Archive for the 'Media' 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

Who’s Our Daddy? A Roger Angell Appreciation

Eric, November 30, 2009, 4 Comments

Roger Angell is 89 years old. He was born in 1920. To put that in perspective, Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle were born in 1931. Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush were born in 1924. What I’m saying is that Roger Angell is an old man. That fact, of which there is no hiding, is what makes his latest in the New Yorker, Daddies Win, so magnificent.

He takes a few cheap shots at the blogs. He bemoans statistics. But the man still writes like he is living in 1957, in a world where baseball players are made not by television, but by the words floating through the air via radio, and the ones printed on newspaper and magazine pages. He writes like baseball still has the power to capture the imagination of an entire nation. His essay on the Yankees’ latest World Series victory is plucky and poetic. Without being sappy, the piece emits a sort of sepia-tinged nostalgia. What struck me most as I read this was Angell’s knack for magnificent little descriptions. He writes about baseball like the game is still new.

Here are some of my favorite descriptions:

On Alex Rodriguez:

“This year – well, this year he he’s been somebody else.”

“I’ve had the impression that I’m within touching distance of a new species.”

Cliff Lee:

“He throws with an elegant flail, hiding the ball behind his hip or knee and producint it from behind his left shoulder, already in full delivery. His finish brings his left leg up astern like a semaphore, while his arm swings across his waist. This columnar closing posture . . . is classic and reminded me strongly of some fabled pitcher from my boyhood.”

Chase Utley:

“Utley, who has slicked-backed, Jake Gittes hair, possesses a quick back and a very short home-run stroke; he looks like a man in an ATM reaching for his cash.”

AJ Burnett:

“a Tom Joad with beads.”

CC Sabathia

“Sunny looks and pavilion-sized pants and weird, white-toed spikes.”

“his fastball-cutter-changeup assortment . . arrives like a loaded tea tray coming down an airshaft.”

cc: turtlemom4bacon

On the New Yankee Stadium:

“I enjoy the wild, Ginza-esque light shows – the “lightage” I mean – but I’d trade them for the steeply vertical stands of the vacant, now shrouded original and the walls of noise they produced on big nights.”

On Nick Swisher:

Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?

On Hideki Matsui:

“His silence kept him old-fashioned: a ballplayer from the black-and-white newspaper-photograph days, before our heroes talked.”

I’d venture to say the same thing about Angell.

Baseball the Teacher and Media, 4 Comments

Grains of Loyalty: Staying True to Your Team in Traveling Times

Ted, August 12, 2009, 7 Comments

Transience might be the defining characteristic of my generation, those in the ballpark of their twenties right now. It starts with college a thousand miles from home, then a junior year abroad, then post-college city-hopping to chase down entry-level jobs, and then post-post college grad school hopping to chase down normal-type jobs. My own pursuits and mispursuits recently brought me–as of a week ago–to Seattle, Washington. I’ve arrived, in other words, at the latest geographical challenge to that dusty term, loyalty.

Loyalty

I was born in and have spent a considerable portion of my life in Houston, Texas, and I’m an Astros fan. My high school days were a golden time for the home team, as me and my buddy Mike skipped out on afternoon classes to spend hours in the Astrodome, under the fluorescent lights, watching Biggio and Bagwell. But since those geographically stable, unambiguously Astro-faithful days, I’ve lived in six cities or towns in six states. By my tally, that would stake each of the Red Sox, the Braves, the Cubs, the White Sox, the Reds, and now the Mariners with a decent claim for my attentions (for what they’re worth). The draw of some have been greater than others, driven by media outlets (I was a Braves fan in the early nineties only because they were on TV every night) and friendships. But usually there is the ever-moving convivial current, the urge to float along downstream with those around you, in spite of the quiet, wooded pond waiting back home.

At 17, I left for college in New England, and in the days before mlbTV, it was nearly impossible to pass as an engaged Astros fan from so far away. All I had were the Houston Chronicle’s game recaps to work with. I couldn’t see the new rookie play, I couldn’t watch the fading veteran struggle to replicate his past glory. I could read about it, and that’s not the worst, but it gives little sense of satisfaction. To others, you sound like an absentee father talking half-proudly about the children he doesn’t know.

Naturally, therefore, as a Robinson Crusoe figure stranded on an island barren of any Astros awareness whatsoever, I was drawn into the narrative structures that unfolded around me. The Red Sox fans dominated the narrative game, this before the decade of their abundance. Back then they were hypnotically loud, obnoxious, sour, despised and despising, especially by and of the loud, obnoxious, hubristic Yankees fans, whose narrative at the time was that of the wealthy hypochondriac (whose illness, it turned out, was all too real). There were other cadres–some Mets fans, a few Phillies fans–but the Sox and the Yanks banter filled up the TV rooms; it was their bemoaning and disbelief and jubilation that steered the baseball conversations up that way. The Sox fans with their ill-fated futility, the overlooked attic inventors to the Yankees fans’ canny corporate taste makers. Of course these stories were infectious.

