The generation of kids who are now college-aged came up in the middle of a losing streak. America lost to Osama bin Laden on September 11, 2001, and continued to lose as it bowed under the pressures of war and fear. The losing streak was what they knew, and it has formed their world view. They don’t have the relative comfort that even I do, at age 30, that comes with the ability to draw from the long memory of a pre-terror United States. The generation's default stance is, therefore, one of defensiveness and fear, symbolically calcified in opposition to an evasive mastermind who posed an indeterminate danger.
In the same way that a World Series win for an historic loser represents, with a single swipe, the quick end to long suffering, this generation of kids places a significance on the capture or killing of bin Laden that trumps the nuance of foreign affairs, or the cynicism of older folks who have seen enemies and crises come and go. That much became clear with the news footage of their celebrations, even if it has been overlooked by someone like me.
And it was with some cynicism that I tried to detect traces of irony among the kids celebrating in front of the White House after President Obama announced the successful secret ops mission in Pakistan. There was one guy dressed up as Hulk Hogan who threatened the sincerity of the crowd, but after watching for some time, I decided that the ebullience of those who had gathered was authentic. It was a young sort of excitement, from people who haven’t known anything different. They know little outside of this world that we live in now, and their celebration reflects their reality.
Part of their world now is the absence of certainty. American wars are questionable and indeterminate, leaders are fallible, morality is clouded. President Obama’s announcement, in light of the last decade’s fog, offered certainty. I have never heard anyone say, “You know, we may be treating bin Laden a bit harshly.” He is the unquestioned villain of our age, and his death is a benefit to mankind. Victory is unquestioned, and these kids are not sitting around to question it, but taking to the streets to celebrate a victory in a way that they've rarely been afforded.
What light can sport shed on such crucial international developments? In sport, and in baseball, winning washes away failure. Eight innings of shit gives way to one inning of excellence. Communities need such short memories to survive and prosper, the way a closer's work requires that his memory extend no further back than his breakfast. Our brains can only hold so much poison before they perish, and it needs tricks to staunch the flow. While the world boils, we allow ourselves the luxury of a short memory, and we call it baseball.
I don’t know where I first heard about Sam Fuld. I can’t recall whether it was a Jonah Keri tweet that alerted me to the remarkable feats of the 29-year-old out of Phillips Exeter Academy and Stanford via Durham, New Hampshire, or if it was a TV highlight package, or one of the blog essays or comments that have sung his praises in the last few weeks. I don’t know who planted the story’s seed in my mind, where it has since taken root and grown, bearing fruit in the form of a question, a yearning that is somehow also a signal of communal upswell: “Who is Sam Fuld?”
Fuld runs, flies, throws, hits, thinks, speaks with the power of myth already, strengthened by his relative obscurity. I, for one, don’t watch him play regularly, so all I see or hear about him are the feats and marvels in past tense. Fuld’s is a story that so far relies only on stories, without the daily truths that can chip away at myth’s sculpture.
When it comes to a phenomenon like Fuld, which seemed to materialize within a day or two, there’s a drive to find its nascent moments, when the early adopters recognized the novelty and the charm of what they were witnessing. The adopters not only realized the potential; they also spread the word among their local friends and within the greatest circle of friends the world has ever known, the Internet, and not necessarily in that order. Sam Fuld may have stumbled fearlessly into the bullpen while making a catch, and flung himself through the air to save three runs on a deep fly ball, but it was the ones who told the Fuld story, through enthusiastic tweets and posts, that stimulated their fellow fans’ imaginations and spread it. The myth is in the telling more than it is in the doing, and Sam Fuld got told by some influential tellers.
From the springboard moments when the enthusiasm of the fresh discovery of something new pumps adrenalin through the veins, the legend flowers. Others join in the mirth. The room fills with the aroma of the remarkable (for me that smell is that of a sausage with onions outside of Fenway, I don’t know what it is for you). Fuld makes another catch, and a moment becomes a trend. More twitter drops, more stories emerge. Each game is a new opportunity for us to watch, to nail another talisman to the wall to mark the improbable continuation of a blessing.
A single is just a single until it’s Dimaggio’s single for the 56th game in a row.
In Fuld, we sense something of ourselves. He has walked both sides. Probability suggests that he’ll be walking on our side again soon enough, but providence buoys him for the moment.
Like Werner Herzog sailing down to Antarctica or filming the oldest cave paintings in history, I want to be an archaeologist of the human condition, trolling along the obscure edges of my own personal history. But I’m not willing to scour my browser’s history for the first few moments that the Fuld story formed. It's a load of work to find the making of a myth, and it's a futile business, to boot.
In the past, it was simple and perhaps more important-seeming to trace the origins of origin. “A traveling salesman passing through town told me about Sam Fuld at Smitty’s Bar” or “My father worked with a man who used to tell stories about Sam Fuld.” If not to identify, then to at least put narrative to the origins of a story. The way the information was delivered was sewn into the legend itself. Now, of course, the beginning isn’t as important as the sheer accumulation of data. Fuld’s catches, his biography, his steals and hits don’t matter in the string of narrative that mark beginning, middle, and end. They are important in the aggregate. The myth of today, like slot machine winnings, is a pile.
What’s lost is the pleasure of the telling. It’s hard to tell Sam Fuld’s story. There isn’t a narrative path to follow yet, but rather a disparate-seeming collection of ephemera. “Fuld went to some good schools, learned a thing or two, then he made a catch, then he made another catch. He still plays baseball.” How do you convey that to another human without just sending a link to the Twitteratti’s collective tellings, along with a sampling of video clips and transactional histories? A well-worn phrase with new applications in this field of techno-myth: the fragmented narrative.
But then again there’s this word “legend” in use concerning Fuld. I’m the one who pulled the word “myth” in on the conversation. A “legend” might be more applicable to a Fuld situation. Dictionary.com defines the term legend in several applicable ways: “1. a nonhistorical or unverifiable story handed down by tradition from earlier times and popularly accepted as historical. 2. the body of stories of this kind, especially as they relate to a particular people, group, or clan.” The body of stories is a concept that resonates, as it refers to the collection of stories rather than a single dominant story.
When I think of a body of stories that comprise a legend, Davy Crockett and Paul Bunyan come to mind. I know a smattering of facts about each without any particular awareness of a linear narrative that surrounds them. For example, Bunyan is really big, and his friend is a big blue ox. Come to think of it, that’s all I can remember. Davy Crockett killed a bear when he was three, and he patched up a crack in the Liberty Bell. I don’t know the story of his life, just a few juicy details.
The same is true of Sam Fuld, and his legend. The bullet points are lively, and unlikely. Where it came from has little to do with where it is. The act of telling, whether the tellings are truth or lively fictions conjured in the heat of the moment is irrelevant. What’s important is the telling, and that goes on. There’s a hint of Chuck Norris in the fantastical tweets, a stitch of Moses in the sense of delayed gratification and the virtues of patience, and a smidge of Moneyball in the stoutness of Fuld’s secondary stats, and his self-awareness and poise. Add it all together, and what do you get? Who knows, but I’m looking forward to the telling.
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In search of a topic for today's post, I solicited one on Twitter. I said I'd write for 45 minutes on whatever people came up with. The first topic submitted, by Pete Beatty, was "Otis Nixon's Hair." I have done my best:
When I think of Otis Nixon I don't think of his hair. I think of his face. Otis Nixon had the face of a man who had lived a dozen lives. It was expressive and weather-beaten and looked like something out of an American folk art exhibit. Hell, Otis Nixon's entire career could have been folk art. And now that I'm researching his life, well, the rest of it could be folk art too.
I will write about his hair because that is my assignment. But mostly I will write about his life and legacy. Otis Nixon was born in January 1959 in Evergreen, North Carolina. A fitting name for his hometown because Otis Nixon exudes permanence. On Baseball-Almanac, his high school is listed as unknown. Wikipedia and Baseball Reference eschew any allusion to his high school whatsoever.
It's not as if Otis Nixon emerged out of the tobacco fields of North Carolina to become a light-hitting, fast-running, switch-hitting center fielder. It may have seemed like that to me, because by the time I became a cognitive baseball fan, Otis Nixon was already an established veteran ballplayer. But in that interlude after his career began and before I became aware of it, Otis Nixon faced hard times. He had drug problems. He missed the 1991 World Series because of a drug suspension. He was an alcoholic.
The definitive Otis Nixon is probably the one you see in this Braves image from the late 1990s. I'll always think of Otis Nixon as a Brave. Maybe because of pictures like this, maybe the 1999 World Series.
By the time this photo was taken he was around 40 and his face had reached fully petrified Otis Nixon status. Plus there was enough of that hair left to give a glimpse of the dashing Otis Nixon of a few years earlier. The Otis Nixon who stole 70 bases in a year and six in a single game. The Otis Nixon who shined in an era of similar (if often better) outfielders, like Brett Butler and Vince Coleman and even Kenny Lofton. You can still imagine the jheri curl pushing through the helmet and flying backward in the wind as Otis Nixon blasts off out of his long lead at first base.
Otis Nixon would tell you that he blasted off a lot then (sorry, couldn't resist). He was a drunk and an addict. There were arrests and accusations of violence from men and women as recently as five or six years ago. But now Otis Nixon, like any American Folk Hero, has evolved. He's a Christian. He is married to Candi Staton, a soul and gospel singer you might have heard of. He runs the Otis Nixon Foundation and On-Track Ministries. And best of all, he's written a book with an awesomely Clyde Frazier-esque title: Keeping It Real With Otis Nixon.
