a follow up to last night's post

as i'm starting this, it is 6:50am. the video that took 5.5 hours to compress yesterday is still just slightly too big to burn to dvd. that means i have to compress it again. which means i won't be doing it until next semester. damn.

damn->damon->fuck

the sports team as an emergent entity:
every red sox fan has fearfully known this would happen since at least part-way through the summer. i guess we just had faith that damn would give a fighting chance to the team that made him famous. instead, he opted for a quiet back-room deal with the mother-fuckers of professional sports. last anyone knew, the sox were the only ones to have made an offer.
all this got me thinking as i was falling asleep last night. chris has said that he won't watch the red sox next season because certain players won't be returning. i, however, feel loyalty to the team rather than the individuals who are on that team and especially not the damn incompetent individuals who run the team (you've got a hell of a task ahead of you to stop this bleeding and make up for your series of excruciatingly painful stumbles). why is this? if it's not the players, not the managers, not the owners, not the park i necessarily feel loyal to (in that if any of them were to be replaced, my thoughts wouldn't change), what is it exactly that i'm saying when i say that i'm a fan of the red sox?
this is what makes me say that a baseball team, and perhaps especially the red sox, is an emergent entity. the number of individual units that go into making a baseball team are great. i am spekaing beyond simply the players etc. mentioned before. there's the business/mechandising, the sports radio, the newspapers, the city/region, but most of all, the people who interact with the team. here i mean primarily the fans. the fans interact not only with the various tentacles of the team as a business/sports institution but also with one another and themselves.
it is in these interactions, not to mention the interactions of/with the team-as-business/sports-institution that are the key to a baseball team like the red sox. it is from these numerous interactions engaged in by the individual units that the team-as-emergent-entity comes. if one were to take a single unit out, as happens when a team is sold, players traded etc, the team remains. to see an example of this in an extreme form, we can look to a non-baseball team, specifically the cleveland browns.*
i have to say, i know very little of the situation with the browns. yet, from what i have been able to pick up, it seems that the browns were moved in 1995, becoming the baltimore ravens. the team-as-emergent-entity, however, remained in cleveland. formally this was by the agreement between the city and th nfl that the colors and name would remain in the city, but despite the 4(?) year absence of the team-as-business/sports-institution the -larger- team never left. thus when the browns "returned" to cleveland, they merely fit a new individual unit into the wider complex system.
this brings me back to the red sox. damon, pedro, nomar, bill mueller, (manny) may all leave, the "curse" may be broken, the owners/managers/front-office may act like damn fools pretending they aren't wealthy, there will be tough years (like this coming season?) yet the team-as-emergent-entity will remain. and it is to this larger team that i feel connection, as i am one of the individual units that through my interactions, somehow contributes to this emergence, despite my individual unimportance.

i guess this is just comfort for a bleeding team expressed in a venue that does not need anything resembling careful editing.

*i'll note here that i am appreciating brandon's growing love for his local teams. that is a different argument however.