Random Thought: BALCO Slayer?

[dlgood]

Can the Baseball Slayer, in "Chosen" actually pursue Sport as her vocation? Should she?

I'm not sure. The writers, having done nothing on a (for me fairly appropriate) metaphor for Slayer as elite athlete, I'll take it on it's face.

Most professional and olympic sports have a rigourous programme of testing for performance enhancing drugs. Baseball is currently embroiled in the BALCO scandal in which several players, most notably star Barry Bonds are under investigation for use of steroids.

Baseball Slayer, will become dominant overnight, thanks to Buffy. She now has supernatural powers almost no one else can access, and she'll uses them to dominate her sport. Nothing wrong with that. Except that she's going to spend her career under a tremendous cloud of suspicion, as no mere mortal should have her ability. Indeed - she is no mere mortal. She's a slayer.

And what does Baseball slayer say to her contemporary female star athletes like Serena Williams, Diana Taurasi, Marion Jones, or Michelle Wie - who became world class female athletes by dint of hard work and years of effort and practice - and without the benefit of superpowers.. Unlike everybody else, Baseball Slayer didn't even have to work for it. It was just magically given to her.

Are her baseball skills are a cheat and an unfair advantage, or is it simply good luck and better genetics? Think about the post-Sunnydale Olympics. Is this the amateur vs. professional debate of ten years ago, or should there be testing to weed out female athletes hopped up on SLAY-roids?

Setting aside the ethical question of whether a slayer should be playing fulltime professional sports rather than out fighting demons - is it fair or right for a slayer to be competing athletically alongside non-slayers? Should they be in different divisions or leagues?

The slayer is no ordinary mortal. Should she be handicapped?

Then again - Michael Jeffrey Jordan was no ordinary mortal, yet he played by the same rules as everybody else in the league. Thoughts?

Comments

[elementalv.livejournal.com]

The slayer is no ordinary mortal. Should she be handicapped?

This reminds me that Kurt Vonnegut raised the same question about equality in "Harrison Bergeron" (to be found in Welcome to the Monkey House).

Personally, I don't think the Baseball Slayer should be handicapped. I think she should be encouraged with all due care to give up playing the game with nonchosen humans. Aside from the fact that humans can't compete against her without chemical assistance, she herself will end up becoming depressed, because she no longer has any real competition.

Perhaps she can form the Slayer League.

[lakrids404.livejournal.com]

Would baseball not become more boring than it’s ;), if the slayer nearly always, will shoot the ball outside the playing field.

[jennem.livejournal.com]

You know. There's actually this new lawyer show that's supposed to be airing soon on one of the major networks.

It takes place in the future (2030), and one of the previews I saw had a baseball player who was fighting for the right to play the game. My understanding of the preview was that he had an eye defect, and they were replaced with techno-eyes. Everything revolved around whether or not his advantage was fair...

Interesting.

[nwhepcat.livejournal.com]

This is really an intriguing question. As you know, I've played with the baseball slayer in fic, in various permutations in Xander's visions in Double Vision and as a "real life" ballplayer who gets mentioned by our characters in Lilac City. In LC she doesn't know she's a slayer, and I'm not certain if her career path is going to be more the star and great humanitarian I wrote in one vision, or the angry, self-destructive player I wrote in another. In the main plot of DV, as a fifteen-year-old, she decides once she's aware of her origins that her advantage is unfair, that she'd feel like she was cheating if she played ordinary mortals, and also that she'd gotten this advantage under false pretenses if she doesn't use her powers to be a slayer. (Though her father thinks she's crazy.)

But the interesting thing about baseball is the physical differences in players. Some like Ted Williams have such breathtaking natural talent there's no way they can't excell. Others have to scrap for every achievement, being not so physically blessed but driven by their passion for the game. What makes it such a great game are the fireballers and the knuckleballers.

[dlgood.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm totally with you. And I did like the different treatments of Jenny Grimaldi. The BALCO stuff just brought it back to me. It would be awfully tough on her to try to play competetively in the current climate, and gender would only be one part of why. Baseball, while a team sport, is really made up of individual confrontations - so questions of her credibility might actually be a bigger issue for fans than her gender.

But it's a really intriguing issue. Which, at this point, I only wanted to pose a question, instead of really answering it.

But the interesting thing about baseball is the physical differences in players.

That, of course, is true of most any sport. It's drawn in more stark contrast in baseball, when we see all stars like David Wells and John Kruk. Fat shlubs who look like they were rolled in off a beer truck.

Ted Williams, had incredible talent and natural ability for the game. But for me, I associate his success with not just the talent, but to his incredible work (relative to players of his time) studying pitchers, his own tendencies, and exhibiting tremendous discipline at the plate. At meta-gaming.

Getting far afield - but one of those things in "Chosen" I think a lot about - because it's a storyline I like in idea but find frustrating in execution. When I wrote my fic, Bakery (http://www.fanfiction.net/read.php?storyid=1362448) it was something I definitely was thinking about. But I never really got to it.