Archive for the 'America' Category

America and Baseball in Afghanistan

Eric, September 16, 2009, 4 Comments

Matt Yglesias recently compared Afghanistan to an ESPN Zone:

A better analogy might be that it’s the ESPN Zone of empires, someplace where from time to time a lot of people feel tempted to go, but when you get there it turns out to be not so great. But it’s surprisingly expensive to stay! Having gone out of your way to get there in the first place, you’re perhaps initially reluctant to just admit that it’s not worthwhile. But you can’t stay forever.

But doesn’t the war effort also remind you of any number of struggling baseball franchises that dump millions and millions into free agents, but are really just piling misguided resources onto a fundamentally flawed foundation that will surely collapse at any moment, leaving the whole venture futile? Kevin Malone? Bill Bavasi? Obama? Biden? Anyone?

One of the very first posts I wrote here prescribed a healthy mid-market approach to managing the economic collapse. Basically I said we can learn a lot from Mark Shapiro and the Cleveland Indians. This was back in March before the season really got going, and before the blog had really found its voice. This time, I don’t have answers.

I don’t have a prescription for our problems in Afghanistan. It sounds trite to even say we can’t just Moneyball our way out of a major foreign policy debacle. So instead of using baseball as a way to make a political point or explain an inexplicable war, I’ll use the war and baseball to do some thinking on American identity and policy. This stuff’s been on my mind lately.

A friend of mine is an Arabic linguist in the Army National Guard. He spent a year in Afghanistan (where the first language is not Arabic but Pashto), and brought up an interesting point about the conflict: the very presence of American troops on the ground there polarizes the country in altogether new ways. Afghans that live near bases tend to Americanize; eight year old kids who were born after the invasion are fluent in English. Afghans that don’t live near bases tend to have grown less and less appreciative of our current foreign policy

Mostly, Afghans want to be left alone. Those who live outside the red white and blue halo of our military outposts know America by its machine gun fire and bomb flashes and the destruction left in the wake of slow-moving, bulky metallic vehicles. Justifiably, these Afghans don’t like this America and they don’t like this America trampling on their culture, trying to instill its own values where they aren’t particularly wanted.

This creates a divide among the people of Afghanistan. An even stronger American presence over there will invariably lead to a rapid Westernization for parts of the country. This is simply what happens when ideas and people rub against each other for long periods of time. As some parts of Afghanistan Westernize and other parts push back against this process, and against American occupation, the country’s fractured sense of national unity will only find itself in even greater peril. The fault lines will be tested and the strains will be exacerbated.

There is a very real possibility that we stay in Afghanistan for ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred more years. As the Obama Administration’s Afghan surge begins to materialize, it’s looking less and less likely that we go the George F. Will route and just cut our losses (Billy Beane! Fire Sale!). America, it seems, will try with all its might to halt the gravitational momentum of history and create a unified and democratic Afghanistan. In this context, I think it’s fair to start talking about baseball over there.

It was inevitable that Afghan children would play baseball. The game is too symbolic, too ripe for media affection, too damn American to not share. In 2002, the Christian Science Monitor wrote what is, to this day, the definitive Afghanistan Baseball Puff Piece:

“Baseball is here to show them the American way, to show them that we’re not here for any other reason than to help out,” says Sgt. Jay Smith, of the US special forces. “We’re not against [Afghans], we’re not against Islam. We can be here together, Afghans and Americans.”

In what is perhaps a historical first, certainly since the fall of the anti-American Taliban regime, children are playing organized baseball in Afghanistan, to the tune of “Take me Out to the Ballgame,” which blares from speakers on a beige psychological-operations Humvee.

In the seven years since that story was published, Afghan Baseball has not quite taken off. But what if we’re talking another seven or fourteen years? Children are products of their surroundings. If their surroundings are US military bases, then Afghan children will grow up comfortable with not just the English language and the presence of heavy artillery, but the best and worst of American culture. This means McDonald’s and Angelina Jolie and it also means baseball.

