Being (at best) a casual fan of the English Premier League, I had last paid any heed to West Ham United two Saturdays ago in a home match against first-place Manchester United. I had woken up in time to watch the second half on ESPN2. Before doing so, though, I flipped through the most recent soccer thread on Baseball Think Factory and took note of post no. 10:

I have a feeling the second half of this game is going to be like the German attack at the end of Saving Private Ryan, with West Ham as Tom Hanks and company.

Sure enough, after perhaps 20 minutes of the second half had elapsed . . . blitzkrieg! Man U scored four unanswered goals in quick succession, three off the leg of Wayne Rooney.

Anyway, Right Field commenter “Otis Nixon” yesterday wondered about the Hammers’ immediate future. (If the season ended tonight, West Ham, along with the Wolverhampton Wanderers and Wigan Athletic would be relegated. With six clubs bunched up at the bottom of the EPL table (i.e., standings) and several matches remaining, I asked a EPL-phile friend who works in the Senate for predictions.

Here is his reply:

In my view, it will come down to strength of schedule and form, which are key in the final stretch of the season. Based on those undoubtedly subjective factors, my prediction is that West Ham, which lost the last two games and will play Manchester City and Chelsea away in consecutive weeks, Wigan, which has four out the six remaining games away from home, and new boys Blackpool, which lost four out of the last five and will finish off the season away at Tottenham and Manchester United, will be the clubs relegated. Look for more experienced Blackburn and this year’s Carling Cup winner Birmingham to move away from danger over the next few fixtures and the feisty Wolves to take part in last-minute heroics to stay put for another year.

West Ham hosts Aston Villa at Upton Park on Saturday morning at 10:00 EDT.

Ed, another thing that makes sports conservative is that they are a true meritocracy. If one group predominates at the highest levels in a given sport — blacks in basketball, Kenyans in marathon, East Asians in women’s golf — almost no one blames racism. Admittedly, if you speculate publicly about why this or that group might be better at this or that sport, you will get your head handed to you pretty quick. But almost everyone tacitly accepts that the demographic breakdown of a team’s roster cannot be expected to mirror that of the general population — and that whatever the reason for any discrepancies, the sport should reflect them, not be responsible for correcting them. That’s another example of conservative sports thinking.

The Preakness Stakes has a new mascot, Kegasus. It’s half man and half beast, which is actually a pretty good description of the typical infield patron at Pimlico on Preakness Day. Pat McDonough, a state delegate from Baltimore, says he’s disgusted by the Kegasus campaign’s vulgarity, but that’s the whole point: Pimlico is quite openly courting the lout demographic, figuring that a once-a-year invasion of uncouth spendthrifts is worth a bit of tut-tutting from respectable quarters. One might expect better from the sport of kings, but even kings have been known to misbehave.

Still, Kegasus, while perhaps no match for the incomprehensible Whatizit, seems a prime candidate for membership in the Bad Sports Mascots Hall of Fame. If the Preakness folks were intent on using a keg-related mascot, they would have done better to borrow Dartmouth College’s Keggy, the best thing to come out of Dartmouth since Dinesh D’Souza (well, second-best, after former NR intern Emily Esfahani Smith). Here he is in action:

Keggy was semi-officially adopted by the college administration a few years back, three decades after Dartmouth gave up its Indians nickname for a new one (Big Green) that could not easily be anthropomorphized into something that wanders through the stands acting stupid. Dartmouth certainly has its share of frat-boy behavior, at football games and elsewhere, but as Keggy shows, the administration isn’t uptight about it. And now, with Kegasus, there’s finally a sports mascot that makes Keggy look tasteful and restrained in comparison.

You won’t see many cricket items in this blog, but yesterday’s India-Pakistan match, which India took by the narrow margin of 29 runs on its home pitch at Mohali (there, don’t I sound like I know what I’m talking about?), had geopolitical ramifications, as these two fierce rivals (in sport and everything else) completed the event peacefully and amicably, with the two nations’ prime ministers watching the action together. Predictably enough, the Obama administration has released a statement praising the match as a diplomatic breakthrough; soon, presumably, we can expect the president (who must be quietly mourning the loss by his beloved Pockystahn) to announce a global sports initiative aimed at building world peace through hitting, kicking, and throwing balls.

That idea would not be entirely crazy, at least to those old enough to remember Richard Nixon’s “ping-pong diplomacy.” Yet sports can also inflame tensions, sometimes even to the point of military conflict, as in the 1969 “Soccer War” between El Salvador and Honduras. Of course, in that part of the world, countries used to fight over just about anything — including bat droppings. Still, as Right Field readers will understand, a sporting event is a good place for any sort of discussion: You sit side by side without having to stare each other in the face, and whenever you don’t feel like talking, you just look at what’s happening on the field. If Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis had just sat down at a baseball game together, that whole Civil War thing might have been avoided . . .

In this age of light-bulb outlaws and school-lunch police, there’s nothing too insignificant for the nanny state to concern itself with. That’s a lesson that John and Melissa McCafferty learned all too well on the morning of March 25, when construction workers accompanied by several state troopers abruptly showed up at their home in Claymont and pulled out the permanent basketball hoop that had been there for decades. A video of the event has since gone viral on the Internet. In an interview with National Review Online, John McCafferty spoke in greater depth about this latest nanny-state affront to personal freedom.

“When I bought my house in 2005, the basketball pole was here. It kind of rusted and the backboard was all messed up, but it was the first thing I fixed when I moved in, because I thought to myself, ‘That’s just the same kind of thing I had when I was a kid growing up.’” McCafferty left basketballs on the side of the street so that neighborhood children could play at any time.

So when McCafferty and several other residents received a letter from DelDOT in September telling them that their hoops were in violation of the state’s Clear Zone law, which prohibits obstructions within seven feet of the pavement’s edge in residential areas, McCafferty was puzzled. “One anonymous person filed a complaint with DelDOT. That’s fine, but I wish he would’ve come up to me and told me there was a problem. I’ve never had police here, never had a neighbor complain.”

A legal dispute ensued after McCafferty wrote to his state representatives, who in turn wrote to the head of DelDOT questioning the legal basis for the hoop’s removal. First, they argued, the law in question gave the state discretion to act, but no mandate, and, more important, the law was enacted in 1997–98 and contained no language that would give it retroactive effect; thus, the hoops in question were “grandfathered” in. Despite this ongoing legal battle, the family received another letter in December repeating the same charges and threats of removal. McCafferty once again contacted his state reps, and the dispute continued quietly.

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That all changed on March 18th, when a new head of DelDOT took office. One week later, a construction crew and state troopers were dispatched to remove the hoops. So when Melissa McCafferty saw neighboring poles being uprooted and placed in the back of a giant truck as she drove onto her street, she immediately pulled in front of her own hoop and climbed atop it in protest. She succeeded in stopping the removal after a news photographer showed up, but the victory was short-lived. The construction crew returned a few hours later with more police officers and told Mrs. McCafferty that if she went back on top of the pole, she would be arrested for disorderly conduct, or worse. This second altercation was the one captured on video, and it ended with the hoop’s removal by DelDOT.

“The cop in the hoodie [as seen in the video] made it known she had a gun, and put her hand to her hip several times. We were in fear for our lives. Here I’ve got five, six state troopers and armored construction workers against my wife, my 17-year-old son, and myself”, noted McCafferty.

And when it comes to intimidation and remarkably uncivil behavior by DelDOT and crew, that’s only the beginning. “At some point in the video you hear them say ‘you can’t taunt them [the construction crew],’” remarked McCafferty. “Well, keep in mind that this [video] is the second time they tried to remove it. During the first episode, pretty much all the construction workers kept calling my wife—” Here McCafferty listed a string of colorful obscenities and noted that when he shouted back, he was warned against taunting. “I’m sorry, that’s my wife, and I will defend her honor until the death. That’s why I married her, that’s why I love her.”

All of this makes you wonder — how should one respond to this travesty? The answer lies in paraphrasing WFB: “I would rather be governed by the first 200 names in the Claymont phone book than the entirety of the Delaware Department of Transportation.”