It’s going to be a relatively short edition this week, as Brad is on vacation in the non-contiguous United States and we’re just getting through our post-World Cup hangover. So, no Smash or Pass or Wide World of Obscure Sports this week, but we do offer you a bit of obscure sporting that you can follow in the context of one of America’s most popular pastimes: finding something to do when your team is terrible.
In this space, we try to focus almost entirely on sports that, while you may have heard of them, neither you or anyone you really know (other than us!) watches or follows with any kind of regularity. In our initial missive/mission statement, we discussed — in what some might call excruciating detail — what exactly constituted obscurity, especially in the context of sports.
For us, it usually means one of two things: either the sport is not well known by most Americans1 or the organization is not closely followed by the same group. The first bit is probably obvious to most of our subscribers who have read more words on darts and lacrosse here than the rest of the lives combined.
But it’s the second bit that “allows”2 us a ton more creative freedom to cover things that we find interesting without worrying about how it fits into our guiding ethos. It is, essentially, how we justify writing about things like soccer (outside of the big five of the Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A and Ligue 1, and, because we’re in the US3, the MLS) or cricket, which is the second most popular4 sport in the world despite having almost no meaningful traction in the US5.
And it’s what we’re going to use an excuse to talk about Major League Baseball.
More specifically, a very silly, but interesting concept that friend of the program (and yr correspondent) Dylan Roth — of podcasts “Are You Afraid of the Dark Universe” and “The Pod Universe”, as well as the band No Jersey6 — came up with called The Northeast Corridor Cup.
Contested between Major League Baseball teams based out of cities7 (Baltimore, Boston, New York City, Philadelphia and Washington) on the “Acela” or Northeast Corridor lines of Amtrak, the somewhat kayfabed origins of the competition go all the way back to 1917 when the train line was first established8. It’s currently held by the New York Mets after taking their last series from the reigning lineal titleholders, the Phillies, and (as Dylan's explains in the video) puts them just a few series away from (metaphorically) carrying the cup into the offseason as NECC champions.
Though, while the idea of the cup itself is entirely made up, everything it’s based off of — from the records (painstakingly compiled by Dylan) to the rivalries and genuine animosity between the teams/fanbases involved — is very real. And it’s the space in between those two where following “side quests” in sports the most interesting, at least to me. Like wrestling, this kind of augmented reality storytelling (as opposed to alternative history conjecture) is just as much about engaging with what you are seeing as it about embracing the larger narratives surrounding what you are watching.
Which, for most Mets fans (like Dylan) what they have been seeing this season has been shitty baseball. Like, “first third of Major League” levels of shitty. But being able to watch games while thinking about little things like this — straddling the line between the objective truth of the box score and the somewhat manufactured lore of an semi-imagined historical context for the game — is basically the same thing that almost every fan goes through at the beginning of every season:
That this is the year when we will finally be able to break away from the shackles of expectations and the anticipation of impending disappointment that can come in the dog days of summer. That all the games the team play will matter, if not even to the people involved, at least to us.
Because, ultimately, that’s what sports are about: a collective unconscious decision often made by millions of people to push for and with a group of players you don’t know and will likely never meet towards a common goal that will provide a tangible reward for ethereal connection between us and the teams we follow.
And sometimes that leads us to a World Series title, while others, it’s just enjoying being the best team in a world of your own making.
1 After all, we are “obscure sports *america*” and not “obscure sports worldwide”, because every sport is someone’s favorite sport, but those people don’t often live in the US.
2 While we don’t think anything bad would happen if we started covering the NFL or whatever, it would make us stand out less in your inbox/on your timeline, as there are so many people already doing that (and presumably better, or at least with more experience, than us).
3 Also, because Brad genuinely hates the league and the people who run it with a deep passion that surprises even me.
4 Which is something we mention fairly often, and also, on a personal level, find kind of staggering. While it’s not the most popular sport basically anywhere outside of Southeast Asia and certain parts of the Caribbean, it’s often the second most popular sport in sports mad countries like South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and England. And basically no one in America cares about it in any kind of meaningful way unless they grew up in one of these areas.
5 The third largest country in the world by population, behind both India (the new number 1!) and China by almost a billion, ahead of Indonesia by roughly 70 million.
6 A band from New York
7 But only when they are actually playing in those cities.
8 And many of the teams presumably took the train on it to shuttle between the cities long before the invention of jet airplanes.