Archive for the 'Memoir' Category

Teaching Sabermetrics

Paul, August 23, 2010, 0 Comments

Earlier this year a small Bay Area nonprofit called Tutorpedia asked me to teach a poetry workshop over the summer. Actually, they asked to write a curriculum for a poetry workshop, and then to teach it later, which may seem like a slight distinction, but is not. Seeing as I clearly didn’t have enough to do already – I was also in the midst of a Master’s in Education program at Stanford – I petitioned to write and teach not only a poetry workshop, but a sabermetrics workshop as well.

To my surprise, Tutorpedia not only said yes to my nefarious, baseball-teaching plan, they were thrilled. They even offered me free Oakland Athletics tickets so I could go to a game with my students. And so I started crafting my curricula in my ‘spare time.’

Who doesn't love the Oakland A's?

Tutorpedia believes in project-based learning, and I believe in dialogue-driven classrooms, so my model was not, from the outset, stand up and lecture. Rather, the poetry curriculum was to be a series of conversations about famous poems, followed by activities highlighting techniques the poets in question were using, all culminating in the composition (and public recitation) of an original work of poetry. Likewise, the sabermetrics course was designed to give students the skills they needed to perform statistical analysis before sending them off to do independent research projects.

Unfortunately, after carefully putting together my curricula, I found out that no one was signing up for my workshops. And not only me, Tutorpedia was hoping to run dozens of workshops over the summer, and no one was signing up for any of them. Ultimately, three students signed up for my sabermetrics class, and none for my poetry workshop. So be it! If high schoolers would rather learn about wOBA and WAR than enjambment, simile, and pentameter, who am I to argue?

One of my three students ended up having to drop the course due to a family emergency, leaving us at a paltry two – and a brother and sister (and Yankees fans) at that – but nevertheless we trod onwards towards understanding and insight, or at least indoctrination into a different set of beliefs than those you get from watching the Fox Game of The Week. I say that in jest, partially, but it’s also a question. Is it possible to really get students to learn to think critically about anything – even something as trivial as baseball statistics – in just 16 hours of class time? And isn’t critical thinking what sabermetrics is supposed to be about? That’s the real can of worms, I suppose. As sabermetrics have grown more prominent, it’s not clear what the study is about anymore, let alone what teaching the subject means.

Certainly the origins of sabermetrics are in critical thought. At a time when no one questioned the power of batting average and the RBI, advocating statistics like OBP or, even worse, creating new ones like Win Shares, was the kind of heresy that required a great deal of level-headed, penetrating insight and at least a little gusto to boot. Enter Bill James. These days, however, we have Fangraphs, Baseball Prospectus, the Hardball Times, Baseball Analysts, Baseball-Reference, and countless other websites devoted to providing information and analysis about baseball statistics. The old heresy is the new religion.

Which is not to say there’s anything wrong with sabermetrics – I wouldn’t teach it if I were so unfaithful – but rather it raises the question: which is more important, the thought process behind the study of baseball statistics, or the outcome of that process? Which is more important, knowing how WAR is calculated (as much as they let you know, anyway) or knowing more or less how to use it to evaluate players?

Another object of study: Win Probability graphs

I, for one, am persuaded that WAR is a better measure of a player’s value than almost any other single statistic, and WAR formed the basis of the research project – building an all-time Yankees roster – my students and I did at the end of the course. That said, my inclination as both an educator and as a baseball fan is and always will be towards process over outcome. Without the ability to think through a statistic, the statistic has no meaning to me other than the one that other people give me.

How to convey that in eight two-hour sessions? Well, it’s hard. I taught my students how to use excel and basic statistical tools like regression and correlation (which, to their credit more than mine, they understood), and I exposed them to a few of the many sabermetric websites. And in the end I saw that hard work rewarded by rapid – almost immediate – buy-in when we learned about WAR and UZR and ERA+. It remains to be seen whether my students will ever bring the tools of the skeptic’s trade – critical questions, excel speadsheets, and statistical techniques – to bear on the new numbers as we did on the old. I hope I at least planted a skeptical seed, but the narrative of modern baseball statistics, it turns out, is quite compelling.

In retrospect, the course was perhaps a bit too practical. Maybe the better path towards critical thinking runs through a more philosophical approach. Maybe stepping even further back, teaching less and asking the students to explore more on their own, would have netted a more skeptical attitude. But, taking that approach, what do you do if the students come out the other end convinced that pitcher wins and runs batted in are awesome? What if being hands-off means letting someone else do the brainwashing?

I suppose the answer, on some level, comes down to the students. Because I was working with a brother and sister who were at least familiar with the existence of Moneyball, I knew they had the potential to dive into concepts like WAR, wOBA, and UZR, but when our initial discussion turned up batting average as THE statistic of choice, I also knew we had some work to do before we got there. Considering the slightly younger-than-anticipated enrollment (I expected high schoolers and got middle schoolers), we had to begin at the beginning, building regression tables to show that, in fact, OBP and SLG correlate way better with winning than batting average or homers.

As I dove into these analytical and pedagogical depths, considering and reconsidering both the statistics I was teaching and my approach in teaching them, I was called back to another world as we were working on the final project. The sister wrote a limerick on the board in a moment of whimsy, likely tired of comparing Red Ruffing’s ERA+ to that of Roger Clemens.

“How do you like my poem?” She asked me.

“That was supposed to be the other workshop,” I told her.

Memoir, 0 Comments

The Stadium Experience: Exile on the Main Concourse

Eric, August 16, 2010, 6 Comments

Last week PnP began an exploration of the way we watch baseball in person, namely The Stadium Experience. From the ensuing discussion, a plan was hatched: I’d go to a Major League game alone — something I’d never done before – and write about it.

The three miles between my apartment and Safeco Field encompass some of Seattle’s most notable landmarks: the Space Needle and Pike Place Market, the Seattle Art Museum and Pioneer Square. As I strolled to Wednesday afternoon’s Mariners-Athletics contest, I noticed no landmarks. Instead, I jittered from the two cups of coffee I drank for breakfast. I whistled Replacements songs. I smiled stupidly and repeatedly as the sun made itself at home on the back of my neck.

I was on my way to do something totally familiar: settle in amongst tens of thousands of other fans and watch a major league ballgame. The difference was that this time, unlike the hundreds of games I had attended prior, I was all alone. It would be just me and the baseball.

I sat in the top left corner of the seats pictured here.

Midweek day games offer a rare nostalgia. They hearken back to the era before lights made baseball an evening activity. Unlike evening and weekend games, they feel like special events. In line for tickets, you can imagine yourself in another time and place – 1950s New York, for instance. You can see yourself leaving work early and donning your fedora and climbing aboard an uptown train. You can see yourself at Yankee Stadium watching Whitey Ford take the hill against Early Winn and the hated Cleveland Indians.

I was not treated to quite so dynamic a pitching matchup: Luke French for Seattle and Dallas Braden for Oakland. But I was excited anyway. I was excited to be watching baseball in the first place. I was excited to see Dallas Braden – hurler of an unexpected perfect game, enemy of Alex Rodriguez, and favorite of Pitchers & Poets—take the mound. And mostly, I was excited about the essay that would come out of this new experience.

Watching a ballgame alone and writing about it is a hardly bold, dangerous journalistic undertaking. I knew this. But as I made my way toward the stadium, walking past the tourists and the lunchtime business crowds, the resulting essay began to reveal itself: it would be literary, it would be humorous; it would be gripping and deeply personal in a stream-of-conscious sort of way, but it would also say something keen about our society.

I arrived at Safeco Field to find it bustling with scalpers and senior citizens, bicycle taxis and packs of day campers lit up in matching fluorescent tee shirts. Old New York this was not, but alive it certainly was – especially considering the Mariners’ status as baseball’s preeminent disappointment. In line to buy a ticket – a single ticket, I reminded myself – my jittery excitement began to reveal itself as a discomforting restlessness.

The five minutes to the ticket window passed by slower than my hour-long walk to the stadium. Don’t check your phone, I told myself. Keep it in your pocket. Today is about you and baseball. I glanced around. I fidgeted. Finally, I reached the front of the line. “I’ll take one of your cheapest tickets,” I told the attendant, noting in the corner of my eye that a lone A’s fan was purchasing a single seat in the next window. He wore a Mark McGwire jersey, a peace sign tattooed on his calf, and the kind of beard that delays airport security lines.

This lone Oakland fan was an ominous sign. By the time I reached my seat near the top row of Safeco’s left field bleachers, all of my magnificent hopes for the essay had disappeared. It was as if the entire stadium was populated by men watching the game unaccompanied. Or maybe when you watch a game by yourself, you begin to notice the other solo flyers. The problems remained: how could I have thought something so banal would make for a compelling story? How could I have been so self-centered as to think that my experience watching a baseball game alone would be more edifying than anybody else’s experience doing the same?

The view from my seat.

One row ahead of me sat a balding man who had printed a stack of score sheets on legal paper and brought them to the ballpark on a clipboard. His handwriting was impeccably neat. Each time the Mariners grounded into a double play, he exhaled and marked the action with tremendous care. But for all his perfectionism, this scorekeeper was also agitated. He sighed dramatically at the teenagers whose comings and goings forced him to stand up and step into the aisle every five minutes.

Another nearby solo flyer presented a distinct contrast in style. He was a thin man in his mid-sixties. He nursed a Mac n’ Jacks and dumped an entire bag of peanuts into the cargo pocket of his shorts, chomping on them with no regard for the children seated next to him or the great distance between himself and home plate. The only sign that this man was even conscious of his surroundings came in the fourth inning when he removed his shirt in surrender to the heat.

Coco Crisp led off the game for Oakland. And before I could settle into the rhythm of my preferred baseball-watching trance state, he rocketed a Luke French meatball to deep center field. A double, possibly a triple, I thought. No. Franklin Gutierrez caught up with the drive two steps onto the warning track, and bounced off the wall at full speed a moment after making the catch.

“Holy shit,” I said out loud, “what a catch.”

But there was nobody there to answer.

After the Gutierrez catch, most early action took place around the infield: groundballs and strikeouts. Pitchers French and Braden worked fast, and sitting in the far reaches of the bleachers, I found it difficult to focus on the game. I found myself watching the people around me –watching the way different groups watch baseball. A little boy nearby told his babysitter that the fields he played baseball on were way bigger than this one. He took a bite out of a hot dog that was almost invisible beneath an ocean of ketchup.

As the kid and his brother watched the Mariners Hat-Trick, a video version of Three-card Monte in which a baseball is hidden under one of three caps that are then scrambled wildly across the scoreboard screen, I began to realize the extent to which ballgames are manufactured social experiences. Even the most sacred of stadium rituals are group-oriented – they are meant to illicit a comment, a shared smile, even an embrace. I began to feel that not only were the rituals not for me, but that during them, I was conspicuous in my aloneness.

I felt like the only guy not having fun at a party. I felt like the one Jewish guy at the Catholic Wedding who doesn’t reveal himself until everybody else in the pew drops to their knees, leaving him standing alone, hands in pockets. This became especially visceral during the seventh inning stretch. I stood alone, arms crossed, resigned to a hollow half-singing of Take Me Out to the Ballgame.

Even stadium food gave me pause. Hot dogs are for everybody and anybody. But what of nachos and peanuts and garlic fries? These are snacks to be shared; eating them alone feels gross and sad and defeatist. That said, after the fourth inning, I left my seat in search of poutine – trying the Quebec delicacy, new at Safeco Field this year, had been a season-long goal. I had embarked on this endeavor in the name of knowledge and baseball. I had sacrificed much in the name of hard-hitting journalism. One act of self-indulgence would be totally permissible.

In the concession line, I ran into a couple friends. They were at the game independently and invited me to join them. “Only for a little while,” I said, “I’m on a mission.” The decision to sit with my friends was a failure in the “watch a baseball game by yourself’ department, but it turned out to be a major success in the “actually see what’s going on in said baseball game” department, as their seats were on the field level just above third base. I stayed with them for the fifth and sixth innings – or the amount of time it takes to eat a portion Safeco Field poutine.

Poutine is simply french fries covered in brown gravy and cheese curds. I took initiative and added some chopped onions to the mix.

Upon taking my leave, I decided not to return to the outfield bleachers. Instead I made my way to the shady first-base side of the ballpark and quietly sidled into an empty row. Vantage point, I realized, is crucial to the solo-baseball experience. From a good seat you can immerse yourself in the details of the game. You can see what kind of gum the first baseman is chewing. You can see the sweat outline left by a chest protector on the visiting catcher’s back. The action becomes more intimate and more immediate.

There were hardly any fans around me. The section had been occupied by a group visiting from a retirement home, and most of the seniors had left early – driven away by the heat. This was perfect for me. I was finally able to settle down. But even comfortable, I found myself unable to fully embrace my own aloneness. It was a constant struggle to dam the torrents of unrelated and baseball and non-baseball thoughts that rushed through my head.

When Mark Ellis hit his third double of the game, I had nobody with whom to share the excitement. I sunk to the level of sending a text message to the friends whom I had just left. It turned out they were not as impressed with the feat as I was. Of course they weren’t. Three doubles from a mediocre veteran on a third-place team in a meaningless August day game are hardly the stuff of local news broadcasts.

But for me, those doubles felt monumental. Everything did. Without the benefit of company, and unable to take pleasure in the stadium’s many distractions, the game itself took on a much greater meaning. I began to think about the players – not just their presence on the field, but their places in history, their roles in my life. Mark Ellis, I thought, is an icon, a relic, the soul survivor of the exciting early 2000s Athletics. I can’t believe I’m watching the Mark Ellis. Is there a lesser player than Mark Ellis with a stronger inherent team identity?

I became at once oblivious to context and hyperaware of it. Everything about the game in front of me in all its unimportant glory became dire and obsession-worthy. It did not matter that neither team would be playing in the postseason, it only mattered that they were playing right now. And yet with each successive .230 hitter, with each successive groundball double play, I could not help but think about the big picture. Where exactly do these two particularly flaccid lineups ranked in the American League and even in baseball history?

$16 well-spent.

In many ways, watching a ballgame alone is like driving a long distance alone. You are focused on what’s in front of you. But watching baseball – like driving – can be a passive activity. When you are pondering the action on the field or drive a lonesome highway, you are dealing with a million potential stimuli, be they beach balls floating down from the next deck or cars merging into the lane beside yours. And then there’s the greatest distraction: the wanderings of your own mind.

In the car, you play games to keep yourself sharp. You count the mile markers. You seek out landmarks. You change lanes just for the hell of it. The same thing happened to me at Safeco Field. I became obsessed with the minor details of Dallas Braden’s pitching performance. Through six innings, he faced only the minimum 18 batters. I lusted for a 27-up, 27-down performance.

When that streak ended, I began to contemplate Braden’s pitch count. Entering the 9th, he had only thrown 92 pitches. Will he throw exactly 100? I wondered. How many complete-game 100-pitch outings have there even been? And really, who cares? I did. I cared.

Braden retired Ichiro and Chone Figgins in a combined five pitches. I leaned onto the edge of my seat. I was probably the only person in the stadium, Oakland fans included, who felt so invested in the outcome of the at-bat. For some reason, this specific and unlikely outcome became the only thing on earth I wanted. Strike one. Ball one. Here it is: the 100th pitch.

Did he do it? No. It took Braden a 103rd and then a 104^th pitch to induce a pop up from Lopez. But an asymmetrical complete game victory is still a complete game victory. And a ballgame watched alone amongst tens of thousands of people is still a ballgame watched. As I made my way toward the aisle and down the main concourse and finally back into the hot sun, I knew I would eventually repeat this experiment without the added baggage of a notepad and a self-imposed writing assignment. Now though, there was only the long walk home.

Memoir and The Stadium Experience, 6 Comments

The Stadium Experience

Eric, August 10, 2010, 7 Comments

The fan was about fifty years old and if it weren’t for the beach ball we never would have noticed him at all. He had a regular middle-aged build, thinning hair, and two boys – maybe twelve and fourteen years old – in tow. They sat across the aisle in our same row. For a few innings there was nothing exceptional about them.

Dodger Stadium will always be my home ballpark. I saw my first game there. I had childhood birthday parties there. I got Hideo Nomo’s autograph at the height of hysteria, I shook the hand of Tommy Lasorda, I walked past Vin Scully, I caught a ball thrown into the crowd by the cannon arm of my favorite player, Raul Mondesi. I even made a foolish vow to not eat another Dodger Dog until they won the World Series. I learned Dodger Stadium – the secrets of its many cavernous stairwells and the physics of its mile-long urinal troughs and the temperaments of its geriatric ushers – the way kids with different childhood interests learned the geography of Middle Earth.

But I was a child then. I appreciated the old scoreboard and the short-lived outfield wall murals and the even shorter-lived presence of King Taco concession stands. But I failed to appreciate the way the stadium’s tiers cascade over you like swooping cliffs when you’re seated at field level behind home plate. (Unless our tickets were for one of the outfield pavilions, which are disconnected from the rest of the stadium, we always snuck down to field level.) I failed to appreciate the unique natural scenery of a stadium literally carved into a small mountain. I failed to appreciate – or cringe at – the genuine meanness that Dodger fans are capable of when confronted with supporters of another team.

I also failed to appreciate the diversity of the Dodger Stadium crowd. It turns out that Chavez Ravine is a fine place for both baseball-watching and people-watching. The crowd is more varied, more eccentric, more bizarre, than any baseball crowd I’ve seen elsewhere – New York stadiums included. The diversity extends beyond race and class and age to fashion and attitude and the very aesthetics of how people pass their evenings. The diversity extends to the fan in the next aisle

He went unnoticed until a beach ball floated down from the Lodge section above. It bounced around once, twice, and finally landed in his lap. He stood up. He looked around. And slowly, without any expression of satisfaction or remorse or villainous superiority, he deflated it. A few people booed, reflexively. The game went on.

“Look at his shorts,” my mom whispered. And I saw them, they were short and white and cotton and their blue pinstripes matched the blue pinstripes on his Dodgers tee-shirt. The whole outfit appeared to have been purchased in the late 1970s. So did the identical shirt his younger son wore.

“What kind of guy wears clothes like that to a baseball game?” I asked. My parents and brothers shrugged He was probably a season ticket holder, we figured. Maybe the shorts and shirt were good luck charms. But wasn’t he cold? The Dodger Stadium breezes are deceptively chilling, even in the summertime.

We remembered that in the 1990s, my dad would bring home free Dodger tickets from work associates. The most common seats were on the second level, the Loge, and they were great. In front of us always sat the same 30-something, bespectacled man. He was noticeable because he always listened to the radio on giant headphones and because he always kept score and because he kept the seat beside him open – and on it he piled editions of Baseball Weekly and printouts of scouting reports and all kinds of other miscellanea. He ate copious amounts of junk food. And he was always alone. The empty seat was just for storage. There is no rule that says baseball has to be enjoyed with company, that it must be a social event. But it seemed so sad. He seemed so lonely.

The fan in the shorts was not lonely. He was, by all visible measures, having a great time with his family. And yet here he was, destroying a beach ball, staring seriously at the game, as if he could have prevented Hiroki Kuroda from allowing Will Venable to crush a 3-run homer by sheer meditative focus. So what was his deal? Did he lose a bet? Or was he just a character, the kind of aberration you see at any public place?

My evening at Dodger Stadium with (most of) the family got me thinking. It got me thinking about men like the fan in shorts and the fan with the empty seat and whether there is a right or wrong way to enjoy baseball. It got me thinking about what, exactly, makes for a positive or negative evening at the ballpark. It got me thinking about how we watch the game in person – in short, the Stadium Experience. For the foreseeable future, I’ll try and explore these things on the blog. Maybe we’ll even ask some friends to drop by and do the same.

King Taco image via flickr user Daniel Incandela

Memoir, The Stadium Experience and Thinking, 7 Comments

The Game Called Catch (Part II)

Eric, June 25, 2010, 0 Comments

Chrissy Wilson is a writer who lives in Reno, Nevada. She recently bought her first baseball mitt. We’re joining Chrissy as she breaks in, and ultimately becomes one with that glove. Read part one here.

“Well beat the drum and hold the phone, the sun came out today.” It seems this winter has brought insane weather all over the country. Blizzards, flash floods, endless cold fronts. Nevada, my current home, has had no salvation from these terrors. Mostly, we were completely robbed of a spring. It was cold and snowy throughout May with only a couple of days sprinkled here and there of tolerable weather where a light sweater was still required.

My new glove sat in the corner, and I yearned for sunlight and the opportunity to follow through on my purchase and break the glove in. Any time the weather was decent enough I would attempt it.

The first opportunity I got was in the beginning of April. My boyfriend and I headed to his childhood elementary school and played catch as the sun set. We wore sweaters; however, I eventually shed mine as I found myself running all over the place trying to retrieve the ball I was continually unable to catch. My boyfriend stood still fielding each ball I threw. I quickly learned that I luckily don’t throw like a girl, but I catch like one. With each ball he threw at me, I flinched and almost ducked out of the way, working up a sweat running back and forth for the ball. I was also disappointed to realize exactly how stiff my mitt was and how much breaking in this was really going to take. When the ball happened to land in my mitt, it would plop directly out and onto the ground in front of me in a depressing manner. Eventually we had to abandon ship as I was completely out of breath.

The author has more in common with Manny than she thinks.

I looked at my glove with disappointment and anger. Had I picked the wrong one? Why on Earth was it so stubbornly bowl shaped? Was it cheap leather? Do I have unnaturally weak hands? Will I ever be able to play catch without embarrassing myself? Maybe I really just wasn’t built for playing any sort of sport. I worried that maybe I should just stick to knitting and reading.

That night we went to sushi with my boyfriend’s good friend who is a die-hard Yankees fan but still a good person. His wife and my boyfriend are both novice baseball fans who just don’t understand spending a ton of money for online-streaming of games with poor video quality from mlb.com or watching the Ken Burns documentary over and over again in the winter. So when the four of us go out, we tend to cross-separate with each other’s significant others to talk about our respective interests.

He informed me that he was a little-league all-star as a child. His pitching was featured in the local newspaper, and he broke records for number of strike-outs. How much of this is true, I am unsure, but I was open to any advice he was willing to give me. He advised me to fold the mitt in on itself, wrap it with rubber bands, and sleep on it. So that night when I got home, I made sure my parents weren’t home as I snuck into the kitchen and found my mother’s prized possession, her rubber band ball. She has been working on it since she moved to Reno 13 years ago. It sit satop a crystal podium and measures about a foot in diameter. As you can imagine, regular old rubber bands no longer cut it. Her rubber band of choice is the thick blue one that come on broccoli or asparagus at the grocery store. This was what I was after. I stole a couple and hoped my mother would not notice. I slipped them around my mitt and went to bed, hoping this would work. An hour into tossing and turning because of the lump under my pillow, I got frustrated and chucked it across my room. My glove and I were really off to a rough start.

Another cold front swept through the desert, and it took a week or so before I had another opportunity to play catch. This time we went to a nearby park where a multitude of families were trying to soak up the intermittent sun and thaw out from the recent freeze. I had confidence that it would all go smoothly this time around. Yet the baseball just would not stick in the glove. I was frustrated to watch the ball we used grow scuffed from grass, asphalt, dirt, etc while the glove stubbornly remained the same as the day I bought it.

