04 Aug 2011, by Ted
Simon Broder is a starving writer and Blue Jays fan living, working and ostensibly writing his first novel in Victoria, BC. He blogs about the Jays at .363.
My first favourite number wasn’t twenty-seven.
It was 3. Three, because three is the quintessential baseball number. Three outs, three strikes: three is baseball’s time-clock. From three I branched to the number nine. Three repeated three times, nine is just as fundamental to the baseball experience. Nine innings. Nine players. Besides, John Olerud wore the number nine, and I already had a numerical bond to the Jays’ first baseman given our birthdates (8/5/68 and 8/5/86). We looked like distant cousins (tall, thin, pasty). He was coming off of one of the best offensive seasons in Blue Jays history, but it was because of the numbers that I idolized Johnny O.
Twenty-seven is three outs times nine innings, and any baseball fan knows what the number means: perfection. In a way, the number 27 (three times three times three) contains within its mathematical parts the entirety of a baseball game. But the importance of the number twenty-seven extends beyond this abstract baseball sense: ever since Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix expired two weeks apart from each other in 1970, conspiracy theorists have expounded the merits of the number twenty-seven for an entirely different reason – because it’s the age at which musicians die.
Amy Winehouse was born in September of 1983, which made her, as of July 23, 2011, twenty-seven years old. And like Joplin, Hendrix, Brian Jones, Kurt Cobain and Jim Morrison before her, she left in her wake a critically acclaimed catalogue and a well-documented history of substance abuse. Is 27 truly the expiry date for the excessive lifestyle or is it a self-fulfilling prophesy? The number itself has become almost as superstitious as Turk Wendell’s toothbrush or Nomar’s batting gloves. If Wade Boggs didn’t eat chicken one day and went 0-4, there’s no doubt that we would point to the dietary choice as the reason for his failure, when, if anything, it was probably his fixation on the dietary choice that distracted him at the plate (and he might well have gone 0-4 anyway if the pitcher had good stuff on the night). If Kurt Cobain found meaning in the 27 Club, well then maybe one night he shot up with a gun in his hand, testing his willpower to join the famous foursome. We won’t have any indication whether Winehouse chose to join the club or whether her body simply gave out until we know the official cause of death, and we’ll likely never know for sure.
Death is messy in all the ways that numbers aren’t, and maybe that’s reflected in the music of the six stars who died at the age of 27. I know that as an adolescent coming out of my shell, I discovered in music something essential that wasn’t represented in my linear, mathematical understanding of things like baseball; something dynamic, free, and chaotic. For all of its carefully calibrated chord structures and notations, music is spiritual expression. As I realized the world was actually a pretty fucked up place and not the suburban daydream waxed by paternalistic play-by-play announcers, music became the outlet for my angst. Negotiating from one-hit wonders to classics like Soundgarden and Nirvana, I embraced the nineties as my era. I became a fake-nostalgic GenXer, patterning myself an outdated grunge kid, some free-ranging dissociative individual out of a Linklater flick or an idealistic hip hop video. The bottom-line chutes of office work, or public school education – or, yes, baseball – gave way to the experience of life itself. Fair and foul boundaries were blurred. Life – real life, not Kantian philosophy or pep talks – was relative, a world as far from the baseball diamond as one could get.
Baseball rewards – in a way, expects – perfection. Nothing represents what baseball strives for better than the perfect cube of the number 27. Three to its own exponent – an impenetrable mathematical fortress. Take out all the threes, and 27 is a prime number. Baseball players are lauded for their reliability, their machinelike focus on each game at hand. Adam Dunn hit exactly 40 homers for four years in a row. The ideal baseball team would be composed of five Roy Halladays and nine Albert Pujols’; a complete game every night and a 1.000 OPS from every slot in the lineup. There would be no struggle, no personal demons to overcome, because demons affect performance and baseball is all about performance.
If baseball players are the pillars of one model of orderly society, art is littered with the corpses of social outcasts. Nietzsche and Van Gogh went crazy. Dostoyevsky was politically oppressed. Brian Wilson couldn’t get out of bed for a decade. But there’s a reason why A&E can get away with running low-budget shows like “Hoarders” and “Intervention” back-to-back for 24 hours at a time. Even in the baseball universe, we can’t escape the pull of human-interest stories. Roy Halladay didn’t become the best pitcher in baseball until he was forced to reinvent himself in low-A ball. Josh Hamilton recovered from hard drug addiction. Zack Greinke overcame anxiety. Of course, the oft-repeated stories are always about the successful recoveries – the Lenny Dykstras and Ken Caminitis who fall victim to their own excesses are relegated to occasional fine-print bulletins and lamentful obituaries. They become “True Hollywood Stories” or the subjects of sanguine television movies.
Jacoby Ellsbury was born three days before Amy Winehouse. Think about that for a second. Jacoby Ellsbury is older than Amy Winehouse. In a game in which an early middle-aged man is referred to as a “shell” or a “corpse” by cynical commentators and some men shift to the coaching ranks in their mid-thirties, Ellsbury is a paragon of youth. He’s 27 and he’s having the best year of his career – hitting .300, stealing a ton of bases and just now adding power to the mix. He’s emerging as one of the best young – emphasis on young – players in the game today. To say that he’s still very much alive would be understating the point.
For musicians, 27 is special. It’s the burnouts’ burnout, a descending blaze of shooting-star glory at a round and perfect age. But for Jacoby Ellsbury, and countless other baseball players, 27 is an age defined by success. It’s been one of the revelations of the Bill James statistical renaissance that 27 is actually the age at which most players peak. Most good players come up at 23 or 24 and begin their decline around 30, but the best year of a career will usually happen at the moment when experience intersects physical skills. Just run down the list of players in their age-27 years in 2011: Dustin Pedroia. Jose Reyes. Joey Votto. Ryan Braun. Adam Lind. Casey Kotchman. Most of them have been good for two or three years and should stay in their primes for a couple more, but at age twenty-seven any given player can really bust out of his previous mould. Take Kotchman: after half a decade in the failed-prospect wilderness shuttled between four different organizations, at 27 he’s finally found a regular job and is delivering with an OPS in the mid-.800s and plus defense.
We don’t yet know how Amy Winehouse died. It’s possible that it wasn’t directly drug-related, that it was the result of health problems brought about by a self-destructive lifestyle. Rumours now abound that it was due to delirium tremens, the toxic shock brought about by withdrawal from alcohol. That strikes a personal chord with me, as someone who underwent a much milder form of alcohol withdrawal six months ago – not nearly so serious, obviously, but frightening nonetheless. (There’s nothing like cold sweats and muscle aches at four in the morning to make you feel like a real man.) Either way, her death was not a function of a healthy human being in the prime of her life, but more like the expected conclusion to a train barrelling towards a broken bridge. This was someone who wrote 5 years ago: “I tread a troubled track/my odds are stacked/I’ll go back to black.” Predicting that Amy Winehouse’s lifestyle was unsustainable was a bit like saying the Dodgers’ financial situation was precarious.
After Kurt Cobain killed himself, William Burroughs reflected that “As far as I was concerned, he was dead already.” Burroughs hallucinated his way through inaccessible metaphors to the ripe old age of 83, while Cobain childishly languished in a self-imposed drug haze for a couple of years and overdosed seemingly at will, because he wanted to “join the club.” It’s as if only in death could his life take on some kind of meaning – or maybe, more likely, he saw it as the ultimate prank to play on the world. Still, 28 and 26 don’t carry the same weight as 27. And thirty is old, not in a life-expectancy sense, but old in the sense of what it is to be young and what it is to be a rock star. Twenty’s cool and anything over fifty has its place for a whole different set of reasons (I’d pay to see Keith Richards in concert) but 30-50 is an awkward place to exist as a rockstar. Have you ever been to an Offspring show? It’s a bunch of middle-aged surfers lip-syncing songs about revolution. They’re not punks, they’re rich men from Malibu. In her public appearance at the Grammys a few years back, when Winehouse slurred her way through awkward thank yous before staggering off the stage, there was something pathetic in the actions but there was something honest in them, too. This wasn’t an auto-tuned diva created by a publicity machine; this was a pure heroin addict singing about her problems. And even as the shrill condemnations and side-of-the-mouth Courtney Love references rained down, it was in that moment that Amy Winehouse came into focus for me. A famous person who was real – even real fucked up – was compelling.
Amy Winehouse’s public image redefined, or brought back, heroin chic(k). With that messy hairdo and those bleary eyes, she looked like a white Ella Fitzgerald coming off a binge after putting on too much makeup. In a way, it was a female reconception of the Cobain slacker look, a kind of stylized, “I don’t give a fuck, it’s all about my personal demons,” that ultimately becomes a stylized self-parody in the clutches of the handlers of such famous people. I’m not saying Cobain and Winehouse weren’t drug-ruined messes, just that their publicists did their best to weave that messiness into a public image and make it seem less...upsetting. Less what it really was.
And that’s where the worlds intersect. Celebrity culture is about keeping issues under wraps. The way that baseball dealt with the steroid era isn’t all that dissimilar to the way that the United States is dealing with the debt crisis – let’s fix the tilted painting on the wall instead of dealing with the fire in the basement. Even in the 21st century, we are a culture of suppression, a culture in which it seems better to hide the elephant in the room than putting him on the front lawn. Drug addiction is a serious problem in the world, and glorifying the 27 Club does gloss over the fact that many addicts die before 30, famous or not. In a way, saying that great musicians die at 27 is like saying Dominican Republican shortstops go to America to escape the poverty. Many people go to America to escape the poverty, it’s just that the major leaguers are the ones who succeed. Most find life only slightly more bearable on the other side. America, after all, is a country that publicized a domestic war on drugs in the 1980s while still doing business with cartel-supported regimes.
Stylistically, Ellsbury to Winehouse is night and day. Ellsbury is clean-cut ballplayer personified. His personality, his struggle, is entirely manifested in the game itself. He’s simply a left-handed swinging stolen-base machine, who shows up in the same crew-cut and dirty pants from March through October. In a way, what made Manny Ramirez such an enigma during his career was his refusal to do the same. He never seemed to buy into the organized baseball system. He dressed - and lived - like a rock star. But the world of baseball is no different than the world of rock, ultimately; within everything lies the struggle to survive. And while I don’t know if I’ll ever reconcile the perfect world that baseball once laid out for me in her numerical organization with the life I later discovered – that network of shortcuts, failures and, ultimately, the fallible thing that life is – I can do my best to live with a dual respect for the thrill of fair competition and rock’s ethos of struggle. After all, there’s no ambiguity in numbers, but as we’ve so recently discovered, even Ichiro! is human.
28 Jul 2011, by Ted
There's been one ringing voice keeping Pitchers & Poets moving forward in the last few weeks: Patrick Dubuque. He's killing it, and we couldn't be happier.
Eric is, of course, on sabbatical across the pond, and I figured I'd take a moment to explain where I have been for the last little while. The short answer is: in Houston. I moved here from the rainy city of Seattle. An outsider in the Pacific Northwest, I coped on some level by delving into all things Ichiro and Mariners. I started a blog called Everyday Ichiro, I watched the team on TV, I interviewed Mariners broadcaster Dave Sims about scorekeeping, and I shot the bull about the Ms with my landlord at every opportunity. This was the Jacques Cousteau approach to baseball, meaning you dive right in and start to look around. By writing and watching, watching and writing, I learned the language of the team, and the state of the fan. That's just what I plan to do in Houston, too.
So I started Foamer Night.
Foamer Night is an Astros blog, through and through, with game reports, style inquiries, essays, images, and any other media that I can relate to the Astros, the Astrodome, Houston, driving, and space. The title refers to a promotion that the Astros brass launched in the 1970s at the Astrodome, utilizing a light on the monstrous Dome scoreboard. I'll let David Munger explain the rest in words he posted on a comment on Bill McCurdy's Astros history blog, The Pecan Park Eagle:
I was at a game in the early ’70s and was unaware of Foamer Night. Briefly, if an Astro hit a a Homerun while the Green Light over the Foul Poles was on, it was Free Beer for the remainder of the game [sic, it was the remainder of the inning according to one source]. I was in the Restroom and all of a sudden it felt like an earthquake. I asked my neighbor at the next urinal what the HELL was going on . He said it’s a foamer and he ran towards the exit as he zipped up. The commotion was the WHOLE DOME running to get the FREE BEER. FYI-It was the BOTTOM OF THE FIRST. What a NIGHT.
Houston is my old hometown,[1. For more on returning to one's hometown, I'll refer you to Hometown Blues by Steve Earle on YouTube] and the Houston Astros are my hometown team, and as such, some aspects of my experience are familiar, while others have that uncanny familiar yet oddly foreign vibration that can only come from returning to those spots where you cut your teeth and longed to leave.
The Astros themselves are a team of near strangers to me right now. I could count on one hand the number of games of theirs I've watched all the way through in the last four years, and for all the attention I've paid them they've felt as distant as the American Leaguers and their strange and exotic Designated Hitters did when I hitched up in Seattle.
But Foamer Night is my old pickup truck to the Astros' long and winding road back to prominence and prosperity. The work I'll put in will be my way of reacquainting with an old flame, and learning the current players the way I knew Biggio, Bagwell, and Berkman back in the old days. Much of my work will deal with the specifics of the team and the games they play, while much will also, hopefully, discuss the history of the team and the city with the Pitchers & Poets-esque baseball navel-gazing style that we so enjoy in this particular space. I don't expect everybody to come along for the ride. It's a niche market, and the Astros are a sorry sight to behold right now. But I appreciate the opportunity to show off my new venture here, and hopefully I'll catch a few Astro-sympathetic eyeballs for those open to a new voice.
As a note, Foamer Night is hosted here at Pitchers & Poets, though you can get straight to it by typing in foamernight.com.
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26 Jul 2011, by Patrick
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Mariners’ recent fall from grace is the lack of acrimony inspired by it. There are plenty of stories in the national media breaking down the quantitative futility; everyone, after all, loves an outlier. The local fan base is mourning the loss of Eric Wedge’s mustache almost as much as the team’s season. Wedge, although capable of throwing out his share of baffling lineups, is generally respected as a manager. Jack Zduriencik, unlike his predecessor, has made the kind of mistakes that at least follow some line of logic. Expectations were reasonably tempered. Even on the fifth of July, when the team was .500 and two and a half games out of first, everyone secretly knew that this was a roster capable of dropping a dozen games in a row.
Of course, as of July 26, 2011, the Mariners have outdone themselves, accomplishing a feat only twenty teams have done since the American and National Leagues merged in 1903. And with a truly historical run of failure, Wedge and Zduriencik have been put on the hot seat almost by default. But as it turns out, losing fifteen or twenty games in a row isn’t the death knell for a career one might think. The list:
Eric Wedge, as it turns out, has joined some pretty respectable company in the past two and a half weeks. This isn’t as surprising as it seems; if you stick around the game for thirty or forty years, you’re bound to see some streaks, good and bad. Still, several of these managers (Herzog, Kuhel, and Mauch) were first-year managers, and were given at least another year to prove themselves.
Many of the teams who fired coaches after losing streaks did so under extenuating circumstances. Tenney and Collins plied their trade during the player-manager era of baseball; Tenney was traded after his 1907 season, and released at the age of forty after 1911. Collins, the Hall of Fame third baseman, was stripped of his managerial duties mid-season, a full eighty games after the end of the twenty-game losing streak.
Ted Turner gave Dave Bristol a ten-day leave of absence in 1977 so that he could manage the team himself, until N.L. President Chub Feeney stepped in and slapped the rulebook in his face. Turner somehow persuaded Bristol to come back as a lame duck. The world remembers the 1988 Baltimore Orioles for its staggering 0-21 start to the season, but Ripken, Sr. was actually fired after only six games. Replacement-level manager Frank Robinson lost the other fifteen.
Of the nineteen managers, three of them were fired after and because of their losing streak (Collins, Fohl and Bristol). Four were enshrined in the Hall of Fame.
Where does this leave Eric Wedge? Probably in neither category. Miller Huggins once said that “a manager has his cards dealt to him, and he must play them.” Nobody envies Wedge’s hand. He can’t be accused of losing the players, and he’s shown a willingness to be flexible with his roster without making constant, desperate changes. But for lack of a better alternative, we continue to measure managers by wins and championships. Gene Mauch might prove a solid comparison: a pretty good manager who led some pretty awful teams.
The Seattle Mariners are a fascinating ballclub right now; rarely has a team lost so much and had so little meaning attached to it. Usually, this kind of unabated failure beats down even the sensible fan, wears them raw until they need something, anything to be done. They attach responsibility to whatever they can reach, and usually the field leader is the first in line.
In the case of the Mariners, however, there are no mutterings about intangibles, no hidden knowledge of winning. They’ve lost sixteen times to teams that are better than they are. Ordinarily, inferior baseball teams win their share of games against superior opponents; right now it isn’t happening. It feels like an inevitability, but one of probability rather than fate. Sooner or later a team is going to lose fifteen or twenty games; why not now?
22 Jul 2011, by Patrick
We tend to think of the baseball field as something static, a quiet temple or a sanctuary for youth. This is especially true at the stadium: the field takes on a beauty that borders on lifelessness. The grass is shorn into perfect diamonds, lacking the blemish of a single weed. The source of the conflict is at the plate, but the field radiates out from the pitcher’s mound, a Pythagorean web of arcs, right angles, and perfect circles. Even the chalk, pure white against the brown earth, gives the impression of definition and permanence. The result of this meticulous grounds keeping, twenty minutes before a game, recalls the replication of divine order. It was this spirituality that led Roger Kahn to write that “the ball field itself is a mystic creation, the Stonehenge of America.”
In light of this, it’s strange that baseball involves more (intentional) desecration of its places of worship than any other sport. The field of play, once as pristine as a Grecian idyll, is tampered with by human hands. Most noticeable to the fan among these alterations are the numbers painted on the outfield walls, but rustic tales abound even from the game’s infancy. Teams with skilled bunters banked their third base line, helping the ball roll fair. Opposing teams preferred to soak the ground around the plate to kill the ball within reach of the catcher. Even the pitcher’s mound, the most conspicuous feature on the field, wasn’t immune to a few inches of alteration in one direction or another.
The destruction hardly ends when the game begins. Even as the shortstop casts away the tiniest pebble from the dirt before him, other fielders etch their cleats in the dirt as if it were wet cement. Lenny Dykstra spat so much tobacco into center field that Andy Van Slyke described it as a toxic waste dump. The same players who hop, gazelle-like, over the foul line on the way to the dugout then proceed to strap on a batting helmet and kick up a sandstorm at the plate.
No locale in the baseball field is more war-torn than the batter’s box. The hitter (unless he is managed by Maury Wills) is bound to a six-by-four foot chalk-lined prison, and he fights back by scuffing and erasing the lines. He does this in front of his captor, in full view of the umpire and every fan at the stadium, and yet the crime rarely earns punishment. The famous example of this is, of course, Carl Everett. Everett was famous for erasing the back of the box to give himself a few extra milliseconds to react to the pitch. Five years into his career, umpire Ron Kulpa finally drew a line in the sand, or in this case the clay, driving Everett to apoplexy and physical, forehead-based violence.
However, Carl Everett is the exception to this phenomenon, not the rule. For every time a batter is called out for stepping out of the box, or warned for covering the chalk, countless others are unchecked. In his biography, Planet of the Umps, Ken Kaiser had his own solution: “Just before the game began, after the groundskeepers had laid down all the chalk lines, I’d run out the back line of both batter’s boxes. I couldn’t call a player out for being out of the batter’s box when there was no batter’s box. I rubbed out that line every time I had the plate for my entire career.” The umpire has his own priorities in a baseball game, and they veer away from divine right toward the safety of his own cranium.
There’s a baffling, fifty year-old story of psychological warfare conducted over field conditions between then-third base coach Leo Durocher and his own team’s owner, Walter O’Malley. Durocher had been driven to distraction by O’Malley’s on-field gimmick: replacing the field’s coach’s boxes with rubber mats. Durocher was notorious for his compulsive eradication of all chalk in his vicinity. Perhaps it was to sidle a few feet closer to his charges on third, but it’s also possible that Durocher was acting out against the rigidity of baseball, with its hard lines and its countless rules. The mats proved indestructible, but this didn’t stop Durocher from continuing to hack at them with his cleats. It’s possible that nothing could. “I wonder,” he mused, “whether I’ll have to buy a new pair of shoes before O’Malley has to buy a new mat?”
“Mats,” chuckled O’Malley, “are cheaper than the kind of shoes Leo wears.”
What drives a man to this kind of obsessive behavior? The naturalist might look at this metaphor as an indictment on humanity’s effect on the environment, his capacity for razing the most calculated natural beauty. The genealogist might consider these activities as a need to leave one’s mark on the world. The cynical businessman, meanwhile, could envision this frenetic activity, most of it being of little utility, as the human imperative to look busy, to evoke some change as evidence for one’s effort, win or lose, on the field. Or perhaps baseball is just full of little boys tearing the leaves off of trees.
Yet there’s something fitting in all the defilement that goes on amidst a baseball game, a sort of reverse chaos theory. After every game, the grounds crew will emerge to reset the entire scene to its factory specifications. The scoreboard will be reset, the infield raked, and everything will begin the way it did the day before. And though everything begins anew, the game is meticulous in its history, so much that a minor anecdote about a team’s third-base coach survives a half-century. In a world that is full of deterioration, and constant reminders of the fragility of the earth and of youth, it’s comforting to find in baseball and its scenery an eternally renewable resource, no matter how hard they try to erode it. Baseball may or may not share the mysticism of Stonehenge, but it seems to bear comparable endurance.
18 Jul 2011, by Ted
Aaron Shinsano is a baseball scout based out of Korea, as well as the co-founder of the influential Asian baseball blog East Windup Chronicle.
When I think of scouting the President’s Cup in Korea, as I have each of the last four years, I think of one image: me, sitting with a frozen bottle of water between my legs and holding another one on the back of my neck as I watch games and try to take notes.
Last year, I got what I thought was a heat rash around my groin. It turned into something more like athlete’s foot, and was itchy and at times very painful. Made it hard to sleep. It lasted well into October.
The hotel I stayed at last year was of the Japanese business hotel variety. Kind of like a dormitory with thin walls and floors. Chinese exchange students ran up and down the hallways well into the night. On the second night I poked my head out the door and yelled at them. One boy stopped cold and did an about face. He looked terrified. He saluted me, turned back the other way and went in his room, quietly closing the door behind him. About a minute later my phone rang. Just once. Then giggling down the hall.
The President’s Cup includes every one of the 50-plus high school baseball teams in Korea and usually lasts two weeks. There are four first round games every day for the first six days, at 10 a.m., 12:30 p.m., 3:30 p.m. and and 6 p.m. The second round follows in the same fashion, so that’s 10 days, four games a day. The “sweet sixteen” round (my term, not theirs), happens over the next two days, again, four games a day. The final eight and final four are two games a day for three days, then the final on the 17th day of the tournament. That is, if there are no rainouts. There usually are.
The tournament takes place in Suwon, a non-descript satellite city about an hour south of Seoul. Landmarks include a protective wall in the style of The Great Wall, built in the 18th century, and one of the few remaining full-on red light districts in Korea.
