03 Oct 2011, by Eric
Sometimes it takes the games starting for the compass needle in my heart to flicker and point me to my true north. My true north this year lies a few miles outside of Dallas. In other words, I want the Rangers to win the World Series.
This is news to me. A professor friend of mine would tell me not to worry about the fact that I am suddenly a Rangers fan -- that we are all animals and sometimes we feel strange feelings and that's all there is to it. But explaining secondary fandom (or postseason adopted fandom) is one of our favorite pastimes here at P&P so I won't follow my professor's hypothetical advice. Instead I will just try desperately to explain why I am rooting for the Rangers instead of the perfectly likable teams in Milwaukee, Detroit, and Tampa.
The first thing about the Rangers is that last year I picked them to make the postseason, then to win the World Series. I had little attachment to the franchise before 2010, but the prediction (which had no stakes, I admit) gave me a rooting interest. Maybe that interest is lingering because they were so fun to watch last season and because they came so close to making me look brilliant and because they fell to my sworn baseball enemies the Giants.
The 2011 edition of the Rangers is very similar. They lost Cliff Lee, who is my favorite starting pitcher in all of baseball to watch, but they replaced him with Adrian Beltre, who is my favorite defensive player to watch and sort of a mascot for my baseball fandom. I had my Bar Mitzvah the year Beltre debuted in LA. I moved to college in Seattle the year he moved to Seattle. I had a bunch of terrible personal crises and got laid off the year Beltre was hit in the groin by a grounder and missed a bunch of games.
Anyway, surrounding Beltre they have the most exciting top to bottom lineup in all baseball. Ian Kinsler just completed the quietest 7.7 WAR season ever. Elvis Andrus is still called Elvis and still brilliant to watch in the field and on the bases. Hamilton is a flame-tattooed superstar. Michael Young is a pissy non-MVP candidate who batted .338 out of spite. Nelson Cruz is himself. And Mike Napoli is basically Mike Piazza.
And this is before I get to the fact that their remaining starting pitchers (fare the well in bullpen duty, Ogando) are an ex-reliever, a guy from the Japanese league, and two tallish guys with plain names who throw really hard. Three of them are lefties! Three!
The animal inside me is not a beast but some clawed and antlered thing.
But wait, you say. The Rangers were once owned by the unpopular pre-presidential George W. Bush who often sits smiling in a box on the field level. Their current CEO, Nolan Ryan, is the scowliest jowliest man in all of baseball and more than likely a fascist. And the two are friends! Plus there was that whole Tom Hicks/MLB Rescue debacle. Cheering for the Rangers, you say, is basically the baseball equivalent of voting for Rick Perry in an important primary straw poll.
To this I give you Hank Steinbrenner. And Tony LaRussa. And Chase Utley's hair. The negatives are out there for every team (though they are harder to spot for the Rays and Brewers, I admit). But Hank Steinbrenner's asshole comments don't make Curtis Granderson any less exciting. Tony LaRussa's faux-intellectual over-managing doesn't make me want Lance Berkman to lose at what might be his last shot at a ring. And Chase Utley's hair doesn't make Vance Worley any less surprising.
So what I'm telling myself here -- because really I am who I'm talking to -- is that it's okay to root for the Rangers because Nolan Ryan's pompous arms-crossed in a windbreaker aura is not enough to cut into the joy of a Ron Washington press conference or Neftali Feliz fastball. The needle in my heart has flickered. The animal inside me is not a beast but some clawed and antlered thing. And though most of my exes don't live in Texas, my favorite one does. That's enough. Go Rangers.
In Reading Club news, we continue this week with chapters 18-33 of The Art of Fielding. Try to have them read by Wednesday!
30 Sep 2011, by Ted
Tom Ley writes for The Good Men Project, and he contributed to 1990s First Basemen Week with The Big Cat and the Water. You can email him at leyt345(at)gmail(dot)com.
When I was a kid I had two discernible skills. The first was the ability to imitate the batting stances of my favorite baseball players. The second was the ability to act out Chris Farley’s “Matt Foley” sketch from Saturday Night Live in its entirety.
For a long time, I thought that these two skills had nothing to do with each other. Matt Foley made me laugh, so I imitated him. I loved baseball, so I imitated my favorite baseball players. That was that- until recently.
A few nights ago I was in the throes of a particular kind of boredom that only extensive Internet surfing can cure, and I came across this picture of Farley:
Naturally, as a former understudy of the man, this picture had a lot of impact on me. I expected that, but what I didn’t expect was for this picture to make me think about baseball.
We’ll come back to the baseball, but first I want to discuss Chris Farley.