The boyfriend offered to trade gloves and quickly agreed with me that the glove was still stiff. We played for a while as he struggled to bend the glove around the ball. I watched the glove molding.

“Okay, we can trade gloves back now,” I told him.
“I’ll just keep using it. It will break in faster.”
“No, that’s okay. Give it back.”
“My hands are probably a lot stronger than yours; it’ll go faster this way.”

But I wanted to break it in. Even if it takes weeks to break in, I want the glove to mold to my hand, and I want the satisfaction of knowing that I broke it in. So I took the stubborn hunk of leather from him and put it back on my hand. That’s the only way it will ever feel like my glove.

Features, Memoir and Situational Essay, 0 Comments

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

The Game Called Catch (Part I)

Eric, March 15, 2010, 4 Comments

Chrissy Wilson is a writer who lives in Reno, Nevada. She recently bought her first baseball mitt. In the coming weeks (or months), we’ll join Chrissy as she breaks in, and ultimately becomes one with that glove.

I’m a late bloomer when it comes to baseball fandom. Neither of my parents were sports people, and I was just never exposed to it. It wasn’t until I reached college and got a job with the Seattle Mariners that the excitement and obsession of being a baseball fan infected me in a way. When I hear my friends’ stories of playing catch in the backyard, trading baseball cards, and growing up with a team, I feel somehow that I missed out on an amazing part of being a baseball fan. I adore the game and am so happy it is in my life. But the fact that I never got to experience that childhood love definitely leaves my baseball story lacking.

My grandfather, in spite of the torture of not having any sons or grandsons, decided his granddaughters would have to be the ones to fulfill his son fantasies. At a very young age, in my church dress and Mary Jane shoes, he put a baseball into my hand and taught me to throw it into an old, worn glove he wore. I stood there in the leave-strewn yard wanting to go inside. But the proud look on his face every time I managed to throw the ball into his glove made it an irresistible game. “You know, girl. You could be a maaaaaajor leaaaague pitcher,” he’d say. “I think there was some curve to that one!” “Steeeeriiiike.” I didn’t really understand what he was talking about it, but like every child, I was intoxicated by his pride. These were my only experiences with the game called Catch.

“You should have a mitt,” he said. He was right.

Fifteen years later, the man who represented the active, masculine patriarch of the family has a hard time walking down the hall at his retirement home for dinner. No more fishing trips, bird watching in the park, putt-putt games. The most we do is sit in his room, him talking about memories of his glory days, me telling him about my exploits in this town. One day I stopped by and told him about a date I had gone on the night before with my boyfriend. We had gone to the Sparks Scheel’s, which (if you don’t know) is the largest sports store in the world. It’s more like an amusement park than anything. There’s a fudge shop, ferris wheel, talking president displays, and games. I told him how I had beat my boyfriend at the shotgun game, and how I threw some baseballs in the simulated throwing booth. He toothily smiled and pumped his fist in the air. “You should have a mitt,” he said. He was right.

As previously mentioned, I am a late bloomer and started playing my first games of real Catch about two years ago with friends, me borrowing their mitts. I had the time of my life and hardly noticed, until hours later, how my arm was almost numb with strain. I kept meaning to buy myself a glove, but just never got around to it. With the recent teasing of warm weather, I headed to Target, boyfriend in tow to help with the purchase. We walked up to the aisle to see a father helping his two sons pick out gloves and bats. Embarrassed of my age, I decided to do a lap around the store before heading back. When we finally arrived at the Baseball Aisle, I was nervous, looking at all the mitts. The boyfriend picked up a $10 softball mitt, placing it in my hands.

“It’s for softball? And it’s awfully cheap?”

“It’s just a mitt,” he replied. “You need a longer one like this if you want to play with us.” By us, he meant a softball league him and his friends are starting in Summer. “Let’s just get you playing the game, before you worry about getting a fancy mitt.”

“This isn’t kickball. I’ll be better at this. I know it.” He rubs the back of my neck with a face that doesn’t believe.

I had joined his friends for a kickball league in the Fall. Most of the games I spent in the outfield where I never saw any action, and when I was up to kick, our captain kindly told me to stand there and hope for a walk. One night, though, we had a rare 12 run lead. So as I got ready to walk up to the plate, the captain told me to hit it if I wanted. I DID want it. It was my moment. I was about to shine. None of them had any idea how hard I could kick that damn ball. I stood there. The ball rolled past far outside the strike zone. “Ball!” Then I saw my moment come rolling up to my feet. I ran up and kicked the hell out of it. To everyone’s amazement it soared through air over the heads of the infield. I was astonished at myself. I had a hit! I imagine that I looked like the cartoon roadrunner, I was so excited and my feet were moving so fast. I was about to show them all.

