Media Literacy: feeling good about Chula Vista

This Monday morning, many more San Diegans woke up feeling better than they would have on any other regular Monday morning.

The reason: our own Little League team, the Park View All-Stars from Chula Vista, on Saturday won the U.S. Little League Championship, and then on Sunday beat Taiwan, 6-3, for the Little League World Championship.

See the words, "our own?" Three weeks ago, the people claiming the team as "their own" would have numbered about 500. This morning, the number is certainly as high as 50,000, probably more. Park View, even though the team has played here all summer, for many summers, first came onto the San Diego radar when it was winning games in the regional playoffs at San Bernardino. When they won those playoffs and went to Pennsylvania for the Little League World Series, they established a secure place in San Diego newspapers and newscasts.

The team kept winning at Williamsport, and not only winning, but really clobbering people, with scores like 14-0 that started to sound routine. When that happened, San Diegans really started to jump on the bandwagon, adopting the Chula Vistans as "their own."

Actually, co-opting, or "appropriating," might be a better word. People like to win. It feels good, in the humdrum of routine. And when people can enjoy the thrill of winning without doing any work, well, there you have the sports industry in a nutshell. TV ratings go up so much when Tiger Woods plays because viewers know it gives them their best chance of seeing their own favorite player win. They appropriate his skills as a strategy to feel good.

The Park View team has offered the same deal, providing an early example of an autumn reality affecting millions of Americans, on Sunday and Monday mornings. If their college team wins on Saturday, they have such a good feeling on Sunday morning. If their team loses, they feel, well, conflicted. On Monday morning, if "their" NFL team won on Sunday, they have that same good feeling, a genuine, relaxed feeling of well-being. If the team lost, it's a blue Monday. It's the chance that fans take.

In media literacy terms, the values at work are conflict, which people have to live with; progress, which people love; prominence, which people are drawn to; proximity, which empowers people to connect; and novelty, which people seek for its rarity. Our good feeling about Park View in Southern California this Monday morning starts with proximity, both physical and emotional. I say Southern California because the proximity weakens with distance but most likely extends beyond San Diego County, since a Southern California team had to beat those uppity Northern California teams to get to the World Series at all. Proximity means "feel close to," empowering San Diegans to co-opt both the Park View Little Leaguers, who are actually Chula Vistans, with the same power they co-opt the Chargers, whose players come from all over the country but play for a billion-dollar sports business which has a franchise in San Diego.

The players have become prominent to the level that we know their names: Luke Ramirez, Bulla Graft, Kiko Garcia, Andy Rios, just like they were the lineup of the 1927 Bronx Bombers. They became stars, to the men who remember their own Little League experience, and to the women who saw the stars as little boys. Progress was great, as the team resolved its sports conflict at the highest level, and let its fans escape their conflicts for a little while, in the process. A note to the fans arriving late: Park View's colors are not blue, the uniforms assigned to them for the World Series; their Chula Vista uniforms are green and gold.

"TOP OF THE WORLD!" trumpeted the top-of-the-front-page headline in Monday morning's San Diego Union-Tribune, in sensational 96-point bold all-caps type. Front page? Top of the world? That's the natural power of novelty; a San Diego team (El Cajon/La Mesa Northern) had not won a Little League World Series since 1961. In a Starbucks, a man picked up a paper off the rack, looked at the headline and smiled to a clerk: "San Diego!" "Yeah!" the clerk grinned back.

Well, yeah. Nothing wrong with a good sports fix. I am happy this morning that the team won, for them, and for me. But there's nothing wrong, either, with having a handle on the dynamic. Park View is a one-time media story, with nothing at all to gain, compared to the NFL, a billion-dollar media business reliant on these same media values to keep the ad revenue coming in. The feeling of proximity is very important to the Chargers, who have built their pre-season advertising around the word "own." Fans who want to send a message to a business like the NFL, about prices, for example, only need to distance themselves. Another story in the papers this morning tells of the new stadium going up for the Giants and Jets, and worries about filling seats because fans aren't buying tickets. Sports consumers, through media, have more power than they realize.