16 Jun 2011, by Ted
My wife really eats up Sarah Palin news. She could watch YouTube videos of the absentee Alaskan all day long. Angertainment, she calls it: the practice of watching something because you can’t stand the subject, and bashing them gives you a rush. I watch the Glenn Beck show on occasion, just to see what he’s up to, and to rant and rave with my critiques of his approach, developing counter arguments to share with the dog on our next walk.
Healthy or not, figures like Palin highlight the basic human tendency to create nemeses. Developing an enemy, even an enemy who will never hear the cries of disdain you lob at the television, is a way to locate yourself in relation to others, and to establish your own values in a world of subcategories and splinter groups. Angertainment is a private act that feels public, and while the hot-button political commentators will always play some role, in other arenas it isn’t always possible to predict when and where an entertainemy will emerge.
Enter Jered Weaver. He bugs me. Not in a political way, or a social way. He doesn’t make me feel like the fabric of the game is degrading [1. mostly because there is no “fabric” just like there is no perfect America that existed between 1946 and 1959 that we must return to or else]. I just don’t like the looks of him. His California snarl, the styled medium long hair that sweeps up in the back like a ski jump, the defiant angular tilt of his shoulders. He looks like kid in high school who held the parties. I didn’t get invited to the parties, and I wouldn’t have known what to do there if I had been. Jered’s older brother, Jeff, threw out a similar vibe, like he was the one buying the beer. Together, the Weaver brothers create a douchebag dynasty effect, and I can’t help but envision them standing back shoulder to back shoulder, crossed arms, blocking the door out of the locker room just long enough for a towel whip.
Jered Weaver is my angertainment.
The Angels pitcher is clearly--to paraphrase Werner Herzog’s recent line during a guest spot on The Simpsons--a mirror to the soul. I don’t know a thing about his character, or his personality, or the way that he behaved in high school. I’ve never read his side of an interview or followed his career any further than highlights on the teevee. And yet I’ve created a narrative for him in my head, and I’ve imagined a world that we both occupy in which I’ve interacted with him. I’ve predicted the results of the interaction (see above re: whip, towel). Based on a patch of disgusting chin hair, a hairstyle, an intangible comportment I have decided is arrogant, I’ve spun a web of un-reality to match whatever anxieties I harbor about turning 30, about the West Coast, about tall, skinny blonde people, about the act of watching baseball. This angertainment is on me.
Celebrity culture wields such power because of most folks’ tendency to script these narratives, with public personae as the players. It’s a largely automatic response to the stimulus placed before us, manipulating the natural human tendency to form groups and talk shit about other groups. The average gossip blog reader would have an easier time discussing which celebrities they dislike than those that they enjoy. Goats abound these days, while heroes run thin, telling us something about an American need for enemies that probably, if we’re honest, says more about a desperate desire for friends.
Baseball does a lot of the work for us by divvying up allegiances from the start, and much of the inherent entertainment derives from the symmetrical alignment of opposing forces. And, when it comes to angertainment, athletes do differ from general entertainment types and politicians, in that athletes don’t necessarily desire attention as much as they desire excellence, and what they do for a living just so happens to take place in a public sphere. Entertainers and public figures with no trade other than attention, on the other hand, derive their satisfaction and their value from the presence of an audience, and the currency they thrive on is the reaction itself, rather than the transposed currency to look to like wins or hits.
Which means that Jered Weaver isn’t pitching for me. A polarizing politician or talk radio host gains drawing power when someone like my wife tunes in to hear them say something incendiary, because their fan base enjoys it when others frown on their views, enabling them to entrench further, and that in turn strengthens the fan base in today’s new media cycle of violent love and violent hate. Weaver, though, gains little from my distaste. His main goal is to win for Angels fans, not to create a firestorm of opposition that fuels his prominence. The spotlight is his for the taking if he pitches well. Any other attention is fat to be trimmed. If he is really good, he’ll achieve his goal. He doesn’t need hostility--and the attention that comes with it--to heighten his success.
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What gets stuck in my craw about Jered Weaver’s physical presentation is the sense of entitlement it exudes. I’m like anybody in that I naturally resent those to whom success seems to come easily. The conceit of Weaver as imagined high school classmate suggests that he is the kid who was a head taller than everyone else, who probably threw harder than everyone else, and who enjoyed a mastery of his pitches that most of his teammates and opponents were unable to touch with a ten foot pole.
The truth, however, is that success doesn’t come easily to very many people, especially in the major leagues, which has laid low many young talents. There is no reason for me to believe that Jered Weaver hasn’t earned his place. In fact, when I had the chance to watch the pitcher work against the Seattle Mariners the other night, I gained insight into his style that directly undermines my irrationally negative attitude toward him.
First of all, in direct contradiction to his presence on the mound, Weaver isn’t a power pitcher. He’s tall, with long arms and legs, and a long wind-up, and when you mix in his sneer and his hair and whatnot, you have painted the picture of a fireballer who, given his frame, you’d think was wild, and that he got by on strength rather than finesse.
But eaver doesn’t throw all that hard. His fastball lives in the high 80s, dabbling in the low 90s. The fastball you might figure would resemble that of another lanky hurler, A.J. Burnett, with a foot of uncontrollable movement, actually travels as true and straight as an arrow, with the precise accuracy of an Olympian. Weaver hits the mitt on par with some of the best, and he’s only walked 26 through 109 innings this year. Before I sat down to watch him against the Mariners, I didn’t think, “Here pitches Jered Weaver the control artist with an elite level of touch on the mound.” I thought, “Jered Weaver. He looks like a dick.”
And I had no idea he had such a good change-up.
Weaver’s change-up is the foundation of his pitching style. He started off a surprising number of batters with the change piece, showing great confidence in it and confounding hitters who may have liked to start with the fastball and work their way down to the slow stuff. This strategy impressed me. It is an odd gambit to start with a change-up. The reliance on its inherent deception, rather than its relationship to other pitches, shows the kind of confidence in it more often displayed by pitchers like Maddux and Moyer. You could even call the change-first approach quirky [2. The term “quirky” is a great way to compliment somebody and put them down at the same time. Quirky may be the most condescending word in english. Didn’t think you were getting of that easy, didja Weaver?!?]. Before I watched him pitch, I didn’t think I’d ever refer to Jered Weaver as quirky. But there it is, an idiosyncratic tendency that chips away at the preconception I have about him. His inner Zooey Deschanel beats out his outer Lindsay Lohan this round of their best of 9 arm-wrestling match.
The final nail in the coffin of my disregard for Weaver is the fact that he has improved every year starting when he came on like a bullet in 2006. The prominent change-up, the tight fastball, the unfurling motion like a masted ship setting sail, to say nothing of a very good curveball that promises the strike zone before ducking away, these are the products of an artisan, not a jock. From 2007 to 2009 his FIP was in the 4 range, then in 2010 it dropped to 3, and now it’s around 2.5. His strikeout rate has inched upward, and his walk rates downward. A few paragraphs ago, I said that things seemed to come easily to Jered Weaver. Discounting a bang-em-up first season, they didn’t. He has improved, year over year, the way that the analysts draw it up, and he has slowly evolved into the ace that he is now. Such metered improvement can only suggest hard work, and a major league learning curve.
I was way off. He didn't shut the Mariners out with a complete performance by riding arrogance, but by utilizing a collection of mature, insightful pitches and articulate control.[3. Well, I suppose it may have had at least something to do with the Mariners offense....] The message is in the medium. Message received.
Baseball rewards attention, and that’s all you could ever ask for. I had my preconceptions about Weaver, but when I took the time to evaluate what he does out there, and to take a look at his past performance through the numbers[4. For whatever drawbacks the statistical revolution in baseball has, its greatest benefit is its contribution to the art of rational, if obsessive, appreciation.], I was able to fill in an incomplete baseball portrait. He still carries the swagger and the sneer, and while the details of his personal life are still--thankfully--none of my business, his portrait is now framed by a broader, brighter landscape and lit with a more sophisticated palette.
Celebrity and political media cultures intentionally deprive their viewers of such perspective. Short-sighted, reactionary spite and fear are the fuel that feeds the business. Reasoned consideration doesn’t drive traffic, and the camera’s fast-pan to the next circus freak triggers addictive little squirts of dopamine in our social brains, driving us to seek more and more. More angertainment, a longer role call of entertainemies.
Many complain that baseball is a slow game, like that was a terrible thing. For my money, it’s the rare entertainment that allows a moment to contemplate the players in the drama, to consider the products of our own creation and the effects that they have on us. On the night that Jered Weaver pitched against my current home team, I used the time the bit of fresh air that came in between the cracks of the baseball artifice to consider Mr. Weaver, and to consider myself. I took a look in the mirror, and something new looked back at me.
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15 Jun 2011, by Patrick
Editor's Note: We are pleased to bring you Patrick Dubuque's first post as this summer's Bill Spaceman Lee Visiting Professor for Baseball Exploration. Please enjoy:
“The broken flower drooped over Ben’s fist and his eyes were empty and blue and serene again as cornice and façade flowed smoothly once more from left to right, post and tree, window and doorway and signboard each in its ordered place.”
-William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
The words “The End” don’t appear in Faulkner’s masterpiece, because the story doesn’t end; it just stops. In the postmodern literary arena, the traditional story arc has fallen out of favor, replaced by an unflinching, gritty examination of life as is. Climaxes and conclusions are left for the situational comedy, the summer blockbuster and the Dan Brown spiritual thriller. Instead, we get the repeating signboards, and the vantage toward the horizon, with the misery of human existence as it disappears and resurfaces ad infinitum.
Baseball is in no way postmodern. This week, however, a few of its storytellers are modeling with the hypothetical, toying with the concept of realignment. Authors and readers alike strain to envision a world in which the Mariners play the Padres in late September, as opposed to July, or a future where Carlos Lee is a designated hitter rather than a designated hitter who happens to take the field every inning. The whole conversation is wonderful off-season banter, oddly timed in its arrival in early June. Rob Neyer and Al Yellon over at SB Nation present their cases for and against admirably. My response is to reprint the well-worn cartoon that made the baseball blog rounds several weeks ago:
The important part of the comic (for my purposes) is not the seeming randomness from which the narrative is derived: The Return of the Native is a story essentially extracted from the meteorological effects on British topography, breaded with crumbs of angst. Instead, what’s worth discussing is the creation of those narratives, a goal that the sport certainly aims to accomplish. Essentially, baseball is driven by two very separate forces: the desire to have the greatest team crowned as champions, and the desire to have an interesting, dramatic month of playoff baseball.
As fans, we’ve inured ourselves to the fact that the current division and playoff formats are an uneasy alliance between excitement and realism. Unlike the other major sports (except perhaps basketball), the qualities that reflect a good regular season baseball team do not necessarily lend themselves to the playoffs, where fourth starters are nearly useless and losing four out of seven games is entirely reasonable for a team that lost a third of them up to that point. Any plan to expand the playoffs simply introduces more luck into the formula for deciding champions, and reduces the importance of the regular season.
What this phenomenon lacks in purity, however, it makes up for in narrative. A realignment that introduces more teams also provides more underdogs, more parity, and more seventh games. It's democracy, in all the best and worst senses of the word. It provides the hope for victory by diluting that victory, forgetting that too many memorable moments make each of them equally unmemorable.
So we have a hypothetical system designed to add excitement to every season, but people aren’t fans of seasons; they’re fans of teams. A team’s narrative isn’t meant to be a trifling, six-month one-act play. It’s a Michenerian epic, spanning years and generations. Success should come from hard work and skill, the culmination of sweat and suffering and disaster. So too should tragedy. It needs its fatal flaw, its catharsis. To have these results come at the hands of a fluke, a mindless twist of fate, is to render the whole exercise arbitrary, and reduce the work back into a string of random numbers.
Benjy, one of the few Faulkner characters to escape a novel with contentment intact, does so by keeping his gaze on the horizon. In baseball, this is the meaningless weekday afternoon game in August, the second division teams playing for pride. It's baseball for its own sake, just as the existentialists gave up on winning and championed life for the sake of life.
13 Jun 2011, by Ted
Tom Ley writes at Word's Finest. He contributed to 1990s First Basemen Week with The Big Cat and the Water, about Andres Galarraga. You can email him at leyt345(at)gmail(dot)com.
I once sat in a hot tub with David Nied on a crisp Arizona night.. I was just a kid at the time, and so my recollection of the evening in question animates itself in my head as more of a half-remembered dream, clouded by the passage of time and the thick haze of over-chlorinated steam.
There are a few things, however, that stick out from that night. The first being that Nied was wearing a hideous gold chain, not unlike the one that is featured so prominently in this un-grok, cringe-inducing photograph. The second thing I remember is that there was a palpable sadness hanging over David Nied while he sat alone in that hot tub. His face was wet and his hair was slicked back, as if he had just finished splashing water onto his face and head the way that the gritty police detectives from the movies do when they are trying to wash away the filth of a day spent picking through the gristle of a crime scene. He was doing that thing where you drape your arms over the edge of the hot tub and slouch the rest of your body into the hot water, a pose that lent itself perfectly to the wistful sadness that was on his face.
I was in the hot tub with my brother and another friend, and despite our youth we were smart enough to figure out that David Nied did not want to be bothered on this night, and so we all boiled slowly in awkward silence together. I remember that I spent most of my time in the hot tub staring at Nied’s gold chain, all glistening and tangled in his thick patch of chest hair. I stared at the chain to prevent myself from meeting Nied’s own gaze, which was fixed on something that was just as harrowing as it was invisible. He was staring the end of his career dead in the eye.
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For those of you who don’t know (most of you, I imagine) who David Nied is, allow me to pause and give you a little bit of background info.
David Nied was the first overall pick of the 1992 MLB expansion draft. He was selected by the Colorado Rockies, who had won the first overall pick thanks to a fortuitous coin flip. At the time, it had appeared that the Rockies had just won the lottery.
It’s important to understand that selecting David Nied had a lot more impact on the Rockies organization than any first overall pick from the amateur draft would have. The fanfare and pomp surrounding a top amateur draft pick is usually tempered by the knowledge that it will be a few years before that player is seen in the majors. Even players like Stephen Strasburg and Bryce Harper, who are otherworldly talents, have to spend time toiling away in the minors. So it’s understandable when fans have a hard time getting overly excited about a player who they know won’t be making a serious impact at the major league level for a few years.
Nied was different, though. He gave Rockies fans plenty to be excited about because he wasn’t some prep star who needed a few years of seasoning. He was a major league ready prospect who had been lighting it up on the Braves AAA affiliate and briefly as a major leaguer at the end of the 1992 season. The Braves had decided not to protect David Nied from the expansion draft, giving the Rockies the opportunity to steal him.
The Braves decision not to protect Nied seemed foolish at the time because of numbers like these:
Those are the statistics for the Braves AAA pitching staff from the 1992 season. The first three names on that list would go on to help from one of the most formidable pitching staffs in history. The fourth name would eventually enjoy a few dominant seasons as the ace of the San Francisco Giants’ pitching staff. At the time, David Nied was these men’s equal.
“I thought I was going to be protected. Frankly, I’m shocked I wasn’t protected,” Neid told the AP following the expansion draft.
In less than five years, Nied would be retired from baseball.
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David Nied started the first game in Rockies history. He lasted five innings, gave up two runs, and walked six batters. I imagine he was pretty nervous. Two starts later, Nied went up against Dwight Gooden and the New York Mets. He ended up throwing the Rockies first ever complete game shutout. He didn’t walk anybody in this game, and 83 of his 114 pitches were thrown for strikes, and at one point in the game he retired 20 of 21 straight batters.
Nied was impressive enough to compel Tom Friend, who was covering the game for the New York Times, to write the following sentence:
“David Nied, sort of the Shaquille O'Neal of major league baseball, silenced the New York Mets here.”
As far as I can tell, Friend is comparing Nied to Shaquille O’Neal without irony. In order to give the analogy some context, let me remind you that at the time this article was written, O’Neal was in the midst of his rookie season with Orlando Magic. This was a season in which he averaged 23 points and 14 rebounds a game while doing things like this. O’Neal was an absolute force of nature who was not to be fucked with, and Friend’s willingness to compare him with David Nied says a great deal about the potential that lived inside of Nied.
Unfortunately for Nied, outdueling Dwight Gooden in his third start as a Rockie would prove to be the high point of his career. Sidelined by a series of injuries and a labor strike, Nied never became what so many thought he could have been. Nied retired quietly in March of 1997, after being traded to the Reds and optioned to the team’s AA affiliate. He had joined the Rockies as a potential force of nature, waiting to be unleashed. He left them like a gentle, almost imperceptible breeze.
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The true sadness of David Nied’s story is that it doesn’t even qualify as a tragedy. You won’t ever hear Rockies fans grumble about David Nied and what could have been. Nobody will talk about the lost empire that Nied could have helped build with Todd Helton. Whenever a Rockies prospect struggles, you won’t read any “I hope this guy isn’t the next David Nied” columns in the local sports section. David Nied is a ghost. He may as well have evaporated right before my eyes along with the steam from the hot tub on that night in Arizona.
The un-tragedy of Nied’s career illuminates one of the crueler aspects of baseball. Unlike other sports, the game never slows down long enough for us to properly mourn those who left it before their time.
I have only recently become a serious fan of the NBA, and yet I can tell you all about the tragic falls of Sam Bowie, Kwame Brown, Penny Hardaway, Derrick Coleman and Len Bias. NBA fan bases are often defined by the ethereal monuments that they build in honor of those who should have been but never were. There is no doubt that Portland fans will still be talking about Greg Oden ten years from now. Christ, the greatest basketball blog of all time is named after one of these aborted superstars.
Some may call this tendency counterproductive and perhaps even a bit masochistic, but I find it to be rather beautiful. Each misty-eyed recollection of lost potential reminds us that the game is ultimately about the players, because they are what compels us to watch. We form personal connections with them as we become invested in their successes and failures, and when they flame out too soon it feels like an occasion for mourning. It’s this mourning that reminds us that our connection with them and others ever existed in the first place.
Baseball, however, has no time for eulogies and funeral pyres. A game that is so often defined by failure leaves no room to contemplate its impact. When someone like Nied fails so completely we have a hard time finding much to say about it because, well, failure is essentially what the game is designed to produce. Every day players are chewed up and spit out by the incredible degree of difficulty that the parameters of the game present, and then they are expected to wake up in the morning and do it all over again. Baseball is hard, and it’s supposed to do what it did to David Nied. His failure was nothing special.
I asked my brother if he remembered anything from that night in the hot tub with David Nied. His recollection was much different but just as hazy as mine. All we really agreed on was the fact that Nied was wearing that hideous gold chain.
13 Jun 2011, by Eric
Hi all, a quick note: I (Eric, if you didn't read the byline atop this post) will be outside the country as of tomorrow and until mid-August. That means there will be no baseball and hence no baseball blogging in my life. But P&P is far larger than me.