Easier said than done.

I don’t know exactly what went wrong. But my feet knotted together and I fell, arms flailing, dust rising around my skidding failure of a body. I was mortified. I could hear my team in the dugout to my right. Half of them were laughing loudly. The other half were yelling at me to get up, that I could still make it to first base. I picked myself up and jogged to the base and in the nick of time…..was tagged out. Defeated, I returned to the dugout, sat down and buried my face in my boyfriend’s shirt, wanting to cry. My hands were bleeding, my hip hurt, and I had once again (as I always, always do) failed athletically. I could feel his chest convulsing with suppressed laughter. It really must have been an amusing site, but I never returned to that kickball field.

“Baseball is different,” I told him in that Target store. We eventually decided on a 12”, tan, Rawlings mitt. I tried it on my hand. It was stiff. But I dreamt of all the future wear and tear I was going to earn. We took my fresh mitt, and his worn boyhood one to a local park. In the sunlight and Spring-like weather we ate the picnic we had packed. Once we had rested from our eating, we saw the grey clouds and felt the stinging chill breeze anticipating rain roll in. It’s Spring though, we’d have another chance. But, no, it’s not Spring. In the week that followed, it snowed and temperatures plummeted.

So the mitt that is finally mine sits in the corner of my room, still intact, perfect and imperfect in its lack of experience. And I, like a child wanting to grow up and see the world, sit here looking at my glove, still waiting for my own game of Catch.

Features, Memoir and Situational Essay, 4 Comments

Finding Nomar

Ted, March 11, 2010, 2 Comments

My college days in New England overlapped with a large chunk of the salad days of the now-retired Nomar Garciaparra. I was surrounded by Red Sawks (and Yanks) fans for those years, and Nomar was the calling card of the pre-championship Sox. I learned, in time, to enjoy the company of these psychopaths, and I built up even an affinity for their ways, and that meant appreciating their devotion to their shortstop.

The reason, I think, that there’s such a national fascination with and disdain for Red Sox fans is that they are capable of creating a gunpowder fervor that is rare with many other fan bases. It can go either way: elation runs deep, and dissatisfaction festers and boils as hard a blood feud.

Nomar fueled the former, the celebratory side of the Sox fan’s dichotomy. He made Red Sox fans happy, and in those days it was a tonic against the since-evaporated angst: like a happy smile from a colicky baby. The cries of Nomah! that have since fallen into cliche were revelatory in their joy, coming from such a sad bastard people.

I was sure that Nomar Garciaparra would play his way into the Hall of Fame. A premier player in a big-time baseball city, one leg of the beloved ARod-Jeter-Nomar trifecta. I graduated from college in 2002, then left Vermont in 2003. In those years he was his usual great hitting self, with upper 20s home runs, over .300 average, etc.

Then I left, returning to the placid Houson Astros fan base. Next thing I know, Nomar is traded away, to the Cubs. A precipitous fall, it seemed to me, disentangled as I was from the daily churn of news and gossip in Red Sox Nation. Life teaches you, in small ways, that if you look away for a minute, something’s likely to change.

The Baseball-Reference blog tracked Nomar’s early potential, pointing out that through his age 29 year, the shortstop was among the best of all time. I am 29-years-old. Probably unrelated, but these things come to mind when an inconic player moves on. One’s own movings on. From some place to another place, for some reason or another, with varying levels of success and failure. Ballplayers start to mark off the autobiographical eras. Of the recent retirements, Frank Thomas marks my middle school days, and Nomar college.

Good on Nomar for making it to the top, even if his stay was shorter than some baseball romantics would have liked. The romantics want more than they should, and when they get it, they rarely know what, even, to do with it. Some even think that Nomar should make it to the hall. Not I, though. Some climbers don’t make it to the top, no matter how fast they make it to base camp one.

Memoir, 2 Comments

Frickin’ A-Rod or: How I Learned to Stop Wallowing and Grudingly Support the Yankees

Eric, October 26, 2009, 16 Comments

Rooting for the bad guy always sounds so good in theory; there is a sexy excitement to the whole thing, a contrarian pride, and a Clint Eastwood danger. But in practice, it never works. At the movies, you find yourself unable to shake the momentum of the action, somehow hinged to the values of the hero, reasonably off put by the villainous secrecy, shady Russian accents, and grandiose threats of the bad guys. Somehow, you always come home to the good guy.

But this is baseball. And the lines aren’t so clear. And the winners aren’t scripted. So when I tell you that in this World Series I am rooting for the Yankees, I don’t expect that to change. No doubt the Yankees are the bad guys: George Steinbrenner as a grumpier Auric Goldfinger and Ryan Howard as James Bond. The Yankees represent everything evil about baseball – the monolithic corporate model, the financial gluttony, the designated hitter rule – and yet I find myself, thrust by the violent and unexpected winds of time into their corner.

