22 Oct 2011, by Ted
Eric: I feel like I need to do some sort of literary knuckle-cracking. How long has it been since we've done this? Don't answer that. I watched Game 2 at a quiet neighborhood bar last night with music piping through the speakers instead of play by play. Buck and McCarver-less, those first seven innings went by in what felt like fifteen minutes. I have two theories as to why: 1.) the game was actually just very short because Garcia and Lewis were fantastic and 2.) when you watch a game free of broadcasters and other outside stimuli -- this bar was very empty -- your imagination can run wild. I found myself noticing things about the players that I never would otherwise have considered. For example, Colby Lewis has the most perfectly brown and shaped and broken in baseball glove I have ever seen: it's flawless. And without announcers there to remind you of how great of a person he is, Albert Pujols doesn't just look boring, he looks sad. His eyes are heavy and forlorn like it doesn't matter whether he hits .400 in the postseason or whether Lance Berkman is protecting him in the lineup, or whether the Cards win or lose. Is he gazing into the distance at a future outside St. Louis? After all, the World Series is not just an event -- it's also an ending.
Ted: Where have you been watching the World Series, Eric, the lobby bar of the Days Inn Tukwila?
I will now quote an imaginary book-within-a-book: "It always saddens me to leave the field. Even fielding the final out to win the World Series, deep in the truest part of me, felt like death." While I'm sure there's some parallel to Pujols' demeanor and the melancholy tendencies of an imaginary shortstop, Aparicio Rodriguez, the imagined Hall of Fame-type character from "The Art of Fielding," has an endless passion for baseball, whereas Albert's seems to be running on the dry side. For reasons I'm not quite prepared to explain, Pujols' appeal must be at an all-time low. He's catching almighty hell for leaving the locker room quickly after last night's game on the heels of a modest fielding error, and it seems that, in the public eye, his dominance as a player is somehow caving in around him vis a vis public adoration.
One pet theory: Lance Berkman has reminded St. Louis and America what a chill dude is like, and the contrast between a chill dude and a stoic personality drain has thrown Pujols into a new light. As Eric Freeman notes in a Deadspin article, Pujols and manager Tony Larussa don't seem to fit into the modern cultural landscape the way that a dynamic man of the times like Joe Maddon does. Freeman goes on: "Major League Baseball generally lacks personality. Albert Pujols, Cardinals star and the best hitter of the last decade, has none." Harsh words for the decade's greatest hitter, former WS champ, and current WS player. The Rangers, if anything, embody a young, contemporary attitude towards baseball and the playing thereof. Is there a pair of infielders playing now who are more enjoyable to watch than Ian Kinsler and Elvis Andrus? (That question is non-rhetorical.)
Eric: How about a trio? Because Adrian Beltre is as exciting a defensive third baseman as a third baseman can be. Also, he has a hard time standing still in the batter's box. Andrus-Kinsler is obviously a more enjoyable middle infield combo than Furcal-Punto, though there's something to be said for Furcal's energy this postseason (even when he can't hit, he really seems like he can hit) and Punto's grizzly beard. Has any small, powerless, middle infielder ever looked more world-weary than Nick Punto? Lemme tell you, that guy has seen it all.
I feel as though we're overlooking the real heroes of Game Two, and those were the starting pitchers. It's funny to think about, but Garcia and Lewis both came out of nowhere last season. Lewis was a curiosity returned from Japan (though Carson Cistulli somehow predicted his success before 2010) and Garcia was a Spring Training miracle who just wouldn't go away. Now they just seem like good pitchers. Lewis has a 2.22 era in 44 playoff innings these last two years. Those are some Curt Schilling numbers right there. (I've always wanted to invoke Schilling in a purely statistical fashion; his career playoff ERA is 2.23, though in many more innings than Lewis.)
This World Series has been billed as a battle of dominant bullpens. Does that narrative leave you as cold as it leaves me?
Ted: The dearth of marquee starting pitchers does detract from the adrenaline of the first few innings of these games, sure. But good pitching is almost as entertaining as marquee pitching. Jaime Garcia has been on my style radar for some time, as he's as little sung as Colby Lewis with stuff on par with some of the best young pitchers in the game. After inning three or four, his work setting down some fine right-handed hitters takes the place of the marquee desire. A match-up of bullpens I suppose slows the game down, and there are few truly iconic performances attributed to relievers.
