While Comrade Burneko's eloquent screed about Space Prison and Clayton Kershaw is both well-timed and well-reasoned, there is a slight flaw upon which we would like to expound.
Sports isn't for you anymore.
It's for Phil Castellini, the Cincinnati Reds failson president, and Shortchangin' Danny Snyder, and even the whole nepotism thing as inspired by Comrade Kahler and expounded upon by Associate Comrade Jones in the latest edition of Game Theory. Castellini showed us that fans don't matter in even more fundamental ways than the Dodgers did. Snyder showed us that even in a powerful cabal, partners are not to be trusted. And Comrade Kahler showed us that the fundamental of thoroughness in search of merit is less important than bloodlines, which doubles back to Castellini.
There are lots of other examples we could dredge up with only a few minutes of research, but the essential truth is this: We're all just wallets with feet. There should be no surprise that the Dodgers had a plan for Clayton Kershaw that was declared inviolable well before Wednesday's game, and that was 80 pitches, period. There were perfectly sound reasons for that, but there was also a way out of it—sending him out to start the eighth inning and saying, First baserunner and you're done. But this isn't about your entertainment or even history. It's about the plan. Eighty is 80, damn it, and that's the deal.
The same goes for load management, which is a perfectly sound idea that lacks only one component—the idea of a refund if you buy tickets to the game in which your favorite player's load is being managed. Your job is to show up and shut up and take what you're given. As Bill Belichick would say while leaning over a hospital patient, Do your job.
That's the deal here. Your support is not a labor of love but an obligation, and if you don't like the deal, the door to Piss Off Gardens is right there. You can and will be replaced, unless you can't, as the acres of empty seats in venues across the nation show on a nightly basis. But even that matters very little in the age of ever-bloating TV contracts. The only way to change the current rules of engagement is to refuse to play. And you can do one of three things in response.
1) Shrug your shoulders and accept their contempt your role in the sporting ecosystem as part of the season ticket package.
2) Rise up as your brethren and sistren did at Arsenal, Atletico Madrid, Chelsea, Liverpool, both Milans, both Manchesters, and Tottenham did and take to the streets and terraces. Their victory against the Super League ought to be a daily inspiration to us all and a reminder to Brother Phil that the relationship between your money and his pocket can be a tenuous one when treated so cavalierly.
3) Demand that your local legislators create a funding mechanism for the Space Prison that doesn't involve the same weasels who tell Reds fans to pound salt, Dodgers fans to accept bullpen help, Commanders fans to tolerate the comprehensively vile Snyder, or your own home team doing a thing you find patently objectionable. If we can GoFund Ryan Hartman to pay his league fine for flipping off Evander Kane, we can do the bigger things; the only thing keeping us back is our own inertia. On the matter of the Space Prison, Comrade Burneko and the rest of Defector are of one voice—Power To The People, Rage Against The Machine, and Stasis Chambers Orbiting Neptune For The Billionaires.
