Archive for the 'Media' Category

The Anatomy of a Hit Piece

Eric, July 7, 2010, 1 Comment

Not baseball, but this remarkable column by Adrian Wojnarowski on the Lebron James situation caught my eye. Mostly, I was amazed by the first paragraph:

The Championship of Me comes crashing into a primetime cable infomercial that LeBron James and his cronies have been working to make happen for months, a slow, cynical churning of manufactured drama that sports has never witnessed. As historic monuments go, this is the Rushmore of basketball hubris and narcissism. The vacuous star for our vacuous times. All about ‘Bron and all about nothing.

Agree with the premise or not, that is one hell of a way to set the tone. But how does it work? How does Wojnarowski infuse this simple little intro graph with so much seething rage? Let’s at least take a look at the first sentence.

He achieves maximum rancor by immediately setting the conversation in his own sarcastic, negative terms. “The Championship of Me” opener sets Lebron up as a narcissist. Without realizing it, by the time we get to the rest of the clause, we are already thinking in the writer’s terms. That clause itself is a minefield of dismissive and negative vocabulary. The words “crashing down” imply, well, a crash. Of course nothing is breaking here, nothing is crashing. In fact, you could very easily phrase it differently and say that something is taking off, a new era is beginning. But nope, we’re now crashing.

And what are we crashing into? An infomercial, of course. We are crashing into the cheapest and least regarded kind of television programming. This kind of inverse hyperbole is pretty obviously ridiculous when you consider all the other fluff programming to which ESPN devotes one hour specials. Compared to National Signing Day or the 5th round of the NFL Draft, the Lebron James press conference actually feels pretty important.

Of course, unlike these other dramas, the Lebron James presser is “a slow, cynical churning of manufactured drama that sports has never witnessed.” This is a beautiful piece of writing. Using the word cynical sets off subconscious alarm bells with sports fans because sports, the holy game of professional basketball included, are supposed to be above cynicism right? Sure. We really think that way. And Wojnarowski’s use of the word manufactured is perfect because it strengthens the (completely ridiculous) premise that the rest of the NBA (and sport in general) is some kind of un-manufactured, organic phenomenon. The word manufactured hits even harder when we consider that Lebron might well be departing a city deeply troubled by its inability to manufacture anything.

And who is doing this manufacturing? Why none other than Lebron’s cronies. There’s a word without negative implications.

I would continue, but I have tickets to go watch an entirely meaningless — but delightfully organic — baseball game between the Kansas City Royals and Seattle Mariners. And for the record, I’m no Lebron fan, but I don’t think his departure would mean the end of Ohio either.

Media, 1 Comment

Radio Motion Meditation

Ted, May 26, 2010, 3 Comments

Via Flickr User Nite_Owel

A version of this essay appears at Everyday Ichiro

In a previous post, I talked about sports talk radio. Now, it’s onto the good side of baseball on the radio: the game broadcasts.

I listened to a good part of Sunday’s Mariners game against the Padres on the radio while driving home from a camping trip with my wife and a group of friends. That I listened on the radio is notable because it was the first time that I have done so all season. Until then, in an attempt to observe and report as much as I could of the Mariners, in the kind of detail that is only possible through TV, I had ridden my DVR like a jockey. The radio, well I left it in the figurative closet, like an antique attache case, made of the kind of old leather that smells like the recliner in your grandparents’ living room that you used to fall asleep in.

Like that leather attache case, baseball on the radio these days requires some back story to be truly appreciated.

My history with the Mariners is only a month or so deep. As such, I’ve got very little back story. At the beginning of the season, I had nothing to go on but some spring training games. I turned to TV broadcasts to cull Mariners knowledge through my eyeballs. Ichiro’s batting stance, King Felix’s mechanics and pitch movement, Guti’s glovework near the wall, and so on. I’m all for using my imagination, but I would have been out of my comfort zone listening to games about players I hadn’t watched play.