Which reminds me, it has been a while since I've seen the media parse a game into its parts with such a fine toothed comb as they have this World Series. Whether questioning LaRussa's bullpen moves or Ron Washington's bullpen moves, it seems to me that there is a kind of obsessed attention being paid to the tid bits. I never would have thought that a match-up featuring the Rangers offense against Pujols, Holliday, and Berkman would come down to piddly maneuvers and hot defense.
Eric: I think part of the strategy obsession has to do with the managerial character of this series. Imagine a Ron Roenicke vs Joe Girardi series or some such -- people who don't read the New York Post would hardly think twice about bullpen usage. The Washington - La Russa dynamic is another one that feels completely different at the bar with the game on mute. La Russa, for instance seems far less menacing in silence, and far more like a bit actor in a second-rate cop show. Washington on the other hand just looks kind of like a fan. Anyway, we can save the strategic theorizing and second guessing for next time.
20 Oct 2011, by Ted
For most of this book, Henry Skrimshander was the quiet fulcrum around which a group of vibrant characters wheeled, projecting onto his country frame their anxieties and insecurities. Henry, for his part, played the wall. Speaking little, affecting nothing, his presence was like a wall painted white: only with a blemish, a fierce and irrational smear, did it appear at all. Henry, as he walked off of the field when his throwing arm rebelled entirely, only finally realized this limited value to those around him. Unable to express his needs, especially to the friend he needed most, Henry pursued a philosophy of negation. If his value was as a blank wall, he would very literally erase himself from being. No food, no coffee, no Henry. How he managed not to allow himself to sink to the bottom of the lake in a 30-pound vest is beyond me.
Henry's depressed turn caught me off guard, I will admit. He seemed incapable of anything but recovery, or at least some kind of good cheer. Even as he handed the ball off to the pitcher, I didn't sense sadness from him, but acceptance. He could have recommitted himself to the studies that seemed less than irrelevant to him, or he could have pursued a decent romantic relationship. When a path becomes blocked, depression isn't the only alternative route.
In Pella, Henry found a fascinating bed fellow. Perhaps his acute sorrow appealed to her. She plays the mother and the lover in a gracefully uncomplicated triangle. The men in her life all reflect a certain model of stability, whether as the confident jock, the confident scholar-president, the pompous West Coaster, or the solidly blank white wall.
I little expected to care about the result of an actual baseball game as this little universe hurtles into its own future. But here we are and I can't wait to see where Henry falls in relation to the fate of his team, the understated but brilliant Harpooners, who will play on live national TV in this brilliant alternate reality in which Division III baseball games play, even if it is on cable.
20 Oct 2011, by Eric
Bryan Harvey, who has previously written here about Brian McCann and Jason Heyward and John Henry, is a high school teacher and poet, who writes for The Faster Times and The Lawn Chair Boys. His poetry has appeared in the Cold Mountain Review and DeckFight Press released his eBook, Everything That Dunks Must Converge, in April..
The truth is sobering. The lie intoxicating. To get better, at some point, the truth is needed, and if I'm wrong in what I'm about to say, put me in my place.
Surrounded by land, Westish College and its bevy of depressed characters are still somehow connected to the water: there's the Melville statue overlooking the lake, there's Pella swimming her laps, there's Schwartz rehabbing in the athletic center's whirlpool, and then there's Henry's soup and bathtub routine. But Henry's aquatic melancholy doesn't begin in a bathroom. As far as I can tell, it begins in Chapter 54 when he swims out into the lake (most likely with Melville's stone eyes watching him), wearing a flak jacket. It's dangerous. It's foolish. And it's the most desperate act Henry makes, that is until he sleeps with Pella.
A lot is going on in Chapters 54 and 55. No doubt. Prior to these chapters Henry is a rather flat character, as many here have stated. He plays baseball. He lifts weights. He runs the stadium. He plays baseball. Everything is cyclical and, well, predictable. Then a gust of wind disrupts everything, Owen goes to the hospital, and Henry is introduced to the harshness of real life, like a baby forced to breathe air through its nose for the first time, and that's what Henry is prior to this segment of the novel: a baby. He does what he's told, as he's told, not thinking, soaking up the wisdom of Aparicio and Schwartz tabula rasi. And when baseball fails to give him "The dream of every day the same" (345), where does Henry go for answers but back to the womb-like waters of Lake Michigan, reenacting the single time in everyone's life when their being is entirely flawless, "[improving] little by little till the day it all [becomes] perfect" (345)? Everything after that is downhill, right? Mistakes, unmet potential, and sin.
