to keep that from happening.