Nathaniel Shockey

The common assumption is that having children puts everything else in a different, more truthful perspective. Now that I have some actual experience with the issue, I attribute this new perspective to parents who can’t tell the difference between being awake and being asleep.

Being a parent is awesome. I love coming home to see my family. I love holding my little boy. I love playing the piano for him to help him calm down. I love imagining what he’s thinking, or at least making up stuff for comedic value. And I also love watching sports with him in my lap.

A great parenting tool.

While I’m a tad reluctant to begin indoctrinating him with my political opinions, I have no reservations about promptly engaging him with professional sports. As he was born on a Saturday, we were watching Monday Night Football two days later, and the next week. I explained to him that Brett Favre, while acting like a baby  (I also explained to him that this expression held no real meaning) in his previous four offseasons is still a legendary quarterback enjoying a career year and he deserves our respect.

We’ve even sat on the couch during several Phillies playoff games – he slept, I watched – which makes celebrating ninth-inning comebacks a bit more challenging. Try yelling, “YES, YES, YES, YES!” so quietly a baby won’t wake up. Despite receiving a San Francisco Giants uniform in his size, I’m pretty sure I’ll have very little trouble turning him into a Philadelphia sports fan. After all, of the many concerns about raising a child in this whacky state, perhaps at the top of the list is that he never learns how to appropriately root for a franchise. This is one aspect of parenting I take deathly seriously.

As I was well-prepared for this challenge, I used the Dodgers-Phillies NLCS as an opportunity to explain the difference between sports fans and a group of people who have nothing better to do on a given night.

At some point in both of the first two games in Los Angeles, the fans mustered themselves to a collective chant of a fairly impressive two-word sentence: Phillies suck. I explained to my son that achieving any sorts of chant in which an entire stadium participates without the help of a huge screen in the outfield or loud speakers is both impressive and a valuable tool in sports. But you can’t just chant anything. “Phillies suck,” for example, is about as clever as mayonnaise.

In game 5, however, Phillies fans chanted “Take a shower,” which was in response to the shower Manny Ramirez apparently was taking as his team was being handed a loss in the bottom of the ninth inning the previous night. Clearly, this was as superior to the Dodger fans’ chant as Ryan Howard is to Manny Ramirez. It was original, witty, edgy, and well-executed. Real fans do better than “(fill in the blank) suck.”

“You see, son,” I explained, “I’m not explaining the superiority of Phillies fans so that you’ll look down on all other fans. There are plenty of good sports fans out there who root for franchises outside of Philadelphia. Just not in L.A.”

And for this reason, my son and I concluded that the overwhelming desire for a Dodgers-Yankees Series was entirely misled. Baseball needs a championship series played in L.A. like it needs instant replay. It may seem like a good idea, but in reality, it’s just going to set the game back about thirty years.

Who knows? Maybe my son won’t be as interested in professional sports as his father. But on the off chance that he is, I’d be remiss if I didn’t give him every opportunity to squeeze as much fun out of them as I do.

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