I went to buy Yankee tickets last weekend. Some friends and I are headed out to NYC this summer to see the new ballparks there. The thinking was that if we didn’t jump on day one, we’d be at the mercy of the scalpers. Lo and behold, what showed up when I asked the computer for five “best available” seats but a quint of prime ducats in the lower deck. Booya . . . no. Face prices on these babies were $2,600. A ticket. No, I didn’t leave a decimal out. (Anything under $50 was sold out, natch.)

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Throughout the course of this year, I have become more and more aware of the immense amounts of time my peers spend on the road transporting their kids to sports leagues and games. The more I learn, the more appalled I am.

—One colleague transports her teenager to Blaine from south Minneapolis several days a week for lacrosse.
—Another participates in three concurrent basketball leagues for their pre-adolescent, with games and practices across the south metro.
—Another spends several evenings a week and most summer weekends at baseball practices and tourneys from Farmington to Forest Lake.

At one time, I envied these one-income families (virtually none of the parents that sign up for this rat race have two full-time careers) for all the additional time they had to be together on weekends. No spending half the weekend running errands and paying bills, etc. But I’m not so sure now.

Many of these folks routinely drive 200 miles or more a week transporting kids to sporting events. In an era of $4/gallon gas, the cost is astronomical. There are no “family Sundays” etc. Just a relentless schedule of practices and games.

Last spring, my son asked if he could play in a youth baseball league all spring and summer (He already played park district ball twice a week, but the season was only two months long.). He would have to attend practices and games two weeknights at 5 p.m. all over the metro area. Weekends would feature tournaments requiring two days of attendance at a ball field, often in the exurbs.

We said no. We could not leave work at 3:30 p.m. to have him in Lakeville by 5 p.m., and we simply would not spend so many hours of our evenings and weekends away. It would shortchange his sister and turn our remaining lives into a constant race of catching up with everything we were neglecting while we were sitting around watching him practice or play or sit. (The ironic upshot—the neighborhood kids he had plenty of time to play pickup ball with weren’t around all summer—they were in Farmington playing in weekend-long tournaments.)

As a guilt-induced token, our son is playing “fall ball,” five Sundays of baseball all over the metro, consuming up to eight hours of the weekend, more if there are Saturday evening practices. I’m still appalled.

I’m appalled by the waste of gas and carbon emissions, ostensibly by people who care about the environment. I’m shocked that these leagues and circuits have not been optimized to conserve fuel and minimize driving. I’m amazed that so many of my peers check their values at the door when it comes to pleasing their kids. And I’m saddened that so many of my peers seem to think their children are incapable of respecting the fact that there is more out there in the world than their obsessive schedule of sports. That their siblings and parents have the right to time of their own, interests of their own.

“I know it’s crazy,” said one parent to me about their time on the road each week. “But I can’t bear to say no to him because he loves it.”

Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m shortchanging my children. But I wonder what kind of kids we are creating when we don’t expect them to relate to or recognize needs other than their own and through our actions subvert the very values we say we maintain merely to keep them smiling?

One of the more common refrains of sports fans, especially those who call into Sunday morning radio shows, is that the local sports media is cynical, negative, don’t ever see the glass as half full. Pat Reusse, even to my jaded ears, wears on me with his utter disdain for so many sports figures, historical and current.

Then something reminds me why he’s right.

If you had been online last night at approximately midnight, you would have realized that long after the NBA draft ended, the Timberwolves pulled off a huge trade, sending its highly regarded number three pick, OJ Mayo, to Memphis for the less-than-sure-thing Kevin Love. A passel of other players changed hands as well.

I’m not going to evaluate the merits of the trade, look here for that, and here’s some trenchant background.

After I read the news on the Star Tribune’s website, I scanned the rest of the sports articles, and my jaw dropped. Under Sid Hartman’s name were these words, “Wolves wanted Mayo all along”. Clearly the sports legend had written his column before the midnight trade. Under Jim Souhan’s byline: “Wolves made the right choice [Mayo]”.

