This week, Pitchers & Poets turns One. To mark this momentous and surprising occasion, here is the inaugural PnP podcast. We’ve kept things short — it’s only about twenty minutes — so please give it a listen.
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Archive for the 'Meta' Category
In a literary sense, I sort of like clichés. Before they become hackneyed and mundane, they are tight exceptional metaphors and similes. The first time somebody compared his lover’s eyes to a glowing moon, or her beauty to a red rose it was brilliant. The meaning of those words has worn over time, but not the initial spark of genius from which they were born. Like any writer, I avoid clichés as much as I can, but their initial spark remains bright in my mind.
The same can be true for most conventional wisdom: at one point, it was not conventional. It was just an idea that explained something fairly well, or a strategy that was effective most of the time. The sacrifice bunt, for example, is a conventional strategy in baseball. It’s often employed without second thought, lauded if effective, criticized if ineffective (or used too frequently). But the first time some manager trotted a weak-hitter out to move a runner over with a bunt, it probably blew minds.
In the tendency to assign grand meaning to Sports, I see both the cliché and the conventional wisdom. I see the initial reasoning for doing so and dig the value of this pretense, but I also see the worn out catchphrases and the strained logic and wonder why it happens. There are so many sayings about Sports – and I mean to refer to Sports as a proper noun here – that it gets hard to remember which ones came from Vince Lombardi and which ones originated with some orthopedic surgeon coaching his son’s Little League Team.
Football is War. Baseball is a microcosm for life. Casey Stengel and John Wooden and so on and so forth and I think I’ll grab myself a drink. The task of a coach is to mold young men, men who prove their mettle, prove their value as humans on the field of play. By this world view, people don’t dive in front of slap shots, or lean into inside fastballs, or take a hard charges in the lane merely because they want to win the game, but because winning the game has everything to do with winning at life. And damn it to hell if life is not about winning.
The point to all this crotchety, self-righteous, rambling is pretty much to bemoan the overwrought (ironic that I’m calling somebody that) way we think about sports. I’m thinking we should back up a smidge. Instead of seeking wisdom in the broad existence of Competition and Running and Playing and Winning and Losing maybe we can find wisdom elsewhere. Maybe the real wisdom can be found in the tiny situations, the intricacies of each game, the times that a particular sporting event lines up with a particular moment in our lives. Baseball is the National Pastime, not the National University or the National Church. Things are better this way.
The game serves a wonderful purpose: not as a metaphor, but as an entity that merits discussion on its own terms. There is insight to be had and wisdom to be found in baseball. The sport has its own language and its own issues and its own ongoing dialogue. Sometimes baseball mirrors greater society and sometimes it exists on a completely separate plane. Baseball and Sports in general, contribute to language and culture and dialogue the way anything else do. There are things a man’s curveball can tell us, but there also things his marriage or his job performance or his fashion sense can tell us.
I love the way Free Darko can extrapolate on-court behavior and performance into stunningly accurate and refreshing takes on an athlete’s broader position in our society, his own personal struggles, and the general mythology of sport. But I also appreciate that while Greg Maddux’s repertoire and approach and legend seem an accurate reflection of his entire existence, he probably wouldn’t put it that way. Sports is just another activity in our lives which means sometimes it’s an effective way to make the nuanced, the deeply personal, the incomprehensible events and emotions that we deal with every day a little easier to understand. But sometimes those events and emotions are better explained in the context of a road trip, or a meal, or a six pack of beer.
The Free Darko guys understand this. They like basketball and have a keen sense for what basketball can tell us about both itself and the broader world, but they realize that the game is not a perfect representation of society. Unlike the speeches of Vince Lombardi, or the pained reminiscing of nostalgia-crazed “those were the days” baseball fans, there is no dogma to be found here. There is only the transitory wisdom and pleasure of a pastime.
We must realize that while Sports can tell us unique and vibrant and refreshing things, it cannot tell us everything. A life is a life, a war is a war, and baseball, to end with a surprisingly fitting cliché, is only a game.
Dear Spaghetti Arms,
I try not to engage in criticism. That is, I try to avoid using this blog as a platform to shout about why a certain player should bat in a certain place, or why Joe Scouting Director should be Fired Immediately. There are plenty of blogs for that, but we at Pitchers & Poets pride ourselves on a different kind of thinking. We try to examine the game from both a greater distance and a much more intimate, immediate angle.
We’re much inclined to gently criticize a point of view, or go off for a thousand words on some inane theory on fandom than make actual concrete predictions. Most of this is because Ted and I don’t see baseball as just a collection of results. But another part of it, at least for me, is that I hate being proven wrong by insurmountable piles of data and cold hard facts.