There is a precedent: Little League has been played by the children of expats in Saudi Arabia since 1954. As more troops and private contractors pour into Afghanistan, the creation of a real official Little League is more than possible. Their parents would not understand, but Afghan kids growing up in the shadows of military bases would know Hanley Ramirez, Joe Mauer, and Tim Lincecum. They would know double plays and the infield fly rule. Afghanistan would face off against Little Rock in Williamsport on ABC. Is it really that far-fetched?

The better question is whether or not this is a good thing. Baseball is not just any other sport in the American identity. Its merits as a game are secondary in importance to its status as cultural touchstone. We as Americans take great pride in the fact that baseball has taken off in East Asia and Latin America. We don’t care who wins the World Baseball Classic, because its very existence is strokes our ego. We tend to think that those who embrace our national pastime are embracing the nation itself – its values, its history, its citizenry.

Baseball in Afghanistan would be more than just a foreign country starting to play a new sport, but how so? It would probably be seen as a victory. Pundits would hail the dawn of baseball as the dawn of a new era in Afghanistan – the proof of a successful foreign policy, the justification of our actions post 9/11. But let’s not be foolish. Even in the confines of this thought exercise, it would be silly to claim that every country who has embraced baseball has embraced American democracy. Japan was baseball-crazed long before it attacked Pearl Harbor. Cuba is still quite baseball crazed.

Baseball in Afghanistan could be looked at as bizarre manifestation of everything that has happened between our two countries since September 11, 2001. It would encapsulate all the rights and all the wrongs of an extended war. It would be the export of something truly American, as American as things get. But it would be the fossil of a failure. It would be completely, entirely inconsequential.

Can’t you hear Glenn Beck now? “Those Afghans couldn’t handle democracy. But at least we gave ‘em baseball didn’t we?”

America, Politics and Thinking, 4 Comments

Shoeless Joe

Eric, September 9, 2009, 1 Comment

When we asked young Phil Bencomo, chronicler of all things baseball if he would like to write a Situational Essay, we were unsure of what to expect. His Baseball Chronicle is in many ways a kindred spirit in this massive, lonely, internet world. Both sites value the narrative over the calculated, and both tend to tread dangerous water when it comes to nostalgia. The following essay is many things. It is America. It sure as hell ain’t nostalgia:

At 3 a.m. on a Sunday morning in August, I sat in the back of a broken-down van, stopped on the highway shoulder 10 miles outside of Rolla, Missouri. Much too close for my liking, cars and 18-wheelers barreled past on the left, blurs of light and sound. The trucks left the van lurching from side to side.

I felt small and powerless, protected only by a thin-walled metal box just feet from the road. Perhaps that’s why, as I waited for the tow truck, I turned my mind elsewhere, flicking on a reading light and pulling “Shoeless Joe” from my bag.

* * * *

My parents, four siblings and I had left our home in the Chicago suburbs seven hours earlier. It was an unplanned trip, prompted by the news that my grandmother, widowed less than six months before and fading fast, would likely last no more than a month. By 2 p.m. on Saturday we’d resolved to leave. Six hours of frenetic packing and preparations later, our aging, seven-seat conversion van pulled away from the house, and we began our 1,700-mile, cross-country journey to Phoenix.

These trips have become standard fare over my 20 years, though there’s usually more than six hours of preparation to them. We’ve driven through every state west of Illinois, save a few, and a handful more to the east.

On our trips west, we usually leave by noon and drive through the night, ultimately spending over 24 hours in the van before stopping — collapsing, really — for a night in Albuquerque, New Mexico. But on this trip, it was not to be.

* * * *

My Mom had been driving for a few hours, with the rest of us sleeping quietly, when the noise started. She’d been awake thanks to coffee and an evening nap, but the loud flapping sound, a puttering perhaps, that came from beneath the hood made both unnecessary. I woke immediately, reached for my glasses and found everyone else wide awake, too.

“Is there a bird?” asked my sister nervously. She’s been terrified of them since one found its way into our house through a vent years before. “It sounds like there’s a bird in there.”