Hartman’s column, now revised with the headline “Wolves liked Mayo and Love”, was particularly embarrassing. “There was never any doubt,” he wrote. “Wolves assistant general manager Fred Hoiberg verified Thursday night that Mayo was their choice all along. Hoiberg said the Wolves never came close to making a trade. The truth of the matter is they think so much of Mayo that they wanted him on the team.”

“Our people thought that Mayo had far more upside than Love,” Wolves owner Glen Taylor told Sid.

Later in the column, team boss Kevin McHale told Sid that the Wolves “couldn’t be happier” guard Greg Buckner is under contract, as he’s a role model and teacher. “He is a world-class kid.” Buckner was traded to Memphis along with Mayo.

I am not here to bury Sid or Souhan for that matter. And I’m sure the Wolves, at Friday’s press conference, will tell the media the trade came up out of the blue, the team didn’t expect it, and it only traded Mayo because it was able to acquire other key players and unload stiffs. And that may be partly true, but it’s also partly b.s.

The team has deservedly taken a lot of heat over the years for bad basketball and poor management decision-making. Pat Reusse laid it on the line earlier this week. It is certainly entitled to hate the local press and mislead them on draft night (though when you speak to the press, you are speaking to your fans, I’d remind them).

But Sid is a different story. He may not always support you, but he is the only sportswriter in town that always gives management the benefit of the doubt—the opportunity to spin disingenuous drivel in the name of authoritative source material—and a guy who never takes a cheap shot.

The Wolves knew it was dangling Mayo, knew something might be brewing, and knew it valued Love almost as much as Mayo. They all lied. Someone owed it to at least Sid to whisper, “Hey, more may happen tonight, don’t run those quotes until you check with me” or something to that effect. It happens all the time.

Instead, Taylor, Hoiberg, and McHale demeaned themselves and the entire Wolves organization by their disingenuousness and burned the one local scribe who always roots for their success.

Classless.

I rarely indulge my interest in sports in this space, knowing that this site’s readership is skewed heavily female and the interest in the topic is inevitably limited. I will make an exception because I’d like to clue as many of you who care into the analysis of longtime Twins blogger Aaron Gleeman, now available on Minn-Post.com.

Gleeman’s statistically based (but not number-obsessing) take on Minn-Post is a particularly welcome middle ground for those of us fans who care enough to want the why, but can’t digest tables of stats and newly invented acronyms every day.

Gleeman’s posts, which I have only regularly perused this year (I lumped him in with many of the homer-bloggers who engage in weepy baseball swoons and see Babe Ruth and Bob Gibson in every fresh-faced minor league player at Fort Myers), recently included a debunking of the organization’s approach to hitting and its image as a defensive juggernaut. I find him lacking in caution about the potential of minor leaguers (a chronic disease in this town, our goofy preoccupation with “the kids”), but otherwise offering a nice balance between skepticism and enthusiasm, with little evidence of stenography.

And we need more Gleemans. Unlike the Vikings, T-Wolves, Gophers, and Wild, who are aggressively and thoroughly dissected by the Star Tribune, the newspaper’s baseball coverage is extraordinarily thin. Joe Christensen and LaVelle E. Neal are nice guys, but their work is workmanlike at best, and exceedingly cautious.

Perhaps the mental strain of, and access issues presented by, having to be around players and management for nearly 200 games from February to September (October is not in the cards this year, trust me) has made them gun-shy around an organization that can be sensitive, I hear. After all, this is a newspaper that often values access over insight.

The duo’s coverage is characterized by frequent bursts of optimistic hype seemingly generated by the organization’s front office, an inability to deliver powerful statistical analysis, and an over-reliance on hoary clichés about the Twins’ pluck. Columnist Pat Reusse is the only consistently skeptical voice on baseball, so his recent shot at sports bloggers seems particularly ironic. (To be fair, Reusse has taken several thinly veiled pokes at Neal and Christensen this season. I suspect he might harbor some of my concerns.)

