Let It Be

I have a confession to make - I really dislike New Year's Eve. All that forced "Happy New Year!" jollity rubs me the wrong way. Of course, it's also the one evening of the year where there's likely to be an invitation to a party somewhere (this year, we're doing the inviting, so I can't even wriggle out of it...) so I generally just try to get through the evening without someone calling me Grumpy and asking if Snow White and the other six dwarves will be along soon.

Which is why the end of this post by Sheila hit me like a ton of bricks the other day. The last lines about happiness and openness struck a chord so forcefully that the lines from Longfellow were immediately etched on my brain. I searched out the quote (from Hyperion) and offer up the whole passage today as an apology in advance to those natural optimists who will be grinning at me all night:
I'm quite happy to contemplate the thought of a happy New Year, but please let me do it in my own quiet way.

Laugh Out Loud

My belated holiday gift to you, dear reader, is Annette and Kristen discussing the World Baseball Classic:

How is Tony not representing Italy?!? His name is TONY GRAFFANINO for crying out loud! My nonna calls him that "nice italian on our team." If 4-foot tall, 88-year-old Italian grandmothers place him on Italy's team, then dammit, he should be there.

Brilliant. In fact, classic...

Human Touch

The tickets have been purchased.

The end-of-year bonus is winging its way to me as I write (Note to boss: Thank you, thank you, thank you. Your loyal, caring employee, Iain).

All that remains is for me to book a flight and find a hotel and we’re set to go. After all my aborted trips I have a good feeling about this one. As Major League Baseball reminds us every July: this time it counts.

After 19 years of following baseball from afar – casually at first and then with increasing intensity – I’m finally going to be able to sit in a major league ballpark and watch a game (or four). Since the trip is still a good four months away, I’m trying to remain calm about the whole thing, but every time I see a picture of Fenway I get a jolt of excited anticipation.

The anticipation is partly due to the games, but the games are only a part of the story. If it were only about the games, I could easily stay at home and watch them on the Internet. This trip is about the whole experience, about being in a city where your baseball cap is not a fashion statement but a pledge of allegiance, where nobody is going to ask if the "B" stands for Baltimore or who this "Robert" guy is.

But more than any of that, I’m looking forward to meeting Red Sox fans. The Internet is a wonderful thing, which has allowed me to ‘meet’ baseball fans from all over the world, but no matter how much time you spend going back and forth with people in forums, e-mails and comment boxes, there comes a point where you crave a real baseball conversation with a living, breathing baseball fan, and I’m hoping that this trip will allow me to have many of those.

For those of you who live in baseball towns, just think for a second of the number of baseball conversations you have in any given week – at home, in the office, at the grocery store, on the telephone. Now subtract those conversations from your life as a [insert team name here] fan and think just how much would be missing. As you can imagine I am looking forward to contacting some of the people I 'know' from out there in cyberspace and trying to get together over a couple of beers to talk baseball. So this is an open invitation: if you're going to be in the Boston area between May 3 and May 6 and feel like talking baseball with a guy with a funny accent, please let me know - I'm open to all offers.

Oh, before I forget, one last key piece of information: the beers are on me!

Addiction

I saw people around me getting hooked, and, inwardly, I smiled. "You'll never catch me doing that," I thought. "It's for weak people whose shallow lives have no meaning. I don't need that."

At least, that was the reason I gave myself, but deep down I think I suspected that it might get its claws in me and and never let go. Then, during a lull in the Christmas festivities, someone said "Go on - give it a try," and I wasn't strong enough to resist. This is powerful stuff, there's no gradual process. Ten minutes after the first hit my anal-retentive personality kicked in and I was hooked.

So here is my plea to those of you reading this: don't try it, don't let members of your family or anyone you know try it. For the love of God, STAY AWAY FROM IT!

Poetry In Motion

Whilst trawling the Internet this evening for some amusing and/or insightful baseball quotes, I came across this one from Bill Veeck ("As In Wreck"):

Baseball is almost the only orderly thing in a very unorderly world. If you get three strikes, even the best lawyer in the world can't get you off.