Dad suspected a broken fan belt but, after we’d pulled over, could find nothing wrong. Still, the noise persisted. The call went out to AAA, and I began to read.

* * * *

“Shoeless Joe” is a wonderful book that oozes sentimentality like few other novels. The characters are genuinely good in the deepest sense, and the few villains need only a nudge from the realm beyond to change their ways. Even facing bankruptcy and scorn, Ray Kinsella dances merrily to baseball’s magical tune. It’s nearly impossible to read “Shoeless Joe” and not yearn for the simple pleasures of bat, ball and a lush expanse of the greenest grass.

I realize this now, of course, but at 3:45 a.m., as I read in the back of a Rolla-bound, smoke-filled AAA taxi driven by a lithe, mustachioed man whose slow, drawling words whistled through a missing tooth, Ray’s adventures couldn’t have pained me more. Ray drives from Iowa to Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Boston and even to northern Minnesota, with only a few blank lines representing the hundreds of miles driven from city to city. There are no stops for gas followed five minutes later by a wail for a restroom; no greasy meals from roadside fast food restaurants; no thermoses filled with coffee, to be emptied and filled again; and, most salient to me, no middle-of-the-night breakdowns. The realities of long road trips are unacknowledged in “Shoeless Joe,” but I could think of nothing else.

With every repair shop in town closed on Sunday, we were left stranded in our hotel room, waiting for Monday. We could only hope for a swift repair. “Shoeless Joe” was to be an escape from our troubles, not a mockery of them, but while Ray walked with Moonlight Graham, I ate cold scrambled eggs at a Waffle House and listened to my younger siblings bicker out of boredom. The book’s endless optimism gnawed at me. I didn’t want green grass and sunshine — I wanted someone else to suffer, too. But there is little suffering in “Shoeless Joe,” a book in which all troubles are washed away by time and a little faith.

* * * *

The repair shop, only a mile from the hotel, opened at 8:30 Monday morning. The tow truck driver had the night before told us that the van would make it that far, and he wasn’t wrong. Dad drove to the shop fearing the problem would delay us another day, but, for a change, Lady Luck was with us. The repair took 20 minutes, and we were back on the road by 10 a.m.

Still, I could muster no optimism, even with the aid of “Shoeless Joe,” and I felt old despite my youth. We won’t make many more family trips, not all together. The van’s too old for it, and so are we. I’ll soon finish college, with my sister close behind, and the schedules and lives will grow too complicated. The simple days, with all seven of us under the same roof, will soon pass.

As I read in the van, I wanted more than anything else to love “Shoeless Joe,” to embrace and revel in all the hope and goodwill it represents, to leave all my angst behind with a blown spark plug in Rolla, Missouri. But I thought of my dying grandmother, the reason for the trip, and reality crept in again. I closed the book and watched the trees fly by.

(flickr courtesy of cc:rutlo)

America, Books, Memoir and Situational Essay, 1 Comment

The Sheff Abides

Eric, August 5, 2009, 5 Comments

Last night I got the chance to sit front row behind the home dugout at Citi Field. Needless to say the game between the Mets and Cardinals was stunning. I saw Johan being Johan, Albert being Albert, and K-Rod being Joe Borowski.

But mostly I saw Gary Sheffield.

I’ve been fascinated by Gary Sheffield since his tumultuous stint with my Dodgers. He was awful off the field in LA. He bitched about his teammates in the media, he fought with management, and he whined and whined and whined. But goodness gracious did he hit.

No matter where he’s gone Gary Sheffield has always been that guy. He’s never been your favorite player, but he’s often been your favorite team’s best player. He’s never been enough of a problem off the field, or enough of a superstar on the field to elicit romantic baseball love or fanatic baseball hatred from fans. Gary Sheffield is meant to confuse, meant to muddle, and meant to be pondered. In my mind he is a first ballot Hall-of-Famer.

The thing about Gary Sheffield is that he’s very serious. I saw it yesterday. He emerged from the dugout for the National Anthem with a distant look on his face. As other players sang, blew bubbles, and grinned their way through the song, Sheffield stood focused. He was solemn and somber. I wondered for a moment if I had discounted him. Perhaps the brooding Sheffield was more complex than I had ever given him credit for. Perhaps he was a humble patriot doing his American thing for these few quiet moments before the game.

But his expression stayed that way. Over the nine innings, Sheffield’s face remained distant, sullen. It was as if he carried some burden, understood some troubling reality that we in the stands could never appreciate. Indeed, it was not the Anthem, it was just Gary. It was just Gary playing baseball. And when Gary plays baseball he is more than just immune to his surroundings – he appears oblivious to them. It’s as if he doesn’t even see his own teammates on the bench.

The game, it seems, happens around Gary. He simply is. The Sheff abides. He doesn’t put on a uniform, but rather the uniforms seem to put themselves on him. He doesn’t come to the stadium either. The stadiums he plays in grow organically from the ground beneath where he happens to be standing, so as to leave him at ease in left field, the batters’ box, or the on-deck circle. These things happen by sheer momentum. They are just the way of the universe.

In a sense, there’s a Ricky Henderson-ness to Sheffield. Ricky played baseball like gravity. He was everywhere, and he was the same everywhere. Sheffield is like that too. He is serious and wise and silent and ubiquitous and eerily consistent. He’s only played for eight teams in his career, but it seems like so many more. He hasn’t hit 30 home runs in a season since 2005, but his violent pendulum of a batting stance still induces the fear of nature into opponents.

Sheffield went 2-4 yesterday, with a double and a pair of runs batted in. He jogged and took a couple awful, lazy angles in left field. On an exciting evening, a back and forth, high scoring, star-driven evening, Gary Sheffield was muddled, inhibited, himself.

America, Conventional Wisdom, Kooks and Thinking, 5 Comments

Fountains Of Greinke

Eric, July 17, 2009, 0 Comments

Our first ever Situational Essay comes today from Reeves Wiedeman. Reeves has written about hot dogs for SI.com, a Pi savant for The Boston Globe, and the Recently Insufferable Roger Federer at his blog, Meanderings, which he would be honored to have you skim after you get through Pitchers & Poets each day. An aspiring journalist and storyteller, whatever that means, he also likes the Kansas Jayhawks and barbecue.

“Our job is to inject as much joy into people’s lives as we can.” – Royals manager Trey Hillman.

I was born in Kansas City, Missouri on May 1, 1986, six months and four days after Darryl Motley caught the final out of the 1985 World Series (and for Cardinals fans, six months and five days after Don Denkinger astutely called Jorge Orta safe at first). In the subsequent 23 ½ seaons, the Kansas City Royals have yet to return to the playoffs, lost 2,039 games, run through nine managers, and traded away an outfield that would have included Carlos Beltran, Johnny Damon, and Jermaine Dye for Angel Berroa, Mark Teahan, and Neifi Perez (only Teahan is still with the team).

In short, it’s been a rough 23 years. But it’s been a rough two decades for Pirates, Rangers, and Brewers fans too, with the D.C. area set to join us. What’s unique about the Royals’ struggles is that people like you – Dodgers and Sox and Yanks fans – seem, strangely, to care about the Royals.

It’s often hard to recall that the Royals were once at the front of the national baseball consciousness. George Brett flirted with .400 and Dan Quisenberry made the submarine fashionable. They won – a lot. And perhaps most importantly, they were the little team from the fly-over town who had become arch-rivals with the New York Yankees. And of course, if you were the Yankees’ enemy, you were America’s friend. But then, bad things started happening. Mostly, they lost – a lot. A franchise going on 30 years old, they suffered through an affair with a rich benefactor, the loss of bowel control, and impulse buys: the baseball equivalent of a mid-life crisis.

If I may stretch to draw a different metaphor, the Royals are baseball’s much whiter, much less violent version of The Wire’s Stringer Bell. (Your assignment: identify your team with a fictional character). They came from the wrong side of the baseball tracks, challenged the Powers That Be with good old fashioned hard work and occasionally illicit behavior, and against all odds, won the hearts of viewers everywhere. (Ed. Note: Spoilers Incoming Of course, Stringer ended up dead: for their part, the Royals had been relegated to the last five minutes of SportsCenter with a Wikipedia entry for the era titled, simply, “Rock bottom.”