My mantra is that baseball teams with the most loyal and deep fan bases are those whose fans and media expect the most and can be the hardest on their teams. It’s a sign of success, really, because people care deeply. It would be nice if the Strib could employ the kind of rigor with which it approaches football and hockey in its baseball coverage. It has the inches, but does it have the players?

(Disclosure: This website’s parent company publishes the Twins Magazine under contract to the Twins.)

The tragic prosecution of Anthony Klaseus, who killed his own eight-year-old son, mistaking him for a turkey while on a hunt, reminded me how much distaste I have for our state’s “great” hunting tradition, the hypocrisy of “sportsmen,” and the power their interests wield.

Anthony Klaseus deserves to be prosecuted. He took his child’s life under the rubric of male bonding and family traditions. He didn’t intend to. But he loved nature, and pot, and beer, and guns.

I spent a weekend a long time ago researching a story about a family of hunters at their deer shack in northwestern Wisconsin. They were stand-up guys, responsible, affable, and completely disdainful of the louts. But they could never explain the one thing to me that I most wanted to know—why this unequal battle between them and a deer was the linchpin that kept them bonded and steeped in family traditions.

Hunting for them was an excuse to be together, to be challenged, to play. And hunters romanticize it because it is what the men pass down from generation to generation, like baseball in my family. But if I bring a rifle with a telescopic sight to the Metrodome, I’m locked up on terrorism charges.

Explain to me how thousands of guys (mostly) armed with telescopic sights, fake animal urine, camouflaged tree stands, underwater radar, and other advanced weaponry and aids, convince themselves they are engaging in an battle of wits with an animal armed with nothing but its sense of self-preservation?

I’m all in favor of men hunting each other. That’d be a fair fight. I think Gov. Ventura proposed something like that a decade or so ago.

I am stereotyping here, but within every stereotype is an ugly truth. I am suspicious of most hunters’ regard for nature beyond its ability to provide them with prey. Trust me, nature is twice as nice when you’re not worried your buddy thinks you’re a deer.

I support people’s right to hunt; and when they consume what they kill, they’re better than I, who lives off the depravity of the commercial meat industry. But let’s stop kidding ourselves about why people hunt and do away with the romantic fairy stories about hunters and hunting.

So happy fishing opener. Watch out for carp that jump and whack you in the head. I mean, people get hurt.

I am puzzled by the apparent interest in women’s basketball and hockey. Not the interest in playing but in viewing it. I don’t think anyone out there would claim the quality of play is equal to the men’s sport at the same level, whether it’s preps, college, or the pros.

The Star Tribune covers Gopher women’s ball as a sort of Affirmative Action project. It’s so equal to the men’s coverage that you often have to read into the story to figure out which team they’re talking about. Obnoxious.

And we’ve made big local heroes of Lindsay Whalen and Janel McCarville (I could not bring myself to even skim the profile of McCarville we ran in our magazine, not that I’d react any differently to one about Spencer Tollackson, who I’d imagine can outplay Janel.). They now are in the WNBA, I believe. The WNBA is a joke.

Now, this isn’t some sort of misogynist rant. I fully support most of the Title IX stuff and have no objection to men’s athletics profits funding women’s at the U, for example. I just don’t understand why any of the rest of us are supposed to care about the games. For the same reason I don’t understand why people claim to care about the St. Paul Saints.

The Saints are a yuppie social club, by and large. And that’s fine, and no one who goes to their games claims otherwise. Throughout the years, media coverage of them has eroded as it has become clear that’s the case. But that’s not the situation with women’s athletics.

If I am going to spend my dollars and time watching athletic competition, I want to watch the best. College sports makes my cut because they play a more exciting, less predictable brand of football and basketball than the pros. But watching the Gopher men’s b-ballers collapse to Indiana this week reinforced how hard it is to watch and care about demonstrably inferior talent week in, week out.