Maybe thrust is the wrong word. This has been a slow process. My hatred for the Yankees has certainly faded in recent years. It’s a well documented fact; it confounds my friends and absolutely infuriates my girlfriend. But how did a cooling of hatreds morph into an unabashed rooting interest? What chain of cosmic calamities could have made a Yankees fan of me?

1. Childhood fascination with old Yankee legends

I spent a great deal of my childhood reading baseball books, especially biographies. Many of these books documented Yankee stars: Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, and especially Mantle were pillars of my childhood. And as much as I hated the 90s Yankees of that childhood (and names like O’Neill, Boggs, and Brosius still send a shiver down my spine) there was always a disconnect between those Yankees and the Yankees. I did not realize this until quite recently, but because of the books, because of the history, my loathing for the Yankees never went beyond those specific teams and the culture surrounding them. It never extended to the franchise in its entirety.

2. Living in New York City

Before I moved to Brooklyn, I had this image of Yankee fans as self-righteous, greedy, and pompous. But even at the Yankee game I went to, I didn’t see this. Sure, Yankee fans are brash. But people in New York City are brash. That’s just the way it is. I had also always associated the Yankees with a more upper crust fan base. Intrinsically, I figured the Yankees to be the wealthy man’s team and the Mets to be the working-class team. This may be true to a point, but I don’t know that. I didn’t see it. Small sample size example: the dudes on my softball team, who were mostly tow truck drivers, were split down the middle: half Yankees and half Mets.

3. The rise of the Red Sox and awful Boston sports fans.

Along those same lines, Boston fans have really emerged has the epitome of the self-satisfied, bragging, obnoxious sports fans. Part of this has to do with winning a lot, and you can’t really begrudge them that. But it’s still annoying. The Red Sox, in many ways, have come to represent the same thing as those 90s Yankees teams. Bill Simmons and co. have made me, at the very least, more sympathetic to the Yankee cause.

4. My weird Alex Rodriguez fascination.

In the early months of this blog, I wrote a three-piece series wondering if Alex Rodriguez was a tragic hero in the Shakespearian sense. It was a bloated, meandering, and borderline pretentious essay. But the sentiment from whence it came remains valid. Excerpt:

I’ve lived in New York for two months. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned about this city it’s that people here absolutely despise Alex Rodriguez. It’s more than steroids hatred, or sucking in the postseason hatred, or trying to usurp heartthrob Jeter’s iconic place status. No, this is a kind of weird personal fetishistic hatred. I’m not sure if it starts in the media and spreads to the man on the street or vice versa, but listening for A-Rod banter in the Subway and reading the tabloid headlines off newsstands has become a hobby of mine. The A-Rod chatter has sunk to the point where people are merely disagreeing over how much and why they dislike the guy.

The act of writing those posts got me invested in A-Rod. I wanted to see him succeed just for the sake of tracking his image, his legacy. The hatred from New Yorkers just didn’t seem just. So I began to root for him, not in the interest of redemption, but in the interest of a break. The guy just needed a little space, a little room to breathe, little time to just be.

So yeah, I like A-Rod. I want him to do well.

5. The Dodgers lose to the Phillies consecutive years in the NLCS.

Okay fine. This post could have been three sentences long. It may be petty, but at this point I wish to inflict all human misery on Shane Victorino, Jayson Werth, Chase Utley, Ryan Madson, and pretty much every resident of Philadelphia. Never underestimate the power of bitter frustration.

Ted and I have talked a lot lately about what a free-floating fan is supposed to do during the playoffs. These are strange times for the non-Yankee non-Philly fans among us. While we haven’t reached any profound conclusions as to how to behave in these end days, we can at least consider what makes us tick, what factors dig us in, get us invested. For me it is a combination of geography, childhood experience, and player intrigue (which really amounts to cheering for the narrative). But above all that, it is a savage desire to see the team who wounded me feel a similar, burning pain. And maybe that’s the real allure of the bad guy. Honor be damned. Maybe deep down in all of us there’s an unquenchable thirst for revenge.

What do you guys think? Everybody’s gotta root for somebody. So what biases played into your decision. Is it friends? Is it revenge?

[awesome Greenpoint photo via flickr user svar]

Memoir and Thinking, 16 Comments

Shoeless Joe

Eric, September 9, 2009, 1 Comment

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

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

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

* * * *

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

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

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

* * * *

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

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

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

* * * *

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

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

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

* * * *

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

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

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

(flickr courtesy of cc:rutlo)

America, Books, Memoir and Situational Essay, 1 Comment

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