But for eight years there was glory in Suwon.
But for eight years there was glory in Suwon, as it played host to the KBO’s Hyundai Unicorns, who won the championship no less than three times in that span. Hyundai didn’t renew its 10-year sponsorship deal after the 2007 season, so after changing sponsors the team moved to Seoul proper and became bar-none the worst franchise in the league. Today there is no team in Suwon, and the stadium is falling into disrepair.
Due to the positioning of the structure, the seats get an inordinate amount of sun during the day after 10:30 a.m. The paint on the roof and dugouts that matched the Unicorns green and gold has faded. Year by year I noticed bigger patches of brown in the outfield grass, until last year, when it was finally replaced by a cheaper, yellow crab grass. Pigeons have made nests where PA speakers once were.
Sometimes, as I sit in a humid daze watching the third game of four, I try to imagine a scene of the Unicorns winning a championship on that field -- the stadium full of screaming fans, players on the field in tears, and a guy dressed in a unicorn costume falling to his knees, cheerleaders ecstatic behind him, his brown human arms stretched skyward in exaltation, perfectly in line with his bright stuffed gold horn.
The high school games usually proceed in an orderly manner, appropriately sped up or slowed down by the size of the umpire’s strike zone and nagging of the hitters to hurry up between innings. If in a real rush, he’ll push the catcher down into his crouch following the warm up throw to second.
The tables behind home plate where the scouts sit are made of metal. I always mean to bring an egg with me, because I’m sure I could fry one there. Once 10:30 a.m. hits, the tables start to heat up, and by 1 p.m. they’re too hot to touch. I even call them “skillet seats,” to myself. I think I mentioned that concept to another scout, but it hasn’t caught on.
Another structural problem I’ve noticed is that there are rarely air currents inside the stadium. When it’s hot, the heat just kind of hangs in the air, as does the cigarette smoke from a number of the fathers. I’ll see a man light up, and by the time he’s half done the first whiff of smoke will hit me. Then it sticks around for a good 10 minutes after he’s done.
During games the mothers serve drinks to all the men, including the scouts. It’s typically iced instant coffee, which is deceptive in its momentary coolness and Snickers bar taste, but is sure to induce at least minor stomach pains shortly thereafter. To say nothing of the jittery sleepless nights if I drink one in the late afternoon.
Sometimes parts of the tournament are broadcast on TV, and if they are, as the sole white person in the entire stadium, and as an MLB scout, I’m sure to be shown.
The games and performances all blend together. I mean, I watch the games intensely, don’t get me wrong. If there’s a player I like, or one I’m following, I’m taking notes, and I’ll remember what he does in detail. But there are only so many of those. The rest of the data, which is a lot of baseball in hot humid weather, fills the gaps in my short term memory along with the other occurrences of my day -- the water bottles between my legs, the semi-edible hotel buffet room that doubles as a goofy cocktail bar at night, the manager that called a suicide squeeze with the bases loaded in the top of the ninth, the leftfielder that misplayed a ball into a triple and was taken out of the game, the chain smoker 10 rows down, the first baseman with the good body and ok swing that can’t hit a breaking ball, the attractive mom that brought me a plate of rice cake. Sometimes parts of the tournament are broadcast on TV, and if they are, as the sole white person in the entire stadium, and as an MLB scout, I’m sure to be shown. I guess I’ll admit I get a kick out of that.
At the end of the final game I’ll extract myself from the hazy wall-to-wall baseball world and head to the high-speed rail station that will take me home to Ulsan, located in the south east corner of the country. I will have gathered the handfuls of memories, along with the proper scouting data I set out to acquire, and reflect on all of it while the Korean countryside goes by at 300kph. Part of what I’ll feel is relief -- relieved to get out of the heat, away from the smoke and the noisy hotels, relieved to get back home to my wife and our bed.
But most of what I’ll feel is sadness -- sad to realize I won’t get to enter the blur again until the next tournament.