Anyone who knows anything about Farley and the tragic nature of his death will immediately understand why this photograph is so haunting. It’s hard to say whether or not the photo is staged or candid, but in my mind it doesn’t really matter. It’s very rare for a picture to so accurately capture the spirit of its subject. This is Chris Farley, the court Jester who donned a crown that’s shine only brought the shadows closer.
The darkness invoked by this photograph is the same darkness that made Farley’s comedy so brilliant. On the surface he was just the “Funny Fat Guy” of his era, but that’s not what makes him memorable. What makes me miss him still to this day was his unique ability to successfully incorporate an undeniably authentic sense of anxiety and desperation into each of his characters.
Take a moment to watch this classic Matt Foley sketch.
This sketch isn’t funny because it features a fat man yelling and falling through a coffee table. It’s funny because Farley so convincingly plays up the “broken man” aspect of the Foley character. He forces the audience to confront the pain and sadness of a life that has slipped its last rung, and then he forces us to laugh at it. A comedian can only pull off a feat like this if he allows pieces of himself to seep into the performance. It’s authenticity that turns Matt Foley in a hilarious force of nature rather than an awkward sock puppet. When he croaks out his famous line about living in a van down by the river, it’s not hard to imagine Farley himself ending up in a van down by the river, thrice divorced.
I find it less than coincidental that the names Foley and Farley so closely resemble each other.
Even as a kid I think I was subconsciously appreciative of Farley’s ability to incorporate his demons into his comedy. I loved the fact that he was willing to show his audience so much of himself, and that we were allowed to embrace the imperfections he revealed to us. We were allowed to love him not in spite of his ugliness, but because of it.
I thought about all of these things as I looked at the photograph in the pale light of my laptop, rehashing all of Farley’s best guttural one liners in my head, and I realized that it was an attraction Farley’s authenticity that drove me to imitate his most memorable character.
Which brings us back to baseball, and more specifically, batting stances.
Baseball is a game that is governed by the rigidity of a diamond and a rule book, and it leaves little room for self expression. There are only so many ways that a player can field a grounder, swing a bat, and dive for a ball in the gap. Some players do these things better than others, but in the end they are all essentially going through the same set of motions.
But not when they are standing at the plate.
When a player steps to the plate, he is given the opportunity to allow some of his true self to seep into his on field demeanor. Gary Sheffield always played the game with a focus in his eyes that hinted at an unseen intensity boiling inside of him, and yet this intensity had nowhere to manifest itself while he was forced to loiter silently in left field. Things changed when he stepped into the box, though. There he was given the opportunity to set free some of his fire, and he did so by violently cocking his bat back and forth, forcing everyone to take notice.
Ken Griffey Jr. always possessed a swagger and athleticism that seemed too big for a stadium to contain. Centerfield was never quite big enough to reveal his true potential, and the youthful cockiness of his backwards facing cap was always snuffed out once batting practice was over; the game demanding that he straighten his bill. This cockiness returned once he stepped up to the plate. He’d stand upright and nonchalant, his elbow cocked high while the rest of his body waited patiently to begin that smooth, unmistakable hitch towards first base once the ball was hit. Swagger oozed out of him while he stood in the box, enough that it was almost impossible to imagine that he was about to do anything other than hit a home run. For me, Griffey Jr. was the most captivating version of himself during those few moments that he spent standing at home plate.
For players like these, the batter’s box was a limitless space, free for them to fill with whatever form of self-expression they wished.
More importantly, players are allowed to take advantage of the expressive space of the batter’s box without fear of scorn or judgement. So many sports, baseball in particular, demand that the action on the field be sanitized. Athletes are expected to maintain a stiff modicum of what is considered professionalism when they are on the field, and anyone who attempts to blur the lines between the two is often shunned by the fans and media. Think players like Carlos Zambrano and Milton Bradley, who allowed their to bleed onto the field, only to get written off as cartoonish, insignificant caricatures. We don’t allow ourselves to embrace an athlete’s raw personality as something that can inform their performance on the field in a way that makes them more compelling to watch. Instead, we often consider such a phenomenon to somehow be an affront to the sanctity of the game.
As a fan of the game, this makes me sad. I’m sad because I’ve realized that I watch athletes and comedians for precisely the same reason; I want to be entertained, and what’s real is often what’s most entertaining.
That’s why I spent so many hours perfecting Sheffield’s violent wiggle and Foley’s broken wail. I was after something real.
29 Sep 2011, by Eric
Dayn Perry is a senior writer at NotGraphs and skilled Reggie Jackson biographer.
This runs long, but I'll do better at reining it in going forward ...
