Rooting for Laundry

I'm going to be taking a little time off the column; hiatuses ("hiati"?) are good for the health and probably give time to accumulate a few topics for future columns.  Plus, I actually work for a living, and every once in a while it gets more than a little busy -- particularly in the last couple months of the fiscal year.

So, laundry.

Baseball, as is often said, is not without its charms.  OK, it hasn't been said here, but people do say it.  And among its many charms is the, well, "charming" patois spoken by its practitioners in the major leagues.

In the major-league dugout, for example, "moss" is not the stuff on the side of trees; it is what grows on the heads of humans.  "Moss" is a player's hair, much like a player's stomach is referred to as a "boiler."  When you have a stomach ache, which is conveyed to the press as "intestinal turmoil", the player is said to have "the bad boiler."

Note the definite article there, which appears superfluous, but is used regardless, in the same way as non-baseball players will refer to hyperuricemic inflammatory arthritis as "the gout", perhaps because of the awkward construction if you were to say "He's got gout."

Arms are "hose" and shoes are "kicks."  And when the "hose" tosses a good fastball, it's referred to as "cheese."  So, laundry.

You root for the team that you, well, root for, for whatever reason that may be.  But the roster of that team is likely to have 45-50 guys play for it in a typical season, even though only 25 can be on the active major-league roster at any one time (OK, 26 on those rare doubleheader days, the league allows teams to add one player for just that day).

So you find yourself rooting for whomever happens to be wearing the uniform on a given day, of course, but when you think about it, it's the uniform as much as the player.  The players move too much, too few are with their teams and stay long enough for you to get excited about them.  And that is called "rooting for the laundry."  Or against.

Makes sense.  I mean, I could really like a player on some team, particularly the Red Sox, for whom I root.  Could be a great guy, donates time to charity, all-American type.  Or all Dominican, that's fine too, Papi.  But ... put the guy in the wrong laundry -- and by "wrong laundry", I'm talking about the Yankees -- and he becomes a completely despicable person, scum of the earth, worst of the worst.  It's the uniform that matters.

Now, that's true for me even though I know all the players on the Red Sox major-league (25-man) roster and am pretty familiar with most of the top prospects in the minors.  Imagine if I rooted, but didn't really follow, the team.

For example, well, there's football.  Or college basketball.  I really think I recall that North Carolina won the NCAA basketball tournament last year, but I'm not sure.  You see, the finals game didn't start until almost bedtime, and the first half of a basketball game is irrelevant anyway most of the time.

The point, of course, is that I went to Carolina for med school, and they are the college team I most want to win.  You know how many current Tar Heel players I can name?  Zero.  I can't even get close to naming one.  They don't stay in school more than a year or two, so you can't really root for players.  Say it with me -- you root for the laundry.

I actually have some of that laundry, a Red Sox home jersey that I bought at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY on a trip in 1981.  It still fits, by the way.  And it's the laundry I still root for, even if I didn't grow up anywhere near there.


I just don't think it's right.  I think that you should root for the team and the player on it, and be promised a relatively long association between that team and, at least, its better players.  But you end up rooting for laundry, because that's the constant.

Can you tell I need a little break?

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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