Also, I wanted to see how each player carried himself, and what their general presentation was.* Radio, for all of its charms and enchantments, can’t feed my eyeballs with that information. Instead it consists of the limited storytelling scope of one or two observers. They’re hard-working observers, without a doubt, but they’re constrained by the limitations of their medium. Not to say that TV doesn’t also face myriad constraints, but I think it’s safe to say that many more of the senses are stimulated when you watch TV. There’s basically a radio broadcast laid over the constant stream of images, so everything TV-wise is an add-on from the foundations of the radio broadcast. Humankind and its social interactions and judgments leaped forward on the shoulders of speech and storytelling, but we’re still rooted in faces and bodies, postures and poses, and that’s what TV offers.

*It’s also true that Mariners fans also had to learn about their own players, like newcomers Casey Kotchman and Cliff Lee, for example, who they might not have watched play for more than a few games previously.

Via Flickr user abardwell

Granted, I’m discounting the great possibilities of the human imagination, replacing wonder with concrete data. It’s the book vs. movie problem, in essence, ie. that I can’t read a Harry Potter book anymore without envisioning the actors who played them in the movie series. I saw the movies before I read the books, so now I will never know what my brain would have come up with if I had read them first. I will also never know what it’s like to imagine the Mariners via the descriptions of Dave Niehaus. But really baseball isn’t about imagination as much as it is about the wonder of actual things. Every day you’ll see something new, yes, but you’ll see something new that is real. The play of the imagination isn’t in the tension of real vs. fantastic, but of the magic of every day life, of Every Day Ichiro.

That being said, radio does have its mystical properties. It was with some nostalgic pleasure that I found the game on the radio while driving home from a weekend away. Not only was this the first broadcast I heard on the year, but there isn’t a better way to end a camping trip or to spend an hour on the road than with live baseball on the radio. It’s the middle ground between the country and the city, a bridge from our pastoral roots to the urban present.

So I turned up Dave Niehaus piping through on 710 AM, I draped an arm out the window, and I tuned out.

I didn’t literally tune out, like out of life. I kept an eye on the road and all, and at the very least I wasn’t texting and driving. But instead of zeroing in on the details of the Mariners game, on every pitch, I let my mind wander in between the phrasings, and the pure sounds of a man telling a story of a game happening somewhere distant. The radio game was the backdrop, the hazy middle distance seen from the path that my thoughts wandered, rarely settling anywhere but walking, step after step, in the directionless direction of a figurative destination, the highway emerging a few car lengths ahead and crumbling away behind me. Driving the pace of my ranging thoughts: the game itself, pitch after pitch ringing in the subconscious like a heartbeat.

The radio, humming along like time and the storyteller before the fire, sets a beat to life rather than recreating the world the way that TV does. So maybe I was wrong. I didn’t need to know anything about the Mariners that the radio couldn’t provide, because the voice in the radio doesn’t offer information as much as it does forward motion. A sense of progress, through time, through life, down the highway, on the way home.

Media and Memoir, 3 Comments

Pew Pew Pew! Baseball Demonstrations from the Booth

Ted, May 6, 2010, 2 Comments

I enjoy it when retired pitchers turned broadcasters in expensive ties grab a baseball that some intern had to scare up for them and demonstrate how to throw a cutter or a circle change. The starched cuff of a fine dress shirt, a little bling on the fingers and slow demonstrative arm gestures remind me of Little League, when the dad who was also a lawyer would pull up in his beamer and teach the kids a thing or two before heading off to the steakhouse to make deals.

My dad never worked nine-to-five, so I suppose there was something mysterious about these well-dressed, clean-shaven dads. I didn’t envy them. In fact from the beginning I thought it was tacky to put a glove on and toss it around in business clothes. It didn’t feel right. I didn’t appreciate, at the time, the tightening noose of time that each day presents.

But I digress. The reason I brought it up is because FackYouk has an awesome dramatization of an Al Leiter broadcast booth demonstration. What he is demonstrating, I have no idea. I do know that is is Magic®.

via a Reader share from WalkOffWalk

Baseball the Teacher and Media, 2 Comments

Life in The Show, Volume 1

Ted, April 5, 2010, 4 Comments

Eric has his Little League baseball team, and me? I’ve got the Playstation 3. So in the spirit of one downsmanship, I will be tracking my year on the virtual field, playing MLB 10: The Show, a masterpiece of a baseball video game and the pinnacle of the form.