"The last time I forced myself to slog through a work of fiction that did not sufficiently move me was during my undergraduate years, which were so long ago as to devastate. Anyhow, I was assigned to read Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain over my December break. The work in question, it turned out, featured far too much time in a tuberculosis sanatorium, far too many lengthy disquisitions by something called “Herr Settembrini,” and far too much anguish on my part. I sweat, I wept silently, I forwent the viewing of important bowl games. And for what? A sense of completeness and academic calm that could’ve been mine after mere and stolen moments with that bumble-beed miracle known as “Cliffs Notes.”
After this experience, I took a monastic vow never to complete a work of fiction that, according to my own dubious and capricious standards, did not merit completion. Since then, I’ve been accordingly preoccupied with the exact moment at which a novel crosses the threshold that separates, for me, Magic Mountain-ness from “A Book I am Willing to and Perhaps Delighted to Finish”-ness.
In the curious case of The Art of Fielding, this moment occurred for me, your current interlocutor, probably when I first cracked the spine. (Fair enough: I’m reading it on the iPad, so I cracked no literal spines. But you know what I’m saying. Don’t you?) Specifically and honestly, though, I was taken at the closing words of Chapter 15, when Affenlight “truly was a fool,” and then, seconds later, “was renewed.” There was something ineffably real and endearing about the set-up and sequence. I knew what I already suspected, which is that I was in.
So, my question: At what moment did you determine, from on high, that The Art of Fielding had secured and earned your readerly attentions for good and all?
Also, Skrimshander = Scrimshaw!"
29 Sep 2011, by Eric
Navin Vaswani is a writer extroardinaire at NotGraphs and the lone Canadian participating in Reading Club.
I've got a couple of confessions: One: I don't recall having read any baseball fiction; if I have, I don't remember the book(s). And, two: I like most everything that I read. What can I say, I'd never make it as a critic. I've found the first 135 pages of The Art of Fielding to be enjoyable, to be readable, even though I find much of the book not believable. No matter how hard I try, I can't imagine Owen Dunne a member of the Westish Harpooners, the "Buddha" the absolute furthest from a baseball player. I also wasn't expecting Westish President Guert Affenlight to be gay, and to be falling in love with Owen, the improbable baseball player and easily the book's most eccentric character so far. Again, just not very believable. But that's why it's fiction, I suppose.
I am pleased with the array of characters we've so far been introduced to. At first, through the book's initial chapters, I couldn't help but think of John McDonald when reading about Henry Skrimshander. A wizard, a savant, in the field, and nothing more. Until he was taken under his wing by Mike Schwartz, the thinking man's baseball player. By now, we know where we stand with each of our protagonists: Will Henry's errant throw be the first of many? It has to be. What will become of Schwartz? It is Henry's turn to return the favour, and take care of him? Will Guert Affenlight pursue a relationship with Owen, a student at the college he presides over? I can't see it happening, which means it probably will. I don't really know what to make of Pella, who might be the one to save Schwartz, instead of Henry.
I'm not sure how much of the book I was expecting to be about baseball, but think Harbach has a struck a decent balance, so far. He's a strong writer, as the depth of the characters proves. My question, what I'm interested to find out as we read further, is: How much of an impact will the happenings on the diamond, on the field, have on the lives of The Art of Fielding's main characters? It seems as though baseball, the game, is secondary. Both to the plot, and to the characters. Life happens, and baseball is the escape. While I'm finding certain parts of the book a bit of a stretch, that's one that certainly rings true.
28 Sep 2011, by Eric
Pete Beatty is a future boss at The Classical and P&P's resident Jim Thome scholar.
Some people will demur but "Guert Affenlight" is a truly excellent ridiculous name for a fictional character. "Guert Affenlight" is exactly the kind of name that college presidents/the over-accomplished sometimes are burdened with. I actually have a theory that the book publishing world (where I work), being a demimonde with a lot of unreconstructed WASPs and other old-line elites, has a disproportionate share of ridiculous names. I actually keep an Evernote file of "NARP" (Not A Real Person) names, which Guert Affenlight would be right at home in.
But beyond his pitch-perfect fake name, I'm not sure what to make of President Affenlight, who just strolled in and gayed (I mean that in a judgment-free way) everything up (and anyway, this novel is homoerotic from the copyright page onward-- Mike Schwartz angrily whispers the word "pussy" at Henry, who ignores it! Symbolism! I solved literature!). I was just getting comfortable with this novel turning into a male gay-supremacist version of I Am Charlotte Simmons (fuck you guys for making fun of me, I liked that book) about the lower-middle-class souls-in-crisis of Schwartz and Skrimshander, and now I have to deal with Guert, who is a real adult with problems more complex than a rare throwing error or law school admissions. I'm rambling, but so far so good, right? I blazed through pages 1 through 117 in what felt like an hour. Good job everyone, especially the author.