What I found so compelling was that term I mentioned above: the loyalty. Never before or since have I met fans whose teams were so much a part of their personal fabric. They oozed allegiance, not from some choice, but by a sort of birthright. If it wasn’t an actual birthright, it became so through sheer force of will, through a repetition so relentless the Catholics would be jealous. Red Sox fans and Yankees fans believed it–they believed that they were inseparable from their teams–and it was so. Loyalty was not a choice of geography, it was a certainty. Not being a religious person, and being an Astros fan, I’d never seen that before.

dan duquette.jpg

Anyhow, I’ve diverged, but that was my first sense of the tenuousness of loyalty, that feeling I’d get listening to Red Sox talk on sports radio, and imagining myself for a couple of ticks to be a Red Sox fan, to be as engaged in those tedious, melancholy debates as the Irish kid from Newton, Mass. I felt a little guilty, but I also felt that, like an adulterer, my desire was overwhelming my reason and my loyalty. In the end I overcame temptation, and watched the Astros when they showed up every several months on ESPN’s national broadcast. But the same thing happened again in Chicago, with America’s second great–and now its only–bastion of despair, the Cubs. Fortunately, I got to see the Astros play locally a few times, and it helped that they were in the same division, so the sense of isolation wasn’t as great. But I didn’t, I’m ashamed to say, discourage my wife from getting a Cubs hoodie. (It looks great on her.)

So what is it about this loyalty? Why should I feel bad about switching allegiances, if that’s what my id demands? The word itself derives from the term leal, which is in some way related to the term fealty, which means fidelity, which means faithful. So there is an implicit sort of religious drive behind it, of faith over choice. One doesn’t think of choosing a religion (though it happens all the time, I suppose), as much as one is born into it, and I think there’s the perception that baseball fans should work in the same manner. Fathers playing catch with sons, and that sort of hereditary legacy. That is, after all, how I was drawn into the appeal of the New England fans, with the jealousy of a day guest at the country club. And the guilt creeps in too, the way the day guest feels bad about his friends back home and all of those after all pretty pleasant bike rides through the boring old neighborhood at sunset.

So its an internal process, this loyalty business, a way of calibrating one’s own compass to sustain a sense of continuity and a connection with the homeland in the midst of the transience that I mentioned in the first paragraph. Guilt comes into play, and temptation lurks around every corner of the continent. I could’ve become a Red Sox fan whole hog, yes, but would I have enjoyed their 2004 and 2007 World Series victories as much as I would have an Astros win, in 2005 for example? The answer is too easy, and so an Astros fan I remain.

The good news, or at least the news, is that for all of this existential wrangling, there are vastly more tools available today to nurture the uprooted adherent. With mlbTV and radio, media coverage is always available everywhere, and the monopoly of content is wrested away from the ESPN scheduling gestapo with all of their New England-centrism, into the hands of the MLB. And you don’t even need a TV. The same flexibility holds for all of life too, obviously, which probably means that college freshmen, instead of abandoning their high school friends until next summer, get to hear all about how shitty a team each other is having year round.

The residual effects of this ease of access suggests to me that today’s baseball-loving college freshmen a) spend a lot more time than they already do huddled in a shadowy corner of their ten foot, double occupancy dorm room watching their home team play meaningless September games b) find even fewer reasons to interact with their peers who are all out having more fun than them anyway (see item a) c) be out 120 bucks of WoW budget money d) fail to detach themselves completely from their vastly romanticized high school days, thereby spending the next four years devising ways to get back to Cincinnati or Cleveland or Milwaukee instead of just getting on with it already.

I kid, of course. It’s possible to closely follow your home town team on a daily basis, as if you were there, and bring it up regularly in conversation, even though you’re thousands of miles from where your team does it’s business, in a city with its own far more successful team, without sounding overbearing or brutally out of touch. Right?

Media and Memoir, 7 Comments

TV: Watching an Episode of Baseball Tonight, All the Way Through

Ted, July 6, 2009, 0 Comments

I don’t know if I’ve ever sat still and watched an entire episode of Baseball Tonight before. But on the 4th of July, at midnight, when I probably should have been out somewhere watching colorized, simulated cannonfire, I decided to do just that. These are my notes from that hour. Humble nod to Chuck Klosterman, who once in a fit of apparent insanity clearly watched 24 hours of VH1 Classic.

11:56 p.m. – Who else is watching Baseball Tonight at midnight on American Birthday: 2009? And of this minuscule party, what percentage is some number of sheets to the wind right now, prone on the couch with a hand on the carpet to stop the spins, hoping that some baseball highlights will usher them into a needed sleep? Will the anchors slow down their delivery a few beats per minute, to cater to this impaired demographic? Slightly unrelated inquiry: What would Peter Gammons be like drunk? I’m guessing the trade rumors and word-of-mouth insights would flow unfiltered, one insider baseball Jägerbomb after another, blowing the minds of anyone within a fifteen-foot circumference.

