04 Dec 2009, by Ted
There is a long-standing tradition of parody in literature, from Hemingway all the way around the world to Sarah Palin, with reams of Internet teletype in between.
On the heels of Eric's Roger Angell Appreciation post, we thought we'd do the same thing and invite you to join this new contest, and write parodies of Roger Angell's sepia-toned, straight ahead New Yorker style. We're calling it Write Like an Angell.
The gig is that you describe a player or baseball incident of your choice in the Angell way. This might involve comparing a particular style quirk to a mundane daily activity, or describing the hoi polloi and capturing the quaint essence of a long-time fan. You could also do what he did back in the 60s and describe the seating in a certain domed stadium in the metaphorical terms of a summer dessert cocktail.
And it's a contest, so for the first place winner, I will create a customized digital baseball card, in the manner of those of our poets-in-blogidence (examples here, here, here), for whatever human, animal, or mineral you so desire. The top three winners will be enshrined forever in the Rogue's Baseball Index, under Roger Angell's entry (which doesn't exist yet), with a link of your choice that isn't porn.
You can email your entries to tips@pitchersandpoets.com, or post them in the comments. Eric and I are the final judges, unless Roger Angell calls and wants to be the judge, in which case he will be the judge.
You want an example of a contest entry, you say? Here is my offering:
I haven't been to the press box in more than a month. The spread of ham sandwiches and Dr. Pepper that I recalled from the chilly contests of early March was all but extinct. Standing at attention in the instead was a stern company of carrot sticks facing down a squadron of celery. The sportwriters were as wary of the raw buffet as Ichiro Suzuki was unfazed by the platter of sinkers regularly delivered by Derek Lowe on the night of my visit. With every pitch, he gazes up into the distance. One might think he were trying to remember where he parked his car. At the mid-point of his swing, Ichiro leans backwards like a kite-surfer coasting in a light gale.
01 Dec 2009, by Eric
Roger Angell is 89 years old. He was born in 1920. To put that in perspective, Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle were born in 1931. Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush were born in 1924. What I’m saying is that Roger Angell is an old man. That fact, of which there is no hiding, is what makes his latest in the New Yorker, Daddies Win, so magnificent.
He takes a few cheap shots at the blogs. He bemoans statistics. But the man still writes like he is living in 1957, in a world where baseball players are made not by television, but by the words floating through the air via radio, and the ones printed on newspaper and magazine pages. He writes like baseball still has the power to capture the imagination of an entire nation. His essay on the Yankees' latest World Series victory is plucky and poetic. Without being sappy, the piece emits a sort of sepia-tinged nostalgia. What struck me most as I read this was Angell's knack for magnificent little descriptions. He writes about baseball like the game is still new.
Here are some of my favorite descriptions:
On Alex Rodriguez:
“This year – well, this year he he’s been somebody else.”
“I’ve had the impression that I’m within touching distance of a new species.”
Cliff Lee:
“He throws with an elegant flail, hiding the ball behind his hip or knee and producint it from behind his left shoulder, already in full delivery. His finish brings his left leg up astern like a semaphore, while his arm swings across his waist. This columnar closing posture . . . is classic and reminded me strongly of some fabled pitcher from my boyhood."
Chase Utley:
“Utley, who has slicked-backed, Jake Gittes hair, possesses a quick back and a very short home-run stroke; he looks like a man in an ATM reaching for his cash.”
AJ Burnett:
“a Tom Joad with beads.”
CC Sabathia
“Sunny looks and pavilion-sized pants and weird, white-toed spikes.”
“his fastball-cutter-changeup assortment . . arrives like a loaded tea tray coming down an airshaft.”
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On the New Yankee Stadium:
“I enjoy the wild, Ginza-esque light shows – the “lightage” I mean – but I’d trade them for the steeply vertical stands of the vacant, now shrouded original and the walls of noise they produced on big nights.”
On Nick Swisher:
Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?
On Hideki Matsui:
“His silence kept him old-fashioned: a ballplayer from the black-and-white newspaper-photograph days, before our heroes talked.”
I’d venture to say the same thing about Angell.
25 Nov 2009, by Eric
When we recruited Epilogue Magazine editor Corban Goble to contribute a term to the Rogue's Baseball Index, we didn't know it would lead to this. That term, Babermetrics, has become a full-blown science. Here's Corban's overview.