Ted will hold things down this summer (he always does, really) with some fine guest contributors helping him out. Principle among those is Patrick DuBuque, the talented writer of The Playful Utopia, who you may know from his two previous posts here, or his new-ish role at Fangraphs' NotGraphs blog.
Now that that's over with: a song. During 90s 1B Week, Corban Goble wrote about the theme song to Major League Baseball Featuring Ken Grffey Jr on Nintendo 64. I played that game a lot, mostly at my cousins' house. One of those cousins, Travis, is an awesome musician. He sampled the theme song in creating this:
[podcast]http://pitchersandpoets.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/baseball1.mp3[/podcast]
10 Jun 2011, by Eric
Matt Kemp might be the most exciting player in baseball. He has two less home runs than Jose Bautista. He has as many stolen bases as Ichiro. He plays center field (not exceptionally well, according to advanced statistics, but with a hell of a lot of verve). Matt Kemp is everything you could want in a baseball hero, especially a center fielder. He’s glamorous. He’s practically electromagnetic.
He is also my fantasy center fielder. This is a good thing. Matt Kemp is batting .329/.406/.620. He has 18 home runs and 14 steals in 17 attempts. He hit his first triple of the season yesterday in a game that saw him fall a single short of the cycle (we’ll get back to that in a bit). The reason I bring up Kemp, and his place on my fantasy team, and his near-cycle performance, is so I can bring up the following: Despite the fact that he’s my favorite player on my favorite team, and despite the fact that I’m what’d you call a semi-professional baseball fan, I’ve only seen Kemp bat about a dozen times this year.
This is a product of my unwillingness to shell out for MLB.tv. This is also a product of something Eric Freeman talked about in his post on Wednesday. He argued that Bryce Harper will force us to watch baseball players as performers, as stylistic actors, and not just as stats-producing robots whose amassed results matter more than the actual physicality of their play. It’s a shame that for me – and for many reasons, I imagine much of America – Matt Kemp’s 2011 season has thus far been relegated to a bunch of high numbers on a screen.
Matt Kemp deserves to be watched. He’s big and fast. He’s handsome. His home runs all seem to go to center and right center field. And when he crouches in his stance and his bat points out over his head toward the shortstop and he steps into a pitch you can’t help but be awed by the quickness of his swing, by how light the bat looks during his one-handed finish, and especially by the inherent and surprisingly understated balance of the entire motion. When Matt Kemp plays baseball, he’s an aesthetic pleasure -- even when he’s getting bad jumps on fly balls in center field.
Of course style is what a certain kind of sports columnist can’t stand about Matt Kemp. He spoke poorly of Jeff Kent at too young an age (speaking poorly of assholes is only okay for white veterans who hustle, obviously). He took at-bats away from a sadly washed up and frustrated Luis Gonzalez. He dated a pop singer. He made a handful of overly aggressive base-running mistakes. These are Matt Kemp’s sins.
They bring us to his game last night against the Rockies: Kemp went 3-5; he homered, tripled, and doubled; he struck out twice, once in the ninth inning with Andre Ethier standing on second base. It was the kind of performance no sane baseball fan can argue with. But a single short of the cycle is also the kind of game Matt Kemp would have.
It’s the kind of game that leaves him short of the segment he deserves on Baseball Tonight. It’s the kind of game that a certain kind of sports columnist might use as a metaphor. Sure he went 3-5 with three extra base hits, but he didn’t do the little things. Matt Kemp is all big flies and big style, a certain columnist might write, but where’s the substance? The stuff of victory is made of? Where are the clutch singles? And what was with that ninth-inning strikeout?
I didn’t see the game. I watched the highlights. It was a typically shitty evening for a Dodger fan in 2011. (As a team, the 2011 Dodgers fail at both the stylistic and analytical criteria). A lot of the lineup failed to hit. The defeated bullpen helped Clayton Kershaw blow a game in classic Coors Field form. But Matt Kemp played baseball. He played it the same way he has all year: the way that makes me want to watch more baseball.