11:58 p.m. – I’ve tuned in at the conclusion of Sportscenter. First, SC undercuts the impact of the show that’s on in two minutes by offering a quick-burst highlight package of a few games, stuffing them into the broadcast in the waning minutes. Then it’s some Rick Reilly-style closing coverage of the Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July Hot Dog Eating Contest. The anchors went to fade-out by quizzing each other about hot dogs: “How many hot dogs could you eat?” Awkward search for a hilarious reply. “Ever been to Coney Island?” Nope. “Crunch time? This is MUNCH time.” “Did you know that 26 million hot dogs get eaten at baseball games every year?” And scene.

12:00 a.m. - The opening images of your Baseball Tonight feature Lou Gehrig’s heart-rending speech, being celebrated in MLB games across the country. BBTN shows a clip of the speech, but rather than simply showing it, they display it on a sort of simulated screen within a screen, as though the Gehrig speech was showing at a drive-in, and BBTN dispatched a cameraman to film it. Such is the nature of ESPN highlights programming these days, that they very badly want viewers to remember that they are watching something, that a major production is underway, that this is a Pretty Big Deal here. The Gehrig speech is always stirring, though, in a way the antithesis of the popping madness of the BBTN intro.

Well, it was sort of like this

12:01 a.m. - The crew for this doubtless relatively unpopular time slot include anchor on the left Steve Berthiaume, in the middle former infielder Eric Young, and on your right former infielder Fernando Vina. Absent are the familiar BBTN heads, pro’s pro Karl Ravech, cantankerous defender of the Old Manner John Kruk, and the sober pro’s pro Peter Gammons. A meat sandwich on a pro’s pro bun. I don’t mean to suggest that Kruk is not professional–it’s a hard job and not anyone can do it–but he does seem to relish the role of the common man, as baseball’s most recent incarnation of the old archetype, the hidden hope that your average Jack might hide within him a formidable batting average.

Berthiaume strikes me as one grain in the sandstorm of rotating SC anchors. He hasn’t left me with an indelible impression. Eric Young, as a commentator, has a shrill voice and much enthusiasm, which I can’t fault. Vina’s facial hair makes me uncomfortable, and his style on TV is the same as it was on the field: serviceable, but a little stiff.

12:04 a.m. - Every MLB player and coach is wearing the special red USA baseball cap, regardless of team. An MLB.com article has this to say about it: “This promises to be the most patriotic display of an American baseball cap since Bruce Springsteen stuffed a red one into the back pocket of his blue jeans on the cover of his “Born in the U.S.A.” album nearly a quarter-century ago.” Which part of the titular ballad of a Vietnam vet do you think they have in mind? Is it: “Sent me off to Vietnam / To go and kill the yellow man”? Or perhaps: “Down in the shadow of the penitentiary / Out by the gas fires of the refinery / I’m ten years down the road / Nowhere to run, ain’t got nowhere to go”? Maybe it was the penultimate refrain, which could just as easily describe the 2009 seasons of MLB veterans like Magglio Ordonez, Chien-Ming Wang or Jason Giambi: “I’m a long gone Daddy in the U.S.A.”

12:08 a.m. - In the first true batch of highlights, EY heralds Manny Ramirez’s first home run back from his hiatus with a cry of “souvenir city!” without any hint of irony. Vina praises his hustle, especially in the field. A Joe Torre interview quiets the BBTN ecstasy for a moment with a calm, reasoned post-game interview before the gang launches back into praise for Manny’s timing, and notes his standing on the all-time home run list (tied with Jimmie Foxx for 16th). Quoth one of them: “He is one of the greatest hitters of all time, that’s why we keep bringing this up.” I’m still waiting for the PED sideswipe (it will not arrive).

12:09 a.m. - The answer is no, the anchors do not augment the pace of their presentation for the drunk.

There’s an interesting dynamic on this and other MLB highlight shows, namely the MLB Network’s. The anchorman does what you’d consider to be traditional SC-style rundown that we’ve seen for years. The commentators, meanwhile–the retired pro ballplayer types–verbally hop around this way and that, injecting their hasty insights around the linear narrative of the anchor.

BBTN: The style is a kind of verbal pepper

12:12 a.m. - Some Red Sox highlights. Berthiaume can’t believe what a bad inning Takashi Saito had. He really can’t believe it. His disbelief is fervent. One of them says, AAARrrdsma, pirate-style. Honestly, I thought Berthiaume would be the neutral one, the straight man, but he’s going on and on about Takashi-friend.

12:20 a.m. - Time for a rundown of the latest Mets melt-down, Independence Day Edition. Berthiaume is equally amazed at the suckiness of the Mets defense. “They’re throwing it all over the field here! This is Bad News Bears stuff!” Berthiaume is really doing a lot of editorializing here for the host-type moderator guy. “Howard is really becoming a better defensive first baseman.” He doesn’t seem content to let EY and Vina do the Little League-coach style barking.

Feature alert! They just froze a shot of Mets catcher Omir Santos. They zoomed in on his eyeballs, to somehow illustrate that he took his eyes off of a pop-up behind the plate. “Look at his eyes!” Vina’s shouting. “Where are his eyes?” The evidence as to the actual focus of Santos’ gaze is certainly not as cut-and-dry as Vina purports. The zoomed-in eyes are grainy and pixelated. Did I inadvertently flip over to Cheaters? I’m a little uncomfortable.

