22 Sep 2009, by Ted
Ember Nickel of the often e-less Lipogram! Scorecard! offers up the latest Celebrity Rogue contribution to the swelling cavity of hardball knowledge that is the Rogue's Baseball Index. On tap, there's the basic delusion of old school broadcasters, and a melancholy marker of a favorite done moved on.
Keeping Score at Home consists of, while at home, filling out a scorecard to keep track of a game being watched on TV or, more romantically, listened to on the radio. In the days before pitch-by-pitch updates online or through cell phones, this might have been an eminently worthwhile undertaking. Nowadays, the belief that some people might be Keeping Score at Home propels radio announcers to repeat themselves, sometimes by using numbers to represent fielders in a way that lends a smug sense of superiority to a small group of listeners. This all takes place despite any evidence that anyone is actually Keeping Score at Home.
The One That Got Away is the player whose career with one single team spans, if not multiple decades, the early years of your childhood fandom. After he is past his peak and/or your market is too small for his salary, he is traded for several prospects or goes unsigned by a general manager whose shrewd sabermetric knowledge far exceeds yours. When The One That Got Away gets away, it causes you to resent said general manager with a child's self-righteousness for years, when you could have been doing more productive things.
Stay tuned for more tales of baseball madness and sorrow, as our Celebrity Rogue week continues...
22 Sep 2009, by Ted
Two RBI entries this go round, this time from Paul Catalano of the blog And A Player To Be Named Later. Paul brings us one term to describe a franchise gone over-protective, and another to describe the personal favorite who lets you down.
Jobawacky is a state of being that surrounds treatment of the pitcher-as-long term investment. All of the worst traits of pitch-counting and arm-swaddling and New Age crystal-reading come to bear in the early career of this Bonus Baby. When a team goes Jobawacky, the pitcher in question has his innings pitched and daily velocity and injury history scrutinized and deconstructed by fans and the media to the point of absurdity. The pitcher will start games upon the harvest moon but never after the hunter's moon, and he may only throw the number of pitches that equals the square root of his birth date cubed.
The inevitable erratic performance of the pitcher will lead said pitcher to act strangely. When the pitcher throws a strike, for example, or gets lazy can of corn with one out and none on, he may react as if he just struck out Lou Gehrig, Stan Musial and Ted Williams on nine pitches to win the World Series in four games single-handedly. Such behavior, and the overall ineffectiveness of the pitcher, will call into question the future of the franchise. The manager gone Jobawacky will demand a recalibrated horoscopic inquiry, and the pitching coach will angrily snap his diviner's rod in half.
The term derives from the New York Yankees' treatment of young pitcher Joba Chamberlain.
The Curse of the Giambino occurs when you like a baseball player simply because you and he share a cultural heritage, hometown, high school, tattoo, etc. You tout this player up to all of your friends like crazy. Then he turns out to suck and be a disgrace.
For more of these gems, don't forget to visit the Rogue's Baseball Index.
21 Sep 2009, by Eric
Kicking off our week of all things Rogue's Baseball Index, our first celebrity rogue term comes from Orel Hershiser, that famed Son of Steve Garvey, whose contribution touches on the twerpier side of baseball:
The MSB is a pejorative term for a tiny, annoying player, often a middle infielder. The Mini Sirloin Burger at Jack in the Box? Tasty. Getting beat by a player who looks small enough to fit in Ryan Howard's back pocket? Like a mouthful of ashes. Such annoying players can be identified by these media-friendly descriptors: Pesky. Grit. Hustle. (The non-media-friendly version? Pain in the ass.) The MSB rarely puts up impressive numbers, but always seems to be knocking in the game-winning run against your team -- on a bloop single, naturally.
Current MSBs include:
* David Eckstein (listed at 5'7")
* Craig Counsell (amazingly, listed at 6'0")
* Maicer Izturis (listed at 5'8")
For more of these gems, don't forget to visit the Rogue's Baseball Index.
21 Sep 2009, by Ted
We here at Pitchers and Poets are very excited to announce a new web project that we think you will enjoy. We've spent weeks in deep meditation in the nosebleeds, pecking away at the telotype exchanging correspondences with fertile-minded PnP friends, building the vitamin-enriched, high-in-fiber, and brand spanking new Rogue's Baseball Index.
The Rogue's Baseball Index (or RBI for short) is what we have deemed an alternative baseball lexicon: it's a baseball dictionary, if Merriam was Mike "King" Kelly and Webster was Bill "Spaceman" Lee. Eric and I thought that baseball needed a new glossary, full of terminology that describes today's baseball, from the life of the modern fan and the tics and tendencies of the modern player, to the strange ways of the GM and the creepy capers of the ballpark mascot. This is the game that you know deep down, from the rogue's mouth to your ears.
To celebrate the launch of RBI, we have an excellent week ahead. We've asked some of our best web friends contribute terms and definitions to RBI, and starting today we'll post several of these sage suggestions per day, incrementally exposing you to the sharp-witted wisdom of the baseball crowd.
The first contribution we want to highlight is that of badass artist Mark Penxa, who generously offered up his time and extensive talents to create a beautiful RBI logo:
So have a visit to the Rogue's Baseball Index, and check back with PitchersandPoets.com daily (and multi-daily) to see the latest contributions. Hopefully you will enjoy reading RBI as much as we've enjoyed putting it all together.
Sincerely,
Eric and Ted
Proprietors, PitchersandPoets.com & RoguesBaseballIndex.com
18 Sep 2009, by Ted
There is poetry in repetition, and repetition in poetry, and poetition in repeatery. In their mystical, reptilian brain-type ways, rhyme and verse and meter build and release tension, create and demolish expectation, and generally provide the aesthetic infrastructure that enables poetry and music to variously melt our insides and set fire to our brain stems. There's no point in offering an example. Just think of the scariest or the most exhilarating aesthetic experience you've ever had, and it's likely that it either a) repeated the best part or a variation over and over or b) established repetition and then sent it spinning. (I'm not scholar of poetry or music enough to go much farther than that, and even in this generalization I'm working on instinct).
All of that to say: I watched Ichiro play the other night, at Safeco Field.
Ichiro's been much in the news in the last week or so, for cracking 2,000 hits, for doing it quickly, and for breaking Wee Willie Keeler's record eight consecutive seasons with 200 hits. These are records that bring a word to mind: consistency, ie. doing something very well for a very long time. It's marvelous, but the word that interests me more for the sake of having watched him play the other day and for this post is: repetition. They're two words with much different implications, but they're also co-dependent.
Repetition means doing the same thing over and over. Consistency means successfully pulling something off again and again. Repetition: Ichiro does the same thing before every pitch. Constistency: Ichiro gets a hit 35% of the time, but doesn't get a hit 65% of the time. More than any other player, Ichiro gives the impression that hitting with such consistency, ie. getting a hit 35% of the time, would be impossible without repeating the the same ritual 100% of the time. Repetition is the platinum setting upon which the jewel of his consistency is mounted.
So yes, there you have it, Ichiro has these rituals that he repeats over and over again. So why is this important, or why, rather, is it satisfying to watch?
For one, I think, it's the style that Ichiro lends to his rituals. For most other players, you'd call them tics. But Ichiro adds something, a certain theatrical bent, to suggest his awareness of the importance of the ritual itself as a means to the end. He brings attention to the act of preparing for a pitch. A word that pops up in the definition of the word ritual is ceremony. In modern parlance, ritual has a more widely applicable connotation--everyone's got their ritual, whether it's a cup of coffee in the morning or the way a Little Leaguer wears his stirrups--while ceremony still carries with it the banner of history, of communal import and procedure. All of this to say that Ichiro's repetitive acts have the flavor of ceremony, of fulfilling the necessary requirements to move forward, recalling the lessons of his youth and of seasons and weeks and days past. Through all of the games over all those years, the thread that sews them altogether is that ritual:
the pre-pitch motion in which he raises the bat in his right hand to the pitcher, pointing in the same direction with all five fingers of his left hand, before dropping the bat and bringing it around and up to his ear.
Watching all of this go down in person is what I dig. On TV, you might catch a glimpse of his at-bat ritual before the camera cuts to the Bud Light trivia question or the roving reporter in the stands. But in person, it's unedited Ichiro, in real-time. More than the edited version, one can watch Ichiro in his full state of Being. There is the pre-pitch ritual, but there is also the continuous stretching in funny crouches, the practice swings, and--this one was new to me--the exaggerated, Satchel Paige-like wind-up with high leg kick that he goes into with every warm-up throw in the outfield. While centerfielder Franklin Gutierrez lolligaggs his tosses with an air of boredom, Ichiro makes the boring act into an art form by constricting it, by placing a constraint around it and carrying it through to its extreme.
My baseball career was defined at all times by inconsistency. Not of performance, necessarily; I was great until about age 15. But I never threw the ball with the same arm angle, my batting stance changed every week, the height of my stirrups fluctuated wildly, etc. My style was to have no single style. This wasn't by design, necessarily, but rather a matter of character. My handwriting, for example, is messy and it changes with the wind. Perhaps it's this nature, my flapping, groundless personal story, that urges my fascination with Ichiro's superhuman capacity to repeat and repeat. I am jealous of and amezed by perfectly uniform, utterly neat handwriting too. For me, that consistency is unattainable.
And then, of course, there is what Ichiro does between rituals, when the pitch is on the way and the ball in play. The rituals mark one side of the coin, and the other side is stamped with his improvisational skills, and his ability to stretch and contract with the demands of the present tense. The career of Turk Wendell taught us that a bunch of great rituals with feeble results doesn't go nearly as far. But watching the two skills in concert, the repetition and the consistency, is what makes baseball worth watching, even when the teams involved are long out of the race and the season is lost.
P.S. Ken Griffey, Jr., hit a home run in that game, too, but that's another story.