18 Mar 2011, by Ted
The first opportunity to watch Ichiro take an at-bat after a long winter off from baseball is always a joyous thing indeed. - Conor Dowley, Pro Ball NW
Last year I took a stab at blogging about one team on a daily basis: the Mariners. The blog was called Everyday Ichiro, and the experience was humbling and illuminating. I watched the team play every day, scoring the game in my own style--a sort of running play-by-play and scouting report--and synthesizing my observations into regular posts.
I had never watched so much baseball, or learned so much about a team so quickly. Blogging a team daily required a Zen centeredness, a spiritual calm, and a sense of patience that I've rarely drawn upon. My attention span increased, and my awareness of the broader trends of a baseball team expanded. But, alas, my experiment lasted just half of the season. It didn't help that the Mariners turned out to be, without exaggeration, one of the worst baseball teams in history.
The daily baseball blogger, working for little to no pay, year after year, is a folk hero.
The primary inspiration for the blog was the opportunity, as a then-new Seattleite, to watch Ichiro Suzuki play every day. Such a privilege deserved notice, and I devoted a section of most of my game analyses to his at bats. Every game, Ichiro used his unique skills and speed to coin a novel way to hit a single or make an out. So distinct is his game that his failures are often just as compelling as his successes, which, in a game of failures, is an aesthetic boon. Each at bat was and is an aesthetic experience.
So, while Everyday Ichiro the blog expired and now floats aimlessly in Fire Joe Morgan/Walkoff Walk Dormant Baseball Blog Purgatory, my goal is to carry on the core concept: the chronicle the exploits of Ichiro, right here on Pitchers and Poets,* with Eric throwing in his two cents as well.
*I know that I live in Seattle, and that Mariners ball isn't on everyone's radar, but it's my belief that Ichiro is among the players who transcend the limitations of franchise and make us all happy to be baseball fans.
Without further ado, here is the first edition of 2011's Everyday Ichiro:
Wednesday, March 16, 2011, vs. MIL
With the first televised Mariners Spring Training game, there's the chance to once again bathe in the routine of Ichiro. I missed it--as did Conor at Pro Ball NW quoted about--without realizing how much I missed it.
Ichiro's routine balances the regularity of his tics, stretches, and postures with the irregularity of his batting style. He lofts easy pop ups, chops grounders, swings at bad pitches, takes awful swings, and dribbles swinging bunts to every side, even as every single pitch he brings the bat up in a salute, brings his hand to his cheek, glances past the pitcher, and swings the bat back up to the hitting position as predictably as if they were the hands of a grandfather clock.
To paraphrase Grampa Simpson and his description of Jonny Unitas' haircut, Ichiro is a player you can set your watch to.
1. In his first at bat of the evening, against the Brewers pitcher Yovani Gallardo, Ichiro takes a couple of pitches, then rolls a smooth grounder right to the shortstop, and is thrown out at first by a quarter step. The return of the image of Ichiro, and his unnatural quickness to first base.
2. Nobody dodges an inside pitch like Ichiro. He dances gracefully away from danger. Gallardo's straight fastball and his good curve keep Ichiro on guard, and he fouls away pitches until the count goes full. An easy grounder to second retires the batter, who has important things on his mind after natural disaster wreaked havoc on his homeland.
On these shores, baseball was back, and Ichiro was back. The sun had gone down in Seattle, and the dog was asleep. I followed quick on his heels, and wouldn't see if Ichiro hit again, or even if the Mariners won the game.
16 Mar 2011, by Ted
Over at The Cardboard Connection, Brett Lewis created an illustrated list ranking all of the 2011 MLB caps.
I don't know about you, but for me, such a list represents an irresistible opportunity to piggyback on Brett's idea and create my own. The fun of a rankings list is disagreeing with it, and the best way to right history is to make your own. So make sure to check out The Cardboard Connection, because it was his idea first, and below you'll find my response in the form of Ted's 2011 MLB Cap Rankings, worst to first:
30. Cleveland Indians
I'm over racist mascots, and that includes incredibly offensive caricatures of oppressed peoples right on the cap. Also, the alternative C cap has the feel of a JV high school team.
29. Arizona Diamondbacks
Snakes in the shapes of letters are for stoners.
28. Milwaukee Brewers
While they earn a few points for using the good retro design, the modern Brewers hat is playing so far below replacement level that it cancels out the throwback. I get the concept, logo designer, but the cap doesn't have to look exactly like a Miller Light Can.
27. Tampa Bay Rays
The powder blue highlights are a bold design choice, and I can respect that (however, for more on the drop shadow see below). This cap, however, just feels stilted. The letters seem gangly and awkwardly conjoined, like two middle schoolers slow-dancing to "You Look Wonderful Tonight."
26. Texas Rangers
These primary colors make my head hurt. I'd also like to introduce the idea of the offensive drop shadow. A drop shadow should just barely exist, offering a subtle effect without being prominent (I am not a designer, but this feels intuitive). The Rangers cap drop shadow is also one of its main colors. Worsening matters, the regular and alternative cap just flip flop colors between the main color and the drop shadow. Bleh.
25. Cincinnati Reds
At first glance, this cap looks like a venerable classic design still in use. As I stared at the logo, however, I realized that there is another offensive drop shadow! The old school C is there, but it's laid on top of black in two versions, and white in the other, like some kind of lame Tron 3D-style reboot. Johnny Bench and Pete Rose didn't need three dimensions, and neither do I. Also, that black cap is just ugly.
24. San Diego Padres
The Padres have slowly sapped all personality from their uniforms over the last few years, and the hats are no exception. These hats have the classic logo, which is decent, but it's colorless; there's no blood pumping through its veins. The only bit of spark comes from the military connection, and the camo design is bold, but it's ruined by the fat-edged treatment of the logo, and the same sort of visual flatness.
23. Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim
Rare is the cap that uses the same color in the logo that it does for the cap itself. For good reason, I'd argue. I find it a bit weak to use the little barbs on the sides of the A. It's a letter, let it be a letter! There's already a halo perched on top, why do you need to ornament it further? And with its inner glow on the A, and the halo on top and the lack of contrast, the whole cap design feels cramped and excessive.
22. Colorado Rockies
The purple is coming! Read these caps from left to right and tell me there isn't a disturbing invasion of purple into the cap design. I'd agree with Brett that "the color scheme fits Colorado perfectly," but that may only be a result of their stubborn commitment to the hue that made the nurple famous.
21. Houston Astros
I've never much liked the Astros' brick, black, and cream color scheme, a fact that sinks the overall cap design (the star itself I don't mind so much, even if it's a little crowded). The color scheme was meant, I think, to mesh with the brick of the new Enron Field, but it's time to move back to something more worthy of space city. I'll admit that it's an improvement over the 90s heinousness, though if a team is ready for some retro goodness, it's the Astros. And if it's me wearing the hat, there's no way I would appear in public in the all-brick alternate.
20. Chicago White Sox
This is the first hat that's probably more a personal repulsion than one that is broadly accepted. I appreciate the nod to the past, but I don't like the logo's downward-falling lettering, or its jangly asymmetry. And though he likes it more than I, I'm with Brett: these look like bones hung on a wall. Or, as the typical White Sox fan would put it: perfect!
19. Washington Nationals
In a case of perhaps reaching too low, the Nationals decided to just use an old cap from the archives, and unfortunately it's taken from a look that wasn't all that hot to begin with. The logo's got a bit of character in the jovial curls, but it threatens the confectionary faux pas noted below. And that alternate cap is just not very attractive.
18. Toronto Blue Jays
This cap is an easy target: it's a bold design, with a really expressive graphic element. I really tried to dislike this hat even more than I do, but in reality there's something likable about it that I can't place. It looks like an arena football logo, but even that I could let pass, as I think the colors really pop. Then I looked more closely at the J. First of all, it's a J, for "Jays." That is a little too chummy for a major league baseball cap. Second, the J is made of metal, and third, it is wavy, with only half of a serif on top. It just gets too weird upon such closer inspection.
17. Atlanta Braves
I'm going to play the racist mascot card here again. While I'll concede that the design of the two primary hats is nice in itself, and pretty iconic, the alternate hat, with the tomahawk, is as tasteless as the racist caricature it represents, and reminds me only of the terrible tomahawk chop chant.
16. New York Mets
I can't get over the droopy arms on that Y, though I'll cede that the typography is sort of charmingly anachronistic, like something you'd see on Knights of Columbus letterhead. The colors are equally challenging, urging me to dislike them. They are best served by the first cap, where the two main colors live together. As the black is introduced, and the logo darkens, it goes to hell. The alternate cap feels like staring at a photo negative.
15. Philadelphia Phillies
The blue button on top of the main Phillies cap is a quesy little M&M atop a cupcake of a cap. Try and tell me that P isn't written in icing.
14. Seattle Mariners
The concept is strong, and the design is bold, incorporating a thematic graphic element into the typography. It could do with an update, however, I think, in agreement with Brett, who believes it's "gone stale." The teal is an issue (though living in Seattle I can attest it's a big part of all of the sports teams here and is basically a fact of life), and the components are a bit jumbled.
I own a nice Mariners cap, and in person it's shimmery in an outdated 90s way. But there's a lot of potential, and a bit of simplification could go a ways towards rejuvenating what is a solid foundation. (On that note, it bears saying that a cap is much different up close and in real life, where the richness of the fabric and the thread makes it pop. I haven't looked at each cap in real life, so that's a kind of handicap in this process.)
13. Florida Marlins
I am truly conflicted over this hat. It's fair to say that if I was a Marlins fan I would love it. I would be proud of it, for all of its hubris, for it's improbability. Let's look at it closely. First, the F is enormous. Second, this F is draped in the full figure of the marlin itself, like a society dame in her mink stole. Marlin can reach almost 20 feet in length. Simply put, there is a 20-foot marlin on this cap. To put that in perspective, the other MLB caps that include the full figure of the team's mascot include two birds, a snake, and a pair of socks.
In the end, the Marlins cap leaves something to be desired with its continued use of teal, long after the rest of the world left that regrettable color choice behind, and by the black-on-black letter design and its odd scale. That said, this cap is one of the boldest entries, artistically.
Also, now is about the point where I like the hats. The vitriol is above, and below, the overall sentiment should read as positive.
12. St. Louis Cardinals
The Cardinals red cap is an unapologetic testament to the color itself, a brilliant use of the word's double-meaning as a color and a bird. This brash commitment renders the white logo all the more substantial. The blue cap, frankly, I can do without in either form, but the strength of the red carries the rest.
11. Pittsburgh Pirates
The Pirates make the all-black cap look good, through the use of a simple, bold yellow logo. The high contrast and the vaguely industrial typography do well to embody the team's general aesthetic.
10. San Francisco Giants
Color-pop and contrast, lettering intertwining like plumbing that isn't worried about legibility, and orange and black define this cap, which is essentially the offspring of an Orioles-Pirates coupling. That's why I've squeezed it between the two. More on these colors below.
9. Baltimore Orioles
Staring at the primary Orioles cap, I couldn't quite figure out why it made me vaguely uncomfortable. Then I realized it was one of the few main caps that does not use initials or lettering. It's just a drawing of a bird. It's a very nice drawing, though, and the Baltimore orange continues, against the odds, to be one of the nicest colors in baseball. Again, using a great color can make the use of black in the palette an asset rather than a liability.
That said, a drawing of a bird does not make it into the upper echelon of hat designs. And the O's alternate cap feels a bit too casual for me.
8. Kansas City Royals
Color rules in this cap, and the slim, sensible lettering doesn't get in the way, a few clouds in a summer sky.
7. Boston Red Sox
The Red Sox B lays against the navy blue clapboard of the cap like a painted sign resting against the pine wall of a neighborhood hardware store. The alternate cap design with the actual red socks on it is like a made-for-TV movie adaptation of a Salinger novel.
6. Chicago Cubs
This is a cap that will draw you in like a nice light coming from the doorway of a bar. It's a cheerful cap, bright and inoffensive. The logo's edges are soft, like a smile. If the Cubs won a World Series, the smile wouldn't seem so tragic.
5. Detroit Tigers
The Tigers cap is a sharp-edged answer to the Cubs cap's soft side. The blades of that white D come up like Cobb's spikes, without apology, with the authority of time and tradition.
