Media Back to reality (Part 1)

With the lazy days of summer upon us, the reality TV season (for new episodes and reruns alike) will once again dominate network programming (along with game shows). As NBC trots out the latest attempt at a reality TV show, "Fear Factor," the passion for such television is in the spotlight one more time --that's one time too many for sports fans like me.

Simply put, in the effort to "keep it real," these networks are really missing the boat.

As a member of the young white male couch potato establishment, I need to stick up for what I do -- watching sports -- while also striking a blow for improving our cultural literacy and awareness.

Yes, the act of watching games, games and more games is quite fun, and can be dismissed as just that -- idle, male-bonding fun. But since sports will always be worshipped in our culture, we might as well learn to derive some meaningful lessons while we watch.

Live sporting events, not "Survivor" or even the Super Bowl itself (which is more authentically a stage for parties and commercialism in our culture than it is a game), represent the best of reality TV -- television that is as enriching as it is dramatically superior.

Though its playoff games are lasting longer than ever in this day and age, baseball in October -- ironically, during the beginning of the new TV season -- provides more genuinely wrenching tension and drama, built slowly but deliciously around each individual pitch, than anything else on the small screen. To go back a bit, Kirk Gibson's winning home run in game one of the 1988 World Series was a real-life version of "The Natural." The script that was naturally written by the force of human events was greater than anything any TV writer could conceive.

This is how it normally is with baseball. The Subway Series from the fall of 2000 wasn't a string of "Sopranos" episodes with plot lines that were known (or at least advertised) in advance. No, the Mets and Yankees, along with every New Yorker, didn't -- couldn't -- know that all five games would come down to the last pitch with the outcome in doubt.

For Met fans still reeling from the loss to the Bombers (as someone who rooted for the Cubs and Cardinals in my very early youth, and who stands as one of the three Expos fans left in the United States today, I always love to stick it to Mets fans), let me bring up another painful memory: the 1999 National League Championship Series, when the Mets fell to the Atlanta Braves. The fifth and sixth games of that series were two of the most incredible dramas I have ever seen, certainly the best pair of consecutive playoff games in any one series I've watched on the tube.

Game five featured a remarkable pitching duel that ended with the Braves taking the lead in the top of the 15th, only to see the Mets' Robin Ventura hit a game-winning grand slam in the bottom half of the inning... and get mobbed my teammates after touching first base. Game six featured Met comebacks from 5-0 and 7-3 deficits, only to see the Braves comeback from single-run deficits in the eighth and tenth innings before winning in the 11th. The sudden plot twists in these games were vastly superior to "The Practice," and the thrilling afterglow of victory dwarfed any celebration from the strategy room of "The West Wing."