DADWAGON

(This is the Tantrum, in which Dadwagon’s writers debate one issue over the course of a week. Normally, we try to answer a question, but this week, with the publication of “Are We Winning? Fathers and Sons in the New Golden Age of Baseball,” by Will Leitch, we’re doing something different. For previous Tantrums, click here.)

Despite his feigned attempts at cynicism, you can tell that my steamed colleague Theodore has a Tuesdays with Morrie vision of sports and families. “The next Jewish point guard for the Knicks!” they say each time a Ross child is pushed out into this Earth: a sports tradition handed from father to son with the sort of warm chuckling that reminds you of dens and cardigans.

I don’t think that sports is less important in my family. It’s just that for us I think of sports as a bit more like a genetic disease, more Tay Sachs than Red Auerbach.

And I’m not talking about my father’s ambitions for his sons as professional athletes. That is a story about how pluck and will can be massacred by the realities of genetics. It should be saved for another post, or, if I ever make any money, for therapy.

No, rather, I think that in my family, the way we follow sports transmits a host of characteristics that aren’t generally regarded as favorable. I sense this is the case with a lot of families, at least from my time living in Somerville, Mass., when a trip to Fenway Park meant seeing fathers lead sons in chants of “Jeter is a homo,” even when they were playing the Blue Jays.

In our family, it’s not homophobia or racism or other Boston delights that get passed down. Rather, it’s the strange combination of obsession and fickleness. My father taught me to be a horribly fairweather fan. Take baseball, which happens to be in season. My team is San Francisco, because, well, I lived there some and I am not one to lecture Barry Bonds on drug use. So, they are doing pretty well this year (welcome back, Zito). Which means that neither I, nor, I suspect, my dad, can stop watching them. He has TIVO, I have the MLB 2010 on my iPhone (which streams Jon Miller’s sublime radio broadcasts to me wherever I am in the world). So we both have our ways of catching up on day games, night games, whatever. But I am also ready, if they ever start to lose, to stop listening to the Giants, to write them off as a lost cause and exile them from my life for the rest of the season. My dad is just as twitchy. Literally, if they lose four games in a row, if they fall too far behind the Padres, then I will just start getting psyched for football season, in which the 49ers will likewise be on a very, very short leash.

This could be because my father and I are spoiled. His divorce landed us in San Francisco in the 1980s, when Eddie DeBartolo was using all that money he shook down from used-car dealers or whatever the fuck he was doing in Youngstown, Ohio, to buy a decade of utterly unfair football domination. We used get mad if the 49ers didn’t win by three touchdowns. Even before I moved away from Key West, I won $50 in bets on the playground against the lumpen Miami Dolphin fans, who were so slathered in baby oil and hair gel that they didn’t even realize that the 49ers didn’t even lose preseason scrimmages, much less Super Bowls.

But, not to get as saptastic as Theodore about it, there is an alternate explanation: maybe I just care too much. Losing a big game can tear a little chunk out of me for the rest of the day. A win—someone else doing their job well—can make my current failures a little easier to swallow. Those reactions are strange and fantastical. Cutting a team off for the season—an act of apparent faithlessness that would anger your average Masshole as much as, say, being a called racist and homophobe—might actually just be a protective mechanism, exactly the sort of coping skill that any father would be proud to hand down to his son.

[Tomorrow, Will Leitch himself weighs in.]

So exciting to hear! Old-fashioned baby milk is just so boring and un-processed and natural! Yes, the Los Angeles Times reports Mead Johnson, the maker of Enfamil, has introduced a product for toddlers who are graduating from breast milk or formula to new food, and it’s not just flavored (chocolate OR vanilla). It contains 19.7 grams of sugar per seven-ounce serving.

That’s more than four and a half teaspooons. Almost surely more than you, a significantly larger adult person, put in your coffee, and just slightly less than an equivalent amount of Coca-Cola contains.

Well, if we’re going to go this route as a culture—which is to say, habituating 1-year-olds to something that will give half of them diabetes—I say go all the way. Offer tricked-out flavors, the way Coffee-Mate does. Crème brûlée. Hazelnut. Give out free refills, from the dispenser stations at fast-food outlets and at Dunkin’ Donuts. And most important: Caffeinate it. Those future Starbucks drinkers aren’t just growing on trees.

I just wanted to respond briefly to Nathan’s post from yesterday on whether it was important for a 3-year-old to go to school.

I have no ideas about the long-term educational impact of schooling for toddlers, and truth be told, I don’t really care. Right now, it seems enough to me that JP enjoys school and clearly seems to get something out of it, even if that “something” is only how to play nice (and sometimes not so nice) with the other kiddies.

I also don’t know that I’m interested in the differences, as stated by Nathan, between the “deep educational experience” of universal pre-K and the apparently less-deep experience of daycare. Maybe I’m too shallow to know from that deep, as my (fictional) Uncle Morty always used to say.

But I do know one thing about pre-K that I like a whole lot better than daycare. It’s one of my favorite things in the whole world, beloved of my people, and worshipped by all right-thinking people everywhere.

Know what it is, Nathan?

It’s called The Free, my friend. And me likey. How about you? Or do you prefer to have your children receive their shallow educational experience and pay for it?

Yes, I’m being a dick. But can someone please do some ‘splaining?

(This is the Tantrum, in which Dadwagon’s writers debate one issue over the course of a week. Normally, we try to answer a question, but this week, with the publication of “Are We Winning? Fathers and Sons in the New Golden Age of Baseball,” by Will Leitch, we’re doing something different. For previous Tantrums, click here.)

Every time there is a child (boy or girl) born into my family, all the men make the same joke: “Look at him/her—next Jewish point guard for the New York Knicks!” Put aside the fact that the great majority of my clan stands well under six feet, that none of us has ever played a Division 1 sport let alone gone pro, and that Ernie Grunfeld was a shooting guard (and Bernie King carried his water)—kid is born, and it’s sign ’em up!

See where I’m going with this? I don’t know if it’s important or even necessary to “bond” (whatever that means) with your child over sports, but it certainly is fun … and expected. Does that mean it will happen? Probably in inverse proportion to how much I want it, unfortunately. So far, JP has shown no interest in watching sports, but he loves soccer, swinging (and missing) a wiffle ball bat, badminton (missing on that one, too); I fully expect he will come around on the couch potato aspect of sport.

I feel awfully conventional about all of this, but the fact remains: opiate of the masses, last refuge of the violent and stupid, whatever, I love sports. Always have and always will.

The rest of you may debate the niceties as you see fit.