Baseball, the Internet & me (Part IV)

I think it’s in the movie Major League where the manager of the hopeless Cleveland Indians gathers his players together in the locker room to give them a lecture about the game of baseball, and at one point he says this: “It’s a simple game - you throw the ball, you hit the ball, you catch the ball”… [Update: it's actually in the movie Bull Durham. Thanks to Matt at Just Another Mariners Blog for setting the record straight...] In a sense, he’s right, because it is a very simple game, but, within that simple framework of run + hit + catch, there are endless permutations. I had an interesting e-mail exchange earlier this year with my good friend Tim, who is the inspiration behind The Baseball Desert (see post of Oct 23) and who asked me if games (especially the long, drawn-out, 6-hour, 16-inning ones) are exciting or not. My answer was more or less as follows:

They can be exciting, whether they're over 9 innings or more. I've actually seldom seen a boring game of baseball. I'm possibly biased, but I think – certainly if you compare it to soccer, for example – that the rhythm of the game is different and makes for a different approach. In soccer, there's a lot of team build-up, and sometimes, in those terrible, dull matches, it all goes to waste when the team loses the ball, and that kind of thing can go on for 90 minutes. It's not necessarily 'bad' play, just fruitless. However, in baseball, there is the constant confrontation between pitcher and hitter: whatever the game, whatever the final result, you're going to see that particular confrontation at least 54 times (or 51 if the home team is ahead after eight-and-a-half innings). And each time, there's the same set of questions, but with an infinite variety of answers. Is the pitcher throwing strikes or does he not have his control? Is he going to throw a fastball up around the hitter's ears or is he going to go with the knee-high curve? Is the hitter on a streak? Is he just looking to make contact? Does the situation call for a hit or will he take the walk? Is the hitter going to try to bunt? If he swings, will it be a home run or a strikeout? What about the guy on first - is he going to steal? If there's a hit, is the runner on first going to try to go to third base or maybe even score? If it's a ground ball, is the fielder going to make the play? If he makes the play, can he get get two outs? Can the runner beat the play? If it's a fly-ball, is the fielder going to make the catch? If he makes the catch, can the runner tag up and still advance one base? If the base-runner is trying to score, is he going to get around the catcher's tag? Well, you get the picture... ;-) The point is, though, that with all these different situations occurring all the time, there are obviously going to be situations and plays that you’ve seen hundreds of times before, but there is also the very real possibility that you might see something you've never seen before, so 'boring' is rarely an option. Roger Angell mentioned a great example in his postseason wrapup: Boston’s Bill Mueller hitting two grand slams in the same game, from different sides of the plate, in consecutive innings – never been done before, ever…

To come full circle, there's also the fact that baseball doesn't have a time limit - you play the nine innings (or however many it takes), but the inning goes on until you've got the three outs. This means that there's always a chance you can come back into a game, as long as you can keep sending guys to the plate: a couple of seasons back, the Indians beat the Mariners by scoring something ridiculous like 12 runs in the ninth inning; then you have Games 4 and 5 of the 2001 World Series, in which the Yankees – on consecutive nights in New York – hit game-tying home runs in the bottom of the ninth inning with two men out, and ended up winning both games; and, of course, Game 7 of this year’s ALCS, when the Yankees rallied against the invincible Pedro Martinez in the now infamous eighth inning and then won the game with a walk-off homer in the bottom of the eleventh inning (from Aaron Boone, of all people, who had been hitting worse than me up to that point…). The stuff of legends...

Yogi was right (and it’s one of the real beauties of this wonderfully simple yet complex game): it ain't over 'til it's over…

Part V

Words (don't come easy)

Thanks to Alex Belth at Bronx Banter for this link to Roger Angell's 2003 season wrapup in the New Yorker. Angell has always been one of my favourite baseball writers, but even if that weren't the case, you have to love a baseball article that includes the phrase "the wholly discombobulated Alfonso Soriano"...

The New Yorker also provides irrefutable evidence that Angell is one of the all-time greats by printing one of Angell's pieces from 1963 - this guy has been writing consistently good stuff for over forty years. Read it and weep...