12:27 a.m. - SC commercials really are as funny now as they always have been. Who writes these?

12:32 a.m. - Tigers and Twins. Justin Morneau has a Fred McGriff-style helicopter follow through. Now there’s a great player that I NEVER see play. Morneau, ripping into another pitch. He literally hits exactly like the Crime Dog, from the stillness of his hands to the pace and follow-through of the swing. One reference I found to this phenomenon comes in a NYTimes piece on the batting stance guy, Gar Ryness: “In [Ryness] parlance, the former star Fred McGriff “Morneau’d it” at the end of his swing by curling his bat over his head in the style of Justin Morneau, the current Twins first baseman.” Why on earth McGriff Morneaus it, rather than Morneau McGriffing it, is something I will never Morneau.

McGriffin' it? Or Morneauin' it?

12:36 a.m. - A new skill for the new baseball fan is to pick your fantasy team members out of the endless barrage of highlights. They pop out from the crowd like ex-girlfriends from a high school yearbook. For me, Edwin Jackson catches my eye, and Mike Napoli, etc., for no good reason beyond the fantasy angle.

12:39 a.m. - White Sox rookie Gordon Beckham face-plants on a headfirst slide into second, where his hands get caught on the dirt and no longer let him glide like Rickey along the surface of the dirt. I’m glad to know that what humiliated me as a 14-year-old can happen to a pro, albeit a youngster. Beckham then gets clocked by a baserunner, then he hits a homer. This after maybe 350 at bats in the minors.

12:41 a.m. - I am going strong. I’m not bored at all, and my general compulsion to change channels every 30 seconds remains at bay. There’s a feeling of satisfaction from actually watching the show, the way you would, say, an hour-long drama. I’m so used to the low commitment threshold of BBTN that this marriage is refreshingly stable. I don’t need to change channels, I’m solid. My dog, conversely, is dead asleep on the bed, dreaming about Fernando Vina’s goatee.

12:42 a.m. - A special feature! With the crack crew of former middle infielders at their disposal, the BBTN team will focus on the architecture of the 5-4-3 double play. Third-to-second-to-first. It’s about time some old jocks took to the simulation field. Oddly, EY and Berthiaume opt to leave their jackets on. Vina is the only one sans his coat, and as such he looks like he poorly judged his present company, like the kid who wears khakis and penny loafers to the pool party.

The demo was solid, a lot of talk about footwork. EY really winged the ball hard to Vina, though they were no more than ten feet apart. But Vina grabbed the screamer like it was nothing and finished off his phantom double whammy. Vina, having fake-doubled him off of fake-second base, real slaps Berthiaume on the ass and says, “thanks for coming.”

12:47 - A good way to keep me glued to BBTN: tease me with upcoming clips of Tim Lincecum throwing seven innings of sweetness.

12:52 - The episode starts to wind down with an array of summary-type segments, like That’s Nasty, in which they go through the strikeout hammers of the day (Timmy’s got a few of them), oohing and ahhing at the curveballs and the high and tight fastballs and what not. Then it’s on to Touch ‘Em All, with some impressive home runs of the day, and finally it’s the Web Gems, where BBTN now puts much of its branding stock. They keep score, now, which is charming while at the same time an empty sort of pleasure. A single great play is fine for TV, but it overlooks much of our baseball education of the past 5-10 years, that one great play does not make a great player. Add enough of them up, I suppose you’ve got something. But anyhow, it’s fun, and maybe I’m just getting a little melancholy as these wrap-ups portend the end of an era, the end of an hour.

12:59 - There you have it. I barely registered the hour, it flew by. Soon the dolphin-sounds that announce the beginning of SC will ring out in the galactic void of the transitional graphics. Steve, EY, Fernando, I can’t promise the same attentions ever again, but on this night, my hour was yours.

This evening's holy trinity

Media, 0 Comments

The Union Forever

Eric, June 23, 2009, 1 Comment

I recently caught my first ever episode of Studio 42 with American Treasure Bob Costas® on the MLB Network. Costas interviewed Bob Gibson and Tim McCarver for the whole hour and had me fascinated from the get-go. Gibson is disarmingly genial for a guy who threw 96 mph fastballs at opponents just because, and McCarver is as great an interviewee as he is awful an interviewer/commentator. Credit to Costas for covering everything from segregated Spring Training facilities to losing World Series efforts against the Yankees and Tigers.

One topic they hit on was Curt Flood, who played center field for those sixties Cardinals teams. It was the rare discussion of Flood purely as a ballplayer. His teammates asserted – and Costas backed them up on this – that Flood was among the best defensive center fielders of all time, with better range than Willie Mays. As Gibson chatted about Flood the teammate, and Flood the player, I realized that before this interview I knew next to nothing of Curt Flood playing baseball. I knew Flood the Martyr, Flood the Patron Saint of Free Agents, but not Flood the baseball player.

This realization sent me down a thought-spiral on memory and legacy and all that stuff. For me Curt Flood isn’t so much a ballplayer as a symbol, a historic figure, a memory. Because he challenged the reserve clause, Flood represents something way bigger in baseball history than his contributions on the field. But maybe instead of complementing a fine career, the legal battles have caused Flood’s achievements to be overlooked.