Two hours later, like some unconscious echo of the same thought, I found this passage in Roger Angell's The Summer Game:

Always, it seems, there is something more to be discovered about this game. Sit quietly in the upper stand and look at the field. Half close your eyes against the sun, so that the players recede a little, and watch the movements of baseball. The pitcher, immobile on the mound, holds the inert white ball, his little lump of physics. Now, with abrupt gestures, he gives it enormous speed and direction, converting it suddenly into a line, a moving line. The batter, wielding a plane, attempts to intercept the line and acutely alter it, but he fails; the ball, a line again, is redrawn to the pitcher, in the center of this square, the diamond. Again the pitcher studies his task - the projection of his next line through the smallest possible segment of an invisible seven-sided solid (the strike zone has depth as well as height and width) sixty feet and six inches away; again the batter considers his even more difficult proposition, which is to reverse this imminent white speck, to redirect its energy not in a soft parabola or a series of diminishing squiggles but into a beautiful and dangerous new force, of perfect straightness and immense distance. In time, these and other lines are drwn on the field; the batter and the fielders are also transformed into fluidity, moving and converging, and we see now that all movement in baseball is a convergence toward fixed points - the pitched ball toward the plate, the thrown ball toward the right angles of the bases, the batted ball toward the as yet undrawn but already visible point of congruence with either the ground or a glove. Simultaneously, the fielders hasten toward that same point of meeting with the ball, and both the base-runner and the ball, now redirected, toward their encounter at the base. From our perch, we can sometimes see three or four or more such geometries appearing at the same instant on the green board below us, and, mathematicians that we are, can sense their solution even before they are fully drawn. It is neat, it is pretty, it is satisying. Scientists speak of the profoundly moving aesthetic beauty of mathematics, and perhaps the baseball field is one of the few places where the rest of us can glimpse this mystery.

The last dimension is time. Within the ballpark, time moves differently, marked by no clock except the events of the game. This is the unique, unchangeable feature of baseball, and perhaps explains why this sport, for all the enormous changes it has undergone in the past decade or two, remains somehow rustic, unviolent, and introspective. Baseball's time is seamless and invisible, a bubble within which players move at exactly the same pace and rhythms as all their predecessors. This is the way the game was played in our youth and in our fathers' youth, and even back then - back in the country days - there must have been the same feeling that time could be stopped. Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young. Sitting in the stands, we sense this, if only dimly. The players below us - Mays, DiMaggio, Ruth, Snodgrass - swim and blur in memory, the ball floats over to Terry Turner, and the end of this game may never come.

Simple lines, intertwining.

Blue Christmas

Everyone seemed to be getting some kind of gift today and I could tell that my poor old blog was feeling a little left out, so I decided to give it a new look. After months of looking at acres of white screen (the answer to the question "How much more white could it have been?" was "None, none more white") I thought we might go with this little blue / grey number. Hope you like it.

Whilst I'm here, I'd like to take the opportunity to wish all those of you who stop by here every now and again all the very best for the holiday season. Peace on earth, good will toward men etc.

Bye Bye Johnny

"There's no way I can go play for the Yankees, but I know they're going to come after me hard," [Damon] said on May 3. "It's definitely not the most important thing to go out there for the top dollar, which the Yankees are going to offer me. It's not what I need."

Good to see that there are still men of principle playing this game.

To be fair to Damon, he was still a member of the Red Sox on May 3rd, so any open indication that he might be interested in going over to the Dark Side Of The Pinstripe would have been a guarantee of boos and hostility at Fenway. I do however have a harder time with phrases like this:

"My message to Red Sox fans is I tried, I tried everything in my power to come back"

If that were really true then he would have signed the 4 / 40 deal that the Red Sox offered. It's always hard for me to get any kind of perspective on these deals, because the money is so ridiculous. Part of me thinks "if you really wanted to stay, then you could have signed the contract which guaranteed you $10, 000, 000 a year" (I can get a better idea of the amount with all the zeros in there), but everything is relative, and the only people who can really give any opinion are the players themselves. I know that if someone offered me a 30% pay rise to do exactly the same job in another city, I would probably signed on the dotted line, and if the Red Sox weren't prepared to match the Yankees offer - for whatever reason - then it's their loss.

I really can't figure out the thinking behind the Red Sox (non-)offer. Is $13m a year a fair price for a genuine leadoff hitter? Given that no team in baseball - not even the Yankees - was going to give Damon the 7 /84 deal his agent Scott Boras initially talked about, 4 / 52 seems like a pretty good trade-off.

Apart from the gaping hole this leaves in the leadoff spot and in center field, this deal makes it all the more essential that the Red Sox do everything in their power to keep Manny. Losing one star outfielder is careless; losing two would be wilful negligence.

Christmas In Heaven

I was going to rant about how fed up I am of the annual orgy of spending and excess that is Christmas, until The Eddie Kranepool Society pointed me in the direction of this:

Mets pitcher Kris Benson as Santa and his wife Anna as Mrs. Claus at the Mets' holiday party at the Diamond Club at Shea Stadium (Newsday).

Christmas? Love it - always have done, always will.

Does This Bus Stop At 116th St?

Yes it does, and this is why.

Classic.