I picked up my copy of The Show on the day it was released, at my local neighborhood big box store, without much hesitation. And why not? It’s the centerpiece of my video game collection and the one that cannot–barring some apocalyptic fundamental change–disappoint me year to year. Dodging the blue shirts to grab my dummy steal-proof copy, I presented it to the girl at the front, who went searching for the actual game. On her way from the cash register to the Actual Game Bin, she forgot what game I was buying (I think Battlefield Apocalypse so I had to say it out loud to her, which broke that vow of silence between a cashier and a grown man buying a video game on a weekday.

It was worth it. The Show is as purty as ever, with a number of the kind of detailed improvements that a veteran of baseball video games can really geek out on, like more lifelike throwing animations and more dynamic fans who actually–gasp!–reach down for ground balls skittering along the wall in foul territory. Some would argue, accurately, that there isn’t all that much different with this year’s version, and that perhaps I put down my hard-earned for little in the way of innovation. I, however, budgeted for the 2010 version just as soon as A-Rod spit his gum out and jumped onto the pile, so I’m pretty happy with the cosmetic upgrades.

After a hiatus last year, I’m back into the online gameplay this year, as I usually reserve the long-form Road to the Show mode and Franchise modes for late in the year and the offseason, after I’ve grown weary of the weirdness of baseball on the Internest. For now, though, in the fresh new early season, it’s human versus human.

The year in The Show started off choppily in 2010. There were quite a few glitches to dance around in the first week of play, particularly in the online iteration. Simple online match ups quickly became frustrating freezes and wahcked out statistics. First it was the intentional walk glitch, which brought the sleek supercomputer to its knees and required a reboot every time you tried to give someone a free pass. The rub was that whovever shut down their system first would get credit for the win. There were a couple of times that in my stubborn refusal to cede a win, I left game running in its frozen state while I walked the dog, trying to wait out the frustrated.

There’s also the typical not-perfectness of the online play. The Show is a timing game, and the briefest bit of lag can mess up a pitch or a swing. In the past, like in the early days of The Show on the PS2, you’d get online with a gamer who seemed to be tapping into The Show’s servers via dial-up from in an Internet cafe in Manila. Buster Keaton films have been smoother. This isn’t so much a problem these days. Now it’s more the occasional blip that comes unexpectedly when you’re trying to strike someone out with the bases loaded, and you end up chunking a fastball to the backstop or right down the pipe.

My team this year, for the most part, is the Seattle Mariners. They are also my newly adopted bandwagon team for the real season, so it makes sense because a) there’s that emotional level affinity and b) I like their defense. The Show’s 2010 version seems to have a ramped up RANDOM-O-TRON that guides fielding play so there are way more glancing balls, blatant gaffs and balls scooting under gloves than in the past. The 3rd-ranked Mariner defense goes a good way to mitigate the negative impact of the new defensive crazy.

There’s a problem with my online play this year, though: I totally stink. Back in 2005, the typical nerdball gamer hadn’t yet discovered the hidden gem that was The Show. I was literally something like the 90th best player in the country. By now though every Madden freak fresh off of football season picks up a copy of The Show and commits his fast-twitch motor skills and Aderol-fueled attention to the National Pastime. I don’t stand a chance, and I’m currently fighting my way back to .500, ranked, and I’m not making this up, 72,126th.

My highlight so far? In my only game playing as the Red Sox, I threw a no-hitter with knuckleballer Tim Wakefield against what was no doubt some frustrated ten-year-old with an itchy swing finger. The gimpy servers never did log the game, though, so my achievement–the first no-hitter I’ve thrown in a baseball video game ever–is as of right now lost in the data cloud, floating like a Wakefield knuckler between sleeping and wakefulness. There have been some great extra inning games, some more pitching games, some slugfests. A bit of everything, as it should be.

My favorite pitcher is, expectedly, “King” Felix Hernandez and his hammer down curveball and 97 MPH heat. My favorite hitter? A glitch in the Matrix has granted Jose Lopez Team MVP status. He gets the job done, verisimilitude and sabermetrics be damned.

As for The Show, it’s just getting started. I’m just gonna play it one game at a time, give it my best shot, and Good Lord willing, things’ll work out.