Hell, between 1963 and 1969, Curt Flood, Willie Mays, and Roberto Clemente won every National League Gold Glove for outfielders. Then, in 1970, it was Flood, Clemente, and Pete Rose. Flood was a decent hitter, but not a superstar like those guys. He wasn’t winning these awards because his offensive production prejudiced voters. Flood made a couple of All Star games too.

From what I’ve read, Curt Flood was a hell of a guy. You have to be bold to take a baseball contract dispute to the Supreme Court, risking your own career to prove a point for your fellow ballplayers. He wrote (not recited to a sportswriter, but really wrote) a book, part autobiography and part critical essay on the commercial realities of baseball as run by the freewheeling and unchecked owners of the time. He owned a bar in Spain. He was commissioner of the short-lived Senior Professional Baseball Association. And sadly, Flood died young, of throat cancer at just 59 years old.

I wonder what a guy like Curt Flood, whose interests and perspective extended far beyond the diamond, would think of his legacy. I wonder if he’d feel overlooked as a ballplayer, or proud to be something more. Let’s face it, you don’t get rock songs written about you for just tracking down lots of fly balls in center field.

If Curt Flood is to baseball players as Cesar Chavez is to farm workers, what does that make George McGovern in this picture?

Then yesterday, obviously due to his concern with my current-train-of-thought, Donald Fehr stepped down as head of the MLB Player’s Association. Fehr came up as a lawyer, general counsel to the MLBPA, and prodigy of former Flood co-conspirator Marvin Miller. The first reaction I read to Fehr’s retirement was from Darren Rovell on CNBC.com. Rovell framed the story, and Fehr’s career in about the least surprising way possible:

“Does Don Fehr Get An *?”

I thought it was cool that Rovell, who is generally more interested in the businessy and right-now side of things, jumped straight to a piece on legacy. But the way he framed Fehr’s legacy, as either all-about, or not-totally about steroids leaves no room for nuance. Steroids will be a part of the discussion for a long time, but maybe the immediacy of it all makes these issues hard to process.

I recently swore to myself I would stop writing about steroids, because nothing good can come of it anymore, but this is only tangentially related. Fehr ran the MLBPA during the “steroid era.” Until the end, when public suspicion grew into public outrage, he defended the players from accountability on the issue of performance enhancers. But as head of the union wasn’t that his job? Wouldn’t it be fairer to see Fehr in the same light we see defense attorneys? For there to be dialogue, doesn’t somebody need to argue the less popular point? It only got interesting because Fehr was so much better at it than Selig and his cohorts.

Did people know in 1972 that Curt Flood would be the Reserve Clause Guy? Maybe, but if the Reserve Clause wasn’t overturned three years after Flood struck the opening blow, that battle might have been a mere footnote, a triviality.

Then again, what else has Don Fehr really done? His wikipedia page is terribly short.

*Bonus video: Billy Bragg, Power In The Union:

Conventional Wisdom, Media and Thinking, 1 Comment

Blogging Econo

Eric, June 15, 2009, 6 Comments

Bonus Info: Blogs With Balls is also responsible for my playing wiffle ball with Harold Reynolds.

I went to Blogs with Balls this weekend, the first ever sports blogging conference. There was some early trepidation about going, but I’m glad I bit the bullet. It was a lot of fun, the food was decent, and I met some exceptionally cool people – more on them later.

More importantly, the conference allowed me to flesh out some ideas on blogs and blogdom and the broader sports media landscape that I had been unable to previously articulate. The panelists were a mix of blogger/writers, new media moguls, and miscellaneous white people. I learned a ton.

I didn’t realize I was learning anything groundbreaking besides how to be good on Twitter until the last panel of the day. It was supposed to be on why the old guard media hates bloggers, but devolved into a sort of free-for-all. FreeDarko’s Bethlehem Shoals worked himself up into an existential, expletive-filled frenzy over what we were all doing there in the first place.

“A blog is just a fucking platform,” he said at one point.

That hit home. I don’t blog because I want to make a million dollars in ad revenue or because I believe in blogging as some sort of movement. I write a blog because blogs are stunningly effective at getting words from one person’s head to another’s line of sight. If this were the 1700s, and the most effective way for me to share a thousand word essay on racism, nationalism, and fan identity was by printing up pamphlets and handing them out on the streets, I’d probably be doing that.

In the 1700s not all pamphleteers were doing the same thing, and today not all bloggers do the same thing. Some pamphleteers wrote angry screeds about the Quartering Act and others collected funny jokes about King George III’s fish-like facial features. It’s unfair to lump those two together content-wise because they both happened to choose the most effective means of distribution.

Went crazy in later years, and spokoe nonsense for 58 straight hours in the days before his death.

Went crazy in later years, allegedly speaking nonsense for 58 straight hours in the days before his death.