4. Minnesota Twins
This cap does what the Reds cap fails to, embracing tradition and resisting the urge to modernize an already solid design with cheesy contemporary flourishes. And think about it: the T and the C refer to the "Twin Cities." This sounds obvious, but the initials on the cap refer to the city's nickname. How bad-ass it is, that the cap manages to wrap its conceptual arms around a strange geographical feature! Imagine if the Rangers cap initials were "DFWMA" the Angels' were "LAAA," or the Marlins' were "?".
3. Oakland Athletics
The history of the A's features, as much as any team, showmen and showboats, circus acts and self-aggrandizers. If there is a ball cap that contains like the genie in Aladdin's lamp the spirits of Charlie Finley, orange baseballs, Rickey Henderson, an elephant standing on a baseball, Rollie Fingers, Dennis Eckersley, Dave Stewart, Herb Washington, white shoes, and the Bash Brothers, it is this glorious A's primary cap.
The other two are compromises.
2. Los Angeles Dodgers
The crooked union of the A and the L as the former dangles from the latter reminds me of the letters of the Hollywood sign and how they fluctuate with the contours of the hillside. Blue the deep color of the ocean.
1. New York Yankees
The N stretches wider than it should, to straddle the slingshot Y. Are these train lines meeting in the middle of the city? Are they skyscrapers jockeying for position on the skyline? What is the gravity that pulls the legs of the N inward, bowing them? Of all the caps, this one raises the most questions, and seems more than any to be the result of chance pressed against opportunity.
...
The images are from The Cardboard Connection, and again I encourage you to visit Brett's fun list.
14 Mar 2011, by Ted
What did I learn from Scorekeeping Week, after baseball fans of different stripes and styles weighed in on their scorekeeping tics and habits?
I learned, mostly, that a scorecard is a living text, and that the act of scorekeeping far exceeds in value what the resulting document offers. Our contributors, commenters, and friends around the web enjoy keeping score, not the kept score. Watching a baseball game, the scorekeeper watches the game, sees something differently, participates in a new way, or in an old way. They grip the scorecard and pencil like the handles hanging down on a subway car, crowded among all the other passengers on this baseball train.
I've learned, during Scorekeeping Week, that keeping score is an action, and a scorecard lives brilliantly for a particular time, rolling out in tune to the game like Kerouac's single scroll of On the Road manuscript. Downhill writing, recording each moment and that moment’s connection between the fingers and the pencil or the typewriter. Recording oneself watching.
Writing a scorecard, you never get to stop. Mistakes happen, the game goes on, the game goes crazy, columns bleed into one another, time marches on. There are no second drafts, no revisions. Downhill writing, time-saving codes that lay another layer of meaning over top, another translation. What’s lost in translation is what is gained.
The personality of the scorer defines his or her scorekeeping. The expressive marks of the emotional fan, like Alex Belth, who only scores the games whose results he cares about, are bound to stray and straggle. The pragmatic baseball broadcaster's book will be color-coded and clean, a fast and functional reference point to help verbalize the game in real-time. The designer's book will reflect, from curated cover to the least last leaf, the fashionable modes you'd expect to see in an urban coffee shop or ad firm. The scorecard of the doodler will fill up with lines that wander as the mind that guides them wanders.
The truth is relative, in baseball like in any arena. Witness the Hall of Fame debates, the steroid hunt, the sabermetricians and their resistors. Even professional scorekeepers disagree over the judgment calls. Baseball is said to be a highly quantifiable game, and it is. But for all of the concreteness of scoring a baseball game, of making sure that the indisputable facts go down in the record, the divergences are the most intriguing, when facts give way to debate, and when the complicated spiderweb of action goes madly down in the book like it was written on a Doc Ellis bender.
A scholar named Bruner once said that literature "renders the obvious less so." Poetry, in other words, makes the ordinary seem strange. The scorecard and the act of scorekeeping translate a simple act--playing a baseball game--into another, equally simple-seeming, but wholly mysterious and reflective one, the art that we here at this blog and countless other bloggers and zine-makers and novelists and journalists pursue at their own risk: the perilous act of writing things down.
Peter, of A Building Roam, put it nicely in a comment on Patrick Dubuque's Poetics of Scorekeeping (as did Patrick, in the piece itself):
When I was growing up, I always had to escort my grandmother to church (which I hated). She was so devoted that every single time she’d be holding the book, keeping up with everything that was read and singing with every song and I know this was because she was there to have an EXPERIENCE. I haven’t been to church in years and would never go back, but I consider the ballpark to be a cathedral, a site of gathering for ritual, and to keep score is like the grandmothers keeping up with the readings and songs. Having an experience.
Amen.
12 Mar 2011, by Eric
Paul Franz is a Rockies fan, an educator, and recurring P&P contributor. Welcome to Scorekeeping Week..end. His blog is Nicht DIese Tone .
"The end of pitching as we know it." That's how SportsCenter would describe the game , in their typically overwrought tones. Still, to a grade-school-aged Rockies fan like me, it was monumental enough that a game I attended in person was leading the venerable ESPN program, much less in biblical - or at least Hollywoodical - tones.
The game in question was a 16-15 affair between the Rockies and Dodgers. It took place on June 30, 1996, just days after my 11th birthday. We attended - my family and I - as my present for the year. Because I was a huge nerd as a kid,* I insisted on keeping score. Where I learned to keep score is a question I can't answer, as my dad is nearly blind and can't follow the game, my mom knows next to nothing about baseball, and my brother is younger than me and not particularly a baseball fan. At the time I knew the principles of scorekeeping, but had never done it for a whole game. And, hey, at 11 I reasoned it was about time I graduated from theory to practice.
* As in, when I was a kid my brother and I would play fake baseball games with stuffed animals and matchbox cars. That's not the nerdy part. The nerdy part is that, while my brother moved the "players" around and generally executed the actions of the game, I actually kept track of the statistics - batting averages, home runs, ERAs, and so on - of the toys involved. I had literally notebooks full of this stuff, all from when I was around six or seven. So yeah, nerdy.
Needless to say, the decision to keep score for this particular game would prove disastrous. Besides the final score of 16-15 (guaranteed to produce a messy scorebook), the Rockies used six pitchers and stole ten bases. The Dodgers' Hideo Nomo gave up nine runs (only five earned) in five innings. This was my birthday, dammit, and I was keeping score no matter the consequences. Indeed, the experience was so traumatic for Nomo - as he and Piazza combined to allow the bulk of the stolen bases, including all 6 of Eric Young's - that he threw a no-hitter in his next Coors Field start. Perhaps a less determined young man - or a smarter one, anyway - would have given up after the Dodgers batted around in the third inning, necessitating jumping into the next inning on the scoresheet. But I was exceedingly, bull-headedly, determined. This was my birthday, dammit, and I was keeping score no matter the consequences. Even as I began bisecting already bisected columns and rows in order to fit all the substitutions, I persevered.
For whatever reason, of the many pieces of childhood paraphernalia my parents kept, this scorecard was not one of them. It could not possibly have seemed significant to them. It likely would have seemed an incomprehensible mess even to someone familiar with such things, thanks to the many divided cells and arrows mapping events to their proper innings. Still, despite the necessary mess - and my less-than-stellar 5th grade handwriting - it would be fascinating to see now.
Sometimes the simple, elegantly designed structures we use to understand, categorize, and generally record our experience of the world cannot cope with the complexity of reality in actionIn retrospect, there's a lesson in my scorekeeping experience - if I may pontificate for a moment. Sometimes the simple, elegantly designed structures we use to understand, categorize, and generally record our experience of the world cannot cope with the complexity of reality in action. Not all baseball games are tidy 3-2 affairs. Faced with reality, then, we have the option of building more complex, but less aesthetic structures to house our understand in, or we can continue to hope the simple and elegant will serve often enough that it remains desirable.
Unfortunately, in this age of technocracy and commodity, we too often pick the robust over the beautiful, forgetting that there is a very different story one might tell about those times when the simple, elegant, minimalist scorecard confronts 16 to 15. The experience wasn't disastrous, the scorecard not a hideous mess after all in this different account. It was, instead, elegant in its own way, and heroic besides. A baseball game ought to fit onto a simple scorecard, perhaps, but if it does not, it is up to the scorer not to invent a new, more convoluted, more sophisticated model, but rather to see, behind all the runs and runes, substitutions and symbols, the stolen bases, the errors, and the five-run innings that it is still baseball that is being played. Even that little, inadequate scorecard, all chaos and chicken-scratch, is perfect for the job.
11 Mar 2011, by Ted
Today's Scorekeeping Week contributor, Patrick Dubuque, writes about baseball and the Seattle Mariners at his blog, The Playful Utopia.
It’s the question many of us dread at the ballpark, usually accompanied by a smirk and perhaps a mesh-backed cap, as a man with a salt-flecked mustache twists around in his seat. Why do you keep score? It’s a question that is rarely worth trying to answer, except with a shrug: “I just like to.” Then the conversation ends; the chasm between can never be bridged.
It’s not a bad question, though.
---
On Sunday, June 4, 2000, I went to a baseball game at Safeco Field in Seattle. Trailing 5-1 in the seventh inning, Padres third baseman Phil Nevin lifted a fly off Arthur Rhodes, deep to right field. Jim Caple wrote the following passage about what happened next:
[Stan] Javier raced back to the warning track, leaped and reached his glove over the fence. The ball appeared to strike the glove's pocket about an arm-length beyond the fence but Javier couldn't hold onto it. Yet when he pulled the glove back, he also flipped the ball back onto the field side of the fence. As Javier fell to the ground, he looked up, saw the ball dropping toward him, reached out his glove and became the leading candidate for Catch of the Year.
From my seat, I wrote my own version of what occurred:
9!
---
The average comment about scorekeeping will inevitably mention that it is fading from the national consciousness, a dying language. In the story above, both accounts are translations of a moment, the encapsulation of a million simultaneous details into a single, communicable event. When you read Caple’s account, you get a good feel for what happened, but all writing is in some way summarization, an altered translation. The single 9!, in a only a few strokes of a pencil, hacks away at the adjectives and the hyperbole. What remains are the man, Stan Javier, and the quality of his performance.
By keeping score we have created our own language. Each person’s style varies, providing a unique dialect, but the narrative is one which other scorekeepers (and, it must be emphasized, only other scorekeepers) understand. The language of baseball creates its own citizenry. It has its own punctuation and pronunciation, its own trimeter rhythm. Scorekeeping converts baseball into poetry. Its minimalism represents Keats’ negative capacity, a freedom from resolving the unresolvable, and instead revel in the process itself, the telling.
The relative simplicity of scorekeeping demonstrates the powerful human need to categorize, to make sense out of what we observe. In reality, even amidst the repetition of baseball, no two pop flies are ever the same; there is always some factor, some element, that is unique. Scorekeeping allows us to condense these infinities into a single subset, like a 9, so that we can process them and, more importantly, discern patterns. It’s not enough to sit passively, and let the game (or life) unfurl before us; we want mastery over it, a knowledge of why things happen the way they do.
---
In a game of chess, the number of possible permutations exceeds the capacity of the human brain after the first few moves. In baseball, many of the variables reset between batters, supplying the mind with only a few contingencies to consider. Because of this, we can use the data we’ve collected to make predictions about what will happen. This, more than anything, is why baseball fans are drawn to numbers, to the game’s unique capacity for analysis. For a sport and its chronicling method, scorekeeping, that are so heavily rooted in the past, they are also obsessed with the future. The scorecard allows this process to happen in the middle of the action, using those inevitable pauses to reflect and reassess.
Finally, scorekeeping isn’t merely transcription. A quick glance at a cell phone will confer a sheer quantity of information that no scorebook can replicate. It’s the writing itself that is the defining act; it is the commemoration that separates a given ballgame from any of the million before it. We write to connect ourselves to history, to name ourselves as part of it. Scorekeeping, like writing, allows us to describe for posterity our own fandom, our presence at that game and our understanding of it. It is how we take possession of our past.
Because I was there to witness it, I own a small piece of that Stan Javier catch. As long as I have that scorecard, I always will.
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