But you won’t find a fan of The Wire who wouldn’t give up Marlo and Wee-Bay to have Stringer back for one more episode. Though we still live in a world where it is possible to publish a fictional account of Willie Wilson questioning Sonia Sotomayor, the Royals are now defined not by losses but by a 25-year old right hander and a sense of, well, hope (forget for a moment that they are 14 games under .500). Zach Grienke may be the best pitcher in baseball. And for once, with a long-term contract in hand, he is a Royal that opposing fans can admire for his talent rather than dreaming what he would look like in their team’s uniform. Grienke has, quite suddenly, put the Royals back on the map.

But what’s odd about Greinke is just how much attention he’s gotten. Last season, Tim Lincecum was two years younger and started 10-1 with a 2.49 ERA, but had to wait until July for his SI cover. Greinke started with slightly better numbers, but got his cover by late April. To be fair, we primarily have Joe Posnanski to thank. One of America’s three (give or take) greatest local sports columnists was hired by SI last year, where he has been able to do nearly impossible feats like put the Royals in high places and work Tony Pena Jr. into a column about Andy Roddick. People in high places do wonders.

But I would contend that there is something else going on here: a national affection for everything the Royals embody and, occasionally, actually are. They are from the heartland. They have regal blue uniforms. They have a giant, kitschy crown scoreboard, and fountains that dance between innings. They have a recession-proof team salary. They are baseball in its purest, most uncompetitive, most enjoyable form, and because of that, people who have never stepped foot in Arthur Bryant’s BBQ are able to look at the Royals the same way they look at a toddler, longing for younger more innocent days and hoping the kid grows to do something great.

Which brings us back to Hillman. I cannot name the Royals starting lineup (Note: I just tried and got five of nine). I haven’t seen the Royals play in person in two years, and can’t remember the last time I sat through a whole game on TV. No matter how much you like a team, it’s hard to sit through all that losing.

But it’s not about the losing. It’s about the fountains and the uniforms and Buck O’Neill’s seat in the stands and crying when the team trades your two favorite players – David Cone and Brian McRae – on back to back days. It’s about relaxing in a row of empty bleacher seats, with a beer and a hot dog and a 3-2 game in the 6th. It’s about the joy at team gives you, that a 25-year old baby-faced pitcher gives you. It’s about the quaint hopefulness of a small-market team at spring training each year. And every once in a while, it’s about sitting in right field in a sold out Kauffman Stadium as Ken Harvey blasts a walk-off home run in the 11th on April 18th, 2003 to boost the Royals to 12-3, best in the majors – never mind that they would finish 3rd in the division, seven wins short.

America, Memoir and Situational Essay, 0 Comments

Happy Independence Day

Eric, July 4, 2009, 0 Comments

From Pitchers & Poets, Rick Monday, and the E Street Band:

Rick Monday, patriot

America, 0 Comments

Americanizing The National Pastime

Eric, May 25, 2009, 1 Comment

Today is Memorial Day and the streets of Manhattan are eerily empty. I’ve always appreciated the imagery of this holiday –Naval fleets ashore at major cities, barbecues, three-day camping trips, and lots and lots of flags, even though I’m not sure the festivity jives too well with the somber task of remembering fallen soldiers. Memorial Day calls for reverence and quiet dignity. And although I’m a sucker for the stars and stripes and the anthem and all that stuff, I think baseball gets it wrong today and generally in all matters of Patriotism. Especially with these hats:

There is nothing inherently bad – in fact there is something tasteful and good– about baseball honoring our troops and our country on days like today. But as usual, the execution is cumbersome and overwrought and completely ignores the whole concept of subtlety. An unadorned moment of silence, for example, seems appropriate.