I was sort of irked by the notion of the blog as a genre and bloggers as a monolithic entity. The platform is still new and its conventions are still being defined. The whole notion of blogger solidarity seems more based on the common recognition of technology’s value (and the whiplash scolding by media folks who don’t) than any unified concept of what we do. Or as Spencer Hall, who blogs for the Sporting News and Every Day Should Be Saturday, so drunkenly put it on Saturday, “we all do different things.”

Many of the panelists, like I said before, weren’t bloggers at all. There were Twitter experts, entrepreneurs, and all kinds of internet gurus. Most of what they talked about was money. How do you turn your passion (blogging, writing, sports, whatever) into cash? How do you grow your audience? How do you become as famous as the guys from Deadspin?

All good questions, but questions that caused me to take a second look at my motivations for blogging and for being there in the first place. I blog because I love to write, and at this point nobody – much less the vaunted mainstream media – is paying me to do it. It’s an outlet and a platform and hell, a bit of a showcase for me. I’m interested in baseball and culture and literature and I think some other people might be too. Hopefully one of those other people works for ESPN or The Atlantic and wants to pay me to write something. If not, that’s alright too. I love the process.

That’s what scared me about that second, businessman type of panelist. I don’t know if he gets or cares about that process. Content might be king to that guy, but only because without it there is nothing to draw an audience, nothing to wrap ads around.

None of this really crystallized until the keynote speaker, a super-rich wine/internet expert named Gary Vaynerchuk took the stage. His message, I thought, was muddled. He said that we should grab life by the balls, define our passion and pursue it and make it our livelihood (key phrase: FUCKING CRUSH IT). Then he said that for every hour we spent on that passion, we should spend twenty or thirty hours on promoting it, on hustling basically. That’s a lot of hours, Gary, and it doesn’t jive with me or my values. I wasn’t the only one who thought so either.

If it’s really about the content, about doing something you care about and doing it well, then that’s what you spend the time on. There was a punk band out of San Pedro, CA in the 1980s called the Minutemen. Their message was simple: We Jam Econo. It’s not about the money or the chicks or the record companies or the egos. It’s about playing the music we love and getting it out there and everything else is bullshit. They’ve got a song called History Lesson, Part II. You may have heard it:

Our band could be your life. Their band was their life. Not because they were out on their knees in front of Capital Records trying to get their demo in the right suit’s hands, but because they put the music first, always. The stage, the radio, the record were just platforms.

Of course I’m not 100 pct idealistic and naïve and I’m not on some futile jihad for artistic integrity. I want more traffic on this blog. I want more attention as a writer. I want to do this for a living. All the passion in the world won’t net you a dime by itself. I’ve got a soap box, and I could stand up here all day and shout for my small audience. But if I don’t step away, that audience won’t grow very fast. It takes networking, hustling, savvy to make it in the business. A Tribe Called Quest puts things into perspective:

Note the last verse from Diamond D. It’s all about striking a balance, and it ain’t easy:

You gotta get a label that’s willin’ and able
To market and promote, and you better hope
(For what?) That the product is dope
Take it from Diamond, it’s like mountain climbin’
When it comes to rhymin’ you gotta put your time in

And that’s the one thing I did appreciate about the keynote speaker, Gary Vaynerchuk. He said we should play to our strengths. If that means joining a blog network like Yard Barker or SB Nation to get promoted and make money and build traffic, then maybe it’s a wise thing to do. If that means asking a friend to help with spreading the word about you, while you help them with something else (note: not sure how helpful I can be, but I’ll try), then do it that way.

I may differ from a lot of the other guys at the Blogs with Balls event. I’m not posting a ton every day, or putting up sports gossip and pictures of hot chicks, or writing exclusively about one team. But that’s okay. There’s a place for what they do and a place for what I do.

In the end, a blog is what you make it: journal, news source, humor venue, platform for silly essays only ostensibly about baseball. It’s really up to us.

–

I’m going to list some of the cool folks I talked to at BwB. I’ve spent the last day reading over their sites, and I can say with confidence that aside from being nice guys, they are good writers and worth a look. Some might not be your thing (i.e. I’m a huge Dolphins fan, but spent a lot of the day talking with the proprietor of a Jets blog), but good writing is good writing:

Mike Mader: MikeOnThePhillies.com

Paul Catalano: AndAPlayerToBeNamedLater.blogspot.com

Brian Bassett: TheJetsBlog.com

Bethlehem Shoals: FreeDarko.com

Don Povia*: HuggingHaroldReynolds.com

Jared Wade: BothTeamsPlayedHard.net

Andrew Feinstein: DenverStiffs.com

–

*Bonus points for organizing the conference

Conventional Wisdom, Media, Meta and Thinking, 6 Comments

Harold Reynolds

Eric, June 12, 2009, 3 Comments

Today I played wiffle ball with Harold Reynolds in the studio/baseball stadium pictured below. He pitched and when I came up to the plate, he said “uh oh here comes the big guy” which was very baseball coach-ish. I hit a couple line drives off the left field fence but didn’t get any over. Typical. Anyway, that’s all I had to say.