I’ve listened to WCCO’s Don Shelby go on and on about women’s ball. I know he has daughters and did some coaching. I will go watch my daughter play prep or college sports, if that’s her thing. And I understand why other people do the same. I have friends who insist the standard of play in women’s volleyball is equal to men’s, and they have season tickets to see the UC Berkeley team play.

But I am wondering if the increasing media attention and interest in women’s ball is a function of the vast stretches of time cable TV has to fill and the great liberal, egalitarian underpinnings of the print media and academia. Cause it ain’t about the ball.

A friend of mine took his kids and mine to a Gopher women’s hockey game. “Why?” I asked him. “It wasn’t bad,” he replied. My point exactly.

There, I said it. And on a commercially driven website. I am using the Super Bowl to advance the fortunes of my employer. It’s only minutes before we hear from the lawyers, I’m sure. Cease, and desist.

As we approach the game this weekend, I am more and more aware of the gradual replacement of the name “Super Bowl” in our culture with the phrase “The Big Game.” It’s long been rife in advertising, ever since the NFL started pursuing businesses trying to make money off its event without becoming a paid sponsor.

Want to advertise your salsa’s utility for Super Bowl parties? Like to promote a plasma TV as just perfect for watching the Super Bowl? Can’t do it anymore if you don’t want to pay the NFL. So instead, marketers call it The Big Game. Everyone knows what they’re talking about, and the greedy NFL and its coterie of billionaire owners, sour coaches, and recidivist players gets nada. Nice.

But have you noticed the phrase “The Big Game” showing up in casual conversation? I was sitting at a restaurant’s bar the other day, and the guy next to me was talking about “The Big Game.” “The Super Bowl, you mean?” I said.

“Well, yeah, but we’re not supposed to call it that,” he said.

Then on the Today Show, Matt Lauer introduces a cooking segment of chicken legs that might be suitable for halftime munching, and he says “The Big Game.” Cut to the TV news—“big game.” Newspaper headlines—“Big Game.”

What’s going on? As best as I understand the law, as long as you’re not using the term Super Bowl to promote a product that is separate from the Super Bowl, you owe the NFL nothing. TV anchors can say it. Guys at restaurants can say it. Even Hillary Clinton can say it. (Bill can’t.)

Much the same situation exists with the upcoming Oscars. The “Academy” maintains very tight control of its trademark and pursues anyone who uses it to promote a party, prix fixe menu, plasma TV sale. Problem is, there’s no real catchy generic label for the Academy Award.

Unless you’ve sat through one end to end. Can we all agree on “The Big Snooze®©™?”

Kinda catchy. And no lawsuits.

I like to think of myself as not easily suckered. I am repelled by hype and won’t easily board the bandwagon. Nonetheless, by mid-December, I was comfortably ensconced aboard the Vikings train. I shelled out $330 for four tickets to last Sunday’s portentous classic against the Redskins.

I blame the Star Tribune sports section for most of this. I mean, three weeks ago, my view of this team was that it had a third-rate quarterback with major skill-set deficiencies and had defeated only one good opponent all season. Adrian Peterson seemed promising, but he was so soundly routed by the 49ers and Bears (second game) that I wondered if it might be too soon to anoint him as the second coming of Walter Payton.

But I trusted the experts. My football-preoccupied colleague, Steve Marsh, told me this team was the real thing. I was impressed with the intensity of his belief after he became so agitated at images of Peterson that he loudly yelled, “Go! Yeah!” in the bar at Morton’s—while watching a three-day-old replay on a rerun of SportsCenter.

And the Strib? What a disappointment! I’ve long accepted the fact that La Velle Neal and Joe Christensen simply will not second-guess anything the Twins do. If I want a contrarian’s take, I know it’s got to come from Reusse or Jim Souhan. But the paper’s Vikes coverage has long seemed more balanced and emotionally detached—with a realistic view of the team, its players, and management.