So it’s with a heavy heart that I apologize to you Jim Tracy. I not only questioned your hiring as manager of the Colorado Rockies, but berated the team’s management for it. Here are some of the silly things I wrote:
In both Pittsburgh and Los Angeles, Jim Tracy was epically dull, notably un-dynamic, and completely void of compelling traits.
Okay that’s still true.
Even on an interim level this might be the least inspired managerial hiring in the history of baseball.
Here are some statistics:
70-54 as of today
19-28 on May 29 when Clint Hurdle was fired.
51-26 since you, Jim Tracy, took over the club.
You can’t see it, but I’m actually looking away from the screen as I type this, so shamed I am by the numbers above.
It’s not Jim Tracy’s fault he’s dull and ineffective and keeps getting hired. I’m sure old Spaghetti-Arms is a nice enough guy and he certainly won’t screw things up too badly.
If you discard my sarcastic, mocking tone, then this statement is actually accurate too.
Anyway, the point is I was wrong about you Jim Tracy. Your arms remain discomfortingly long and your gaze remains eerily unaffected, but you certainly have the capacity to manage a baseball team. As much as I’d like to hold on with contemptuous pride to the words with which I described you (words like unsurprising, conventional, representative of a managerial stases in the MLB bloodstream, and retread), I must let them go. They were inaccurate and unjust and I have learned my lesson.
In the future, more esoteric, off-kilter, semi-obsessive posts on fandom, less pretending I actually know something about the inner workings of the Colorado Rockies. Alright, Jim. May you win the Wild Card, but fall comfortably short of the Dodgers in the NL West Race.
Warmest Regards,
Eric
As of today Pitchers & Poets has enough posts for somebody (like VH1 or Pitchfork or Time Magazine or the Modern Library Association) to create a definitive and Important list of the Top 100 Pitchers & Poets posts. Indeed this very collection of words that you are reading right now is the blog’s 100th post. It’s very cool to write that, to reach that A-ball milestone, as I had very tempered expectations in terms of not just audience, but the quality and consistency of the content when i started this blog. Thanks to Ted for coming out of nowhere to simultaneously challenge me, spell me, and reign me in with his writing. And thanks to you guys for reading, or at the very least pretending to.
- Fact #1: Some species of Catfish can live to be over 100 years old.
Your reward is an update to the Baseball Mixtape. This one’s a cover of Bob Dylan’s classic bootleg Catfish. This version, performed by a Miami blues artist named Albert Castiglia, has a kind of heavier, soul-oozing vibe. Ted, who dug this up somehow, says there is a Dr. John-ness too it. I’ll agree with that and mention my first reaction: it puts me in a swampy southern minor league ballpark on a hot summer night. Enjoy.
- Fact #2: It takes longer to read the first 100 pages of a James Michener novel (like Centennial!) than it does to write 100 essays about baseball.
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Bonus Info: Blogs With Balls is also responsible for my playing wiffle ball with Harold Reynolds.
I went to Blogs with Balls this weekend, the first ever sports blogging conference. There was some early trepidation about going, but I’m glad I bit the bullet. It was a lot of fun, the food was decent, and I met some exceptionally cool people – more on them later.
More importantly, the conference allowed me to flesh out some ideas on blogs and blogdom and the broader sports media landscape that I had been unable to previously articulate. The panelists were a mix of blogger/writers, new media moguls, and miscellaneous white people. I learned a ton.
I didn’t realize I was learning anything groundbreaking besides how to be good on Twitter until the last panel of the day. It was supposed to be on why the old guard media hates bloggers, but devolved into a sort of free-for-all. FreeDarko’s Bethlehem Shoals worked himself up into an existential, expletive-filled frenzy over what we were all doing there in the first place.
“A blog is just a fucking platform,” he said at one point.
That hit home. I don’t blog because I want to make a million dollars in ad revenue or because I believe in blogging as some sort of movement. I write a blog because blogs are stunningly effective at getting words from one person’s head to another’s line of sight. If this were the 1700s, and the most effective way for me to share a thousand word essay on racism, nationalism, and fan identity was by printing up pamphlets and handing them out on the streets, I’d probably be doing that.
In the 1700s not all pamphleteers were doing the same thing, and today not all bloggers do the same thing. Some pamphleteers wrote angry screeds about the Quartering Act and others collected funny jokes about King George III’s fish-like facial features. It’s unfair to lump those two together content-wise because they both happened to choose the most effective means of distribution.
Went crazy in later years, allegedly speaking nonsense for 58 straight hours in the days before his death.