Studio 42 at MLB Network

Media, 3 Comments

Pitchers and Poets Interview: Glenn Stout

Eric, June 11, 2009, 3 Comments

The conversation I had with sports writer, poet, and Best American Sports Writing Editor Glenn Stout Monday twisted and turned informally. In fact, it was so bouncy that I was only able to transcribe chunks at a time. The conversation ran from Spaceman Lee to Theodore Roethke to David Halberstam. Mostly we talked about writing. Here are some of the most compelling excerpts from the First Ever Pitchers and Poets Interview.

Courtesy of GlennStout.net

On how he found Pitchers and Poets:

I don’t remember to tell you the truth. I was cruising on the internet for something and I saw a reference to it pop up. I like pitchers and poets so I thought “I’ve got to check that out.” Then I saw the “Death of a Pitcher” post, read it, and really liked that. I thought “I’m going to write that guy.”

On becoming a writer:

Well, there’s only 26 letters. And nobody’s that much better at putting them together than you are. I’m not in awe of the process that gets it done. When I grew up the notion that I would be a writer and would know people who were writers was like walking on the fucking moon. I thought that was just not accessible. Now that it is, I’m not intimidated by it, at least not many more. I deal with people now that I can’t believe I get to talk to, sometimes. I find out that they’ve read me and I just can’t believe it. But it doesn’t intimidate me. We’re all plowing the same field in some way.

I think a lot of writers put up needless road blocks. Artists in general will find reasons not to do things. A lot of doing it just entails sitting down and putting in the time. And in that way I feel like I share some things with people who are much better than I. IF nothing else, I put in the time.

On becoming a sports writer:

I got out of school in 1981. There were no jobs then. Nobody I knew had a job doing anything remotely close to what they wanted to do for 3 or 4 years. Of course back then there wasn’t the opportunity to do blogs. You couldn’t really do anything. You got a shit job doing something and you bitched and moaned and complained with all your friends.

This time is like that time, as time, where if you’re serious about writing you keep doing it regardless. A lot of times when I talk to younger writers I say that the one difference between being a writer and not being a writer is that the people who are writers are the ones who never quit. In a silly way, it’s almost that simple. Just don’t stop.

I just wanted to write. Sports writing was sort of an accident for me. When I was at the Boston Public Library I stumbled across a story about the Red Sox manager in 1907 who killed himself in Spring Training. The general attitude was that he couldn’t handle the pressure of managing the team, but something didn’t sit right with me about that. I looked it up in old newspapers, found out what happened, and wrote query letters tot the Globe and to Boston Magazine. Boston Magazine ended up buying it for $300 and the editor really liked me. So I became their Sports Columnist without having any previously published clips.

On the current state of sports writing:

I think the big problem with sports writing today, if you want to say that there’s a big problem with it (and you can argue that there is), is that too many people try to write like they talk on the radio. It just leads to columns that have no shape or form but just spew opinions. A really good column should have shape and form. If you’re just arguing about who should start at quarterback, they don’t

The thing about blogs – and I recently started my own and I appreciate them – is that very few people put the time in for either the writing or reporting on a blog that you would for a print publication. Not too many people have the discipline to do that for two, or three, or four days a week. Bu there’s a lot of great info in them, a lot of great data, occasionally some really good writing.

On David Halberstam:

I feel pretty fortunate that I was allowed to work with him. I met him before BASW when he came to the library to research “Summer Of 49.” I was kind of the unofficial curator of sports stuff at the time. He was business-like, but he didn’t try to big-league me or anything like that. He solicited my opinion about things. For a young writer to have somebody of stature pay attention to you at all was sort of significant. That’s the kind of thing that can really give you a confidence boost.

On his favorite baseball poems:

I really like the Tom Clark Poem “To Bill Lee. He’s a west coast San Francisco poet, kind of a neo-beat. I really, really think that Casey at the Bat is terrific, too. In a lot of ways I think baseball writing really begins with it. It’s got an amazing lead and there are moments in it with just great description, like “benches black with people.”

On his favorite ballplayers:

As a kid I was a huge Clemente fan, because I was a Pittsburgh fan growing up outside Columbus where the AAA team was a Pittsburgh farm team. I also like guys like Sparky Lyle. My first bat was a Yaz model. I always liked pitchers because that’s what I did. One of my first baseball memories is having a t shirt with a cartoon drawing of Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris on the front.

I got my tonsils out when I was like 5, and I had my mom iron a number 9 on the back for Maris. I grew up in Ohio and the only big league baseball we ever saw at the time was the Yankees on the Game of the Week.

On his favorite poets:

Theodore Roethke. In particular, “Straw for the Fire,” a book of fragments from his notebooks was really influential on me. Also, James Wright. He is much more regional and I was from Ohio, so that has resonance. I also like Rilke in translation, especially the Michael Hamburger translation.

On reading poetry outside of Fenway Park on Opening Day for 9 years:

I was just a couple years out of college and I was into combining the things that I liked. That’s the goal, right? I liked baseball, I liked poetry. I was kind of involved in the local coffeehouse poetry scene in Boston. I got a little pig nose amplifier, started collecting poetry, and we just went out there. I’d send out press releases, TV stations would cover us, and newspaper columnists would cover us. It was kind of a kick in the head.