Media and Technology, 4 Comments

On Sabermetric Transparency

Eric, April 3, 2010, 3 Comments

Over at Walkoff Walk, 310toJoba (somebody get this guy a first name), writes about the mega-awesome-super news that Bill Simmons, the internet voice of the Sports Media Industrial Complex has officially embraced sabermetrics. This is a major (if inevitable coup) for the stats-y baseball blogosphere. If no longer the Voice of the American Sports Fan, Simmons remains influential. He is also useful as a bell weather. As Simmons goes, so goes the sports fan.

Anyway, 310toJoba asks many great questions of the article, and hits Simmons for his navel-gazing and the back-handedness of his compliments. It seems futile to point out that a Simmons column without navel-gazing has yet to be written. And as to the back-handedness, I didn’t really read the article as pejorative. But perhaps that’s because I’m not a numbers guy myself and this is not a numbers blog.

But once again, that’s not what I’m here to write about. 310toJoba says the following of The Sports Guy’s desire to understand what goes into making these statistics:

On the one hand, I appreciate his efforts to attain a better grasp on the stats as a whole; he consistently tries to find out how they’re calculated. Good on him. On the other hand, perhaps Simmons is getting a little too overzealous and missing the point.

And later:

Again, it’s admirable that he wants to go all the way with his newfound obsession, but he comes off as being condescending and too in depth when there’s no need to be.

310toJoba then honorably admits that he has no idea how many of these stats are calculated and questions whether actually understanding the formula would make him a better or better-informed baseball fan. All this amounts to the typical argument “there are smarter, better suited people to do this, I’ll just trust them.” (Not an actual quote).

And here is where I find myself disagreeing with Mr. 310. I think Simmons’ desire to understand the formulas is entirely reasonable. And I don’t see how it is in any way condescending. Here he is admitting to the great wide world that sabermetrics are better than traditional numbers at measuring baseball performance. That’s still a pretty big deal, and for people to embrace that notion, they have to understand why these numbers are better.

There is a tendency among people at the forefront of change and new ideas to assume that the masses will somehow intuit why their proposed changes and new ideas are better. This assumption is why Americans were so vehemently opposed to Health Care Reform – they just saw it as an amorphous blob set forth by people unwilling to explain it in a palatable manner. So when guys like Joe Morgan (or Lindsey Graham), say that these ideas are wrong, or un-American, or will have horrible consequences, the urge is to recoil from them. The remedy to all this is spelling out exactly what these new ideas amount to, and doing so in simple and tangible terms. Just saying “trust us, it will be better,” is not enough.

The baseball stats we grew up with are very easy to calculate. If they aren’t counting stats like runs or runs batted in, they are equations with few inputs requiring basic arithmetic. Walks Plus Hits Divided By Innings Pitched. Okay Simple. We trust those stats because we have a good grasp on what exactly they are telling us. And we know that although not perfect, they are not necessarily bad. Baseball was just fine without sabermetrics. So who are you to tell me that this newfangled stuff can make it better?

I’m not sure it’s enough to just have some smart person tell you “OPS+ is a great metric for offensive performance!” and just believe them on blind faith. I’ve grappled with this myself. I am a pretty sabermetrically literate guy. But I hate relying on statistics I do not fully understand. It often feels like I am arguing on a foundation of quicksand; like somebody could open the curtain and reveal that Bill James is as phony as the Wizard of Oz, and because I don’t fully understand how to calculate UZR, I too will be revealed as a phony.

Obviously, I know this is not the case. I know that smart and well-intentioned people are doing this research to help our understanding of the game. But I know this because I write a baseball blog, and because I’m a curious guy who has tried to learn the formulas. I am not inclined to take it on blind faith that new stats are better stats, and neither are most other baseball fans. It might take, as Simmons says, only ten minutes to be a better informed fan. But it takes more than ten minutes to figure out how VORP is calculated. Does being able to rattle off advanced stats really make one a better informed fan? Or is there some obligation to learn how the gears grind beneath the sheen of the number itself?

Conventional Wisdom, Media, Stats, Thinking and Walkoff Walk, 3 Comments

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: