The Friday Variety Plate is coming to you as I jet home from Budapest, Hungary. I’m still mourning a somewhat-legally watched Oakland Raiders loss. One of my fantasy football teams also got jobbed out of a win due to a BS technicality, but as Chris Tucker put it in “The Fifth Element, “Who cares?!” I owe you another Raiders prediction and a few links for your clicking pleasure. Let’s go:

• – I’m playing Out of the park Baseball 11 and have probably included you on my baseball team, as i like to name my players after friends and acquaintenances. It’s a great baseball simulation. Deep. Broad. It stands head and shoulders above almost any sports game I’ve played (save, perhaps, Madden 10). Warning: it’s almost totally text-based but still bunches of fun, especially if you’re a baseball fan.
• – If you need to think through an idea, then Freemind is probably the software for you. It’ll help you brainstorm your way through decisions, creative ideas or almost anything you can think of once you get the hang of it.
• – I should thank the Dan Patrick Show. I captioned a photo on the show’s website and won the NFL Sunday Ticket package from DirecTV Tuesday. Unfortunately, I’m overseas and can;t use the package. So, DirectTV has been good enough to transfer it to an Air Force Reservist who lives in California. I listen to the DP Show almost every day and will look into getting DirecTV when I get back. in any case, thanks to Dan Patrick and crew for picking my caption and thanks to DirecTV for working with me to transfer the prize.
• – One of my favorite iPad apps is Springpad. It helps me with tasks, shopping lists and other organization. There’s an online component that’s pretty cool as well. Also available for iPhone and iPod Touch.
• – I write for the Army of Ermas, so I should plug the blog here. My next column will be Sept. 30, about the adventure of buying my daughter a … turtle.
• – I’ve lived overseas for 1.5 years now and two years while serving in the military. American Forces Network tries to communicate timely messages. It hits the mark sometimes. Sometimes it misses. This Facebook group pays tribute to all the efforts.
• – This song is pretty big in Europe right now.  I suppose it points to the general disdain the continent has for Americans. Or it’s this year’s “Shaddap You Face.”

My prediction for the Raiders Game

Well. Where to begin. The Oakland Raiders were murdered in Tennessee thanks to an inept offense. The defense that held for about two quarters eventually got worn down. Darren McFadden looked surprisingly good. Jason Campbell did not, but it looked like we were short an offensive lineman or three. Campbell got beat up. Onthe other hand, Tennessee looked pretty good and Vince Young looked like the second coming of, well, Vince Young. All that said, week 1 is done. On to week 2 and the St. Louis Rams. Now, if the pundits are right, and if any of them are still on the bandwagon, then this is the game where the bandwagon rolls out of the gate and starts its fast ride down the hill. Sam Bradford looked good last week. But St. Louis needs many moving parts to work. So, we’ll go to St. Louis and, hopefully, we’ll right the ship. i think we can score this week. And (gulp) I’m also thinking we can eek out a win. So, let’s go with this: Raiders 17 Rams 10.

Who I’m starting on my fantasy football team

Won in two of three leagues. Got jobbed in the loss because of a dumb scoring rule. Even with the win, I left 46 points in the bench with Arian Foster. That won’t happen again. We move on. This lineup represents my local team:

Peyton Manning, Ray Rice, Ryan Mathews, Arian Foster, Marquis Colston, Wes Welker, Tony Gonzales, Mason Crosby, the Patriots.

It is November 2009. The World Series just ended. The New York Yankees won. And for all its blustering about higher ratings (this year; last year, they were down 22 percent by most accounts), TV and everyone else knows interest in baseball is dying.

But then, too, so are professional team sports in the United States, whose once singular place in the spotlight in now crowded by snowboarders, reality shows, Halo players, Jenna Jameson watchers and movie night. Something ills all professional team sports, and has since the Internet became something more than construction signs and blinking text. What erodes at the foundation of our interest in team sports is the evolution of our society from one in the manufacturing age to one in the information age.

In the 1960s and 1970s, when professional team sports began its largest growth spurts, teams were very much like their communities. They were united by people who worked in the same factories where their parents and grandparents had worked. They visited the same watering holes. They attended the same churches and so on. More importantly, there was stability in jobs and location.

Today, there’s more business travel than ever. Few people stay in the same job for more than a few years. Employees come and go quickly. Temporary employees are common place. Of more importance, the largest community businesses are gone – steel mills are extinct. Auto factories are fewer and far between. Manufacturing as a whole – and the unity it provided to the fabric of our nations – is practically a history lesson.

As a result, sports fans have lost the bonds that tied them together as communities. After all, the textile mill that created Pawtucket, Rhode Island; the steel factories that fueled growth along the Rust Belt; and the powerful arms of auto manufacturing that gave Michigan is political power had what drew people to the communities in droves: jobs. Work. Income. A potential for a stable life.

