Fernando Perez, new Tampa Ray call up and old school South American poet, has penned a very nice, but slightly sentimentalist essay for Poetry Magazine. Me? Jealous? Nah (via the scoop stealers over at Walkoff Walk)
Lions in Winter: Former Situational Essayist Reeves shares three fantastic profiles of over-the-hill baseball gods over at Meanderings. Go over there, then guess which of the recommendations was mine, then fill up his comment section with odes to my taste when it comes to long form journalism.
Craig Calcaterra has written a moving essay on growing up with Ernie Harwell, who was recently diagnosed with terminal cancer. I really believe that nobody can shape a baseball fan's experience more evocatively than a broadcaster.
A silly press release arrived in the PnP inbox this morning from the union representing Aramark stadium concession employees. I'd have deleted it right away, but I think they merit attention for creativity, finding the first practical explanation of Pythagorean Luck.
In a comparison between teams with home stadiums that use Aramark and teams with home stadiums that do not, Workers United found that non-Aramark teams’ average luck is 40 and Aramark teams’ average luck is -1.93."
And some bad news: I accidentally deleted the Pitchers and Poets twitter account. It was a mistake and it should be back up soon. Please don't tell Ted.
I'm headed to a minor league game tonight between the Everett Aquasox and the Vancouver Canadians, a Northwest League short season A-ball match-up. A ritual that I like to go through before hitting a minor league park--aside from donning my raggedy Astros cap--is to research who the supposed "top prospects" in the game are. It's a tough thing to keep up with, the prospects game, beyond the top 20 or so, but I've found that it can be a great way to engage with a randomly attended minor league game.
The guys who show up as top prospects do seem to have an air about them that sets them apart: a little stronger, a little more relaxed in the batter's box. Just...something. I watch them a little more closely, noting the quickness of their hands or the snap of their fastball, and their hands seem a little quicker, their fastballs a little snappier than everyone else's.
It is likely that these are tricks of the mind, and that I perceive these chosen players as superior because their status has been planted into my brain by the bloggerati. This is a notable 180 from the usual baseball blogging/SABRmetric goal of pointing out who is actually better than he appears to be to the naked eye.
The real trick would be to take my amateur scout's eye to a game and make the determination myself about who looks the sharpest. Then I could check that against the prospect lists and see what happens. Granted, one game is nothing on lengthy scouting trips and reports, but I have to think that most scouting--by anybody, at any level except the highest--is firmly rooted in the second hand to begin with.
It's too late to try this experiment tonight, as I've already got the names of the chosen ones bouncing around in my head, but perhaps soon I will trek to minor league parks unknown and challenge myself to a Scout-Off. It's me VS. the Internet. I'd better wear my glasses.
How do you watch a minor league game? Is it all beers, conversation and promo night hi jinks, or do you try and get into the prospect-watching yourself?
(For the record, my favorite prospect site is John Sickel's Minor League Ball.)
This week's poem comes a day late, but you know, at least it's here. It's a canto in the tradition of Ezra Pound, featuring an allusion to Ezra Pound, and written by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Ferlinghetti is (I'm pretty sure) a Giants fan, which is a bummer, but his life's work in writing and advocating literature makes up for it. He founded City Lights Books in San Francisco, palled around with fantasy baseball fan Jack Kerouac, and published Ginsberg's Howl. Here's his poem, Baseball Canto:
Watching baseball, sitting in the sun, eating popcorn,
reading Ezra Pound,
and wishing that Juan Marichal would hit a hole right through the
Anglo-Saxon tradition in the first Canto
and demolish the barbarian invaders.
When the San Francisco Giants take the field
and everybody stands up for the National Anthem,
with some Irish tenor's voice piped over the loudspeakers,
with all the players struck dead in their places
and the white umpires like Irish cops in their black suits and little
black caps pressed over their hearts,
Standing straight and still like at some funeral of a blarney bartender,
and all facing east,
as if expecting some Great White Hope or the Founding Fathers to
appear on the horizon like 1066 or 1776.
But it don't stop nobody this time,
in their revolution round the loaded white bases,
in this last of the great Anglo-Saxon epics,
in the territorial libre of Baseball.
But Willie Mays appears instead,
in the bottom of the first, and a roar goes up as he clouts the first one into the sun and takes off, like a foot runner from Thebes.
The ball is lost in the sun and maidens wail after him
as he keeps running through the Anglo-Saxon epic.
And Tito Fuentes comes up looking like a bullfighter
in his tight pants and small pointy shoes.
And the right field bleachers go mad with Chicanos and blacks and Brooklyn beer-drinkers,
"Tito! Sock it to him, sweet Tito!"
