The best Westerns do not feature the men who laid the tracks for the railroad's methodical predictability, and seldom do they make heroic the movements of a conductor checking his watch for an estimated time of arrival or of a gritty man, hunched over and sweaty, shoveling coal into a hot furnace. No, the best Westerns feature the men who threaten the set path with dynamite, upending the train's metal cars, blowing open the safe's cold door, holding passengers and employees at gunpoint, stealing the business man's gold, and preventing the execution of plans laid in hard steel. In short, watching too many westerns can make a person believe that the only way to be a hero is to become the personification of riotous freedom. And, if you come to believe that rebellion is the stuff that makes men courageous, then you can also come to believe that order is a lukewarm drink sipped by quiet men. And baseball is full of quiet men.
Brian McCann has never been a dynamo, and he's never been a train robber. There is no mystery to the Braves catcher. He's homegrown and ripe with familiarity--another ballplayer taught to swing a bat by his father. And, if he were in a Western, he'd probably have a green visor and an accountant's arm bands, because the truth of the matter is that Brian McCann's game has always been calculated, reduced or enhanced by a score on an eye test, a vision-correcting prescription, or how many starts can a catcher make without blowing out his knees. Nothing about Brian McCann has sparked our imaginations to run wild about whether he's killed a man, got a family somewheres, or just how far can he hit a baseball. By consistently hitting around twenty home runs every season, he's shown himself to be a power hitter that always makes contact, and there's something less dramatic about a slugger who doesn't come to the plate with an all or nothing mentality. In other words, Brian McCann, in all of his chubby generosity, has found a way to be too dependable for his own good, for his style of play is not as inspiring as say a Buster Posey's, who has risked his very life protecting the plate. And, while announcers, fans, and analysts weep over his tragic sacrifice, the cuddly McCann is discussed in a manner that, like his name, suggests he is merely capable. Both men are catchers, but only one is followed through swinging saloon doors by hushed whispers and pointed fingers. Only one of them is a gunslinger, and Brian McCann is not that man.Brian McCann, in all of his chubby generosity, has found a way to be too dependable for his own good
To have a torrid passion for the game of Brian McCann, an individual would have to be in love with the catcher almost as much as they are in love with the game of baseball itself, for even his game-winning hits, whether in the All-Star game or a meager regular season outing appear to be the work of percentages, that they were due to happen, like an accountant playing the odds in poker, rather than the mythos of The Natural's Roy Hobbs or Jason Heyward's spring training blasts. And, while McCann's swing is round and smooth, it's delivered in a very matter of fact style, lacking the poetry of Ken Griffey, Jr., the killer instinct that rode Fred McGriff's line drives like a bullet, or the freakish monstrosity of a Barry Bonds lightning strike. And it also lacks the same static crackle that resonates from the bat when Chipper Jones sends one flying for the fences, but I doubt there's any science behind the difference; the physics of Brian McCann hitting a baseball 400 feet are the same as when any of those other guys do it; so why then doesn't a Brian McCann home run have the same scorched earth effect as it sizzles down our optic nerves and is engraved upon our brains?
Somewhere along the line, the career of Brian McCann became less than the sum of its parts. He was too quiet, too underrated, too underappreciated, and there was a storyline that was all too easily available for defining his career; a metaphor that was perhaps too perfect to do anyone any good, even if that somebody happened to be a Major League baseball player who hits clutch grand slams with an air of regularity.
Cowboys and baseball players are the quintessential American heroes, but how many cowboys wore glasses? Then consider not just the Western genre but all of Western literature, and ask the same question: how many of our heroes wear glasses? The list probably isn't much longer than Atticus Finch, Harry Potter, and Ben Franklin; a pacifist lawyer, a moping teenage wizard, and a bald tinkerer, not exactly the vivacious, muscular archetypes of the sports world.