In 2003, the innovations outlined in Michael Lewis’s Moneyball brought deep statistical analysis to Major League Baseball’s front offices and to the mainstream. However, baseball’s statistical awakening strangely hasn’t trickled down to the world of hooking up, a world still framed in the antiquated slang of base-counting.
I propose a new science, Babermetrics (from baseball’s “sabermetrics”) that can more truly capture the multifaceted and complex experience of hooking up.
Some sample Babermetrics statistics:
BRI—Babes Reeled In, a rather conventional measurement that tallies the number of sexual encounters, quite similar to baseball’s RBI (Runs Batted In) statistic. BRI is a statistic that doesn’t truly account for consistency or performance, but should be noted for its raw counting value.
Hypothetical Example: Wilt Chamberlain has the highest-known career BRI total, claiming over 10,000 sexual encounters over his lifetime.
Used in a Sentence: “Last year, Sal’s BRI was the lowest total of his career. Leaving college is a likely factor as well as the accumulation of a gratuitous beer gut and residence in his parent’s basement.”
Bar Factor—like sabermetrics’ “park factor,” a statistical device use to measure the impact of a particular stadium’s characteristics on performance, Bar Factor is an effective statistic that measures performance at a certain venue relative to another.
Hypothetical Example: College is the ultimate example of the Bar Factor; it’s a realm maintaining a distinct set of characteristics uniquely tailored to hooking up.
Used in a Sentence: “Janet, I don’t think I’m going to go to library fundraiser tonight. The Bar Factor simply isn’t high enough; I’m going to O’Halligans!”
VORB—Value Over Replacement-level Barfly. Akin to Kevin Woolner’s VORP (Value Over Replacement-level player), VORB measures the relative value of a particular mate in relationship to the value of an average (or replacement-level) hook up.
Hypothetical Example: The majority of the student population at any Northeastern-region private college will likely hover right around replacement level, where the average VORB in NYC’s Meatpacking District remains very high due to the high concentration of patrons who work as models.
Used in a Sentence: “Winslow, the VORB at this nightclub is way too high for me to even talk to anybody without getting a drink splashed in my face. I’m going to O’Halligans!”
OPS—Opportunities Plus Sexual encounters, a clean interpretation of sabermetrics’ OPS (On-Base Plus Slugging), a statistic used to evaluate the overall effectiveness of a given player’s offensive production. In Babermetrics, a tool used to provide an accurate approximation of sexual effectiveness, combining both “opportunities” (first base and above, as defined in the Babermetrics Almanac) with total number of sexual encounters.
Hypothetical Example: As in baseball, the man or woman with the highest OPS is likely the most productive performer.
Used in a Sentence: “Tucker Max, due to your sizeable dip in OPS, our publishing company no longer sees you as a credible literary voice, despite the preposterous embellishment of your stories.”
Though I’ve decided to pull out some statistics that best illustrate the need for a revolution in the statistical analysis of hooking up, it should be mentioned that there are numerous other structural similarities between baseball and sex that have long gone unrecognized.
For instance, in college baseball, the NCAA allows the hitters to use aluminum bats; it’s hard not to get a hit, and it’s an unrealistic representation of baseball’s professional world, where MLB mandates that hitters use the heavier, power-dampening wooden bats. Such an analogy is rather pliant to the departure from the unrealistic bubble of college and joining the population at large.
However, there’s a notable difference between the world of baseball and the world of hooking up—hooking up doesn’t have an offseason.
As the calendar crawls toward another baseball season’s conclusion, America’s singles will still be wearing slutty bee costumes for Halloween, sidling up to the previously unapproachable co-ed from the Creative Department at the office Christmas Party, still playing “empty the Solo cup” at football tailgates for respective alma maters.
It’s time to fill a void. Welcome to the playground of new science.
23 Nov 2009, by Ted
Nerdiness and baseball are frequent bedfellows. Bloggers in their mother's basements, Steve Bartman, Excel spreadsheets, hyper-focused statistical analysis, George Will...the list really does go on and on. Another bastion of the super nerdy, a practice so odd and pointless that it makes listeners uncomfortable in conversation, is the animated .gif. Peewee Herman eating a cartoon ice cream cone, Pokemon characters doing strange things to Mad Men actors; whatever you've got, chances are good that someone has created a .gif that animates them doing strange things.