And sweet Tito puts his foot in the bucket
and smacks one that don't come back at all,
and flees around the bases like he's escaping from the United Fruit Company.
As the gringo dollar beats out the pound.
And sweet Tito beats it out like he's beating out sury,
not to mention fascism and anti-Semitism.
And Juan Marichal comes up, and the Chicano bleachers go loco again, as Juan belts the first ball out of sight, and rounds first and keeps going
and rounds second and rounds third,
and keeps going and hits pay dirt
to the roars of the grungy populace.
As some nut presses the backstage panic button
for the tape-recorded National Anthem again,
to save the situation.
I watched In the Loop this evening, which is a movie about politicos screaming at each other and forcing their will upon one another through devious and guttural means. It was great, a sort of power-wielding vicarious fantasy film, in which the viewer is able to imagine and enjoy the idea that the world's political puppeteers are all semi-violent masochists screaming insults at each other at every opportunity. It's not a rosy picture, but there is clearly something in all of us--or maybe just in me--that wants matters of import to be decided in barks and rants, rather than in Obama-esque calm, considered conversations.
Eric, in his recent post, posed questions about our relationship to baseball, what lessons we want to learn from it, and where we should draw the line. I have realized in my calm, considered meditation on the above film, that many of us live our baseball lives in pursuit of that similar kind of macho fantasy. The critiques that we lob across the Internet and across the pub table are just as spirited, the sort of outburst that would lead to an unsavory arrest if exercised from a cubicle. When you've got all of the power--when you are a defense secretary, for example, or a seasoned manager of a major league baseball team--the cops clear the way for you when you're walking to the car.
This is nothing new, and it even treads into the territory of the cliche that Eric mentioned, ie. fans living vicariously aggressive lives through sport (see hooligans, football, England). There's the stress relieving nature of the thing, and the social limitations, those seem pretty obvious. But there's still something in it, I think, that bears consideration. Digging quite deep...Why do we need to live vicarious lives at all? What is it about the human experience that demands such fantasies? Why can't we live, as for example my dog does, satisfied with the life we've got? As Jerry Seinfeld would ask it: What's the deal with imagination?
I am unequipped to even brush the hem of these questions. Great men and women have labored in the sweat shop of these inquiries and come up with no solid thing but poetry, answering questions with questions.
Troublesome as the broad questions are, perhaps it bears turning again to Eric's notions, and ponder: what do we expect to get out of these games? We're drawn to them, and we make heroes out of the humans that play the games, but what gnarly truths emerge when we ask why we do what we do?
Part of the appeal of baseball, admittedly, is the luxury of thinking of nothing else, of concentrating upon, as Eric puts it, "the tiny situations, the intricacies of each game." As humans have done for a very long time, we draw the intricacies of our real lives--the sobs and the doldrums and the deficiencies-- from ourselves like a nurse drawing blood into a syringe, and we set our vials into the centrifugal ceremonial space in the middle--the diamond, the great circle, the alpha and the omega, the mandala, the CENTER--and watch it spin. A piece of ourselves spins in the middle, but in giving it over to the communal centrifuge, we buy the luxury of becoming viewers, and we watch ourselves from outside of ourselves. (For a deeper investigation of the symbolism of the baseball field, see Lance Strate's essay in this interesting anthology: Take Me Out to the Ballgame: Communicating Baseball.)
The heroes are the designated dervishes, perambulating the ceremonial stupa as we yell ourselves hoarse. We know full well that Joe Mauer is no hero, that he is no different than we are except that he's been chosen to stand in the eye of the storm, carrying us on his back, bearing the burden of the community. We make a hero of him but it's a play, a ritual, and he is playing out the role that we've assigned him, putting voice to the tragedy and the comedy. We all watch together as the hero walks alone. And it is so ingrained in our concept of community, and of ritual, that we think nothing of this process, but carry it on endlessly.
Why else would Manny Ramirez make fans so angry? It's because he is me, and he is you, and when he dances a jig across the archetypes, when he runs a careless hand across his face and smears his stage make-up, when he kicks the sand mandala up into a colorful cloud, he's raising the curtain to expose the wiring and the complex pulley systems and the bags of sand and the director with a script in his trembling hands and a trouble-shooting expression. That would make anyone nervous, who's invested a pint of his own blood into the occasion, the well-intentioned theater goer who's bought his ticket fair and square, with the understanding that the fourth wall would hold strong. For an actor in this very play to suggest that it's all just a put-on, that you'll never really wield the power that he appears to, that the fans have vested him with for this three hour period; that it's an illusion, a fantastical stage production designed solely to ignite the pleasure sensors in that dozy, gullible mass, the human brain.