Baseball, the Internet & me (Part III)

*****WARNING – THE TEXT BELOW CONTAINS EXPLICIT LYRICISM*****

When it’s played well, baseball is a game which has an almost balletic quality to it. I’m not saying that other sports don’t sometimes have that same quality, it’s just that it seemed to me that baseball had more of those graceful, athletic moments than other sports that I had seen up to that point. There are lots of extraordinary examples that can be cited – Willie Mays’ amazing catch in the ’54 World Series, Brooks Robinson’s amazing plays in the 1970 World Series – but what amazed me the most were the ordinary aspects of the game – I watched pitchers throw curveballs which defied the laws of gravity, I watched hitters react to having a projectile thrown at them (sorry, to them – Pedro Martinez wasn’t pitching…) from 60 feet away by hitting it over a fence 400 feet from home plate and, my favourite thing of all, I watched teams turn ‘routine’ double-plays which left me speechless. If there’s one baseball play I love above all others – whether it be at Little League or Major League level – it’s the double-play. There is a level of co-ordination required to get the ball cleanly from shortstop to second base to first base before the hitter runs those 90 feet that still amazes me even today. The overriding images that stayed with me from my initial exposure to baseball – outside of the look of despair on Bill Buckner’s face when that ground ball got by him – were those of a shortstop leaping in the air to avoid the runner charging in, whilst making a perfect throw to first base to retire the hitter. For people raised on baseball there’s possibly nothing extraordinary about that play (for it to be extraordinary it needs a behind-the-back flip from the second baseman), but to my foreign eyes, it encapsulated everything that I found exciting in baseball – speed, strength, grace, agility and perfect timing…

Part IV

Baseball, the Internet & me (Part II)

There are moments in life when you fall head-over-heels in love – with a member of the opposite sex, with a song, with a city, with a particular flavour of Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream – and in October 1986 I realised you can fall in love with a sport. It wasn’t quite love at first sight, because I’m sure I saw at least one or two of the earlier Series games that year, but I do know that when I saw Game 6 of that World Series, with all its drama and its tension and its amazing finish, I was hooked.

Like with football, I didn’t understand all the subtleties of what I was seeing on the field, and I certainly didn’t understand the historical aspects of what was going on (the first time I saw it, Bill Buckner’s error was just a ball that got by a first baseman, and not a stake driven through the heart and hopes of Red Sox Nation) but, unlike with football, it didn’t really matter, because I was under the spell.

Buckner’s error was clearly the highlight (or lowlight) of the game, but it was the rest that had really got my attention – the pitching, the hitting, the fielding, the catches, the throws, the uniforms, the caps. You name it, I loved it. In purely visual / entertainment terms, it had everything that football had (the teams with ‘exotic’ names, the uniforms, the caps…), but in sporting terms it had some indefinable quality that just drew me to it. Thomas Boswell wrote a great piece a good few years ago entitled “99 Reasons Why Baseball Is Better Than Football”, and although many of the points could provide fans of the respective sports with years and years of material for heated debate, there are one or two of his reasons which ring true for me. The fact that football is a very physical sport in which players are obliged to wear protective padding and helmets is one of the things I don’t like – the players are immediately distanced from the crowd, hidden behind their clothing, whereas in baseball, we get to see what they actually look like. On top of that, a lot of football players – as Boswell says – are like freaks of nature. One of the football players I remember best from those Channel 4 days was William ‘The Refrigerator’ Perry, and the nickname says it all really (actually, that’s not quite true - the nickname didn’t really do him justice, because he was in fact bigger than most refrigerators I had ever seen…). Although baseball players are clearly athletes in excellent physical condition (with the exception of David Wells, they look more or less like regular human beings.

The fact that they looked like you or I (OK, I have more of a David Wells figure than a Randy Johnson one, but it’s still more or less the same ballpark…) was both positive and, in a sense, misleading. It was positive because it meant I could identify – and identify with – these guys, but it was misleading in the sense that they made a hellishly difficult sport look relatively easy. It was only when I stepped out onto a baseball field for the first time that I realised that the ball moves pretty quickly from the pitcher’s hand to the catcher’s glove, that the 90 feet from home plate to first base is further than it looks on TV and that playing center field is not quite as easy as the Brewers' Brady Clark makes it look...

Part III

Baseball, the Internet & me (Part I)

It’s a long story, but one which several people have asked me about, particularly since I started the blog. How the heck does an English guy end up as a crazy baseball fan? Well, here’s how it happened…

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away… Oh, sorry, that’s someone else’s story… Actually, it wasn’t that long ago, it was back in 1986 – half a lifetime for me, but not long in terms of, say, the history of the universe.

Anyway, I’d had a pretty straightforward upbringing as far as sports go – the holy British trinity of football (soccer), rugby and cricket. Soccer was my thing, both as a player and a spectator, but I also had a soft spot for cricket, with its slower rhythm and its slightly arcane rules and traditions. All three of these sports got extensive coverage on the main UK TV channels at the time (of which there were just 4 – this was before the explosion of cable and satellite), but one of the channels – Channel 4, a recent addition to the UK TV market – had a thing for American sports. I guess in part it was dictated by the fact that they had neither the money nor the influence to get TV rights to the three main British sports, but I also think there was a real desire to offer viewers something new and help American sports get a wider audience in the UK. Football (not soccer, football) was one of the first things they showed – there was a regular highlights show every week and live broadcast of the Superbowl every year. I watched the football, and I have to say that I liked it – I liked the atmosphere, I liked the fact that it was so different to anything I'd seen before, I loved all the team names (the Buccaneers, Patriots, Raiders, Jets etc. seemed made a nice change from all the Uniteds / Athletics / Towns that abound in British soccer…), I liked the uniforms and the helmets and the cheerleaders. However, the one thing that didn’t really grab me was the game itself. Part of the problem was that I obviously didn’t understand everything that was happening on the field. Channel 4 did their best to rectify that – they realised that probably 95% of their audience was new to the sport, and so there were plenty of explanations of the rules and tactics, but the truth is that it just didn’t grab my attention (at least as a sport – as entertainment it was second to none…). Maybe it was just a little bit too much like rugby (i.e. a contact sport with a really weird shaped ball…), and rugby was the one ‘big’ sport I’d played of which I’d never been a real fan.

Encouraged by the success of their football coverage, Channel 4 decided that UK sports fans were ready for a new challenge, and so that autumn I got my first real glimpse of baseball. I knew that baseball was out there somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic, I’d heard of Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio and the New York Yankees, but it was more in terms of just general cultural and sporting knowledge than anything else. To me back then, baseball was nothing more than a more complicated version of the game of rounders we used to play back in primary school (except that the baseball field was bigger, and they had funny pinstriped uniforms). And then I saw the 1986 World Series…

(In an effort to keep the Matrix-like suspense-level as high as possible, Parts II and III will follow later in the week...)

Part II

Strawberry, Mel shake

(It's Friday afternoon and it's been a long, hard week, so apologies for the terrible MLB.com-style pun on this one...)

Agreements have been reached in New York... The news is that despite George Steinbrenner (in the first case) and because of George Steinbrenner (in the second case) Mel Stottlemyre and Darryl Strawberry will be part of the Yankees organisation next year. Stottlemyre's decision to stay could be a factor in Andy Pettitte's "should I stay or should I go?" dilemma, whilst Strawberry is being given yet another chance by Steinbrenner to prove that he has turned his life around.

Steinbrenner was quoted as saying: "Our young players will learn from his knowledge and talents as a ballplayer as well as from the mistakes he has made," said Steinbrenner Thursday. "I will not turn my back on a man who has failed and is doing everything possible to turn his life around."

Do as I say and not as I do...

The rumour mill

We've heard about A-Rod possibly going to the Red Sox, we've heard about him possibly going to the Yankees, but Thomas Boswell likes the idea of A-Rod as an Oriole.

The Boys of Winter

Christian Ruzman over at The Cub Reporter has this great quote from Rogers Hornsby on his homepage:

"People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball. I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring."

That's what it feels like I'm doing right now - staring out of the window, waiting for spring (or spring training, to be more specific) to roll around. I'm passing the time reading about baseball (at more or less all the sites listed on the right), thinking about baseball and watching baseball (those classic games available on MLB.com), but I'm not actually spending all that much time writing about it. I'm keeping an eye on the trades and the different moves happening (as well as those apparently not happening) in the baseball world, but there's really not that much to do except sit around and watch as the winter soap opera unfolds.

The one advantage of the offseason is that it sometimes gives you chance to reflect on the bigger picture, because you're not spending all your time reading boxscores and analysing specific games and players. For me right now the bigger picture involves trying to respond to the question that lots of people ask when they come across this weblog: how does an English guy living in France end up as a baseball fan? I thought I would be able to answer quickly and concisely, but the question opens up all kinds of avenues worth exploring, so it's taking a little while to piece something together. When I finally get something close to a complete answer, I'll post it on here.

A mere amateur

Although the offseason is only a few days old, I'm already beginning to realise my analytical shortcomings. During the regular season and the postseason, there are always 'things' to talk about - games, box-scores, tactics, managerial moves, individual records etc. - but the offseason has none of these things. Instead, the focus is both larger and more intense - check out almost any baseball blog, and you'll see fans dissecting the past season and analysing teams' chances for next year.

I have to say that I never fail to be impressed by this kind of analysis. Of course, it's just individuals' opinions, but the opinions are almost always backed up with a bunch of relevant stats (relevant to the author of the opinions, at least). It's at times like these that I realise that I'm still 'just' a fan of the game, rather than any kind of analyst (even in the most amateur sense of the word). There's a simple reason for this - I think I just haven't been exposed to enough baseball (despite the late nights and the broadcasts and the websites and the weblogs) to have a good, comprehensive picture of how it really all fits together. I can see, for example, that Soriano has a problem with discipline at the plate, but I couldn't for the life of me give an opinion as to whether a possible Soriano-for-Carlos-Beltran trade would be a good move or not. I guess it will come with time and increased exposure to the game (welcome to "YouHaveNoLifeVille"...).

In the meantime, I'm happy to claim my status as an "amateur" (in the true French sense of the word): in English, it is often set in opposition to "professional", with the inherent criticism that occasionally brings, but in French it simply means somebody who loves something (wine, baseball, music, ...). I'll never be Thomas Boswell or Jayson Stark or Peter Gammons, but I'm quite happy plodding along here at The Baseball Desert, doing this 'for love of the game'...

Better late than never

I was pointed in the direction of this gem by a number of different blogs. I know I'm posting it after everybody else, but I figured it was worth pointing out, just in case you haven't come across it.

I don't listen to the radio that much here in France (thus avoiding brain-numbing over-exposure to French "music"), so I don't know whether there's a booming talk-radio culture over here. I suspect not, but even if there were, nothing could come close to this guy. For his sake, I sure hope that Lee Mazzilli doesn't end up in Baltimore too...

Setting the ball rolling

Trades - whether they be during the season or during the offseason - are like a complex game of chess, but instead of there being two players, there are up to thirty different players playing the game at any one time.

After a few days of rumours and speculation the current game got under way yesterday, with the Phillies trading Brandon Duckworth and two minor-league players to the Astros in exchange for closer Billy Wagner. The trade itself shows that the Phillies are willing to do what they have to do to shore up their very weak bullpen, which blew 18 save opportunities last year. Had they been able to prevent just 50% of those blown saves, the Phillies would have been playing in the postseason instead of the Florida Marlins. Wagner converted 44 of 47 save opportunities last year, so you can be sure that Larry Bowa is going to be happier going to him in save situations than he was with any of Philadelphia's closers last year.

However, just like in any game of chess, the trade is not a stand-alone move - it opens up other possibilities and shuts down other options all over the place. For example, the Astros - having shed a chunk of payroll - might now be interested in trying to entice the Yankees' Andy Pettitte to Houston. Pettitte is expected to file for free agency in the coming days, and although it would be in the Yankees' best interests to keep him in New York, he might be interested in playing closer to his Deer Park (TX) home. It's by no means a done deal, but it's one of the possibilities that the Wagner deal opens up...

On a similar theme - but this time in-house - you have the game of musical coaches currently being played at Yankee Stadium. After Don Zimmer quit his job as Yankees' bench coach (and hitting coach Rick Down was fired) right after the World Series, a number of names started to be bandied around, notably Grady Little (for the bench coach job). As it turns out, the Yankees are staying more or less within their organisation on this one - third-base coach Willie Randolph will be Joe Torre's bench coach next year, first-base coach Lee Mazzilli will be promoted to third-base coach (if he's not offered the managerial position with the Orioles), Luis Sojo - having been released by the Yankees as a player - will become the first-base coach. And who's going to be making a welcome return to Yankee Stadium as the club's next hitting coach? Donnie Baseball...

Sweet dreams are made of this

Left field is where Manny "Can't Even Give Me Away" Ramirez plays, but it's also where Bob Klapisch has gone looking for his wild idea for a trade that might solve some problems for the Red Sox and the Yankees. (The link might require you to register, but the article is worth the ten seconds it takes...).

I love the crazy speculation that the offseason brings with it - it's a time to dream of impossible trades, fantasy lineups (A-Rod going to Boston is another rumour I like right now...) and endless possibilities. Expectations are obviously lower in Tampa Bay and Detroit than they are in, say, New York or Boston, but fans all over the country are hoping that their team can put together just the right mixture of players to take it to a World Series title / win its division / have a winning season / lose less games than last season (delete as appropriate).