16 Sep 2009, by Eric
Matt Yglesias recently compared Afghanistan to an ESPN Zone:
A better analogy might be that it’s the ESPN Zone of empires, someplace where from time to time a lot of people feel tempted to go, but when you get there it turns out to be not so great. But it’s surprisingly expensive to stay! Having gone out of your way to get there in the first place, you’re perhaps initially reluctant to just admit that it’s not worthwhile. But you can’t stay forever.
But doesn’t the war effort also remind you of any number of struggling baseball franchises that dump millions and millions into free agents, but are really just piling misguided resources onto a fundamentally flawed foundation that will surely collapse at any moment, leaving the whole venture futile? Kevin Malone? Bill Bavasi? Obama? Biden? Anyone?
One of the very first posts I wrote here prescribed a healthy mid-market approach to managing the economic collapse. Basically I said we can learn a lot from Mark Shapiro and the Cleveland Indians. This was back in March before the season really got going, and before the blog had really found its voice. This time, I don't have answers.
I don’t have a prescription for our problems in Afghanistan. It sounds trite to even say we can’t just Moneyball our way out of a major foreign policy debacle. So instead of using baseball as a way to make a political point or explain an inexplicable war, I’ll use the war and baseball to do some thinking on American identity and policy. This stuff's been on my mind lately.
A friend of mine is an Arabic linguist in the Army National Guard. He spent a year in Afghanistan (where the first language is not Arabic but Pashto), and brought up an interesting point about the conflict: the very presence of American troops on the ground there polarizes the country in altogether new ways. Afghans that live near bases tend to Americanize; eight year old kids who were born after the invasion are fluent in English. Afghans that don’t live near bases tend to have grown less and less appreciative of our current foreign policy
Mostly, Afghans want to be left alone. Those who live outside the red white and blue halo of our military outposts know America by its machine gun fire and bomb flashes and the destruction left in the wake of slow-moving, bulky metallic vehicles. Justifiably, these Afghans don’t like this America and they don’t like this America trampling on their culture, trying to instill its own values where they aren’t particularly wanted.
This creates a divide among the people of Afghanistan. An even stronger American presence over there will invariably lead to a rapid Westernization for parts of the country. This is simply what happens when ideas and people rub against each other for long periods of time. As some parts of Afghanistan Westernize and other parts push back against this process, and against American occupation, the country’s fractured sense of national unity will only find itself in even greater peril. The fault lines will be tested and the strains will be exacerbated.
There is a very real possibility that we stay in Afghanistan for ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred more years. As the Obama Administration’s Afghan surge begins to materialize, it’s looking less and less likely that we go the George F. Will route and just cut our losses (Billy Beane! Fire Sale!). America, it seems, will try with all its might to halt the gravitational momentum of history and create a unified and democratic Afghanistan. In this context, I think it’s fair to start talking about baseball over there.
It was inevitable that Afghan children would play baseball. The game is too symbolic, too ripe for media affection, too damn American to not share. In 2002, the Christian Science Monitor wrote what is, to this day, the definitive Afghanistan Baseball Puff Piece:
"Baseball is here to show them the American way, to show them that we're not here for any other reason than to help out," says Sgt. Jay Smith, of the US special forces. "We're not against [Afghans], we're not against Islam. We can be here together, Afghans and Americans."
In what is perhaps a historical first, certainly since the fall of the anti-American Taliban regime, children are playing organized baseball in Afghanistan, to the tune of "Take me Out to the Ballgame," which blares from speakers on a beige psychological-operations Humvee.
In the seven years since that story was published, Afghan Baseball has not quite taken off. But what if we’re talking another seven or fourteen years? Children are products of their surroundings. If their surroundings are US military bases, then Afghan children will grow up comfortable with not just the English language and the presence of heavy artillery, but the best and worst of American culture. This means McDonald's and Angelina Jolie and it also means baseball.
There is a precedent: Little League has been played by the children of expats in Saudi Arabia since 1954. As more troops and private contractors pour into Afghanistan, the creation of a real official Little League is more than possible. Their parents would not understand, but Afghan kids growing up in the shadows of military bases would know Hanley Ramirez, Joe Mauer, and Tim Lincecum. They would know double plays and the infield fly rule. Afghanistan would face off against Little Rock in Williamsport on ABC. Is it really that far-fetched?