In turn, those communities spurred the popularity of their pro sports teams. They provided an almost instant foundation of core fans that, when the long week was over, had something to sit back and relax with. A common cause. Something else that provided a lynchpin to the community bond.

Today, businesses are smaller and leave or die more quickly. Employee churn and layoffs are more permanent. After all, people go where the jobs go. Where one business (steel, automotive, textile) used to dominate a city’s landscape, now several independent businesses litter its countryside. There’s no common goal and many compete against one another for business. In short, the bedrock that once gave team sports its solid foundation and promise for the future is all but evaporated.

And the people have changed. Instead of working for one cause, they’ve become independent contractors concerned about the next career step. Working culture has changed the nature of employment this way. A worker has to be more agile and open to possibilities rather than relying on one job that offered a pension and benefits further down the road.

Sports have changed, too. Free agents move every year. Instead of knowing the quarterback or home run slugger will be with your team until he retires, you can almost count on players moving from team to team, sometimes annually. Sports has grown so big, it’s a financial bottom line business that rests in the portfolio of owners. So, the owners that preceded the Daniel Snyders, Randy Lerners and Malcolm Glazers cared about that team and that community as their sole interest. Today, the owners, just like fans with less disposable income to spread around, care about the margins, not the first-down markers.

Movement of teams is common place. One baseball team, the Montreal Expos, moved to Washington D.C. The Rams moved from Los Angeles to St Louis. The Seattle Supersonics moved to Oklahoma City. Teams move because the team’s owners and the league realize that money and interest in their city is gone. And, yes, Los Angeles doesn’t care that it doesn’t have a football team. There are dozens of other things to do to keep Angelinos occupied.

So the shift has gone from teams to players. The major television networks want storylines. It doesn’t matter than Minnesota squared off with Green Bay in November in a crucial divisional game. It matters that Brett Favre came back to Lambeau Field and got revenge. It mattered that, for all his work, Aaron Rodgers failed. Really, this game was about Brett Favre, not either of the teams.

Back to baseball, which has been losing its youngest demographic for better than two decades. Given a choice of entertainment, would an 18-year-old spend three hours player or watching baseball, or playing Halo? Watching any of Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” movies? Do children play sports because they enjoy the playing the game? Or do the parents push their sons and daughters through Little League and beyond so they might have a shot at a multi-million dollar contract later in life?

Along with the switch in society, I mentioned the sheer value of entertainment sports brings. Is baseball entertaining? Are basketball, hockey and football entertaining? There are 500 channels of cable and hundreds of terabytes of internet pornography, recipes and Netflix movies that would challenge the notion.

This combination of forces, the independent nature of our society combined with its economic woes and the breakdown of industry within communities is slowly killing team sports. Leagues recognize this, but there’s little they can do to combat it. So, what’s the next evolution of sports in the United States? Five ideas:

• Teams with no geographic center. A team becomes a traveling road show. In the case of football, it schedules a majority of its 16 games (say 5) in one sport. It auctions off the rest to the highest bidder.
• Teams gain sponsors instead of towns. The Nike Vikings or the IBM Yankees doesn’t seem too farfetched to me.
• A dearth of advertising. It’s coming: advertising on shirts, pants, the playing field and more. The American pro sports have held off on this as long as they can. Soccer leagues across the globe are already engulfed.
• Every game is pay-per-view. That happens within the next five years. Most leagues are inching closer to this model. They’re just doing it slowly. Instead of $100 for a visit to a stadium, you’ll pay $100 to watch it on your HDTV.
• – Legalize professional sports gambling. Everywhere. Make sure all the right people get a cut.

There are still a great many people who are deeply passionate about their teams. However, by most accounts, they are 20-25 percent of the total fan base. And really, pro sports make only a small portion of revenue from fans taking seats in the stands. The real money is in selling sponsorships and luxury boxes to businesses, and engendering professional business relationships that bring in big dollar volume.

Finally, there’s the notion that maybe the professional sports business is a giant industry. Aside from the league, there is merchandise and hundreds of other cottage businesses across the country, including a massive media industry (with the likes of ESPN, Fox Sports, and a large chunk of CBS, NBC and ABC’s budget) riding on pro sports’ success. And I mentioned gambling. Some reports say that better than $6 billion in money is wagered every year on professional sports, and only some of that is legal money. There’s a lot riding on pro sports success.

However, the deeper consequence here isn’t that baseball could die, or that the money is leaving pro sports coffers in wheel barrows. Rather, the sea change our country has undergone since the end of World War II is reflected in how we consume professional sports across the board. Our bonds as communities have changed. Our bonds to one another have changed. Our entertainment choices have changed. “Teams” are on the out.

It’s time professional sports stop reflecting what was and start mimicking what is. Otherwise, we’ll be talking about Super Bowls and World Series victories with the same fascination we address lions and gladiators.