Humanity vs. Commodity in Sports

"That option's been eliminated."

I don't know if that's a direct quote, because honestly I was too flabbergasted and revolted to recall exactly what ESPN baseball analyst Peter Gammons had said. But I starkly remember when he said it: only a few hours after pitcher Cory Lidle's plane crashed into a Manhattan high-rise, causing death, destruction and the resurfacing of the most painfully paranoid emotions of every post-9/11 New Yorker.

Gammons was discussing Lidle's career and his sudden demise with a Suit on ESPNEWS, cable's most popular network for those searching for that Toledo/Kent State football score. The Suit was one of those typical ESPN JV players: a hack comedian praying his boom-goes-the-dynamite shtick would one day earn him at best a spot on the weekend SportsCenter and at worst a day filling in for the guy on "Around the Horn" who resembles Andy Pettitte doing a bad Dick Vitale impression.

The Suit asked Gammons a question about Lidle that just stunned me for its awkward stupidity: what does his death mean for the Yankees? Sure, he couched it with something like "I know this might not be the right time, but..." — yet the question was asked, and Gammons answered it, offering thoughts on the Yankees' returning starters, Lidle's status as a soon-to-be free agent at the time of his death, and the possibility that he could have come back to the Bronx.

I paraphrase again: "That option's been eliminated."

We didn't know the name of Lidle's flight instructor yet, but we knew the Yankees' 2007 pitching staff configuration and that they wouldn't have resigned Lidle even if he had not lost his life that afternoon.

Sick, I tell you. Sick.

Is there any consideration given to humanity in times of tragedy? I couldn't help but wonder if ESPN had tossed up a graphic back in July that read: "Gammons Has Brain Aneurysm; 'Baseball Tonight' Studio Show Thrown Into Chaos."

By and large, professional athletes ceased being human beings in the eyes of the sports media and the majority of fans a long time ago. They're commodities — chess pieces moved around the board until they're, as Gammons reminds us, "eliminated." We hear of a tragedy like Lidle's plane crash, and go through the motions: shock, grief, bewilderment, what it means for the sport in question, what it means for the team in question, and then, finally, humor.

Yes, humor. How long did it take before you heard your first Lidle joke this week? I had "it wasn't A-Rod, because A-Rob can't hit anything in the postseason" in my inbox before the sun went down.

But that's what we've become as sports fans. The athletes for whom we care deeply are an elite group of superstars and popular fan favorites. Everyone else is just a chess piece or, in other cases, the enemy. So when we hear about the wide receiver, whose personal life took a turn for the worse, taking an overdose of pills and nearly ending his life, we celebrate it, because he wears the wrong colors and has a big mouth. Not that he's a tragic human being or anything; he's just a chess piece we want to see eliminated.

I'm as guilty of that mindset as anyone. When Trent Green got his head taken off in Week 1 of the NFL season, my first reaction wasn't concern about his well-being or whether he'd ever play again. It was shock and dismay that I had just lost my starting fantasy football quarterback. That reaction is really no different than the reaction of a Chiefs fan or any fan whose starting quarterback takes a fall in the first round of the fight — our first concern isn't his health, but the health of our season.

I speak from experience, as a Chad Pennington-era Jets fan.

But those tragedies, such as they were, happened on the field. I think that separation between what happens in the stadium or the arena and what happens in the "real world" has been blurred and, in effect, has blurred our moral clarity. We've seen incidents during games that would have landed the offending parties in front of a judge if had instead happened outside of a bar: a boot to the fact, a punch in the back of the head, or a brawl in the stands. But these athletes never end up in jail; hell, they hardly do when it does happen outside of a bar.

Injuries are treated the same way. If Green has suffered the same injury in a car crash as he did on the field, would our reaction have been any different? Outside of an acknowledgment of bad luck, our first thoughts would have still been centered on what it meant for the Chiefs or for a fantasy football roster. That's just who we are.

This isn't some soapbox screed about how our soulless sports fan culture needs to change its wicked ways. I'm not one of these sports columnists who shame their readers for displaying appalling morals and then next week publish something like "20 Reasons Why T.O. is a Scumbag."

No, I'm a realist. Whether it's due to the media, the commercialization, the economics or simply the coarsening of our society, I realize that we all have a strange disconnect with celebrity and tragedy, humanity and commodity.

And I realize that when Gammons was talking about what the Yankees' rotation would look like after Cory Lidle's death, I was thinking about something else: "Ya know, if it had been [Derek] Jeter on that plane, they would have postponed the playoffs for a month..."

Sick, I tell you. Sick.

Greg Wyshynski is the Features Editor for SportsFan Magazine in Washington, DC, and the Senior Sports Editor for The Connection Newspapers of Northern Virginia. His book is "Glow Pucks and 10-Cent Beer: The 101 Worst Ideas in Sports History." His columns appear every Saturday on Sports Central. You can e-mail Greg at [email protected].