I've been wanting to get into more of the early 20th century genre of baseball poetry as written by sports writers. None of the vague stuff, no complicated metaphors or symbolism. Nope. This is fun, this is baseball poem as offshoot of game recap. Anyway, we start with Ford C. Frick, former newspaperman, NL president, and MLB commish:
You step up to the platter
And you gaze with flaming hate
At the poor benighted pitcher
As you dig in at the plate.
You watch him cut his fast ball loose,
Then swing your trusty bat
And you park one in the bleachers-
Nothing's simpler than that!
For those of you in the market for more modern day poetry, just change the title to Along Came Albert.
Something really weird happened to me this afternoon. I got all nostalgic about Mark Mulder. I was thinking about pitching, preparing to write a post about the rise of a new wave of aces, when all of a sudden there he was. Mark Mulder, free agent. He was sitting in an empty dugout, gazing out on some nameless field, arms crossed, gangly legs kicked out.
Mark Mulder is only 32 years old. He’s got a career record of 103-60. He has started an All-Star game. He has won big in the playoffs. He has led the American League in wins. And now he is all but forgotten. He is not on a big league roster. He is not on a minor league roster. And he is definitely, definitely not among the National League’s ERA leaders.
That list belongs to a different generation. If in some alternate universe Mark Mulder was among the top ten pitchers in the NL in ERA, he would be the second-oldest pitcher there. Once again, Mark Mulder turns 33 in August.
As of today, June 17, 2009, 33-year old Ted Lilly is the elder statesman amongst NL ERA leaders. Next is Dan Haren, 28. After that it’s a bunch of guys aged 23-26. Their names are Johnny Ceuto, Matt Cain, Tim Lincecum, Chad Billingsley, Josh Johnsen, Jair Jurrjens, Yovani Gallardo, and Zach Duke.
ERA is a clumsy metric and stats in mid-June don’t mean a whole lot. But that’s not the point. The list above provides a rough snapshot of the next few years of NL pitching excellence. Surely some of these young guys won’t maintain their current paces, and some guys who aren’t in the top ten will surpass them. If you look beyond the photo’s borders (pardon the extended metaphor), you’ll find unsurprising things: Johan Santana is 11th in the NL in ERA, Roy Halladay is dominating the American League, and CC Sabathia is doing his usual.
But stay within the borders for a moment. Examine this snapshot in detail, ye nostalgic baseball fans, and despair. For soon, none of the old arms outside it will remain. In other words, classes of stud pitchers rise and fall. They rise in exciting waves, cresting like Ceuto and Cain and company right now. Then they fall as pieces, each pitcher alone in success or failure. Some linger, immune to gravity and time like Greg Maddux. Others go the way of the Mulder.
Consider, for a moment, the wave of the early 2000’s. We can call it the Mulder Collective and take 2003 as the year it crested. The American League saw big --or at least very promising – efforts from Roy Halladay, Barry Zito, Johan Santana, CC Sabathia, Mark Buehrle, Joel Pineiro, and Mulder himself. The NL saw big things from Brandon Webb, Javier Vazquez, Roy Oswalt, Mark Prior, Kerry Wood, and Carlos Zambrano. (At this point, Cubs fans are excused). It’s worth noting also, that a year later Jake Peavy and Ben Sheets emerged as aces.
The members of the Mulder Collective didn’t necessarily rise as a monolithic entity. They all entered the league at different times and ages, surrounded by varying degrees of hype and expectations. In the six years since, each member has found his own unique level of success, and they’ve combined for 25 top-5 Cy Young finishes. But at one point, before their destinies unfolded, an air of mystery surrounded the group. Who would climb Mount Olympus? Who would tempt greatness, but ultimately fly too close to the sun?
It’s all fairly arbitrary isn’t it? The Mulder Collective is my invention. It’s how I make myth out of men, because in the end they are just men. That these men happen to be the first pitchers I watched consciously as they entered the league and matured in it is coincidence. That their arrival coincided with the peak of my late-adolescent fantasy baseball obsession is also coincidence. For somebody a few years older, that first class of pitchers might be called the Millwood Collective.
I have no proof statistically that great pitchers arrive in clusters. They probably don’t. If the Mulder Collective is just projected out of my imagination, then the current state of the pitching leader board is an anomaly caused by small sample size, or just a sign of years passing. I’m looking for something meaningful in a relatively meaningless data set.
If the national pastime is baseball, then the national pastime of baseball fans is building up myths and debunking them. Baseball, more than any other sport, is defined by the tension between the truths we believe emotionally and the truths we understand intellectually. It’s about myths and symbols vs. facts and figures; guts and instincts vs. cold competence. In its current form (tools vs. stats, Joe Morgan vs. rational thought), the quarrel has escalated almost to the point where it undermines the fact that its own nature as a pastime. The joy of myth and the joy of fact need one another. Together, they buoy the Game.
In 2003, when the Mulder Collective began to assert itself, I did not have the burden of perspective. There were many great young pitchers and I watched them and I followed their performances and that was it. I would never have bunched them together as a unit like I do in retrospect. I would certainly never have named them. But at the same time, I was excited about them and amazed by them. There was so much joy in Barry Zito’s soul-crushing curveball, in Mark Buehrle’s robotic consistency that I feel ridiculous just typing about it. But it was there. I expected all of them, even Joel Pineiro, to be great.
Now the wave of pitchers dominating baseball is my age or just a few years older. Maybe that’s why I noticed them in the first place. But regardless of how good they are – and they are damn good – the myth seems a little less elevated. I know more about these pitchers as they rise than I did about the members of the Mulder Collective, and I certainly know more about baseball. I know with dead certainty that some of these guys will flame out, or go the way of the Mulder. But a couple will pitch like heroes long enough that they become them.
There is no back-story compelling enough to preordain success. Nor does any past achievement guarantee a future one. The Mulder Collective is breaking, piece by piece into the individual stories of its members. And it will be replaced by these new kids, with new stories. The real magic is in that cycle, those stories, and the mysteries of their unfolding.
The Buddhists have the ball field. Then the teams
arrive, nine on one, but only three on the other.
The teams confront the Buddhists. The Buddhists
present their permit. There is little point in
arguing it, for the Buddhists clearly have the
permit for the field. And the teams have nothing,
not even two complete teams. It occurs to one team
manager to interest the Buddhists in joining his
team, but the Buddhists won’t hear of it. The teams
walk away with their heads hung low. A gentle rain
begins. It would have been called anyway, they
think suddenly.
I went to Blogs with Balls this weekend, the first ever sports blogging conference. There was some early trepidation about going, but I’m glad I bit the bullet. It was a lot of fun, the food was decent, and I met some exceptionally cool people – more on them later.
More importantly, the conference allowed me to flesh out some ideas on blogs and blogdom and the broader sports media landscape that I had been unable to previously articulate. The panelists were a mix of blogger/writers, new media moguls, and miscellaneous white people. I learned a ton.
I didn’t realize I was learning anything groundbreaking besides how to be good on Twitter until the last panel of the day. It was supposed to be on why the old guard media hates bloggers, but devolved into a sort of free-for-all. FreeDarko’s Bethlehem Shoals worked himself up into an existential, expletive-filled frenzy over what we were all doing there in the first place.
“A blog is just a fucking platform,” he said at one point.
That hit home. I don’t blog because I want to make a million dollars in ad revenue or because I believe in blogging as some sort of movement. I write a blog because blogs are stunningly effective at getting words from one person’s head to another’s line of sight. If this were the 1700s, and the most effective way for me to share a thousand word essay on racism, nationalism, and fan identity was by printing up pamphlets and handing them out on the streets, I'd probably be doing that.
In the 1700s not all pamphleteers were doing the same thing, and today not all bloggers do the same thing. Some pamphleteers wrote angry screeds about the Quartering Act and others collected funny jokes about King George III’s fish-like facial features. It’s unfair to lump those two together content-wise because they both happened to choose the most effective means of distribution.
I was sort of irked by the notion of the blog as a genre and bloggers as a monolithic entity. The platform is still new and its conventions are still being defined. The whole notion of blogger solidarity seems more based on the common recognition of technology’s value (and the whiplash scolding by media folks who don’t) than any unified concept of what we do. Or as Spencer Hall, who blogs for the Sporting News and Every Day Should Be Saturday, so drunkenly put it on Saturday, “we all do different things.”
Many of the panelists, like I said before, weren’t bloggers at all. There were Twitter experts, entrepreneurs, and all kinds of internet gurus. Most of what they talked about was money. How do you turn your passion (blogging, writing, sports, whatever) into cash? How do you grow your audience? How do you become as famous as the guys from Deadspin?
All good questions, but questions that caused me to take a second look at my motivations for blogging and for being there in the first place. I blog because I love to write, and at this point nobody – much less the vaunted mainstream media – is paying me to do it. It’s an outlet and a platform and hell, a bit of a showcase for me. I’m interested in baseball and culture and literature and I think some other people might be too. Hopefully one of those other people works for ESPN or The Atlantic and wants to pay me to write something. If not, that’s alright too. I love the process.
That’s what scared me about that second, businessman type of panelist. I don’t know if he gets or cares about that process. Content might be king to that guy, but only because without it there is nothing to draw an audience, nothing to wrap ads around.
None of this really crystallized until the keynote speaker, a super-rich wine/internet expert named Gary Vaynerchuk took the stage. His message, I thought, was muddled. He said that we should grab life by the balls, define our passion and pursue it and make it our livelihood (key phrase: FUCKING CRUSH IT). Then he said that for every hour we spent on that passion, we should spend twenty or thirty hours on promoting it, on hustling basically. That’s a lot of hours, Gary, and it doesn’t jive with me or my values. I wasn’t the only one who thought so either.
If it’s really about the content, about doing something you care about and doing it well, then that’s what you spend the time on. There was a punk band out of San Pedro, CA in the 1980s called the Minutemen. Their message was simple: We Jam Econo. It’s not about the money or the chicks or the record companies or the egos. It’s about playing the music we love and getting it out there and everything else is bullshit. They’ve got a song called History Lesson, Part II. You may have heard it:
Our band could be your life. Their band was their life. Not because they were out on their knees in front of Capital Records trying to get their demo in the right suit’s hands, but because they put the music first, always. The stage, the radio, the record were just platforms.
Of course I’m not 100 pct idealistic and naïve and I’m not on some futile jihad for artistic integrity. I want more traffic on this blog. I want more attention as a writer. I want to do this for a living. All the passion in the world won’t net you a dime by itself. I’ve got a soap box, and I could stand up here all day and shout for my small audience. But if I don’t step away, that audience won’t grow very fast. It takes networking, hustling, savvy to make it in the business. A Tribe Called Quest puts things into perspective:
Note the last verse from Diamond D. It’s all about striking a balance, and it ain’t easy:
You gotta get a label that's willin' and able
To market and promote, and you better hope
(For what?) That the product is dope
Take it from Diamond, it's like mountain climbin'
When it comes to rhymin' you gotta put your time in
And that’s the one thing I did appreciate about the keynote speaker, Gary Vaynerchuk. He said we should play to our strengths. If that means joining a blog network like Yard Barker or SB Nation to get promoted and make money and build traffic, then maybe it’s a wise thing to do. If that means asking a friend to help with spreading the word about you, while you help them with something else (note: not sure how helpful I can be, but I’ll try), then do it that way.
I may differ from a lot of the other guys at the Blogs with Balls event. I’m not posting a ton every day, or putting up sports gossip and pictures of hot chicks, or writing exclusively about one team. But that’s okay. There’s a place for what they do and a place for what I do.
In the end, a blog is what you make it: journal, news source, humor venue, platform for silly essays only ostensibly about baseball. It’s really up to us.
--
I’m going to list some of the cool folks I talked to at BwB. I’ve spent the last day reading over their sites, and I can say with confidence that aside from being nice guys, they are good writers and worth a look. Some might not be your thing (i.e. I’m a huge Dolphins fan, but spent a lot of the day talking with the proprietor of a Jets blog), but good writing is good writing:
