Archive for the 'Baseball Culture' Category

The Way You Look Tonight

Eric, February 25, 2010, 9 Comments

I’ve made the switch from Times New Roman to Garamond for my every day typing. There was something about Times New Roman that made the words seem intimidating as they appeared on the screen. As if each serif, each dark line was saying something about my soul. It got to a point where I almost didn’t want to write because I didn’t want to see any more Times New Roman on the screen before me. Now I feel reenergized. It’s hard to explain.

This has led aesthetics to dominate my recent thinking. I’m starting to realize how easily affected I am by the way things look. It’s as simple as the difference between a sunny day and a cloudy one. For many years I considered myself impervious to the effects of weather. Then I realized that my music tastes were totally affected by it. Now the same thing is happening with fonts, I guess. And it goes beyond my own writing. Aesthetics have a huge impact on how we consume sports.

Take a look at uniforms. Few subjects are less relevant from a tangible perspective. But few things affect the fan experience more. UniWatchBlog gets insanely high traffic (we know that because RBI once got a very brief mention that sent over approximately 17million visitors). In baseball, not even steroids get as much flack from fans as misplaced black trim on traditional jerseys.

Even Paul Lo Duca hates black trim.

But let’s take this even more inward. The readers of this blog are either well-meaning friends of Ted and I or people who consume multiple sports blogs on a regular basis. And your opinion of PnP is greatly affected by its design. For example, the giant picture of Fernando Valenzuela’s face on our header causes people to think this is a Dodger-focused blog. Regular readers know this not to be the case, but the image probably has the same skill for discouraging Giants fans from reading that Times New Roman does for discouraging me from writing stuff. The Rogue’s Baseball Index, looks old-timey — an aesthetic that carries its own baggage.

What do we look for with sports blog design? Should the visual feel of the site somehow match the tone of the content? Josh Wilker’s Cardboard Gods does this perfectly. It’s a slightly literary design with a classic-baseball feel. The content is the focus, framed in white amidst a background of dark grays and blues. Joe Posnanksi, meanwhile, opts for pure utilitarianism. His long, long posts are presented on a plain white screen, with plenty of space for his ample reader-polls on the side bar and his weird personal projects on the header.

But those are singular and powerful voices. Their draw is their exceptional content – bells and whistles be damned. What of sites whose appeal lies in humor or news or pictures? What of Deadspin? Deadspin leaves it in the hands of the reader. Here are 6,000 stories. Pick your favorite. Me? I think it looks cluttered. But then again, I like to pick and choose my stories. God knows I don’t want to end up looking at one of their regular slide-shows of nude male athlete self-portraits.

Mustaches were a crucial part of 19th century baseball's aesthetic.

I suppose the goal of a blog design depends on the goals of the proprietors. Do you want to nurture your reader a-la Wilker into a bookish dream-state? Do you want to build traffic through various clicks and links and options? Is your most recent post key? Or is it about the big picture? This is just the first layer of questions. We can peel them back to reveal even more. Does the number of columns on the blog matter much? Do certain colors have certain impacts on the reader? What about the width of the text? Do you like to read a narrow column or a wider one? How does subject matter affect these things?

This all may seem vague and irrelevant. But I don’t think it is. All of our beliefs as baseball fans are colored by colors and indelible images and uncanny associations.  Consider the way uniforms touch the way we remember eras: the classic 1950s and 60s, the colorful 70s, the unfortunate 80s, the surprisingly teal 90s. It goes into the design of our stadiums as well. They evoke the eras in which they are built and the teams they house. The difference between Cardboard Gods and Deadspin isn’t all that different from the difference between Fenway Park and New Yankee Stadium.

I’m curious as to what your thoughts are. Please share them in the comments. For what it’s worth, two of my favorite blogs, aesthetics-wise, are Beerleaguer and Mike Scioscia’s Tragic Illness. What are yours?

Baseball Culture, Media, Technology and Thinking, 9 Comments

Crowd the Hall

Eric, January 26, 2010, 12 Comments

About two decades before the birth of Jesus Christ, construction began on what some historians have called the first Hall of Fame. It was conceived of by the Roman Emperor Augustus as a way to honor his gods, his ancestors, and himself. Hardly discerning when it came to his statuary, Augustus loaded his personal Hall of Fame with 108 busts, some hauled back to Rome from far-off lands, others commissioned by Augustus himself, others yet commemorating military triumphs.

Earlier this month, the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown elected its 293rd member in Andre Dawson. He will have to make due with a bronze plaque instead of a full-on marble statue. At initial glance, 293 seems like a lot of members. After all, the history of baseball in America pales in comparison with that of conquests in Rome, and Cooperstown is in many ways more notable for the players it leaves out than the ones it admits.

This year, Bert Blyleven and Roberto Alomar found themselves on the cusp of entry, scraping in vain at the impregnable golden fences of Cooperstown. Next year, they should be admitted. But what makes the Hall of Fame dynamic – as an institution more than as an actual building – is the list of men left on the outside. The Hall of Fame is defined by that invisible line that separates the worthy from the unworthy. It is the line over which celebrated men like Marvin Miller and Buck O’Neill, Gil Hodges and Ron Santo can never cross.

The location of this line, this threshold, is hard to place. Once upon a time, it sat squarely between numbers. It sat between 499 and 500, between 299 and 300, between 2,999 and 3,000. Only certain circumstances – misdeeds, injuries, intangibles – could compromise the landmarks of greatness. But these are different times. Belief systems, like home run records, have been crushed beneath a type of deceit. Traditional statistics, once considered infallible measurements of performance, have been proven inadequate.

There are 539 Hall of Fame voting members of the Baseball Writers Association of America. Aside from the broad and broadly-covered schism between old-school skeptics and sabermetric believers, that means 539 unique definitions of what merits Hall of Fame induction. Induction requires 75% approval, or 405 votes. Once eligible, players can remain on the ballot for up to fifteen years. This means time for voters to consider the legacy of a candidate as his career fades further into the rear-view mirror. For guys like Blyleven, who seems to be gaining momentum at the pace of a baseball rolling across a flat surface, it means annual near-misses, an extended human drama that feels destined to play out like the final scenes of an ancient tragedy.

This is why there needs to be some level of Hall of Fame voting reform. Not just for poor Blyleven, for whom induction would mean so much at this point, but for all of us. The Hall of Fame is supposed to be a celebration. It’s supposed to be nostalgic and it’s supposed to make us happy. We want to see our heroes in tears on that podium for their final moments of glory. We want to remember what it felt like to watch them play and win and lose.

I don’t know what I’d prescribe to fix the Hall of Fame voting process, but I know this. I would let more people in. I would ease the restrictions. I would welcome more players and more managers and more executives and more ambassadors. Not a lot more, but a few more; some of those legacies stranded right outside the gates would be granted admission.

As it stands now, the voting process is entirely subjective. There are no statistical requirements for entry, no thresholds that need to be reached. There are just those 539 writers and the meager check and balance of the Veterans Committee (an essay for another time). If it were otherwise, if this were a Hall of Greatness or Hall of Merit, then Bert Blyleven would have already been admitted, and the whole conversation would be moot.

But it’s a Hall of Fame. And that’s a different thing. With a Hall of Fame, the stakes are basically non-existent. Is Mickey Mantle’s presence in Cooperstown really soiled by Bill Mazeroski’s? There need be no statistical formula for inclusion. We have our hearts and our imaginations and the whole point of the institution is to please us, the baseball fans who trek to upstate New York, and pass hours arguing about it. So why not ease the standards, ease the frigid self-righteous shrieking over whether an excellent player (anybody whose even part of the conversation is an excellent player) is or isn’t quite deserving enough?

How could this be accomplished without creating a Hall of Mediocrity, or a Hall of Cora Brothers? There are a few possibilities that immediately come to mind. One option is to simply lower the 75% threshold used by the BBWAA, perhaps even to a more sane 70%. Another would be to introduce an element of controlled fan voting. I realize that some fans hate All Star voting because they believe average folks aren’t smart enough to know who the best second baseman in the NL in a given year is, but the fans are what powers baseball. As a single component of a larger formula, fan voting could bring a new dynamism to the process. A third option would be to introduce appeals processes, so certain candidacies could be resurrected.

I don’t know how much thought Augustus put into the statues in his forum. It is very possible that he argued for hours with advisors over whether to include a 109th statue, or whether a certain ancestor or general was being unjustly excluded. But honor and glory are not finite substances of which we could run out. Even with a slightly-expanded Hall of Fame, there will be emotional induction ceremonies and heated arguments over who deserves admission. It’s just that if we open the gates to Cooperstown just an inch or two wider, there will be more joy, and isn’t that the whole point?

Baseball Culture and Thinking, 12 Comments

Explorations in Baseball Nerdiness

Ted, November 23, 2009, 1 Comment

Nerdiness and baseball are frequent bedfellows. Bloggers in their mother’s basements, Steve Bartman, Excel spreadsheets, hyper-focused statistical analysis, George Will…the list really does go on and on. Another bastion of the super nerdy, a practice so odd and pointless that it makes listeners uncomfortable in conversation, is the animated .gif. Peewee Herman eating a cartoon ice cream cone, Pokemon characters doing strange things to Mad Men actors; whatever you’ve got, chances are good that someone has created a .gif that animates them doing strange things.

Recently, when I should have been doing something productive, I joined these two stalwarts of the socially questionable. I created a baseball-themed animated .gif. Without further ado, and with no point or purpose whatsoever other than the work one can do with Photoshop and a web tutorial, I present:

ichiro-animation

Baseball Culture, 1 Comment

An Argument for the Current MLB Awards Schedule, with Rafting Metaphors

Ted, November 18, 2009, 2 Comments

killing time

Right now, the MLB is slowly, slowly revealing the names of the 2009 award winners. The results trickle out to the media like grains of sand through a poorly maintained hourglass, presumably extending the shelf-life of the now-finished season to grab a few brain cells away from Lebron James and the NFL.

There are numerous arguments, and plenty of good reason to just go ahead and announce the award winners when they’re tabulated, just before the playoffs. However, I am, however, about to argue that there is some legitimate pleasure to be had from the awards announcement process at this quiet time in the baseball life cycle. The free agent frenzy will soon begin, with the corresponding sense of urgency. This time, however, right now, is appropriate for reflection, with a contemplative look back at what is already, jarringly, “last year.”

During the baseball season, I often feel like I’m traveling down a turbulent river in a rickety canoe. Just ahead of me, bobbing in the rapids, is the piece of flotsam that represents the team I choose to follow, the Astros (they’ve been far far ahead of late from another coast, kept afloat only by an enthusiastic blog community. Also, does that make the Yankees a super-tanker?). It’s all I can do to keep my gaze trained on that elusive target, tracking its progress as it dips and swirls, disappears from view and reemerges.

The rest of baseball–the other teams, individual performances, slumps and streaks, scandals, standings, highlights, records–line the shore. Tracking the piece of drift downstream, the shoreline flickers past in my peripheral vision as little more than a blur of color and light.

rafting

The first respite on this journey (it’s a fun ride, despite my somewhat harrowing metaphor) comes in the calm eddy just before the playoffs, when most slots are sealed up, bad seasons come to an end and, and the new second season promises a more concentrated pursuit. That’s the first time I try and take stock of all that has just happened, particularly by catching up on the teams that are still in the race. How did they get there, what do they bring to the table?

That quick breather is soon over, and the class 6 rapids that are the playoffs begin. And as abruptly as they begin, they are through. All falls silent, birds chirp, the woodfire crackles in the evening light.

The twilight fades to the depressing yellow glow of the indoor NBA arena. In the conjoined exhilaration and melancholy of the season’s end, it turns to reflection time. For me, that’s means checking the detailed leader boards on sites like The Hardball Times or Fangraphs.

It’s a marvel to me how much I miss in the course of a season. You can read all of the blogs that you want, and watch as much Baseball Tonight as your eyeballs can take, but small bits and bytes of information still continuously emerge depending on the lens that you put on your camera. Train your viewfinder on the A’s or the Blue Jays or whatever team is furthest from your typical focus, and you’ll find out that Andrew Bailey had a dominant year out of the bullpen, or Adam Lind just crushed it all year. And those are the obvious ones. Aaron Hill can slug, but he doesn’t take many walks. And Vernon Wells…yikes.

For every team, there’s a minimum of 25 things to learn, and truly many more than that. Every player tells an eight month story.

And so, to the awards season. As lengthy as the process is (Joe Posnanski tweeted “As a member of the Baseball Writers, I wonder: Can’t we stretch out these awards more? I understand MVP comes out July 2013.”), there is a core understanding going on that this is indeed the time to discuss the awards. They are individual in nature, and the darkest depths of the offseason are better suited for debates about player prowess than just before the post season, when team play is paramount. Individual award conversation pales in comparison to the playoff vibe, the intensity of each pitch of each game.

sittin around talking

Now, however, the hot lamps have cooled, the champagne has dried sticky to the floor, and we’re by the campfire again. It’s the time to contemplate the individual achievements, the gems buried in the rock of a long, arduous season. What sparkles now can be placed under the microscope and tested for purity. Purity, in this sense, is gauged under the jeweler’s eye of conversation, of debate, with a calm dose of perspective.

Enter the awards, which offer the institutionalized version of one side of a conversation. The general body says, “This is the answer to this question,” vis a vis the best rookie in each league, the best pitcher, the best player, the best coach. A definitive proclamation is the best way to start any conversation, as it’s the ultimate launching point for conversation. And so, in a manner, the awards are not a finisher but a starter, the flint and tinder that set the baseball scene to talking up a fire. The hot stove, yes, is what that is, if it sounds familiar. It’s calm water. It keeps us warm.

The awards season mirrors the times, by which I mean the offseason itself: it’s a slow tedious march, marked by the odd flourish of pretty great stuff to talk about.

Baseball Culture, 2 Comments

On Repetition, Consistency, and Ichiro

Ted, September 18, 2009, 2 Comments

elephantlarge_artworkimage

There is poetry in repetition, and repetition in poetry, and poetition in repeatery. In their mystical, reptilian brain-type ways, rhyme and verse and meter build and release tension, create and demolish expectation, and generally provide the aesthetic infrastructure that enables poetry and music to variously melt our insides and set fire to our brain stems. There’s no point in offering an example. Just think of the scariest or the most exhilarating aesthetic experience you’ve ever had, and it’s likely that it either a) repeated the best part or a variation over and over or b) established repetition and then sent it spinning. (I’m not scholar of poetry or music enough to go much farther than that, and even in this generalization I’m working on instinct).

All of that to say: I watched Ichiro play the other night, at Safeco Field.

Ichiro’s been much in the news in the last week or so, for cracking 2,000 hits, for doing it quickly, and for breaking Wee Willie Keeler’s record eight consecutive seasons with 200 hits. These are records that bring a word to mind: consistency, ie. doing something very well for a very long time. It’s marvelous, but the word that interests me more for the sake of having watched him play the other day and for this post is: repetition. They’re two words with much different implications, but they’re also co-dependent.

Repetition means doing the same thing over and over. Consistency means successfully pulling something off again and again. Repetition: Ichiro does the same thing before every pitch. Constistency: Ichiro gets a hit 35% of the time, but doesn’t get a hit 65% of the time. More than any other player, Ichiro gives the impression that hitting with such consistency, ie. getting a hit 35% of the time, would be impossible without repeating the the same ritual 100% of the time. Repetition is the platinum setting upon which the jewel of his consistency is mounted.

So yes, there you have it, Ichiro has these rituals that he repeats over and over again. So why is this important, or why, rather, is it satisfying to watch?

ichiro_ritual

For one, I think, it’s the style that Ichiro lends to his rituals. For most other players, you’d call them tics. But Ichiro adds something, a certain theatrical bent, to suggest his awareness of the importance of the ritual itself as a means to the end. He brings attention to the act of preparing for a pitch. A word that pops up in the definition of the word ritual is ceremony. In modern parlance, ritual has a more widely applicable connotation–everyone’s got their ritual, whether it’s a cup of coffee in the morning or the way a Little Leaguer wears his stirrups–while ceremony still carries with it the banner of history, of communal import and procedure. All of this to say that Ichiro’s repetitive acts have the flavor of ceremony, of fulfilling the necessary requirements to move forward, recalling the lessons of his youth and of seasons and weeks and days past. Through all of the games over all those years, the thread that sews them altogether is that ritual:
the pre-pitch motion in which he raises the bat in his right hand to the pitcher, pointing in the same direction with all five fingers of his left hand, before dropping the bat and bringing it around and up to his ear.

Watching all of this go down in person is what I dig. On TV, you might catch a glimpse of his at-bat ritual before the camera cuts to the Bud Light trivia question or the roving reporter in the stands. But in person, it’s unedited Ichiro, in real-time. More than the edited version, one can watch Ichiro in his full state of Being. There is the pre-pitch ritual, but there is also the continuous stretching in funny crouches, the practice swings, and–this one was new to me–the exaggerated, Satchel Paige-like wind-up with high leg kick that he goes into with every warm-up throw in the outfield. While centerfielder Franklin Gutierrez lolligaggs his tosses with an air of boredom, Ichiro makes the boring act into an art form by constricting it, by placing a constraint around it and carrying it through to its extreme.

Plain Throw wiffle ball

My baseball career was defined at all times by inconsistency. Not of performance, necessarily; I was great until about age 15. But I never threw the ball with the same arm angle, my batting stance changed every week, the height of my stirrups fluctuated wildly, etc. My style was to have no single style. This wasn’t by design, necessarily, but rather a matter of character. My handwriting, for example, is messy and it changes with the wind. Perhaps it’s this nature, my flapping, groundless personal story, that urges my fascination with Ichiro’s superhuman capacity to repeat and repeat. I am jealous of and amezed by perfectly uniform, utterly neat handwriting too. For me, that consistency is unattainable.

And then, of course, there is what Ichiro does between rituals, when the pitch is on the way and the ball in play. The rituals mark one side of the coin, and the other side is stamped with his improvisational skills, and his ability to stretch and contract with the demands of the present tense. The career of Turk Wendell taught us that a bunch of great rituals with feeble results doesn’t go nearly as far. But watching the two skills in concert, the repetition and the consistency, is what makes baseball worth watching, even when the teams involved are long out of the race and the season is lost.

P.S. Ken Griffey, Jr., hit a home run in that game, too, but that’s another story.

Baseball Culture, 2 Comments

Watching the Hero Walk Alone, Together: Ritual, Community, Power, and Baseball

Ted, September 1, 2009, 2 Comments

In the Loop movie

I watched In the Loop this evening, which is a movie about politicos screaming at each other and forcing their will upon one another through devious and guttural means. It was great, a sort of power-wielding vicarious fantasy film, in which the viewer is able to imagine and enjoy the idea that the world’s political puppeteers are all semi-violent masochists screaming insults at each other at every opportunity. It’s not a rosy picture, but there is clearly something in all of us–or maybe just in me–that wants matters of import to be decided in barks and rants, rather than in Obama-esque calm, considered conversations.

Eric, in his recent post, posed questions about our relationship to baseball, what lessons we want to learn from it, and where we should draw the line. I have realized in my calm, considered meditation on the above film, that many of us live our baseball lives in pursuit of that similar kind of macho fantasy. The critiques that we lob across the Internet and across the pub table are just as spirited, the sort of outburst that would lead to an unsavory arrest if exercised from a cubicle. When you’ve got all of the power–when you are a defense secretary, for example, or a seasoned manager of a major league baseball team–the cops clear the way for you when you’re walking to the car.