I was sort of irked by the notion of the blog as a genre and bloggers as a monolithic entity. The platform is still new and its conventions are still being defined. The whole notion of blogger solidarity seems more based on the common recognition of technology’s value (and the whiplash scolding by media folks who don’t) than any unified concept of what we do. Or as Spencer Hall, who blogs for the Sporting News and Every Day Should Be Saturday, so drunkenly put it on Saturday, “we all do different things.”
Many of the panelists, like I said before, weren’t bloggers at all. There were Twitter experts, entrepreneurs, and all kinds of internet gurus. Most of what they talked about was money. How do you turn your passion (blogging, writing, sports, whatever) into cash? How do you grow your audience? How do you become as famous as the guys from Deadspin?
All good questions, but questions that caused me to take a second look at my motivations for blogging and for being there in the first place. I blog because I love to write, and at this point nobody – much less the vaunted mainstream media – is paying me to do it. It’s an outlet and a platform and hell, a bit of a showcase for me. I’m interested in baseball and culture and literature and I think some other people might be too. Hopefully one of those other people works for ESPN or The Atlantic and wants to pay me to write something. If not, that’s alright too. I love the process.
That’s what scared me about that second, businessman type of panelist. I don’t know if he gets or cares about that process. Content might be king to that guy, but only because without it there is nothing to draw an audience, nothing to wrap ads around.
None of this really crystallized until the keynote speaker, a super-rich wine/internet expert named Gary Vaynerchuk took the stage. His message, I thought, was muddled. He said that we should grab life by the balls, define our passion and pursue it and make it our livelihood (key phrase: FUCKING CRUSH IT). Then he said that for every hour we spent on that passion, we should spend twenty or thirty hours on promoting it, on hustling basically. That’s a lot of hours, Gary, and it doesn’t jive with me or my values. I wasn’t the only one who thought so either.
If it’s really about the content, about doing something you care about and doing it well, then that’s what you spend the time on. There was a punk band out of San Pedro, CA in the 1980s called the Minutemen. Their message was simple: We Jam Econo. It’s not about the money or the chicks or the record companies or the egos. It’s about playing the music we love and getting it out there and everything else is bullshit. They’ve got a song called History Lesson, Part II. You may have heard it:
Our band could be your life. Their band was their life. Not because they were out on their knees in front of Capital Records trying to get their demo in the right suit’s hands, but because they put the music first, always. The stage, the radio, the record were just platforms.
Of course I’m not 100 pct idealistic and naïve and I’m not on some futile jihad for artistic integrity. I want more traffic on this blog. I want more attention as a writer. I want to do this for a living. All the passion in the world won’t net you a dime by itself. I’ve got a soap box, and I could stand up here all day and shout for my small audience. But if I don’t step away, that audience won’t grow very fast. It takes networking, hustling, savvy to make it in the business. A Tribe Called Quest puts things into perspective:
Note the last verse from Diamond D. It’s all about striking a balance, and it ain’t easy:
You gotta get a label that’s willin’ and able
To market and promote, and you better hope
(For what?) That the product is dope
Take it from Diamond, it’s like mountain climbin’
When it comes to rhymin’ you gotta put your time in
And that’s the one thing I did appreciate about the keynote speaker, Gary Vaynerchuk. He said we should play to our strengths. If that means joining a blog network like Yard Barker or SB Nation to get promoted and make money and build traffic, then maybe it’s a wise thing to do. If that means asking a friend to help with spreading the word about you, while you help them with something else (note: not sure how helpful I can be, but I’ll try), then do it that way.
I may differ from a lot of the other guys at the Blogs with Balls event. I’m not posting a ton every day, or putting up sports gossip and pictures of hot chicks, or writing exclusively about one team. But that’s okay. There’s a place for what they do and a place for what I do.
In the end, a blog is what you make it: journal, news source, humor venue, platform for silly essays only ostensibly about baseball. It’s really up to us.
–
I’m going to list some of the cool folks I talked to at BwB. I’ve spent the last day reading over their sites, and I can say with confidence that aside from being nice guys, they are good writers and worth a look. Some might not be your thing (i.e. I’m a huge Dolphins fan, but spent a lot of the day talking with the proprietor of a Jets blog), but good writing is good writing:
Mike Mader: MikeOnThePhillies.com
Paul Catalano: AndAPlayerToBeNamedLater.blogspot.com
Brian Bassett: TheJetsBlog.com
Bethlehem Shoals: FreeDarko.com
Don Povia*: HuggingHaroldReynolds.com
Jared Wade: BothTeamsPlayedHard.net
Andrew Feinstein: DenverStiffs.com
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*Bonus points for organizing the conference