The better question is whether or not this is a good thing. Baseball is not just any other sport in the American identity. Its merits as a game are secondary in importance to its status as cultural touchstone. We as Americans take great pride in the fact that baseball has taken off in East Asia and Latin America. We don’t care who wins the World Baseball Classic, because its very existence is strokes our ego. We tend to think that those who embrace our national pastime are embracing the nation itself – its values, its history, its citizenry.
Baseball in Afghanistan would be more than just a foreign country starting to play a new sport, but how so? It would probably be seen as a victory. Pundits would hail the dawn of baseball as the dawn of a new era in Afghanistan – the proof of a successful foreign policy, the justification of our actions post 9/11. But let’s not be foolish. Even in the confines of this thought exercise, it would be silly to claim that every country who has embraced baseball has embraced American democracy. Japan was baseball-crazed long before it attacked Pearl Harbor. Cuba is still quite baseball crazed.
Baseball in Afghanistan could be looked at as bizarre manifestation of everything that has happened between our two countries since September 11, 2001. It would encapsulate all the rights and all the wrongs of an extended war. It would be the export of something truly American, as American as things get. But it would be the fossil of a failure. It would be completely, entirely inconsequential.
Can’t you hear Glenn Beck now? “Those Afghans couldn’t handle democracy. But at least we gave ‘em baseball didn’t we?”
15 Sep 2009, by Eric
The title of this week's poem by National Book Award winner Denis Johnson is meant to be ironic. It's not a poem about baseballs, but a poem about hanging on and finding meaning and hell, sometimes the only thing for a guy to grasp is a baseball. Sometimes the only way to make sense of big problems is through the scope of balls, strikes, fly balls, grounders. At least that's what he seems to be going for in this very dark, affecting poem. (via Poetry Foundation).
for years the scenes bustled
through him as he dreamed he was
alive. then he felt real, and slammed
awake in the wet sheets screaming
too fast, everything moves
too fast, and the edges of things
are gone. four blocks away
a baseball was a dot against
the sky, and he thought, my
glove is too big, i will
drop the ball and it will be
a home run. the snow falls
too fast from the clouds,
and night is dropped and
snatched back like a huge
joke. is that the ball, or is
it just a bird, and the ball is
somewhere else, and i will
miss it? and the edges are gone, my
hands melt into the walls, my
hands do not end where the wall
begins. should i move
forward, or back, or will the ball
come right to me? i know i will
miss, because i always miss when it
takes so long. the wall has no
surface, no edge, the wall
fades into the air and the air is
my hand, and i am the wall. my
arm is the syringe and thus i
become the nurse, i am you,
nurse. if he gets
around the bases before the
ball comes down, is it a home
run, even if i catch it? if we could
slow down, and stop, we
would be one fused mass careening
at too great a speed through
the emptiness. if i catch
the ball, our side will
be up, and i will have to bat,
and i might strike out.
09 Sep 2009, by Eric
When we asked young Phil Bencomo, chronicler of all things baseball if he would like to write a Situational Essay, we were unsure of what to expect. His Baseball Chronicle is in many ways a kindred spirit in this massive, lonely, internet world. Both sites value the narrative over the calculated, and both tend to tread dangerous water when it comes to nostalgia. The following essay is many things. It is America. It sure as hell ain't nostalgia:
At 3 a.m. on a Sunday morning in August, I sat in the back of a broken-down van, stopped on the highway shoulder 10 miles outside of Rolla, Missouri. Much too close for my liking, cars and 18-wheelers barreled past on the left, blurs of light and sound. The trucks left the van lurching from side to side.
I felt small and powerless, protected only by a thin-walled metal box just feet from the road. Perhaps that's why, as I waited for the tow truck, I turned my mind elsewhere, flicking on a reading light and pulling "Shoeless Joe" from my bag.
* * * *
My parents, four siblings and I had left our home in the Chicago suburbs seven hours earlier. It was an unplanned trip, prompted by the news that my grandmother, widowed less than six months before and fading fast, would likely last no more than a month. By 2 p.m. on Saturday we'd resolved to leave. Six hours of frenetic packing and preparations later, our aging, seven-seat conversion van pulled away from the house, and we began our 1,700-mile, cross-country journey to Phoenix.
These trips have become standard fare over my 20 years, though there's usually more than six hours of preparation to them. We've driven through every state west of Illinois, save a few, and a handful more to the east.
On our trips west, we usually leave by noon and drive through the night, ultimately spending over 24 hours in the van before stopping -- collapsing, really -- for a night in Albuquerque, New Mexico. But on this trip, it was not to be.
* * * *
My Mom had been driving for a few hours, with the rest of us sleeping quietly, when the noise started. She'd been awake thanks to coffee and an evening nap, but the loud flapping sound, a puttering perhaps, that came from beneath the hood made both unnecessary. I woke immediately, reached for my glasses and found everyone else wide awake, too.
"Is there a bird?" asked my sister nervously. She's been terrified of them since one found its way into our house through a vent years before. "It sounds like there's a bird in there."
Dad suspected a broken fan belt but, after we'd pulled over, could find nothing wrong. Still, the noise persisted. The call went out to AAA, and I began to read.
* * * *
"Shoeless Joe" is a wonderful book that oozes sentimentality like few other novels. The characters are genuinely good in the deepest sense, and the few villains need only a nudge from the realm beyond to change their ways. Even facing bankruptcy and scorn, Ray Kinsella dances merrily to baseball's magical tune. It's nearly impossible to read "Shoeless Joe" and not yearn for the simple pleasures of bat, ball and a lush expanse of the greenest grass.
I realize this now, of course, but at 3:45 a.m., as I read in the back of a Rolla-bound, smoke-filled AAA taxi driven by a lithe, mustachioed man whose slow, drawling words whistled through a missing tooth, Ray's adventures couldn't have pained me more. Ray drives from Iowa to Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Boston and even to northern Minnesota, with only a few blank lines representing the hundreds of miles driven from city to city. There are no stops for gas followed five minutes later by a wail for a restroom; no greasy meals from roadside fast food restaurants; no thermoses filled with coffee, to be emptied and filled again; and, most salient to me, no middle-of-the-night breakdowns. The realities of long road trips are unacknowledged in "Shoeless Joe," but I could think of nothing else.
With every repair shop in town closed on Sunday, we were left stranded in our hotel room, waiting for Monday. We could only hope for a swift repair. "Shoeless Joe" was to be an escape from our troubles, not a mockery of them, but while Ray walked with Moonlight Graham, I ate cold scrambled eggs at a Waffle House and listened to my younger siblings bicker out of boredom. The book's endless optimism gnawed at me. I didn't want green grass and sunshine -- I wanted someone else to suffer, too. But there is little suffering in "Shoeless Joe," a book in which all troubles are washed away by time and a little faith.
* * * *
The repair shop, only a mile from the hotel, opened at 8:30 Monday morning. The tow truck driver had the night before told us that the van would make it that far, and he wasn't wrong. Dad drove to the shop fearing the problem would delay us another day, but, for a change, Lady Luck was with us. The repair took 20 minutes, and we were back on the road by 10 a.m.
Still, I could muster no optimism, even with the aid of "Shoeless Joe," and I felt old despite my youth. We won't make many more family trips, not all together. The van's too old for it, and so are we. I'll soon finish college, with my sister close behind, and the schedules and lives will grow too complicated. The simple days, with all seven of us under the same roof, will soon pass.
As I read in the van, I wanted more than anything else to love "Shoeless Joe," to embrace and revel in all the hope and goodwill it represents, to leave all my angst behind with a blown spark plug in Rolla, Missouri. But I thought of my dying grandmother, the reason for the trip, and reality crept in again. I closed the book and watched the trees fly by.
(flickr courtesy of cc:rutlo)
08 Sep 2009, by Eric
This poem by one Tom Clark descended on me from the heavens, like an omen presented by some ancient Greek god or goddess. Well actually, I saw it on the sidebar of Tampa outfielder Fernando Perez's recent essay for the Poetry Foundation. Here it is, a simple, pleasant poem for the inquisitive fan in us all:
Every day I peruse the box scores for hours
Sometimes I wonder why I do it
Since I am not going to take a test on it
And no one is going to give me money
The pleasure’s something like that of codes
Of deciphering an ancient alphabet say
So as brightly to picturize Eurydice
In the Elysian Fields on her perfect day
The day she went 5 for 5 against Vic Raschi