Fail Bigger

Exciting news: my first article for Slate was published today -- a slideshow essay on great unbuilt stadiums including Seattle's Floating Stadium, Edmonton's Omniplex, New Fenway Park, and so on.

If You Don't Build it...

Descent into Doucheyness?

As the Giants ran towards a World Series victory last year, Brian Wilson was a pleasant surprise: a ballplayer with equal parts focus and humor. He appeared in odd places, and said funny things about himself and the game. His charming, modern antics enriched the enjoyable run of an overachieving team.

This season, he’s already toeing the line between charmingly eccentric and outright douchy. His commercial for MLB2K11 is really funny. I dig the lines about “the most perfect honey” and the magic powers of his beard. Good stuff, funny concept, enjoyable execution. His turn as a ship’s captain on “Lopez Tonight” could’ve floundered, but it floated.

Then I saw Wilson in a random Spring Training interview on President’s Day. Some news guy behind the camera, fishing for yet another hilarious Bri-Wi quote, asked him who was on the $50 bill. Wilson, on cue, produced a fat wad of scratch, leafed through it on camera, and produced a $50 bill. “That guy,” said Wilson. Fine, a little gag. The news guy pressed onward, though. “Who’s on the $100?” “That guy.” What should probably have been at most a few chuckle-worthy sound bites became the SNL sketch that wouldn’t end.

There’s a couple of factors in play that determine whether Wilson’s course will be solid or subpar: context and taste.

Context

The context of the Brian Wilson phenomenon is crucial. He clearly enjoys an extended ham session, and something like a commercial provides the necessary cues by which to enjoy him in action, and to judge him on the merits of comedy. In other words, with a commercial or a late night TV appearance, the viewer knows what to expect.

An interview in the locker room, on the other hand, is the realm of information, insight, some level of professionalism (which doesn’t preclude humor, by any means). It’s not the place for rehearsed skits performed with grinning sportswriters, especially when those skits involve the inflated ego that defines Wilson’s comic turns outside of the ballpark. Comedy needs misdirection and a level of the unexpected. But the locker room is within the bounds of the game of baseball. It’s already a bubble of half-fictions and escapism. To try and redirect a redirect shows lack of taste.

Taste

And that is the key to the game that Wilson is playing: taste. There’s no accounting for it, and it’s a fickle mistress. Taste doesn’t mean good manners. It means knowing when to talk, and when to ball. It means understanding context, and withholding some choice lines in the locker room for later use in street clothes. It means knowing when to leave some room for the audience--because at this point Wilson is clearly cultivating his audience--to breathe a little. Harness the power of anticipation, maybe play it straight for a couple of days.

I like to see players having fun, because baseball is fun. It reminds me of when I played baseball, and the characters I played with that made every day different and enjoyable.

But Wilson shouldn’t expect fans of levity to follow him down this entertainment rabbit hole, enjoying every canned move he pulls out, heedless of the situation, which threaten at this rate to soon read more like an episode of Saved By the Bell than the asides of a witty ballplayer.

We Are Baseball: A Manifesto

I am more smitten with baseball in the last two weeks of February than at any other time of the year. It was in the last two weeks of February in 2009 that I conceived of this blog and opened it for business. This time of year, before Spring Training becomes a tired rehashing of the same position battles, before fantasy baseball numbs our collective intellects, before Opening Day creeps from the subconscious, is fertile for baseball writing.

It is also fertile for nostalgia. You can see it in that last paragraph and the optimism that spilled from it. Pitchers and catchers and left fielders and shortstops. They're back. We're back. Everybody's happy. This post was supposed to be studied and precise – a sociological work, not a drooling soliloquy about green grass and red dirt. And yet here we are.

The truth about baseball is that there is no avoiding nostalgia. History lingers over everything, and our many different approaches to fandom are just mechanisms for coping with it. Nostalgia is a fundamental desire to be part of something better – to feel something great that you once felt, or think you felt, or imagine somebody else could have felt. Nostalgia is a way to align ourselves. That is the past I want and this is the present I must now deal with.

"Fandom, like nostalgia, is a way of wrapping ourselves up in sensible context"

Fandom is not so different. We place ourselves in artificial nations. We align ourselves. While the acts of fandom – watching games, researching stats, nurturing complex feelings about players or set of players – may be deeply personal, they amount collectively to a declaration of co-dependence, a linking of hands with history and the people who are currently making it. Fans, much like voters and activists and even opinionated readers of the news, are staking their claim in the culture of something meaningful to them. Fans are necessary. Instead of hesitating to refer to their favorite teams as “we,” fans should be going one step further and referring to the entire sport in the first person collective. We are baseball, hockey, hoops etc.

Fandom, like nostalgia, is a way of wrapping ourselves up in sensible context. But the relationship between the two is nuanced. Fandom also involves nostalgia. Especially in baseball, where the relationship is so storied, so ubiquitous, so self-perpetuating. Practically the entire history of baseball literature from Ring Lardner to Bill James deals with nostalgia in some conscious or subconscious way.

Some fans, of course, choose full immersion. For them, nostalgia is an active possibility, and living in the moment and living in the past are exactly the same thing. In 1973 Roger Angell wrote a story for The New Yorker called "Three for the Tigers" about three crazed Detroit Tigers fans. For these men, the past was as vital as the present. Time was fluid. Far more important was their full immersion in the sport, in the team. By way of their friendship and their fandom, they essentially created an alternate universe in which topics of conversation flowed unencumbered by time and were only marginally influenced by present-day goings on. In this fandom, nostalgia becomes present tense. Angell's story is a reminder that fandom is an act of self-affirmation:

They are the veterans who deserve notice if only for the fact that their record of achievement and service to their game and their club often exceeds that of any player down on the field. The home team, in their belief, belongs more to them than to this passing manager or that arriviste owner, and they are often cranky possessors, trembling with memory and pride and frustration, as ridiculous and touching as any lovers.