Believe it or not, one of those days I was up in the bleachers and Bill Lee was sitting right next to me. I showed him the Tom Clarke poem in my notebook, which ends something like “and then you went to China,” and he read it and said [does Bill Lee impression] “that’s a great poem!”

Just recently, I ran into him having breakfast here in Vermont. He didn’t remember the story – I think he’d had a lot to drink that day, I know I’d had a few – but when I mentioned the Tom Clark poem again, he said the exact same thing: “that’s a great poem!”

On his own baseball poetry:

I never tried to write baseball poetry per se. Those baseball poems that are on the website are the only ones that I ever wrote. I wrote thousands of poems and those are the only ones that I wrote about baseball.

I never, when I’m doing poetry, sit around and try to write about baseball. Sometimes it ends up about rocks and trees, or somebody walking down the street, or sometimes about baseball. Sometimes the ones that seem like they’re about baseball are really about something else, and some of the ones that seem like they’re about something else are really about baseball.

On writing poetry:

It’s all magic, it’s not like the other stuff. It’s not like the other writing. I don’t do as much of it now as I used to. It’s hard to do it when I’m doing this other kind of writing all the time, non-fiction. To write poetry you have to be in a different kind of head space. It’s being mindful of that interior voice. Just sitting around is a great thing to do to write poetry. Being a security guard or working at the library was a great place to write poetry. Lots of break time

I went to Bard College and the big guy there was Robert Kelly. He wasn’t really heavy handed. He was kind of those neo-Ezra Pound poets. I wasn’t but he could care less. Some of the best advice he ever gave us in a workshop one day was that “None of you guys should ever worry about being published. If you’re meant to be published, you’ll be published. So don’t sit there and worry about it.” I think that’s true. If the work is good enough, if you share it enough, someone will want to publish it.

Thanks again to Mr. Stout. Be sure to check out his latest, “The Young Woman and the Sea,” which was recently chosen as one of five nonfiction books to read this summer by the Wall Street Journal, and read his blog Verb Plow.

Interviews and Media, 3 Comments

Dear Rick Reilly, What The Hell Is That?

Eric, May 20, 2009, 2 Comments

I’m not usually one for ripping on people. When I was about twelve, I had a year-long sports radio phase, in which I listened to all sorts of clowns and callers berate athletes. Sports radio gave way to sports reading – ESPN the Mag and Sports Illustrated became my beacons for sports knowledge and the source of my opinions. Of all the guys in those magazines, Rick Reilly daunted my young mind the most. His stories were sometimes grouchy and sometimes moving and sometimes cerebral. Probably for no other reason than their location on the back page, Reilly’s columns seemed an elevated form of sports writing.

Obviously that was foolhardy and naïve. Much the same way I learned that most of the guys with names like Vic “The Brick” Jacobs were worthless blowhards, I learned that placement on the vaunted back page of SI does not a good column make. Rick Reilly is an imperfect columnist at best. He can be sappy and clichéd and repetitive and over-reliant on dental metaphors. But overall I find him a compelling stylist, with a great sense of empathy and although we often disagree, a tendency to provoke worthwhile lines of thought.

But his latest piece is so bad I want to cry. I want to sit in the dark on the floor in my room and weep for the people who have been subjected to these words, for the spineless editor who allowed them to reach those masses, and for the writer himself who is surely incapable of staring proudly at his reflection in any mirror. The concept is hackneyed. The jokes are flat. The content itself, well, there were more good ideas in the House Republicans’ 18-Page 2009 Alternate Budget.

I won’t go full Fire Joe Morgan on it, but here are some highlights:

The title:

Here’s My Solution For Fixing Baseball: Put Me In Charge.

First problem is the assumption that baseball is broken. Second problem is that, in the first sentence of the article, Rick says he hates baseball:

I personally find baseball so crushingly boring I would happily plunge knitting needles into my eyes to avoid another snap zoom of Joe Torre’s nostril hairs.

Clearly, he’s now set himself up as a credible and very funny potential commissioner. I bet he has some great, original ideas. I’ve taken the liberty of listing them here in order to save you from his commentary.

1. A pitch clock.
2. Mandatory autographs.
3. Olympic style steroid testing.
4. Bad at-bat music joke.
5. DH in the NL
6. More fines. Just because. (Joke).
7. Umpires determine when a game is rained out.
8. Balls that hit foul pole are foul. (Joke, I think?)
9. Age Minimum for draft. No mention of international players.
10. Joke not worth repeating.

Anyway, there’s nothing new here. There isn’t even anything old said in a new way. It’s just lazy, boring, and complacent. It’s the kind of column that makes me wonder why, when so many people are writing about sports with so much energy and curiosity, I would ever bother with Rick Reilly again. It’s the kind of column that makes “mainstream journalism” for all of its resources, look hopelessly stale and out of touch.

Have you guys had already given up on Reilly, given up on all the Paiges and Plaschkes of the world? Maybe that comfy perch at the top of an institution – even a crumbling one – can destroy a writer. It isn’t news that there’s better, hungrier stuff on the blogs. But man, I’d like to see the old guard put up a fight.

Media, 2 Comments