Sell, Sell, Sell

I'm glad to see that baseball writers are no different from us common mortals when it comes to selling. To sell Mrs Iain the idea of a $1200 trip to Boston, I have to play the "it's something I've dreamed about for years" card. And to sell us the idea of Roger Clemens possibly returning to the Red Sox, writers are starting to get creative with the English language.

Roger Clemens is many things, but I'm afraid "ageless" is not one of them - he is a 43-year-old power pitcher with 4700 innings on the clock. I'm not objecting to the idea, as I would love to see Clemens in a Red Sox uniform again - I just don't like being sold something with the wrong label on it. Tell me that there would be a risk involved due to Clemens' age and injury worries and I'll listen to what you have to say, but please don't try to sell me Peter Pan.

Sunny Afternoon

You all remember that "I hand over approximately none of my hard earned cash to the Red Sox" speech from the other day? Well, I'm delighted to say that it's no longer technically true:


Such simple objects, but so hard to get hold of. In the end I spent about 5 1/2 hours on redsox.com, going through the laborious process of buying the tickets, which went something like this:

1) Click on the game you want.

2) Welcome to the Boston Red Sox Virtual Waiting Room!

Select Red Sox 2006 Single Game tickets are now on sale.

We are experiencing very high demand. As a result, all requests for seats cannot be served simultaneously. Please be patient, and your browser will be refreshed in:

When we refresh your browser, we will determine your status in the waiting room and if appropriate give you an opportunity to request seats. DO NOT REFRESH THIS WINDOW. We appreciate your patience.

3) Sit staring at the screen for two hours hoping that the Red Sox deem it "appropriate to give you an opportunity to request seats". (Two questions: firstly, can anyone enlighten me as to how they decide to whom it is appropriate to give the opportunities? I was scared they would run a check on me, find out that I rooted for the Yankees once upon a time and then bump me from the VWR. And secondly, could they have made their sentence any more conditional? I think not...).

4) Resist the urge to refresh the damn window every two minutes, trusting that you really are in a virtual queue somewhere, and not the victim of some elaborate practical joke.

5) Bugger off every now and again to go and make coffee / do your laundry / go grocery shopping / read War & Peace.

6) Come back to the PC to discover that one of your VWR windows has turned into an actual redsox.com screen, with actual ticket options.

7) Panic.

8) Select the tickets you want, only to be offered something else in another part of the ballpark.

9) Click 85 times on the "Continue" button, only to be informed that your request cannot be processed right now due to the high volume of traffic ("no shit...!").

10) Then, just as you're considering whether you shouldn't opt for Devil Rays season tickets instead, you're there - the tickets are yours, and you're dancing around the living room, wondering what Fenway looks like in the springtime.

All in all, it was a pretty good birthday :-)

Birthday

(that would be the number of candles, rather than a tribute to the recently departed...)

I'm not really a birthday guy. I tend not to celebrate them in any kind of big way, and this year is no exception - a good meal and a bottle of fine wine are about as exciting as it will get today. However, to compensate for the low-key celebration, I have decided to try to get myself the one present that I really want: a Red Sox game at Fenway.

I don't quite know when or how it will happen (and if my boss is reading this, I could really use that end-of-year bonus...), but you read it here first, folks: 2006 will be the year I finally get to see a game of Major League baseball.

Please tune in soon for the next episode of our new winter drama Please Come to Boston.

Take This Longing

There has been little activity on The Baseball Desert recently, but it's not for lack of things to comment on - it seems as if every time I've logged on to MLB.com there has been news of one heavyweight trade or another. I was going to link to some of the more notable deals, but it's only when going back over the archived news stories that I've realised just how much activity there has been over the last two or three weeks. I can't figure out whether there has been more activity this year than in previous years, or whether it's just that my knowledge of, and interest in, baseball has increased to the point of me knowing exactly who they're talking about in a "Bigbie and Miles for King" trade headline.

Given the volume of trades I am going to need at least two months to get used to all the household names who will be wearing new uniforms on Opening Day, including those who will - or will not - be wearing the uniform of the Boston Red Sox.

I've given much thought to the wheelings and dealings of baseball's front offices in general - and Boston's in particular - over the last few weeks. There have been familiar faces who have moved on, new faces who have arrived and old faces who have played that jaded "Je t'aime, moi non plus" card. Some of the trades have seemed logical, others have had me (and other bloggers) wondering just WTF is going on, but the one common denominator is that they all underline the fact that baseball is a business, and players are its prime commodity. We can hope and wish and theorise as much as we want, but at the end of the day, all of this is beyond our control. Maybe we liked it better when Theo was holding the reins, but Theo's gone, and so has some of the team he helped assemble. So what's the answer? Do I rant and rave and feel miserable because some of the players I'd really started to like have moved on? Do I get all uptight because the front office seems to have made some moves that suggest it couldn't organise the proverbial piss-up in a brewery (I would like to emphasize "seems" here, since I have a naïve kind of faith that these guys have at least some idea of what they're doing, and I can't believe that trading away our prime shortstop prospect because we have a star shortstop signed to a four-year deal and then trading away said star shortstop for our 14th third baseman is the end of the story). I could do these things, but they're not going to do me any good - nobody asked me whether I wanted to trade away Nomar or Pedro or Renteria, and nobody's going to call and see what I feel about the Manny / Johnny Damon situations, so what's the point?

