The Way You Look Tonight

I’ve made the switch from Times New Roman to Garamond for my every day typing. There was something about Times New Roman that made the words seem intimidating as they appeared on the screen. As if each serif, each dark line was saying something about my soul. It got to a point where I almost didn’t want to write because I didn’t want to see any more Times New Roman on the screen before me. Now I feel reenergized. It’s hard to explain.

This has led aesthetics to dominate my recent thinking. I’m starting to realize how easily affected I am by the way things look. It’s as simple as the difference between a sunny day and a cloudy one. For many years I considered myself impervious to the effects of weather. Then I realized that my music tastes were totally affected by it. Now the same thing is happening with fonts, I guess. And it goes beyond my own writing. Aesthetics have a huge impact on how we consume sports.

Take a look at uniforms. Few subjects are less relevant from a tangible perspective. But few things affect the fan experience more. UniWatchBlog gets insanely high traffic (we know that because RBI once got a very brief mention that sent over approximately 17million visitors). In baseball, not even steroids get as much flack from fans as misplaced black trim on traditional jerseys.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="266" caption="Even Paul Lo Duca hates black trim. "][/caption]

But let’s take this even more inward. The readers of this blog are either well-meaning friends of Ted and I or people who consume multiple sports blogs on a regular basis. And your opinion of PnP is greatly affected by its design. For example, the giant picture of Fernando Valenzuela’s face on our header causes people to think this is a Dodger-focused blog. Regular readers know this not to be the case, but the image probably has the same skill for discouraging Giants fans from reading that Times New Roman does for discouraging me from writing stuff. The Rogue’s Baseball Index, looks old-timey -- an aesthetic that carries its own baggage.

What do we look for with sports blog design? Should the visual feel of the site somehow match the tone of the content? Josh Wilker’s Cardboard Gods does this perfectly. It’s a slightly literary design with a classic-baseball feel. The content is the focus, framed in white amidst a background of dark grays and blues. Joe Posnanksi, meanwhile, opts for pure utilitarianism. His long, long posts are presented on a plain white screen, with plenty of space for his ample reader-polls on the side bar and his weird personal projects on the header.

But those are singular and powerful voices. Their draw is their exceptional content – bells and whistles be damned. What of sites whose appeal lies in humor or news or pictures? What of Deadspin? Deadspin leaves it in the hands of the reader. Here are 6,000 stories. Pick your favorite. Me? I think it looks cluttered. But then again, I like to pick and choose my stories. God knows I don’t want to end up looking at one of their regular slide-shows of nude male athlete self-portraits.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="410" caption="Mustaches were a crucial part of 19th century baseball's aesthetic. "][/caption]

I suppose the goal of a blog design depends on the goals of the proprietors. Do you want to nurture your reader a-la Wilker into a bookish dream-state? Do you want to build traffic through various clicks and links and options? Is your most recent post key? Or is it about the big picture? This is just the first layer of questions. We can peel them back to reveal even more. Does the number of columns on the blog matter much? Do certain colors have certain impacts on the reader? What about the width of the text? Do you like to read a narrow column or a wider one? How does subject matter affect these things?

This all may seem vague and irrelevant. But I don’t think it is. All of our beliefs as baseball fans are colored by colors and indelible images and uncanny associations.  Consider the way uniforms touch the way we remember eras: the classic 1950s and 60s, the colorful 70s, the unfortunate 80s, the surprisingly teal 90s. It goes into the design of our stadiums as well. They evoke the eras in which they are built and the teams they house. The difference between Cardboard Gods and Deadspin isn’t all that different from the difference between Fenway Park and New Yankee Stadium.

I’m curious as to what your thoughts are. Please share them in the comments. For what it’s worth, two of my favorite blogs, aesthetics-wise, are Beerleaguer and Mike Scioscia's Tragic Illness. What are yours?

Morning in Baseball Land

Spring has come a little early here in Seattle, so I'm feeling positive as hell. Morning is the time of day I like the most, when it's too early to disappoint yourself. And this is morning time in baseball land.

It is morning in baseball land when a shoddy feed of a random spring training game means more to me than a rebroadcast of any of the greatest games in history. I've seen Willie Mays make The Catch a hundred times, but I've never seen Tommy Manzella field a routine ground ball.

Morning in baseball land means that Neftali Feliz is more intriguing than Alex Rodriguez. It's the spring of his career, too, and just like a day can go sour before lunch, I'll be watching to see if Neftali--and his colleagues Wieters, Porcello, and Hanson, etc.--will make it to the afternoon.

Morning in baseball land and I'm one mock draft in, warming up the fantasy side of my brain like a relief pitcher. One genius turn of fantasy baseball is that it mimics the patterns of the sport. I anticipate the draft as giddily as I do the season, before the truth of the year sets in and it all plays out.