Should we, then, give it all up, these rituals (the derivations of which I've tossed into the culture-blender for my own feeble purpose), and tend to adult things, tilling the fields and falling asleep as dusk darkens, a copy of The Economist rising and falling on our chests? Of course not. The theater is a sound and forgiving medium for human expression, ready to take us in and give back to us in equal measure. Do we need to think about the stage and the players and the director? No, but it sure is fun. Is barking at insubordinates while vaccinated by maximum power as enjoyable as it looks on screen or on the field? Probably, but I I'll never know.
For now, and forever (hopefully), the ring will be there for us to throw our caps into; those dad caps and those promotional giveaway caps, the throwback caps and yes, the fashion caps, and the Dodgers cap stacked perilously and improbably on a pile of infuriating dreadlocks.
In a literary sense, I sort of like clichés. Before they become hackneyed and mundane, they are tight exceptional metaphors and similes. The first time somebody compared his lover’s eyes to a glowing moon, or her beauty to a red rose it was brilliant. The meaning of those words has worn over time, but not the initial spark of genius from which they were born. Like any writer, I avoid clichés as much as I can, but their initial spark remains bright in my mind.
The same can be true for most conventional wisdom: at one point, it was not conventional. It was just an idea that explained something fairly well, or a strategy that was effective most of the time. The sacrifice bunt, for example, is a conventional strategy in baseball. It’s often employed without second thought, lauded if effective, criticized if ineffective (or used too frequently). But the first time some manager trotted a weak-hitter out to move a runner over with a bunt, it probably blew minds.
In the tendency to assign grand meaning to Sports, I see both the cliché and the conventional wisdom. I see the initial reasoning for doing so and dig the value of this pretense, but I also see the worn out catchphrases and the strained logic and wonder why it happens. There are so many sayings about Sports – and I mean to refer to Sports as a proper noun here – that it gets hard to remember which ones came from Vince Lombardi and which ones originated with some orthopedic surgeon coaching his son’s Little League Team.
Football is War. Baseball is a microcosm for life. Casey Stengel and John Wooden and so on and so forth and I think I’ll grab myself a drink. The task of a coach is to mold young men, men who prove their mettle, prove their value as humans on the field of play. By this world view, people don’t dive in front of slap shots, or lean into inside fastballs, or take a hard charges in the lane merely because they want to win the game, but because winning the game has everything to do with winning at life. And damn it to hell if life is not about winning.
The point to all this crotchety, self-righteous, rambling is pretty much to bemoan the overwrought (ironic that I’m calling somebody that) way we think about sports. I’m thinking we should back up a smidge. Instead of seeking wisdom in the broad existence of Competition and Running and Playing and Winning and Losing maybe we can find wisdom elsewhere. Maybe the real wisdom can be found in the tiny situations, the intricacies of each game, the times that a particular sporting event lines up with a particular moment in our lives. Baseball is the National Pastime, not the National University or the National Church. Things are better this way.
The game serves a wonderful purpose: not as a metaphor, but as an entity that merits discussion on its own terms. There is insight to be had and wisdom to be found in baseball. The sport has its own language and its own issues and its own ongoing dialogue. Sometimes baseball mirrors greater society and sometimes it exists on a completely separate plane. Baseball and Sports in general, contribute to language and culture and dialogue the way anything else do. There are things a man’s curveball can tell us, but there also things his marriage or his job performance or his fashion sense can tell us.
I love the way Free Darko can extrapolate on-court behavior and performance into stunningly accurate and refreshing takes on an athlete’s broader position in our society, his own personal struggles, and the general mythology of sport. But I also appreciate that while Greg Maddux’s repertoire and approach and legend seem an accurate reflection of his entire existence, he probably wouldn’t put it that way. Sports is just another activity in our lives which means sometimes it’s an effective way to make the nuanced, the deeply personal, the incomprehensible events and emotions that we deal with every day a little easier to understand. But sometimes those events and emotions are better explained in the context of a road trip, or a meal, or a six pack of beer.
The Free Darko guys understand this. They like basketball and have a keen sense for what basketball can tell us about both itself and the broader world, but they realize that the game is not a perfect representation of society. Unlike the speeches of Vince Lombardi, or the pained reminiscing of nostalgia-crazed “those were the days” baseball fans, there is no dogma to be found here. There is only the transitory wisdom and pleasure of a pastime.
We must realize that while Sports can tell us unique and vibrant and refreshing things, it cannot tell us everything. A life is a life, a war is a war, and baseball, to end with a surprisingly fitting cliché, is only a game.