Recently, when I should have been doing something productive, I joined these two stalwarts of the socially questionable. I created a baseball-themed animated .gif. Without further ado, and with no point or purpose whatsoever other than the work one can do with Photoshop and a web tutorial, I present:
18 Nov 2009, by Ted
Right now, the MLB is slowly, slowly revealing the names of the 2009 award winners. The results trickle out to the media like grains of sand through a poorly maintained hourglass, presumably extending the shelf-life of the now-finished season to grab a few brain cells away from Lebron James and the NFL.
There are numerous arguments, and plenty of good reason to just go ahead and announce the award winners when they're tabulated, just before the playoffs. However, I am, however, about to argue that there is some legitimate pleasure to be had from the awards announcement process at this quiet time in the baseball life cycle. The free agent frenzy will soon begin, with the corresponding sense of urgency. This time, however, right now, is appropriate for reflection, with a contemplative look back at what is already, jarringly, "last year."
During the baseball season, I often feel like I'm traveling down a turbulent river in a rickety canoe. Just ahead of me, bobbing in the rapids, is the piece of flotsam that represents the team I choose to follow, the Astros (they've been far far ahead of late from another coast, kept afloat only by an enthusiastic blog community. Also, does that make the Yankees a super-tanker?). It's all I can do to keep my gaze trained on that elusive target, tracking its progress as it dips and swirls, disappears from view and reemerges.
The rest of baseball--the other teams, individual performances, slumps and streaks, scandals, standings, highlights, records--line the shore. Tracking the piece of drift downstream, the shoreline flickers past in my peripheral vision as little more than a blur of color and light.
The first respite on this journey (it's a fun ride, despite my somewhat harrowing metaphor) comes in the calm eddy just before the playoffs, when most slots are sealed up, bad seasons come to an end and, and the new second season promises a more concentrated pursuit. That's the first time I try and take stock of all that has just happened, particularly by catching up on the teams that are still in the race. How did they get there, what do they bring to the table?
That quick breather is soon over, and the class 6 rapids that are the playoffs begin. And as abruptly as they begin, they are through. All falls silent, birds chirp, the woodfire crackles in the evening light.
The twilight fades to the depressing yellow glow of the indoor NBA arena. In the conjoined exhilaration and melancholy of the season's end, it turns to reflection time. For me, that's means checking the detailed leader boards on sites like The Hardball Times or Fangraphs.
It's a marvel to me how much I miss in the course of a season. You can read all of the blogs that you want, and watch as much Baseball Tonight as your eyeballs can take, but small bits and bytes of information still continuously emerge depending on the lens that you put on your camera. Train your viewfinder on the A's or the Blue Jays or whatever team is furthest from your typical focus, and you'll find out that Andrew Bailey had a dominant year out of the bullpen, or Adam Lind just crushed it all year. And those are the obvious ones. Aaron Hill can slug, but he doesn't take many walks. And Vernon Wells...yikes.
For every team, there's a minimum of 25 things to learn, and truly many more than that. Every player tells an eight month story.
And so, to the awards season. As lengthy as the process is (Joe Posnanski tweeted "As a member of the Baseball Writers, I wonder: Can't we stretch out these awards more? I understand MVP comes out July 2013."), there is a core understanding going on that this is indeed the time to discuss the awards. They are individual in nature, and the darkest depths of the offseason are better suited for debates about player prowess than just before the post season, when team play is paramount. Individual award conversation pales in comparison to the playoff vibe, the intensity of each pitch of each game.
Now, however, the hot lamps have cooled, the champagne has dried sticky to the floor, and we're by the campfire again. It's the time to contemplate the individual achievements, the gems buried in the rock of a long, arduous season. What sparkles now can be placed under the microscope and tested for purity. Purity, in this sense, is gauged under the jeweler's eye of conversation, of debate, with a calm dose of perspective.
Enter the awards, which offer the institutionalized version of one side of a conversation. The general body says, "This is the answer to this question," vis a vis the best rookie in each league, the best pitcher, the best player, the best coach. A definitive proclamation is the best way to start any conversation, as it's the ultimate launching point for conversation. And so, in a manner, the awards are not a finisher but a starter, the flint and tinder that set the baseball scene to talking up a fire. The hot stove, yes, is what that is, if it sounds familiar. It's calm water. It keeps us warm.
The awards season mirrors the times, by which I mean the offseason itself: it's a slow tedious march, marked by the odd flourish of pretty great stuff to talk about.