Morning in baseball land is not optimistic or pessimistic. It ain't true that anyone could win it. The truths is that none of us knows what stories are about to be told. But we know that there will be stories. Like walking out onto the proverbial sidewalk to see who will brush past you and start the wheels of the day in motion.

Morning time in baseball land is the first page of a very good book. Tragedy, or comedy? Ends with a death or a marriage? That all depends on the starting rotation. Either way, there will be heroes and villains. There will be a story.

There will be a story that the media writes: the career records and the standings. There is also a story that your life writes around the season: what you missed, what you saw, where you saw it from, how you missed it. Why you missed it, and who you missed it with.

That's the song of the morning, and they're singing it now.

Weekend Reading: Gearing Up for Spring

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="393" caption="The Bike that Draws via jimmykuehnle.com"][/caption]

1. A dream job for a wannabe catcher: John Harper of the NY Daily News straps on the tools of ignorance and catches a round of bullpen work from Johan Santana.
2. Roy Halladay is a hard worker, according to Philly.com's Rich Hofmann. Is it me, or is it mostly just players who are really good that get called hard workers (David Eckstein excluded)? You could work your ass off, stink, and get no pub for it whatsoever. (Which is probably the way it should be).
3. It's an old blog post from last year, but this MLBlog entry from Gordon Beckham feels less PR-filtered than a lot of the player blogs. Plus we get to go back to a time when he was a nervous rookie rather than a quickly rising star.
4. Would or should Rawlings move baseball production operations back to Haiti? Richard Sandomir of NYT asks what it would take, and what the implications might be.
5. "Branch Rickey made me a better man." The passing of a Mr. Baseball. I didn't know who Bobby Bragan was during his lifetime, but I wish I had.
6. Olympics! Tough out Snowpacolageddonypse with Eric's round-up of 10 Great Winter Olympic moments over at Tonic.

Notes from the Sporting Doldrums

- With the Super Bowl just concluded, I'm compelled for whatever reason to reflect on the NFL's championship extravaganza, and a little bit then on baseball's. These comparisons could probably extend to the sports as a whole, but I'll let you parse that out. My thoughts:

1. Super Bowl ads. Lame, misogynistic attempts to send their brand viral, a huge audience handed over to marketeers rather than entertainers. Andy Samberg's Digital Shorts these were not.
2. The Who. Has any recent decision felt less connected with the times that we live in? I like The Who as much as the next guy, but it should've been Beyonce. Or these guys.
3. Blowouts are over quickly.
4. The Super Bowl embodies immediate gratification as an event; a complete culmination focused on a single point. Of late, it has proven worthy as the games have been compelling and exciting.

What is gained or lost in the baseball version, ie. the wide lens that is the World Series?:

1. Extended gratification. It's not an event, but a period of time--an epoch--that can unfold like a fat novel or dine and dash like a novella. The Super Bowl on the other hand is an episode of CSI. If your team happens to be in the World Series, you face up to seven games of excrutiating pain.
2. Joe Buck and Tim McCarver blow. Up to seven games of that, no matter what you do.
3. Blowouts drag along for days.
4. The World Series embodies old timey values like delayed gratification, depth, and endurance.

- I realized yesterday evening that the MLB Network is a little over one year old. The immediately high quality of the channel has created the sense that it's been here all the time, right alongside ESPN. And yet simultaneously I can't believe it's already been a year since its birth. Already I don't know what I would do without it.

- Is there a baseball equivalent of The Catcher in the Rye? I perhaps predictably went back to the book after the death of its author. The pressure within those pages presses the setting into a frieze; melancholy and timeless. Is this how we feel about Joe Dimaggio? (The book was published the year The Yankee Clipper retired) Is this how we will feel about Joe Mauer?

- Non-baseball related recommendation: Uhh Yeah Dude, a podcast which features a couple of guys shooting the bull. (Don't rely on just the videos on their homepage: listen to the podcast all the way.)

You May Have Noticed...

There is suddenly an advertisement in our sidebar of our home page. That is because Pitchers & Poets has taken on an official sponsor in Barry's Tickets.  Through their site, and DodgerTickets.org, they offer great deals on baseball tickets nation-wide. Even better, they don't add a pesky service charge. In the coming week or two, we'll also work a system out where PnP readers can get 10% off all tickets bought through the website.

Ted and I want you to know that we didn't go about this process lightly. This blog has grown up a great deal the last six months, and we'd begun to think about advertising some time before the agreement was struck with Barry's. We want to ensure you that absolutely nothing changes on the site content-wise (same boys you've always known), and that we're still blogging econo. We don't do this for the money. It's just nice to have a little something to show for it.

We'll drop you a line when the 10% discount code is up and running. Meanwhile, please welcome our official sponsor with good eye contact and firm handshakes.

Thanks,

Eric and Ted.