Henry goes to the water because there's something within him that must be cleansed, and when he comes out of the cool Lake Michigan waters, he gets down on all fours and drinks from a puddle "like an animal" (346), having washed away the complexities of his existence. Then he curls up in the sand--fetal style--and sleeps the night away, only to awake the next day, in Chapter 55, not with the mind of a child but contemplating "the longest speech of his academic career" (348), which happens to be about St. Peter, a man whose most famous act is one of denial (apparently, sainthood does not operate on baseball's three strike rule), and what else is Henry trying to do in this part of the novel than deny the fallible traits that make him a human rather than a machine. Then this chapter that begins with his most complex thoughts on religion (which a young Henry appears to deny), free will, and even damnation ends with Henry's hand being guided into the "icy blue" that guards Pella's private parts (353). So when the baseball diamond fails to replicate the perfect potential of Henry's in utero existence, he turns to Pella, the strongest representation of the feminine there is in the novel, but even this effort will fail to heal him, just like no amount of hours in a whirlpool can restore Schwartz's joints, and Henry will spend the next several chapters, like a fish or a whale, in bathtubs full of water, slurping on warm soup as if it came to him out of an umbilical cord.
Here's the thing, though, Henry knows his actions are "crazy" (346), that perfection is dull to the point of not existing, that he had to leave his mother's womb, that playing baseball long enough will result in errors, that a person cannot tread water forever, that pretty much all moments of ejaculation are short lived, and that bathtubs have a drain for a reason, so where does Henry go from here? And how did Harbach make such a seemingly dull kid from South Dakota into whatever this character is now?
20 Oct 2011, by Eric
Find more of Adam at Everyday Footnotes.
Well, that certainly got plotty, didn't it? Maybe I skipped over the warnings but I hadn't been concerned that Guert was putting his job on the line with his affair. The book successfully encouraged me to focus my concern on Owen's eventual rejection of Guert. This development seemed to appear out of nowhere (dean ex machina?) but I loved the way this turn of events played off the unending and seemingly inconsequential talk of climate change. (Inconsequential to the novel, not -- you know -- the world.) In hindsight, I realize Owen's solar-power pillow talk was actually quite strange and I would love it if Guert's fleeting paranoid idea that Owen may be sleeping with him simply to make Westish carbon-neutral turned out to be true.
While Guert has the Skrimshanders to thank for the unraveling of his life's work, Henry has both Affenflights to thank for avoiding fates such as ramen soup and shallow water drowning. I'm curious to see what's driving Guert, at this dark moment, to send Henry to Nationals.
A question for everyone else: did I miss some legitimate reason for Schwartz to turn down the assistant athletic director job? I understand that we're supposed to believe that he's too stubborn or single-minded to accept this perfect gap-year opportunity ... but is anyone buying that?
19 Oct 2011, by Eric
Find more of Megan Wells at Around the Horn from Aerys Sports.
Everything seems finally to be coming to a head in the novel. Relationships are breaking down and forcing the characters to figure out their own lives, instead of using each other to fill the gaps. Probably the most striking loss, to me, was Henry's loss of baseball. Every other character has something else to chase, for good or ill, but most importantly, for themselves: Schwartz wants the championship. Pella wants a normal, adult life. Affenlight wants a normal, adult life (an unexpected parallel between father and daughter that, to be honest, I only just caught on to as I was writing this).
But Henry has nothing else to want, and frankly, I'm not even sure he's capable of wanting anything else. Even his relationship - insofar as you can call that weird one-sided dependency a relationship - with Pella is a sort of an aimless, reflexive action. And here's where things got difficult for me.
Harbach has illustrated depression extremely convincingly in these pages. As someone who has been where Henry is, it was an exceedingly uncomfortable read for me. And it makes me wonder whether the loss of baseball is really what's tormenting Henry, or whether there's been something pathological about him all along. I object to the tendency society as a whole seems to have for diagnosing from a distance and with limited information. But Henry is fictional, so with that caveat in place, I'll say that his reaction to walking away from baseball throws the observations I've made so far - about the essential emptiness of his character - into a wholly different light. What do you think: is Henry grieving normally? Or was he, by pursuing baseball so single-mindedly, staving off this feeling all along?