However, by the time baby boomers reached middle-age, economics had taken on an outsized role in shaping the cultural relevance of collecting. The cards of the 1950s and ’60s, based largely on their original use as disposable playthings, became scarce, fetishized objects and grew in value at fantastic rates. Squares of cardboards bought for pennies in 1952 became multi-thousand dollar status symbols by the mid-1980s. As Bloom notes, this increase in value played a crucial part in making the return to youthful, pre-pubescent hobbies socially acceptable for a generation moving towards the peak of its social, cultural and economic power. The impressive price tag of a Mickey Mantle rookie served as economic cover for adults wishing to reengage with a child’s activity.

Unfortunately for those of us born a generation later with aspiration of living the good life off the profits from our collections of ’80s and ’90s cards, things have not worked out the same way. Exactly because everyone thought they would become valuable (and thus no one threw them away), virtually every baseball card produced from the late-70s to mid-90s is worthless. The few that aren’t maintain relatively modest values and, as such obvious exceptions, only serve to emphasize the fact that our painstakingly curated boxes and binders of cards are more useful as kindling for fire than in economic exchange. But, yet, for many Gen Xers and Yers, this has done little to diminish the yearning to return to the pleasures of a past free from work deadlines or romantic desires.

The Internet is now home to thousands of blogs dedicated to collecting but, in a significant turn, relatively few focus on baseball cards in economic terms. Some of the most powerful and culturally relevant sites, in fact, offer entirely new conceptions of ownership or eschew cards as commodities altogether. The first such site, and still one of the most popular, is Ben Henry’s The Baseball Card Blog. Started in 2006 when a Google search for “baseball cards” brought little beyond eBay results, The Baseball Card Blog began with a scanner and closet or two full of cards hardly worth their weight in cardboard. Whereas so many hobby magazines and books are dedicated to objects people dream about owning, The Baseball Card Blog revels in items that most collectors consider burdensome chaff. Nonetheless, the site quickly found an audience both among card enthusiasts and the mainstream press, making appearances in Entertainment Weekly and Bill Simmons’ ESPN column.

Most posts on the site consist of an image of a card that is owned by hundreds of thousands of people and available for pennies, alongside a few paragraphs of ironic, occasionally nostalgic comedy. In employing this approach, The Baseball Card Blog exchanges conventional forms of ownership for one that emphasizes the importance of creativity in cultural practice.

The site not only recasts objects of the past through the reframing capacities of new technologies; it also quite literally recreates the past, taking denigrated bits and pieces of 1980s culture and refashioning them into items even rarer than a 1952 Willie Mays. The Baseball Card Blog produces cards of which zero (actual) copies exist.

Site creator Ben Henry and artist Travis “PunkRockPaint” Peterson have collaborated on a variety of projects in which they take iconic card templates from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s and adapt them. Some are simply baseball cards that don’t exist, but would be fun to have if they did. Others embrace what scholar Henry Jenkins describes as the nomadic nature of fans, taking the forms of old baseball cards and infusing them with other elements of childhood play ranging from Super Mario Bros. to The Muppets to Star Wars.

The impulses behind these projects, I argue, are rather similar to those described by Bloom in his discussion of the baseball card boom of the 1980s. Now blessed with economic resources (in time and technology, if not necessarily cash) and burdened with the realities of adult life, there is a strong desire among many children of the 1980s not only to reengage in childhood play, but also to assert control and ownership of it. This is not, of course, an act of true resistance to a corporate-run industry. But it is, nonetheless, an excellent example of how creativity can serve as a satisfying replacement for traditional economic incentives if we only allow it to.

Bill James did not invent the analytic study of baseball. He did, however, introduce sports fandom to the key principles of what is now known as SABRmetrics, a half-acronym inspired by the Society for American Baseball Research. And if you read through James’ early work from the 1980s, one clear intellectual project emerges: the destruction of dogma. James wanted to show that the insiders who thought they knew baseball best were handicapped by decades of collective “wisdom.”

For example, everyone knows that Runs Batted In (RBI) are a key measure of a player’s offensive ability. The only problem, James showed through mathematically informed analysis, is that it really isn’t. The statistic, it turns out, is highly contextual and if you pick your players based primarily on their RBI totals, things could go wrong in a hurry. The point of it all was to let reason and evidence lead the way. Baseball’s lore was often valuable, both for its authentic insights and its seemingly endless supply of straw men for sabrmetricians to tilt at on weekends. Dogma, however, needed to go.

Bill James is still around but, as is the case with all developing technologies, baseball analysis has moved too fast for any one person to stay on top of it all. Now the Internet is littered with people doing studies of all sorts, ranging from intense video analysis of every pitch to obscure simulations of bygone seasons.

But, according to Kevin Goldstein, perhaps not all of this change has been for the better. Yes, more people are doing, or at least following, advanced baseball analysis. But they have, as Goldstein implies in the interview below, forgotten their aims (to learn the truth about the game of baseball) and redoubled their efforts (to show that baseball insiders are generally wrong).

Goldstein is particularly attuned to this situation. His primary employer, Baseball Prospectus, is the best-known proponent of the statistical study of baseball. Most of his colleagues spend their days pouring over equations. But Goldstein studies and writes about prospects. He needs to give informed opinions on 18-year-old athletes from rural high schools whose statistics, as you can surely imagine, only tell part of the story. So Goldstein, much to the horror of the more orthodox sabrmetricians, doesn’t just look at stats. He also calls insiders–exactly the sorts of people whose persistent wrongness gives the sabrmetric community its raison d’être.

On episode 93 of his popular podcast Up and In: The Baseball Prospectus Podcast, Goldstein bemoaned the current state baseball analysis–the rant starts at 24:45 and is worth those who study fandom of all sorts. In the wake of the podcast, we exchanged a few emails on the subject:

Matt: You are clearly not the old curmudgeonly sportswriter who’s afraid of change. But you don’t seem to love Internet analysis.

Kevin: Well, just because I’m not an old curmudgeonly sportswriter doesn’t mean I’m going to embrace every change that comes about. Look, the Internet is a wonderful thing, and I wouldn’t have this career without it, but while it levels the playing field it also opens the door to a lot of garbage out there. What disturbs me is the amount of dogmatism, where basically the attitude is “I’m here and I know stats and every manager/GM/player is stupid, and here’s why.”

Look, being dogmatic is easy. What’s hard is to see something and say to yourself, “That LOOKS stupid at first glance, and maybe it is. But maybe there is something I don’t understand.” To look for that takes effort. It might even take talking to somebody else, which again, forces you to admit that maybe you don’t know everything. I’ve always said that my greatest advantage, one of the reasons this whole thing has worked out for me so damn well is that I’m willing to pick up a telephone with the hope of talking to someone.

Matt: Can you give an example?

Kevin: It happens all the time with everything. Every trade is stupid, every signing is stupid, every tactic is stupid. There’s a team right now and they have a player. Fans of that team want that player in the lineup every day. When he’s not in the lineup, they all scream “stupid stupid stupid.” But you know what? Turns out that team wasn’t playing that player for a reason.  Reporter needed to actually ask someone to get the truth.

Matt: Does the dogma crowd out the good journalism?

Kevin: Well, that’s the thing. Like I said during the little rant on the podcast, maybe I’m the asshole here. I think the signal-to-noise ratio is worse than ever, but people sure seem to like the noise.

Matt: So the Internet democraticizes but it also dogmatizes?

Kevin: Well, it’s two sides of a coin, really. The Internet is great because it levels the playing field. I’m here. I’m successful. I didn’t go to college and I have no journalism background. I was able to learn on the fly (still learning) and get an audience. The Internet is also awful because it levels the playing field and anyone can pretend they are doing what others do. It puts much more pressure on the audience when you think about it. Before, you had just journalists. You had TV and newspapers and those people actually providing the news were already vetted. Now, there’s a sudden onus on the audience to say “hey, who is this person writing this and why should I trust them?” And it’s pretty clear that not enough people are taking the step back to ask that question.

I’ve always been a passionate sports fan, and my dad instilled in me the principle of picking one team per sport to root for and sticking with them for life. I grew up in the Chicago area, so that’s had its upsides (the Bulls) and downsides (the Cubs). Rooting for anyone other than the Chicago Bears in pro football has never been an option I’ve entertained. But by participating in fantasy football, I’d have to mostly root for anyone but the Bears, or more precisely, its individual players.

Our group opted for a computer-generated draft, and when I saw the team assigned to me, I had some pleasant surprises – I got the Bears defense! – and some dismaying ones – I got Michael Vick. I’ve thought back on who is the most detestable athlete I ever rooted for simply because he was on “my team,” and I come up short of Michael Vick with every name. Sammy Sosa went sour, but public awareness of that came largely after he left the Cubs. Dennis Rodman is a creep, but he was more charmingly wacky in his Bulls days. Bears quarterback Jay Cutler frowns excessively, but that’s no crime. So having dog killer Michael Vick on the Mathletes probably put me in my most awkward sports-rooting situation ever.

It was also my oddest experience of fandom ever, because it meshed fandom and anti-fandom. Fantasy league players are matched up against another group member each week to earn the highest point total, which means you end up rooting not just for your players but against the ones yours are matched against. It would be as if you’re invested in Sons of Anarchy but need for Breaking Bad to stink that week for it to truly pay off for you. Or more accurately, you need Charlie Hunnam to fake anger more expertly than Aaron Paul. And, because friends of yours are running those other teams, it’s as if Kurt Sutter is rooting for Vince Gilligan to fail (perhaps a bad example; Sutter might do so). You’re even rooting for players you didn’t start to flop so you don’t regret passing on them, akin to hoping for Julianna Margulies to perform poorly in a Good Wife episode because you didn’t have time to watch it. Of course, this is less like fandom and more like gambling, with the expected stress and alcoholism attached.

So I rooted for the dice to come up Vick, and they mostly did…until he got hurt. I can only assume that the karma of violating my long-held anti-dog killing principles started to reverberate at that point. Halfway through the season, to make the fantasy experience less miserable and more like traditional fandom of rooting for lovable things, I traded for the Chicago Bears’ stellar running back Matt Forte. He promptly forgot how to run fast and then went down with a season-ending injury. He wasn’t alone; across four weeks, I lost five starters to major injuries, including Vick. I started to think I should drop all of my players out of concern for their future ability to frolic with their children after retirement. The final indignity came when I lost a late-season matchup to someone not paying attention and starting a player who wasn’t even suited up. Watching the usually glorious NFL RedZone channel that day was like being poked repeatedly with a sharp stick, every cut to a new sequence of plays reminding me where I went wrong, the ticker a loop of regret.

When all was said and calculated, I actually finished the season among the top points-earners in the Acafantasy group but was relegated to fifth place thanks to matchup losses, so had no trophy to show for it. I felt like Community, ranked high in most critics’ Best lists but unmentioned at the Emmys. (Though I was quite happy that The Perd Hapleys won the group. Ya’ heard?) In the end, I decided that I didn’t like the fan that fantasy football created in me. I rooted against the Bears. I rooted for a dog killer. I rooted against friends. I listened to radio shows that spent hours debating if Beanie Wells should start over BenJarvus Green-Ellis. Next year I’ll just go back to rooting for my Chicago Bears, no fantasy fandom involved. There will still be regrets, and Jay Cutler will frown excessively, but at least I can watch RedZone with contentment again.

On Wednesday, my beloved hometown’s beloved Vancouver Canucks lost the Stanley Cup finals, in Game 7, in their own building, to the Boston Bruins. Vancouver has never won the Cup, despite three trips to the finals.

You’d think that this would make me incredibly depressed, upset, angry, frustrated, or fill in the blank with another “grrrr”-style adjective. A little bit of each, yes, but most of all I feel utter relief. I’ll discuss why shortly, but first, I owe Matt Sienkiewicz, loyal Bostonian, a glowing tribute to his Boston Bruins.

The Canucks were the clear favorites here. Henrik Sedin led the league in scoring in 2009-2010 and was judged its Most Valuable Player, Daniel Sedin led the league in scoring in 2010-2011 and should be judged its Most Valuable Player, Ryan Kesler was one of the best power forwards in the league this season, Roberto Luongo is a phenomenal goalie, and the Canucks topped the league in regular season play with more goals for, the least goals against, the best power play, and the third best penalty kill. When they’re playing at their best, they’re a thing of beauty. But they weren’t at their best. If that sounds like a barbed compliment to the Bruins, I don’t mean to suggest they won merely because Vancouver lost. Because off-paper, the Bruins were clearly the better conditioned. They came into the finals having played the same number of games as did the Canucks, and yet they looked fresh in each game.

The Bruins slaughtered the Canucks. Even in the games they lost, they out-shot the Canucks, often out-hit them, had better special teams, and looked like they could and maybe even should win each game. In the games they won, they out-scored the Canucks as if Vancouver were a Junior A team, and skated around them as if I was on the ice for the Canucks, not millionaires who learned to skate before they learned to walk. Almost every member of the Canucks looked tired and beat up … yet the Bruins had jump in every game, and dominated.

Tim Thomas was, of course, remarkable, and well-deserving of the Conn Smythe trophy for the playoffs’ Most Valuable Player. He allowed his team to get this far, and gave them the confidence to try things in all parts of the ice. Vancouver simply didn’t know what to do with him. Yet I’m not so keen to make this all about Thomas, since the forwards (all Canadians plus one Czech, I have to add. This whole crap about it being the US vs. Canada is silly. If Vancouver won, a Swede would’ve picked up the cup then give it to his brother, another Swede. As is, a Slovak picked it up) were excellent. Marchand skated rings around the Canucks, Recchi looked half his age, Bergeron was always in the right place (damn him!), and the whole team had speed and style.

The Bruins deserved to win, plain and simple.

But back to my relief. Why relief? Well, these playoffs have been really, really hard to watch, and now the anxiety is finally over. Indeed, watching the games hasn’t been fun. Sure, when the Canucks won, I felt happy for about five minutes. But then the anxiety would set in again: will they lose the next one? will they keep their 1-0 lead in this game? will they score in overtime? I could have been enjoying my summer way more if the Canucks lost to the Blackhawks in the first round. That gripping feeling in my chest would’ve gone away over a month ago.

Winning is supposed to feel good, but mostly it was painful. Maybe if the Canucks won each game with 8-1 blowouts like the Bruins were capable of, it could’ve been. But the time between games would still have been horrible. The anxiety that it would all come crashing down was overwhelming.

Which makes me wonder if that’s why so many fans support such awful teams. Though their recent success makes their fans’ whines seem annoying nowadays, for instance, Boston Red Sox fans wear their suffering with so much pride. English soccer fans will often support teams that always get beaten up, and that can hope, at best, to end with a fourth place finish in the third division. But these fans seem to have the answer: support a team that’s bound to mess it up, and you can get on with your life, safe and comfortable in the knowledge that your team will fail. Championship playoffs are way easier and calmer when your team’s absent from them. You can enjoy the sport more by watching teams without biting your nails or worrying about who wins. Maybe, in other words, to be a true sports fan, one needs one’s team to lose and lose a lot?

Indeed, when I look at the Canucks, I still see a team with a really damn good assortment of players, most of whom are locked down contractually for another year (and whose loss in the finals will help the Canucks keep them if they want them) … but this means they might be back in the finals next year. Part of me would love that. But part of me needs another 17 years (the gap since they last made the finals) to recover, and to enjoy the playoffs. So, go Bruins!

Next question:  Had it worked? Had ESPN’s Bill Simmons, champion of all things Boston, succeeded in organizing a series of live fan-chants during the game?  It turned out that he had, at least in part.  Via his twitter account “CelticChants,” Simmons suggested three taunts that the Boston crowd might hurl at the visiting Cavs.  The first one, “New York Knicks! New York Knicks!”, aimed at Lebron James and his aforementioned free agency, had in fact taken hold.   As the superstar took his first free throws, much of the crowd shouted in unison, an act the announcer Mark Breen described as “creative.”  Simmons’ other two suggestions were met with middling results.  But, unquestionably, the first one was a hit.

My reaction to this result is unambiguous. I don’t like it for a gamut of reasons ranging from the aesthetic to the (mildly) philosophical.  For one, it strikes me as kind of lame.  There was a sense of corporate supervision in the suggestions, with the second chant of “Rondo’s Better,” being particularly uninspired.  Yes, I’m somewhat relieved that the previously mentioned idea of yelling “Precious, Precious” at the terribly overweight Shaquille O’Neal didn’t take hold in a Boston crowd whose racial sensitivity is sometimes questionable.  However, to me, if there’s an essence to crowd activity, it’s organicism, or at least home-grownness.  I’m not interested in anything that Robert Iger has potential say in.

Secondly, if the experiment is to see if such a thing can work – if new media can succeed in stirring this brand of collective action – then, well, it’s not a very well controlled inquiry.  Simmons, with access to all the mass audience Disney can muster, isn’t much of a test case.  It reminds me somewhat of Kim Jong-Il heading out to the golf course with an army of assistants to see if the game’s as tough as everyone says.  What do you know, beginner’s luck.  This isn’t the end of the world, but it strikes me as both a blurring of lines and really vain.  I’d feel better if Simmons had skipped the ESPN.com promotion of the idea or, even better, if a true “everyday fan” had given it a shot.

That said, Simmons and his unique power to turn commentary into real life action did bring me a great deal of joy this weekend.  I finally picked up David Halberstam’s The Breaks of the Game, a book that had been out of print for ages and still would be, were it not for Simmons’ repeated recommendations.  It’s a fantastic, truly important sports book that thousands would be missing out on if not for the Sports Guy.  So perhaps I’ll give him a pass on the chant thing. But my weekend certainly brings into sharp relief the power of an Internet star and some of its potential abuses.