The act is not always so aggressive or aggrandizing. One does not need to define his or herself by fandom to claim a stake in the collective nature of a sport or a team. And one certainly does not need to seek asylum in nostalgia like Angell's Tigers fans in order to confront it. Even rejecting nostalgia outright as a component of one's fandom is a manner of confronting it, acknowledging it and even embracing it. The ultimate model for this is Bill James, who's thirst for convention-breaking was/is matched only by his fascination with the most arcane details of player's careers. For a modern example: Jonah Keri is one of the baseball media's most convincing purveyors of new ideas. But when he starts musing on the late Expos, you can practically see him before you picking daisies and staring longingly into the Canadian distance.

"Sabermetricians have bludgeoned the baseball dialogue into something unrecognizable (and I would say better) from that of a previous generation, but they have also bludgeoned their way into history."

There is inherent tension in Jonah Keri’s fandom and in anybody’s who doesn’t succumb fully to their deepest nostalgic yearnings. We are reconciling our modern selves -- our willingness to confront newness, our information-addled brains, our self-conscious multimedia identities -- with an undeniable craving for solid ground amidst a cultural landscape that reinvents itself every minute. Sabermetricians have bludgeoned the baseball dialogue into something unrecognizable (and I would say better) from that of a previous generation, but they have also bludgeoned their way into history. In this way, they are creating solid ground for themselves.

But that doesn’t make them/us exempt from the trappings of traditional baseball nostalgia. It was those trappings that inspired me to start writing this post. I saw Bethany Heck’s Baseball Scorebook Revival Project on Kickstarter and immediately descended into what I call the thought spirals. The scorebooks themselves are beautiful, slender, and modern. The accompanying merchandise all has the same stylish retro-grace. It’s no wonder the project has captured baseball fans’ imaginations.

Ted pointed out that they are a product perfect for the moleskine era. How true. Moleskine notebooks themselves are nostalgic -- and easily mocked -- souvenirs. I bought my first one because it looked cool. I bought my second because of the little card inside the first one listing the great artists and writers (Matisse, Hemingway, Chatwin, etc.) who allegedly carried moleskines around. I was placing myself in history. We do the same by keeping score. It’s an inherently nostalgic act, a deliberate throwback. But by doing so with a delightfully well-designed product, we aren’t just steeping ourselves in comfortable tradition, we’re reconciling it with our present-day aesthetics and values. We’re making nostalgia modern.

The Words Get Out: Miguel Cabrera and the Life of Language

[caption id="attachment_2291" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="photo by Kevin.Ward"]
[/caption]

“You don’t know anything about my problems.” - Miguel Cabrera

“I am a rock, I am an island.” - Paul Simon

Cabrera’s words read like a motto of the disenfranchised, like a stray line of dialogue from a John Hughes movie. It is both juvenile and heartbreaking to hear someone express their feeling that no other person could understand the depths of their sorrow; expressing, as it were, the failure of all art, literature, and philosophy to bridge the divide between human rocks and islands. Cabrera, with his hull scraping bottom, thought compassion a myth.

I don’t pretend to know anything about Cabrera’s experience, but I don’t think that precludes the above reading of his words. When he spoke them out loud to the cops, he entered them into the public forum, just as good as a published book that’s on a library shelf.

We each take the same risk when we start a conversation at a party: that our words will escape our lips, drop to the floor, run down the hall, and clamber out the window into the world. It is the fee for admission to society, now more than ever. The saving grace may be that there are so many public conversations going on at a given point that our particular individual embarrassments are swallowed up in the ocean of radio traffic.

The exception being if you are famous, and troubled. I heard the news about Cabrera’s DUI arrest, and I was, at first, disappointed. I recently researched his past issues with booze, and felt that he had made the necessary alterations, and that he was happy with himself. In January of 2010, Cabrera told Detroit Free-Press columnist Michael Rosenberg, “I think it's going to be a new season, a new life for me. I'm going to be a better dad, better person, better player, better with the fans.”

Then I read the quotation, his declaration of independence from the human family. It thrummed like the final phrase of a hard novel. It probably didn’t feel poetic at the time, an allegedly drunk young man bucking against authority, broke down, frustrated, caught. The tension of the traffic stop, the space between the cop and the baseball player collapsed, thrumming with potential calamity. Cabrera allegedly wandered into the road a few times, upset, swearing. Then the comment, the lash-out, uttered once and repeated. It goes into a report, is spread by the news.

The phrase becomes its own text, subject to public dissection like a frog carcass splayed out on a tin.

“Do you know who I am? You don't know anything about my problems.”

A question asked, and answered by the asker, as he, at that time, saw fit.

A New Look

Hey readers, as you may have noticed, we've redesigned the site. We hope you like it. Before moving on, Ted & I would like to thank three dear friends for donating their time and creative energy to the cause:

Lucas Stanford

Craig Robinson

All three were crucial in the process. You'd be smart to support them in all their endeavors. Also, we're not 100% done but close to it -- your feedback is welcome in the comments or at tips@pitchersandpoets.com. Thanks.