But as the Vikings started their streak against the bad teams and A. P. amassed yardage, the paper changed its tune. The skeptics became acolytes. Even Reusse sold me a bill of goods. This town wants to love these guys so much that we need to be thrown just a crumb or two by the Vikes, and we swoon.

Back to Sunday . . . the Vikes dropped a big Christmas turd on the fans and decided the brass ring didn’t much matter to them. I trudged through blocks of snow and wind, pushed through the vast human sandwich that is the Metrodome concourse, and sat down to watch as my big-ticket purchase turned into the dumbest money I’ve spent all year. (The price of four upper-deck seats came to half a Twins Flex 40 season ticket, I’d note.)

Trust me when I say that there is nothing about the Metrodome that is comfortable or easy when it is packed with 60,000 anything, and when it’s 60,000 addled Vikings fans, well, you get the picture.

I know I won’t convince the guy in front of me—who spent the entire game standing and didn’t speak to his wife/girlfriend sitting next to him for three-plus hours—but these Vikes are mediocre. Tarvaris Jackson is not on his way to greatness. Adrian Peterson has yet to prove he has skills that can outfox a good defense—the mark of a great running back. And the Vikes have amassed its 2007 success on the backs of bad teams. They don’t deserve to go to the playoffs, and if they back in, they will be quickly excreted.

Which is what I have done with the Kool-Aid I drank in from the sports pages of my local paper.

Did my eyes deceive me, or is the Zigster soul-shaking Adrian Peterson after his NFL record 296-yard game on Sunday? (Sign of the apocalypse #474-A: The Wilfs go hip-hop.)

The long slog to settle the land cost of the new Twins Stadium has concluded, and the team has agreed to kick in an extra $15 mil to cover the overrun that the negotiated settlement of $28.5 million exceeds the legislature’s limits on what the county can spend on land and infrastructure. There’s been so much spin on this topic that it’s hard to tell where the facts lie, but both sides obviously felt their case was tenuous enough in a court battle to split the difference in a settlement.

Now’s the time to start discussing what this area will look like in three years' time. Take a walk around the immediate ballpark area. It’s not inviting. The county garbage burner is hideous, its adjacent office building even uglier. They are surrounded by a no man’s land of wide streets and commercial structures. Target Center is a wall of concrete that looms over the site. An I–94 freeway ramp separates the ballpark from the adjacent “village” being planned, a massive physical barrier that inhibits connecting the ballpark with the adjacent neighborhood.

Real efforts are going to be required to overcome these things, but the ongoing real estate crisis is likely to limit additional short-term residential development in the area. The city of Minneapolis appears ready to fulfill county commissioner Mike Opat’s fears, and under-fund the infrastructure for which it is responsible, resulting in a rebuilding of the 5th Street bridge that will not accommodate a pedestrian crossing to the “ballpark village” and public plazas that are Spartan and unwelcoming.

Now I know the council is weighed down by a core of liberal activists who spend more time preoccupied with social justice than working to make the city function, but decisions that make the adjacent area unfriendly to visitors only serve to deter them from finding their way into downtown to spend their money.

If the council looks at the Pohlad family’s bailout of the stadium land purchase and sees more money raining from the heavens to absolve the city of its obligations, it may be in for a rude awakening. The land purchase had to get funded. I’m not sure the Twins need attractive plazas and good pedestrian flow from downtown. But downtown Minneapolis’s merchants sure do.

Update: The Tuesday Strib revealed that “the county will forgo some planned street improvements in the Warehouse District around the stadium, such as plantings, new streetlights and repaving.” I’m pretty sure these were the improvements the county was hoping to get the city to fund.

I would also note for the Pohlad bashers out there that the Twins’ payroll is higher than three of the four teams competing for baseball’s league championship, and well below at least one of the upcoming World Series contenders. Small-market teams can win with 52 percent of their revenues going to player salary.