This is nothing new, and it even treads into the territory of the cliche that Eric mentioned, ie. fans living vicariously aggressive lives through sport (see hooligans, football, England). There’s the stress relieving nature of the thing, and the social limitations, those seem pretty obvious. But there’s still something in it, I think, that bears consideration. Digging quite deep…Why do we need to live vicarious lives at all? What is it about the human experience that demands such fantasies? Why can’t we live, as for example my dog does, satisfied with the life we’ve got? As Jerry Seinfeld would ask it: What’s the deal with imagination?

embrace-escapism

I am unequipped to even brush the hem of these questions. Great men and women have labored in the sweat shop of these inquiries and come up with no solid thing but poetry, answering questions with questions.

Troublesome as the broad questions are, perhaps it bears turning again to Eric’s notions, and ponder: what do we expect to get out of these games? We’re drawn to them, and we make heroes out of the humans that play the games, but what gnarly truths emerge when we ask why we do what we do?

mandala

Part of the appeal of baseball, admittedly, is the luxury of thinking of nothing else, of concentrating upon, as Eric puts it, “the tiny situations, the intricacies of each game.” As humans have done for a very long time, we draw the intricacies of our real lives–the sobs and the doldrums and the deficiencies– from ourselves like a nurse drawing blood into a syringe, and we set our vials into the centrifugal ceremonial space in the middle–the diamond, the great circle, the alpha and the omega, the mandala, the CENTER–and watch it spin. A piece of ourselves spins in the middle, but in giving it over to the communal centrifuge, we buy the luxury of becoming viewers, and we watch ourselves from outside of ourselves. (For a deeper investigation of the symbolism of the baseball field, see Lance Strate’s essay in this interesting anthology: Take Me Out to the Ballgame: Communicating Baseball.)

The heroes are the designated dervishes, perambulating the ceremonial stupa as we yell ourselves hoarse. We know full well that Joe Mauer is no hero, that he is no different than we are except that he’s been chosen to stand in the eye of the storm, carrying us on his back, bearing the burden of the community. We make a hero of him but it’s a play, a ritual, and he is playing out the role that we’ve assigned him, putting voice to the tragedy and the comedy. We all watch together as the hero walks alone. And it is so ingrained in our concept of community, and of ritual, that we think nothing of this process, but carry it on endlessly.

Flip Fly Fly ball dervish

Why else would Manny Ramirez make fans so angry? It’s because he is me, and he is you, and when he dances a jig across the archetypes, when he runs a careless hand across his face and smears his stage make-up, when he kicks the sand mandala up into a colorful cloud, he’s raising the curtain to expose the wiring and the complex pulley systems and the bags of sand and the director with a script in his trembling hands and a trouble-shooting expression. That would make anyone nervous, who’s invested a pint of his own blood into the occasion, the well-intentioned theater goer who’s bought his ticket fair and square, with the understanding that the fourth wall would hold strong. For an actor in this very play to suggest that it’s all just a put-on, that you’ll never really wield the power that he appears to, that the fans have vested him with for this three hour period; that it’s an illusion, a fantastical stage production designed solely to ignite the pleasure sensors in that dozy, gullible mass, the human brain.

Should we, then, give it all up, these rituals (the derivations of which I’ve tossed into the culture-blender for my own feeble purpose), and tend to adult things, tilling the fields and falling asleep as dusk darkens, a copy of The Economist rising and falling on our chests? Of course not. The theater is a sound and forgiving medium for human expression, ready to take us in and give back to us in equal measure. Do we need to think about the stage and the players and the director? No, but it sure is fun. Is barking at insubordinates while vaccinated by maximum power as enjoyable as it looks on screen or on the field? Probably, but I I’ll never know.

For now, and forever (hopefully), the ring will be there for us to throw our caps into; those dad caps and those promotional giveaway caps, the throwback caps and yes, the fashion caps, and the Dodgers cap stacked perilously and improbably on a pile of infuriating dreadlocks.

Baseball Culture, 2 Comments

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