Brittany S. Frederick is one of eSports' senior writers, specializing in poker and baseball coverage. She comes to eSports after twice trying out for ESPN's "Dream Job" anchoring competition, participating in the College World Series of Poker, and thinking she wanted to be Jim Harbaugh when she grew up. Born and raised in Southern California, Brittany is a sports junkie who enjoys and has played baseball, football, hockey, poker, bowling, and even competitive dodgeball, where she was a university captain. She has a particular affection for the San Diego Padres and Chargers, the Duke Blue Devils, J.J. Redick, Adam Eaton, and the Texas Western (now UTEP) Miners. But her all-time favorite franchise has to be the NFL Total Access Hollywood League's "Tastes Like Chicken," the fantasy team run by actor Paul Rudd.It hasn't been a good year for me to be a hometown fan.
After tonight's loss to the cellar-dwelling Colorado Rockies, the San Diego Padres are now in last place in the National League. They were also tied with Cincinnati for the second-worst record in baseball.
Who has the worst record in baseball? The Seattle Mariners – who just so happened to have swept the Padres before the Rockies came to town. The Padres are now 1-9 in their last 10 games.
It's all somewhat pathetic, really. Just two years ago, the team won back-to-back division titles. Now they can't seem to do much of anything right. The once-stable pitching staff is unreliable, and they've never had offense in the first place. When they scored 15 runs the night before, I thought it was a sign of the apocalypse.
Yet everyone has a story that goes like that in professional sports. Oakland Raiders fans can probably understand where I'm coming from. The Tampa Bay Rays used to be the butt of a lot of jokes until this year. The New York Mets had their miserable season just a few years ago. The Duke University football team went an entire season without ever winning a single game. At some point, every professional sports franchise has probably had a miserable year.
That's what gives me more respect for the rare breed known as the hometown fan.
It's easy to be a fan of a team that's winning. I've never been impressed by the seemingly endless legion of New York Yankees fans or New England Patriots fans, or whoever happens to be on a hot streak at the time. You know the type: you never knew they were even sports fans before, yet they suddenly turn up wearing the hat of the team that just happens to be in contention for the championship.
In 1998, when the Padres had their best season, I suddenly discovered there were a lot more Padres fans. I just shook my head and laughed, because I knew none of these fair-weather fans could understand what the real Friar Faithful had gone through.
That's the sticking point that makes the difference. It takes a real fan to stick with a team when they're so miserable that they seem beyond any sort of redemption. When you see the defeats pile up to the point where you don't even bother to check the scores anymore, it can be a very long and tough season. Yet the real fans hang in there, no matter what. They find their small victories, or their things to laugh at, and they never, ever turn their backs. Even when the Baltimore Orioles were down 20-2 to the Atlanta Braves a few years ago, I just knew there had to be an Oriole fan out there swearing Baltimore could come back and win that game.
Maybe this year I'm that fan. You know what, I'm okay with that. At least I know I'm not alone.
Ineffective workplace conduct policies, part 1
Everyone and their brother seems to have weighed in on the fiasco that is Shawn Chacon and the Houston Astros' front office. Let me make a simple position clear: everyone loses.
The only people that are going to know what really happened that day are Chacon and Astros general manager Ed Wade. However, if even half of what supposedly happened is true, both of them are idiots.
Chacon should know better than to physically attack the man who signs his paychecks, no matter what he said. Violence is not an acceptable solution to any confrontation. And Wade – who has a known bad reputation from his time in Philadelphia – should know better than to speak that way to a player, regardless of circumstances. Both of them acted like children.
Unfortunately, because one is the GM and one is just a player, only one of them has been disciplined. I hope Major League Baseball looks into this situation and makes sure that Ed Wade doesn't get off scott-free either.
Ineffective workplace conduct policies, part 2
Mark McGwire wants to come back to baseball – as a hitting coach.
There's no denying that Big Mac was a good hitter. The eternal question, however, is how much of that was due to his use of illegal substances. Most of us don't see the McGwire who took baseball by storm in the summer of 1998. We see the one who got clammed up in front of Congress. That's the more recent one. That's McGwire un-juiced.
After all this talk about how steroids are destroying the game and wanting to hold people to a tougher standard, it would be somewhat hypocritical to let an admitted andro user like McGwire back into baseball without first holding him under a tough microscope and making sure the entire situation is aired and properly resolved. It would be wrong to just welcome him back and pretend that everything is okay.
McGwire captured our imagination with his record season in '98 … and then crushed those good memories. He shouldn't be given his welcome back party just yet.
Random ruminations
Does anyone else think that mustache is a very bad look on Jason Giambi?