Here is talking about it:
He talks like a baseball player. He makes corny jokes. The whole thing looks a little unscripted, a little unplanned, and like most everything else on Youtube, amateurish. The hair is gone, too. The hair that prompted this hastily written essay. But the face, small and sinewy and cut from wood, looks entirely the same.
I have recently come to believe that defense is the most important thing about watching baseball games in person. It occupies the most of our time, it captures the most of our imagination, and in person, it's the easiest thing for fans to see. Here are five reasons why defense is integral to the stadium experience:
1. Space, or The Anti-Television Experience
The television viewing experience is claustrophobic. You are zoomed in behind the pitcher's mound for a close-in view of the plate. As balls are batted into play and the game unfolds, your scope is limited to what the camera man and producers decide to reveal. You don't see the spectrum of players standing patiently between pitches. You don't get an idea of who is backing up who on any given play. You are fed a certain version of the game – a slice that is forced to stand in for the whole. You are required to infer every subtle defensive shift, for example. Your visual understanding of the game is affected by the blathering of announcers. Your field vision is obscured by graphics.
In other words, on television, you have no concept of space. You are so busy tracking the ball and the batter and listening to the analysis that it's difficult to grasp the sheer distance an outfielder runs to make a spectacular catch. It's impossible to comprehend the speed of a grounder as it jumps off the bat and hops off the chest of a waiting third baseman. In person, baseball is defined by space. Most of what we see is space.
2. Speed
In person, greatness happens much faster. One can blink and miss a spectacular, game-altering play. Or one can focus and see something that feels so much more impressive, so much more sudden, than a highlight on television. The entire sequence of pitch to contact to catch, for instance, is mere seconds long. I went to a Mariners-A's game at Safeco Field yesterday. It was a terrible game, but Coco Crisp made a catch that frightened me. He ran straight back at full speed and caught a Miguel Olivo drive a step from the center field wall, slamming into it hard. The entire play happened in an instant. A gasp, a catch, a momentary hesitation as Crisp lay on the ground. I was hundreds of yards away. The stadium was practically empty. Yet no television camera could do the moment justice.
3. Multiple Dimensions
The challenge of simultaneously tracking ball and runner and fielder creates a holistic experience. It gives a better sense of the different systems of the ballgame. When a first baseman makes a diving stop and fires to second for the first half of the double play we are caught up in the urgency of not just the catch and the throw and the turn, but the slide into second and the runner coming up the line at first. There is an element of this urgency on television, but we can't see all it. We can't feel it.
4. Errors
Errors are always more stunning in person. They are discomforting. We often don't know whether the ball went through a fielder's legs or just rolled beside him. We can't tell from a distance whether a grounder took a bad hop. Our vision of fly balls and line drives is askew – think of how many times per game the crowd rises to its feet to cheer a potential home run that does not even reach the warning track. Players are not the only ones who misread batted balls. We do too.
5. Down Time
In person, defensive players are who we interact with. We see them warm up between innings. We (collectively, maybe not you or I), beg ungraciously for a ball. We heckle them the most. We adore them the most. We watch them the most closely. In the field, personalities reveal themselves slowly. Jayson Werth stands around right field looking bored, pacing small circles, playing with his glove. Ichiro stretches and contorts his body and seems to not even realize it. Derek Jeter asserts grace and confidence in just the way he walks -- zone rating be damned, sayeth the scout sitting above the dugout, just look at him. No matter where you're sitting in the stands, almost without exception, the closest player on the field is a defensive player. We're drawn to what's already in front of us.
The generation of kids who are now college-aged came up in the middle of a losing streak. America lost to Osama bin Laden on September 11, 2001, and continued to lose as it bowed under the pressures of war and fear. The losing streak was what they knew, and it has formed their world view. They don’t have the relative comfort that even I do, at age 30, that comes with the ability to draw from the long memory of a pre-terror United States. The generation's default stance is, therefore, one of defensiveness and fear, symbolically calcified in opposition to an evasive mastermind who posed an indeterminate danger.
I don’t know where I first heard about Sam Fuld. I can’t recall whether it was a 
When I think of a body of stories that comprise a legend, Davy Crockett and Paul Bunyan come to mind. I know a smattering of facts about each without any particular awareness of a linear narrative that surrounds them. For example, Bunyan is really big, and his friend is a big blue ox. Come to think of it, that’s all I can remember. Davy Crockett killed a bear when he was three, and he patched up a crack in the Liberty Bell. I don’t know the story of his life, just a few juicy details.