The aesthetics are terrible and strained. The hats every player on every team are forced to wear today and on July 4 and September 11 are a nice idea, but won’t match with uniforms, and make the tribute feel forced and contrived. Much like the confusing “everybody wears no. 42 on Jackie Robinson Day” idea, it sounds really wonderful in theory but falls flat on the field of play. The 162-game season leaves plenty of room for special events and meaningful gestures. No need to make baseball theater out of them.

Promotions like this take away from the quirky, original, and often more powerful statements that individual teams and players can make. The Padres wear those sillyish looking camouflage jerseys, for example, because of the large military presence in San Diego. It’s a fresh tribute for a specific team with a specific fan base and it works well. In the early days of Jackie Robinson ceremonies, it was an honor for certain players to dawn no. 42, whereas now it’s a chore. And the new Mother’s Day tradition of pink bats for breast cancer awareness is graceful and delicate in comparison.

Baseball appears to be on a quest to reinforce its brand as the national pastime by flaunting its history and its American-ness. I don’t think baseball’s national pastime status is even at risk in the first place. The cultural landscape is too well-defined around the sport. But if it is, just calling itself the national pastime is not the answer baseball needs. The answer is making the sport compelling and affordable to watch and play, especially for younger and lower-income communities in which it is struggling.

Ironically, one place baseball is thriving is internationally. The World Baseball Classic proved definitively that baseball is firmly entrenched as a serious sport in not just Latin America and Japan but Korea, Taiwan, and China. And it’s gaining traction in Europe too. A hefty percentage of every major league roster now consists of internationally born players. In that context, the heavy Americana is even less appropriate. Nothing more touching than a bunch of Japanese and Dominican guys honoring our troops.

Consider the Blue Jays, who will be wearing a corresponding Canadian Flag cap. This isn’t even a holiday in Canada, but if we really want to show how much we love our country, I guess these are the awkward politically correct bones we have to throw our neighbors. Of course the proceeds for these caps go to charity, which is not to be discounted as important – but let’s not kid ourselves. The purpose of these caps is informed by public relations, not the desire to be or do good. If we only wanted to do good, the classy flag patch style caps teams used in September of 2001 would be more than enough. They even looked alright for the Expos:

I’m not the first person or the most eloquent to have a problem with the Memorial Day Caps and other baseball-sponsored acts of manufactured patriotism. There has been a great chorus of internet pushback. My favorite comment comes from Phil Hencken in a little panel discussion at the awesome Uni Watch Blog. He writes:

“Wearing the caps once is a gimmick. But wearing them at least three separate dates (with possibly more, should teams wish) –that’s more than enough times to make a complete mockery of the gimmick.”

Gimmicks and mockeries of gimmicks are hardly the stuff of dignity, hardly the stuff I’d say is appropriate to honor our troops. But then again, there are worse things. Jon Weisman, who diplomatically condemned the Dodgers’ 2009 policy of singing God Bless America at every 7th inning stretch, has tentatively embraced the red hats. In his typical balanced and sage-like fashion, he writes:

“As long as they respect one’s right to question authority, to grimace when songs become so overplayed that they become devalued, then go ahead and do your thing. And maybe remind lucky people like me of sacrifice.”

To that end, Weisman has a point. There’s always value in honoring the fallen, and perhaps we’d all be better served to brush our cynicism off for a day. But there’s such a thing as too much perspective, and I’m not ready to embrace the showmanship. Baseball fans are baseball fans and baseball players are baseball players. We’re all capable of thinking for ourselves, honoring our troops, our country, our families, our causes, our religions as we see fit. Baseball is itself a cultural force, inherently and inextricably tied to the fabric of our nation. In that vein, maybe it would be more fitting to celebrate Memorial Day by honoring the scores of players who were killed in World War II.

We don’t need to dress our baseball players up in red hats to honor Memorial Day and we don’t need to dress the game up in outside causes and issues to reinforce its valued place in our society.

Have the Memorial Day you want today. Celebrate what American soldiers have given you and remember the ones you have known. If you go out to the ballpark, enjoy yourself and the game. If you don’t, enjoy the time off and with family and friends. Or not. It’s up to you, and that’s the whole point.

America, 1 Comment