For the longest time, no matter who was calling the game, the discussion about Brian McCann began and ended with a mentioning of his glasses. Were they fogging up? Was he wearing them? Was he not? To Lasik or not to Lasik? What did he see at the plate? Behind the plate? He was always at the crux of where the baseball universe unfolds with a Big Bang crack of the bat, but he was reduced to a pair of eye glasses, or spectacles, which has the same root word as spectator. Think T.J. Eckleburg, gold rims and blue sky, in a Braves uniform and a catcher’s mask, and you have Brian McCann reduced into a passive symbol, like a teddy bear at bedtime, watching, listening, not saying a word; his whole world limited by a flimsy pair of frames.
A few days ago, Ted wrote a great column that revolved around the general principle that familiarity with the limitations of a subject breeds disinterest, and maybe even disappointment, because it is the idea of unlimited potential that spurs the imagination to run wild. To back up his statement, Ted cites the example of how a city’s enthusiasm wanes drastically after a team is mathematically done with its season. Another example of this principle can be found by looking at the television show Lost, and how more people watched when the island could be anything they as a viewer imagined it to be, but the more the show proved that the island was really nothing more than a physical hub for the characters’ physical time on earth (or a wampeter, a la Kurt Vonnegut’s book Cat’s Cradle) and the real focus of the show was simply the characters’ relationships with one another the more people split into camps that admitted confused frustration, hurled scornful disdain, or heaped on praise.
And people’s reactions to the show’s ending, especially the negative ones, seemed to be founded on the stubborn belief that the show should have been what they imagined it to be, rather than what the writers wrote it to be. And the same vehement reactions can be seen in how the average fan reacts to a prodigious athlete when his/her talents wind up less than what the fan had hoped and longed for. And that’s the challenge with rooting for a player like Brian McCann: the response to his play on the field is never visceral, because he is, to quote long-time NFL coach Denny Green, who we thought he was, and, therefore, we will never be surprised nor disappointed with his play.
When McCann came to the Majors, he was twenty-one years old and viewed as the obvious sidekick to future face of the franchise and (then) can’t miss kid, Jeff Francoeur. Chipper Jones was thirty-four and still hitting well over .300, but the search for the heir apparent had already begun and McCann garnered very little consideration for the position. Francoeur was the guy on the cover of Sports Illustrated, hitting his way into the hearts of the fanbase, and McCann was prepping to give the Hall of Fame introduction. Now, it’s five years later and Francoeur is in Kansas City and less than we wanted him to be, Chipper Jones is one more injury away from a church softball league, and the young phenoms, Freddie Freeman and Jason Heyward (well, one more than the other), are all the rage, and McCann, who carried the Braves’ offense single-handedly for the first half of the season, has had his thunder interrupted by Dan Uggla’s hit streak. In some ways, it’s as if McCann’s baseball cap is already faded blue, like a synthetic throwback, that, somehow, he got old without a legacy.
So, while the only catcher to hit twenty home runs in each of the last four seasons (including this one) inhabits a universe that is neither shrinking nor growing, he does shed his skin, like a snake giving us the chance to every so often admire his sheen.
There are athletes who explode into our worlds, announcing themselves like hurricanes, threatening to decimate what was, leaving the past in a haze of grainy black and white photographs, and then there are those who catalogue the scope of their world in mechanical increments, without our knowing, and we find them one day like a bear in the attic, bridging us to some mundane, insignificant moment when we may or may not have learned something. And, while scratching our heads for the memory, we say to ourselves:
“Damn, Teddy Ruxpin sure could talk, couldn’t he?”
Occasionally, baseball players lose ownership of their own names. Steve Blass, Mario Mendoza and Tommy John have become adjectives, terminology rather than personality, their careers condensed into a single trait. Such is also the fate of Brady Anderson, who played fifteen seasons in the major league and yet in a very real sense played only one. In that infamous year of 1996, the reedy Anderson hit fifty home runs, nearly a quarter of his career total. It’s an accomplishment that only twenty-two players in baseball history can claim, and yet it’s invariably followed by an invisible asterisk. It's not that the home runs didn't happen; it's that they shouldn't have.
The value embedded in the phrase "Brady Anderson", naturally, is its connection to the steroid era. It’s one of those cumbersome tasks that every discussion like this has to start with, even though author and reader alike already understand the implications. Amazing feats of baseball abounded in the era directly following Anderson: names like Luis Gonzalez, Ken Caminiti and Bret Boone flung themselves onto the headlines, while Sosa and McGwire smeared their fingerprints ontorecord books, distending the numbers. The resulting chaos has left fans weary and confused, unable and unwilling to sort through the ashes. Anderson has firmly denied any steroid use, but such denials are useless; it isn’t Brady Anderson that has become attached to juicing, but greatness itself.
Several months ago, Joe Posnanski of Sports Illustrated wrote an article about Jose Bautista. Bautista’s career began even more ignominiously than Anderson’s, and has since soared even higher. And much like Anderson, Bautista has faced a significant amount of scrutiny for his achievements. Posnanski begins with the simple question: “Do you believe in miracles?” He then conjures the familiar names of the great and unlikely, Lance Armstrong and Kurt Warner and Dazzy Vance. We’ve grown skeptical, as a nation and as a sport.
It's the ultimate condemnation of Anderson and Bautista: what they did doesn’t make sense.But was Brady Anderson’s 1996 a miracle? Is Jose Bautista’s ascension? Voltaire wrote on the subject of miracles in his Dictionnaire Philosophique, defining a miracle as “the violation of those divine and eternal laws. If there is an eclipse of the sun at full moon, or if a dead man walks two leagues carrying his head in his arms, we call that a miracle.” This is the ultimate condemnation of Brady Anderson and Jose Bautista: what they did doesn’t make sense. A man doesn’t go from hitting fifteen home runs to fifty. He doesn’t go from being cut by losing teams to being an MVP candidate. These things aren’t independently possible, and so there must be something else causing them, something unnatural.
But though Voltaire's eclipse and his headless man were both considered miracles at one time, they’re very different. One violates the natural laws as we know them. The other violated the natural laws as we knew them at the time, but later came to be understandable. As we grow more knowledgeable about baseball, and we become increasingly skilled at analysis and projection, we become increasingly resistant to aberration. The flaw in so much of analysis (baseball and otherwise) is that while we smirk at the ignorance of the past, we neglect to factor the ignorance of the present. We do not know what we will know, and what fails to make sense now may be perfectly clear tomorrow.
In this sense, miracles are dangerous, revolutionary things. They challenge the solidity of accepted wisdom. They force us to question our assumptions about the world. They challenge the laziness of our thinking. Steroids have become one example of this laziness: a refusal to examine greatness, to admit the possibility of being impressed. Occam's razor has gone from being a guideline to a law.
Perhaps most importantly, miracles chip away at our fundamental preference for certainty. Luck is something we understand, at least when it turns against us. We want to believe that our successes, however, are the result of nothing except our own pluck and determination. Anderson seems to agree. He described 1996 as “just one more home run per week, just one more good swing. That is the data that simultaneously comforted me and haunted me, the small difference between greatness and mediocrity.” The role that luck plays in the success of a baseball player is only an exaggeration of what goes on in our own lives. How many people who have condemned Anderson's achievement as impossible have gone home to play the lottery?
Ultimately, I’m not in a position to say whether Brady Anderson used steroids or not. The possibility exists, as do other possibilities. What interests me is the potential for greatness, the acceptance of outliers. Every game, every season, something happens in baseball that defies expectations, and demands that we dig deeper. Call them miracles, call them flukes, call them statistical deviations. Regardless of what they are, they bring vitality to the sport, and in some cases, they form the origins to amazing narratives. It’s a possibility I find infinitely more palatable than the predictable alternative, no matter how much sense it might make.
I don't live in LA anymore. Because of that, I've lost touch with the city and the Dodgers in some ways. I'm beginning to suspect that this is a good thing. Until going to a game on Friday I was, if not blissfully, then at least quietly ignorant of the malaise that has set in at Chavez Ravine. The McCourt family, the Bryan Stow tragedy, the on-field injuries, the front office follies: these things have done serious damage to Dodger fans in ways that became much clearer to me.
On Friday, I intended to buy a fitted blue and white Dodger cap at Dodger Stadium. There was nothing strange or difficult about the circumstances. I would only be at one game this year. I knew I needed a new hat. I wanted to take advantage of a friend's employee discount. But at Dodger Stadium, Dodger caps have become an endangered species.
Before the game, my friends and brother and I wandered into a merchandise store located outside one of the field level entrances. We noticed something strange about the hat selection: there were tons of batting practice caps, tons of Lakers purple and gold LA hats, tons of pink and black and other odd varieties on the Dodger cap, but there were hardly any traditional ones. And the few that store did carry were in odd sizes like 6 7/8 or 7 ¾. No big deal, we figured. They'll have more inside.
Inside was quiet. “Safeco-esque,” I thought. We sat directly beneath a security camera. There were so many security personnel around that I kept on perking up, thinking incidents were occurring in the area near our seats. But nothing was happening. The beefed up security presence and the thinned out attendance combine to give Dodger Stadium the feel of an empty prison camp where hollow-eyed inmates find slivers of hope in balks by opposing pitchers and chant out MVP for Matt Kemp as if he's all they have left to cling to.
I realized that on nights when Kershaw isn't pitching, Kemp actually is all Dodger fans have to cling to. He didn't disappoint, either, hitting his 30th home run to join Raul Mondesi in the Dodgers 30-30 club and accelerate his run at an unlikely triple crown.
Around the fourth or fifth inning, we set out again to buy a cap on the club level, where a small store is located behind home plate. (The employee discount only applies at the club level and top deck stores). In the club level store there was not a single regular Dodger cap. “This is weird,” said my employee friend, who used to work in merchandising. “We should have caps here.”
We rode the elevator to the top deck, where the concourse was empty and the breeze almost made you feel like you weren't in the stadium anymore. In past years, especially on Friday nights toward the end of the season, there have been lines to merely enter the Dodgers team store. On this night there were maybe three other fans in the entire place. It was empty. On the television we watched Vin Scully wave cookies around and announce that he was returning for another season. Great news. But once again, only a handful of Dodger caps. None in my size.
At this point, my employee friend explained that the team has been having problems with it's merchandiser, Facilities Management Inc. You might remember that on August 10th, that merchandiser, FMI, requested protection from the Dodgers in federal bankruptcy court. It turns out, we learned after talking to a few retail salespeople around the stadium, that FMI stopped ordering new merchandise for this season three months ago. Due to low attendance (gate attendance is even worse than the Dodgers' struggling paid attendance), FMI is not going to make back the $4.5 million it pays for the exclusive right to sell merchandise at Dodger stadium this season. So why sink money into apparel that won't get sold?
A woman in hushed tones at a field level kiosk explained to me after looking around, as if checking for spies or clandestine microphones, that merchandise has been kind of an overlooked disaster, a symptom of “all this McCourt business.” She slumped her shoulders. She said that a kiosk a few aisles down had a couple of 7 1/2s earlier that night, and that they might still be there.
The kiosk did have two 7 1/2s left. But I couldn't bring myself to buy one. The employee discount would not have applied and at that point I was too dejected to pay a full $38 for a baseball cap. Somebody else might have wanted it more. Then again, even after the Dodgers won and the vacuously ceremonial Friday night fireworks were launched over Los Angeles, probably not.
When serious rumors of Jim Thome’s return to Cleveland started to bubble up on Twitter yesterday, my first response was sourness. It felt like something between a mercy fuck and an indulgent non-victory lap. Thome is a great guy, a Hall of Famer, and an Indians legend. I love the dude. But he did say in 2002 that they’d have to tear the Cleveland jersey off his back. That was just before he tore the jersey off his back for 85m of the Phillies’ free agent dollars. It still rankles. But I carved out part of Thursday evening to slay those goblins of resentment, grieve them properly, and appreciate what Jim Thome’s return to Cleveland means.
To tell you that, I am starting with a confession: I like to look at pretty girls.
Living in New York City—and spending my 9-to-5 in a part of NY that it’s fair to deem as pacified by cappucino—I spend a lot of time in the presence of unattainable women. I’m not immune to noticing them. This neighborhood sure has a lot. And they’re dressed really well. Also it’s summer. I happen to be single at the moment, too. So I look. That’s part of being alive. Woraciousness is in my nature. The day I don’t notice pretty girls will be a sad day, probably because I will be dead.
I try my level best not to have a destructive male gaze. I temper my heart of a dog by making up stories about the women I see. I look at their shoes, their clothes, their auras, for hints about what their jobs are, who they are, what they’re like. I saw a girl this morning wearing floral print hospital scrubs. She had greasy ringlets and gaudy jewelry, but there was a calm warmth in her eyes that made me think she was a good sister/daughter/mom/girlfriend. There’s a girl I see often on my commute who is around my age. I assume she isn’t into guys because of her haircut. She has “So it goes” tattooed on her left bicep; she is worried about making ends meet, in my story. There’s the mid-twenties-ish lady who gets on the N train at Atlantic-Pacific with peroxided hair, an affinity for neon accessories, and a smoky voice. She’s a lot of fun to know, I imagine, a tomboy with terrible taste in music and guys, but a thorough enthusiasm for life that trumps my brainy cynicism. Or so I have imagined.
These narratives in re the hidden lives of pretty girls are not methodical, but there is a rough set of genre conventions. I try to keep things positive (mental hygiene is important), and I almost always check for a wedding band. I am not a saint.
This was a relatively short but intense summer on the east coast. That day when everyone’s sap rises—and my girl-storytelling season starts in earnest—came late this year. The annual riot of femininity in the male mind didn’t arrive until some weeks into the baseball season, after the Indians had posted a profoundly unexpected 30-15 start. In fact, the beginning of this year’s Indians felt like a month full of that one magical day when tank tops and skirts above the knee get reinvented every year. The Indians were succeeding by being both lucky and good, and it was rewarding to watch. A young, projection-thwarting team playing compelling, if sloppy, ball. They were an obvious regression-to-mean candidate, but fuck math in a summer like this.
Math has a way of fucking you back harder, though. Josh Tomlin’s alchemical command of the strike zone wavered, and a lot of his mistakes have been transmuted into home runs. Every decent bat save for the steady Carlos Santana has spent significant time on the DL. There was the Ubaldo trade, which felt a lot like buying groceries on a credit card. There were flashes of fight through July and the beginning of August, but when Detroit’s Austin Jackson gunned down Kosuke Fukudome to close out a three-game sweep for the Tigers last week, I said my goodbyes to the Indians’ hopes. But this team made me happy, on balance. The minor bummer of their sundowning is a vaccination against hopelessness next year, just like looking at girls in their summer clothes, girls light years out of my league, is an inoculation against loneliness.
And so in its way is Jim Thome’s return. For the same reason I look at pretty girls and make up stories about them, I can’t wait to see Jim Thome in an Indians uniform again. It’s rank sentimentality, it’s cheap, it’s whatever. It’s not a championship, it’s not lasting fulfillment, but it is real. Thome will look particularly ruin-porn-y in the cream alts and the block-C hat. He narrowly missed playing for World Series winners in Philadelphia and Chicago. I suppose I wish for his sake that he’d been on a winner. But seeing him walk back into Cleveland and dance across my laptop screen for this September, I can’t help but notice he’s not wearing a ring. I’m glad, because that leaves room in the story for me.
With that simple phrase, delivered honestly and expectantly, host Tom Scharpling starts most of the phone calls in to his Best Show on WFMU (iTunes link here). The voice that chirps up is often idiosyncratically familiar, one of a cast of regulars checking in to offer their opinion on topics that Scharpling, in his singular style, has offered his own stance on. In a recent August 16, 2011 episode, old people stealing cookies at the buffet earned a ten-minute lambasting. Callers also take some of Scharpling’s mild ribbing in exchange for a chance to catch Scharpling and fellow listeners up on the comings and goings of a cadre of musicians, comedians, and fellow regualars that make up a lion’s share of the content on the three-hour weekly program. Often celebrity friends of the show call in for a bit of comedic ramble. Folks like Patton Oswalt, Zack Galifianakis, Paul F. Tompkins, and John Hodgman.
Scharpling openly derides some of his non-famous callers. The nasal-voiced curmudgeon Spike, who uses every opportunity to hype John Wesley Shipp, the star of The Flash television series, and the awkward if game “James from Southwest PA,” whose cell phone connection is often as wavering as his tone, take their share of abuse. Another category of participants enjoy the "quality caller" label, and they tell jokes and cheer Scharpling up when his tone sags under the weight of the decade of unpaid three-hour weekly gigs with famous guests and the “mirth, music, and mayhem” that he promises at every outset. These callers, giggling ladies earning their Master’s degrees and hipster dudes in Brooklyn, urge Scharpling back on to the conversations that are the heart of the show, like the buffet discussion, and his stories of pinball in Asbury Park, that remind me, at least, that regional culture is still one of the strongest American forces, made stronger by those who don’t necessarily leave home. Home is a topic close to me, that being the place I've just recently returned to.
In sum, the Best Show is a three-hour comedy program that is at once an old school radio outpost, a community radio phenomenon, and the product of the online age of digital media and RSS technology. Tom Scharpling started a radio show on the independent station WFMU out of Jersey City, New Jersey, around 2000. Either WFMU already streamed live on the Internet, or they started to, and the show built an audience beyond the traditional broadcast region in New Jersey. Then, according to Wikipedia, Scharpling and Co. began distributing the show via podcast around 2006. The show is rooted in the region, with much conversation surrounding local shows and field trips to nearby points of interest. The only way to relate to a huge number of people is to be as specific as possible. I am very surprised, for example, that I enjoy Scharpling's discussion of Jersey tourist outposts, but without them he wouldn't be Scharpling. As I drive around Houston, scanning the buildings, street corners, and alleyways that I've haunted since my youth, Scharpling reminds me that it's not a crime to stick around.
I can’t recall how I was turned onto The Best Show. Probably a confluence of commentary from those who have been influenced by it mentioning the show frequently enough for me to seek it out in podcast form. Like many, I started with the latest episodes, got hooked on the vocabulary of the show, on Scharpling’s palette of quips--my favorite being “Heave ho” to those callers who earn themselves a hang-up--and DJ tricks--my favorite being the way he intentionally cuts off the final syllable of every caller, be they welcomed or heave hoed. Scharpling, who I heard from him an interview somewhere took his style cues from the bombastic, bull-headed, egotistical talk radio show hosts of an earlier era[2. They're still around, of course, though now they take on an appealing political shade]--the influence of prototypical radio prankster and manipulator Phil Hendrie is ubiquitous if subconscious--commands the air, one minute heaping praise on his favorite regular callers and another minute bellowing self-aggrandizing testaments to his own brilliance.
Comic routines staged as phone calls from the absurd panoply of characters performed by Scharpling’s comedy partner John Wurster intermingle with phone calls from the regulars and interviews with celebrity guests. The show rolls along like a social evening until the sun has set and a sense of calm comes with Scharpling’s introduction of Solid Gold Hell, the show that follows his. The endorphin glow of intermittent laughter and aural satisfaction fades into the night. The experience is a complete one, with rounded corners.
All of this in the name of comedy, and it really is brilliant. Scharpling, by being hilarious and doggedly pursuing the comedy that he enjoys, the comedians that he likes, and the callers that stir him in whatever manner that they do, has done what great artists do, what community does: he has engineered a creative universe. A universe to me is metaphysical “place” where the players and their interactions and communications follow certain rules that drive somewhat predictable outcomes that simultaneously leave room for spontaneous outbursts that are original within those rules. The successful creative universe is rich, dense, and inhabitable. Scharpling’s show, all ten years of unquantifiable nuance, conversation, character, and comedy, is the rare creative universe whose bounds are out of sight, suggesting a real universe in that the edges are obscured and anything seems possible. I could say the word “yogurt” and suspect without knowing for sure that the topic has been covered somewhere in The Best Show universe.
Enter baseball. There’s not a direct connection between The Best Show and the best game (Scharpling is, in fact, a major basketball fan and an experienced basketball writer). But baseball is a creative universe just like The Best Show. I’ve called it “the baseball multiverse” in the past as a way of trying to put to a term the multi-faceted face of baseball and the variety of ways that we consume, absorb, digest, and exude baseball by watching games, reading blogs, writing articles, playing ourselves, etc. Whatever the entry point or exit point, baseball contains the characters and the rules, the backstory and the breaking news, the boundaries and ultimately the limitlessness of a creative universe. The basic rules of the game and the playing surface establish the baseline of experience, but the human possibilities are endless, and those of us who engage with the game understand the possibilities without knowing the limits.
And therein lies the draw. As soon as one understands the limitations of a system, of a creative universe, the desire to engage that universe diminishes. One quick example would be that of the team eliminated from playoff contention. When the season is set and the results mathematically determined, you may as well move on to football season.[1. I happen to be battling this phenomenon as an Astros fan, see below, and it requires a laser-sharp focus on the day-to-day.] Hence the joy and wonder of Spring Training and the first game of the season, as those are the times when the uncertainty--the sheer possibility--is heightened, when a Dbacks fan or a Pirates fan can dream about contention.
On the micro scale, each baseball game is a universe, too, just like an individual episode of The Best Show. Each new game adds to and draws from the collective mythology of baseball, and presents the opportunity to witness something entirely novel and entirely knowable. A baseball game is both self-contained and all-containing. As Patrick put it in his recent essay, Why I Write (About Baseball): “The game is something that connects all of us, forms a framework by which we can develop other ideas about the world as a whole.”
This sucker is the alpha and the omega.
[caption id="attachment_4055" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Young Astros Third Baseman Jimmy Paredes"][/caption]
As I’ve mentioned, I recently returned to Houston, Texas, and rededicated myself to the Houston Astros and my Astros blog, Foamer Night. Through the pretty deliberate means of starting an entire blog on the topic, I am throwing myself into the Astros universe in much the same way I threw myself into The Best Show universe by listening to back episodes of the show, researching Tom and his friends, reading his Tweets and those of his guests and friends, watching for his credits as a writer on Monk, and generally surrounding myself with the mythology of the show. And there I find the same satisfactions as I watch the young Astros day after day. The excellence of Wandy Rodriguez when he’s clicking is the ultimate Houstonian’s inside joke; the exuberant cut of rookie third baseman Jimmy Paredes’ jib brings a smile as though it was the familiar voice of a comedian with no new album to pitch; a slider low in the zone rather than one hanging like a pair of undies on the line marks incremental improvement for a young pitcher to the attentive fan. These are the planetary bodies and celestial citizens that occupy the creative universe of the Houston Astros.
Postscript
The seeds of this idea were sewn long before Eric’s last post, though I think it goes without saying that I am thrilled to learn that Scharpling will participate in The Classical alongside Eric, Bethlehem Shoals, and many other friends of Pitchers & Poets.
Occasionally, baseball players lose ownership of their own names. Steve Blass, Mario Mendoza and Tommy John have become adjectives, terminology rather than personality, their careers condensed into a single trait. Such is also the fate of Brady Anderson, who played fifteen seasons in the major league and yet in a very real sense played only one. In that infamous year of 1996, the reedy Anderson hit fifty home runs, nearly a quarter of his career total. It’s an accomplishment that only twenty-two players in baseball history can claim, and yet it’s invariably followed by an invisible asterisk. It's not that the home runs didn't happen; it's that they shouldn't have.
Perhaps most importantly, miracles chip away at our fundamental preference for certainty. Luck is something we understand, at least when it turns against us. We want to believe that our successes, however, are the result of nothing except our own pluck and determination. Anderson seems to agree. He described 1996 as “just one more home run per week, just one more good swing. That is the data that simultaneously comforted me and haunted me, the small difference between greatness and mediocrity.” The role that luck plays in the success of a baseball player is only an exaggeration of what goes on in our own lives. How many people who have condemned Anderson's achievement as impossible have gone home to play the lottery?
“WFMU, you’re on the air.”
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