Lincicome: Can it be a baseball rivalry without Eddie Vedder?
Without apology Major League Baseball has concocted something called “Rivalry Weekend,” depending on stunt scheduling and geography to juice what the 1-2-3 inning cannot.
Around here this means Cubs-Sox, of course, a rivalry rooted in mutual disrespect, as any rivalry worth its name should be. How it applies to, oh, San Diego and Seattle, I leave to the sloganeers whose job does get more difficult once Chicago and New York are penciled in.
The Cubs and Sox have had the distinction of their own label, Crosstown Classic, and a trophy to go with it, born from interleague play, another nutty notion contrived out of anxiety.
The north-south rivalry is now sponsored and pay TVed and lumped in with the aforementioned Padres vs. Mariners, which I bring up because they have shamelessly confiscated Eddie Vedder for the weekend.
The old Pearl Jammer, a Cubs loyalist and Cubs song composer, seventh-inning stretch singer, is apparently sharing his allegiance from the top and bottom of the West Coast, endorsing a “Vedder Cup” to the winner of the San Diego-Seattle series, probably not a real trophy.
That’s the thing about these phony flavorings. It is hard to tell what matters and what does not. And since it is a long baseball season, a little spice here and there probably does no lasting harm; that is until playoff time when a team looks back and wonders why it had to play an out of division bully when a division rival was entertaining a neighborhood bum.
Rivalry Weekend has spread across time zones and into unfamiliar quarters, even across international borders where Detroit is paired with Toronto, a rivalry rooted in hockey, but still…
The frenzy aroused hereabouts is mostly genuine, if more fervent from the South Side, whereas Boston and Atlanta don’t even share the same Interstate. The Rockies and the Diamondbacks don’t even order from the same menu.
The natural rivals of the Cubs are the Cardinals, who are paired with Kansas City for display purposes this weekend, whereas the natural rivals of the White Sox are the White Sox themselves, forever self-flagellating while wishing they were somewhere else.
I can see a rivalry building between the Sox and the Rockies, two heels from the same stale loaf, because Colorado is threatening to undo the Sox’ hard-earned distinction of being the worst team of this century and the last. By the time the two teams meet in July, history could be on the line.
When devising so-called rivalries, the concocters missed a natural coupling between the A’s and Rays, two major-league teams playing the season in minor-league ballparks. Call it the Rental Series, winner gets to keep the car.
Manipulating Shohei Ohtani, new Dodgers hero, to meet his old pals from Anaheim may titillate the odd Angeleno, and seeing the richest player in baseball, Juan Soto, play for the other New York team rather than the real one might last an inning or two, but much more authentic would be the Mets and Yankees in the World Series — or the Cubs and Sox for that matter — fat chance — giving this whole rivalry weekend idea the temporary illusion of baseball in a corn field.
Remember that idea? Out in Dyersville, Iowa, baseball recreated a book and movie fantasy in the “Field of Dreams Game,” played twice, once with the Sox and Yankees, once with the Cubs and Reds, presently put aside to make way for some sort of baseball theme park.
Yet now with Shoeless Joe Jackson, the center of the cornfield fantasy, restored to validity, the original site would seem more suitable and sincere. If you wait, he will come.
Baseball is now divided into three seasons, regular, interleague and post, the last two diluting the first. We must now include the interleague season with a sub-weekend, a baseball marketing device created from desperation.
Crosstown rivalries, as compared to cross-border afterthoughts or interstate fabrications, may enrich baseball because of temporary local enthusiasm, but they undermine the natural order of things.
Baseball uses the built-in curiosities and preferences of fans for no other good reason than it can. This is just shameful exploitation. Not that there's anything wrong with that.