When the Theo fiasco went down, I responded to a post by Beth with a few thoughts. Things in Boston have changed even more since then, but my thoughts remain the same, so I figured it was OK to plagiarise myself to express how I feel:

I guess I have trouble seeing the "hard, cold reality [...] that they are a private, for-profit enterprise over which [we] have no power" as fresh news. Haven't we known this for ever? I'm as naïve a baseball fan as you will find, but even I know that it is not the pastoral pastime that we would like it to be, at least, not outside the foul lines.

Any time that we attach our emotions to something that manages to put the words "annual salary" and "$10m" in the same sentence, we know we're headed for trouble at some point. But I, like you, am prepared to accept that. It is going to suck, from time to time, and we will sometimes feel - as I said the other day - that we have "been dumped, by proxy and for reasons we neither understand nor have control over", but what are we going to do?

I see the point about putting your money where your mouth is and just not buying the tickets anymore (God - I wish I had the luxury of saying "OK - no more Red Sox tix for me..."), but I don't see how it fits into the bigger picture. What does it mean? Does it mean you're no longer a fan of the Sox? Does it mean that you'll follow them from afar, a kind of disinterested and disenfranchised observer (which in turn, to me, also evokes questions of rooting for the laundry: do we root regardless of who's wearing the shirt (and, by extension, of who's running the show)? Does it mean no baseball at all, or maybe only the 'uncorrupted' minor-leagues / Little League? Where do you draw the final line?

And one other point - if you're going to worry about the cold, hard facts regarding this for-profit enterprise now (i.e. when things have gone pear-shaped), don't you, by the same token, have to apply the same thinking to, say, the 2004 season? It was the same for-profit enterprise, run by the same people, so were we ignoring all that because they brought home a championship? Or do their current actions in some way invalidate 2004? If we're feeling used and abused now, does that not mean we were foolish for feeling elated last October?

Lots of questions and very few answers. I guess what I'm trying to articulate is that I'm not ready to give up on the Sox or on baseball, but that it is a little hard to define the terms of the relationship I have right now with the ballclub.

Well, that was back at the beginning of November, and my relationship with the ballclub has become a little clearer since then. I want the Red Sox to field a competitive team in 2006, a team that has a chance to go all the way, but I have no say in the matter. The 'advantage' I have over other fans (and believe me, it's not often I see it as an advantage) is that I live 4,000 miles away and consequently hand over approximately none of my hard-earned cash to the club (unless you count the 1/30th share of the $99 MLB.TV package that I presume goes to the Red Sox). This means that there is no possibility of a boycott or a protest at the (non-)moves that have been made this offseason; the flip-side is that I will have no qualms about rooting for the Red Sox, whoever they may be. It might be because of the distance, it might be because my love of the team is relatively new, but I don't feel personally slighted by this offseason. Maybe Beth is onto something when she throws this out there:

Frankly, I may just end up trying to enjoy next season as a kind of a la carte buffet of new players in my favorite laundry--might just look at it as a pu pu platter from around the league assembled for our sampling by the Red Sox.

When you think about it, all seasons are like that - it's just that some seasons the laundry looks better than others. Would I like to see Manny in left field and Johnny Damon leading off for the Sox next year? Of course - I mean, who wouldn't? But if it doesn't happen, I'll still be there, rooting for my favourite laundry, and here's why: ask me which three players I have loved to watch over the past two seasons and I will cite a cast-off from the Minnesota Twins, a guy with the grand total of 86 at-bats in a Red Sox uniform and a part-time second baseman picked up in mid-season from the Kansas City Royals.

I've looked at the Marlins this winter and wondered what it would be like to be a fan of a team that is offloading pretty much every big name player, and I've come to the conclusion that I could live with it. New faces coming along - whether cut-rate wholesale or in expensive dribs and drabs - is an integral part of baseball, and in amongst those new faces there are players we will come to know and love. They might or might not bring another championship to Boston, but that's beside the point - what matters is that they will be our guys, and we will live and die with them as long as they wear the uniform and play the game right. Can we ask for any more?