Tohu Bohu

One of the highlights of my recent trip to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum was when my father and I saw the statues of famous fans, and my father said “That’s Hilda Chester!” and I said “Oh, right, the cowbell lady” and he said “I remember her. She used to sell peanuts at the racetrack.” My father had never been to the Hall of Fame, and had wanted to go for sixty-something years, and he was not disappointed.

It will not, I think, entirely come as a surprise to Gentle Readers that my father collects baseball books, specifically books about the Giants. One thing he had his eye out for, as we wandered through the memorabilia shops that line the Main Street of Cooperstown, New York, was a book about the Giants to add to his collection. Book collecting of that kind, of course, has been less interesting lately; even though he isn’t on the internet himself, when a book comes out about the Giants he is likely to hear about it, and then he can pass along the title and author to his local Borders and wait for them to produce it for him. While we were in the bookstore at the NBHFM itself, I spotted a book called Victory Faust, pointed it out to him, and he purchased it, very pleased with his success. When we wandered in to the Giamatti Research Center, we wound up chatting with a fellow there and mentioning the purchase, and he said “Oh, Gabe’s book. Would you like him to sign it?” Well, yes, that would be nice. So we waited for him to get back from his lunch, and then had what turned in to an hour long chat with Gabriel Schechter, author of the book, Jeopardy! champ and (it turns out) blogger.

Now, having read that far, this note turns out to be about a note that Mr. Schechter wrote over at Never Too Much Baseball called Remembrance of Games Past. In it, he writes about people asking him (in his capacity as researcher at the NBHFM) to find the box score for the first game they ever saw. The problem as you can imagine, is that not only do those people not recall the date, the things they do recall (the final score, the starting pitcher, who hit a home run) are often not true. They use Retrosheet these days, and can narrow it down pretty well, often to the point where the fan can pick one and be happy. Mr. Schachter then talks about his own memories of his first game, and how it doesn’t correspond to any game that was actually played. It’s a great little essay about reference library work and human memory. And baseball, of course.

I don’t have any way of knowing my first major-league game; it may well have been while I was a babe in arms. I have used retrosheet to look things up, often discovering that a game I thought was against the Braves was actually against the Reds, or that there is no way that I could actually remember a particular thing that I think I remember that happened when I was three. Or maybe I did. Our family used to go to a few games a year out in California, and there are memories from those trips that I know I invented to match family stories of them, but I don’t know which memories are real and which I made up.

My Perfect Non-Reader has, in her Box of Things to Keep, the box score from her first game, so she’ll presumably never have that question. On the other hand, she won’t remember it. I suspect the next major-league game we see will be the one she remembers; I doubt it will be this summer, but maybe next year. I wonder what she’ll remember from it. I definitely remember my Giants from 1976, but there aren’t any players from 1975 that I really remember seeing that weren’t also on the team the next year, so I suspect that 1976 is as far back as I remember. But what do I remember?

Johnny Lee Lemaster, ineffectually waving at balls as they went past him. Darrell Evans, but I remember him at third base; he went back to third when Willie McCovey came back to play first in 1977. Strangely, I have only the vaguest memories of Willie McCovey, and none at all of him at first base; the first-baseman I remember seeing at the bag is Mike Ivie, who didn’t come to the Giants until 1978. I remember Chris Speier at second, I remember John Montefusco and Ed Halicki and Bob Knepper. And Gary Lavelle, of course. I couldn’t tell you who I got to see pitch in person and who I heard on the radio and who I watched on television, but I remember their names and I remember liking John Montefusco more than he deserved, and Bob Knepper evidently less. I can’t say that I remember any events, any home runs or shut-outs or dramatic finishes, not from those years. Later, in the 1980s, there are things I remember. I believe I was at this game, for instance, when I was fourteen. But my memories of all those games I attended when I was eight or eleven are of taking off my shirt to tan in the hot sun, learning to keep score neatly enough to be allowed to write it in my Dad’s book, being amazed at the size of the JumboTron (which always had a few burnt-out bulbs making a hole in the image), the smell of sunscreen and peanuts, and of slowly learning to follow the game on the field, learning to watch the fielders rather than the ball, learning to guess when the runner would go, learning to fill the time in between pitches with baseball rather than with a demand for tasty treats.

In the Hall itself, my father looked at the plaques for players that he had seen, starting in the post-war years, really, and going on into the present (he has partial season tickets at the used-to-BOB). But when Gabe Schechter asked him about going to the Polo Grounds, what he wanted to talk about was his uncle starting the game in a fine suit, and as the sun came around to beat down on those right-field seats, the man would take off the jacket, and then the vest, and the shirt, and finally the undershirt and watch the rest of the game stripped to the waist.

One thing that’s great about people: Gabe Schechter finds them a box score and prints it out. What leaves his hand is a piece of paper, but what the fellow gets is the smell of peanuts or the feel of the little pencils, the sound of the elevated train or the companionship of a half-naked uncle. And even when the piece of paper says that the home run or game-saving catch or three-hit game never happened, the memories are still there.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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Your Humble Blogger was going to begin this note with the idea that surely all y’all Gentle Readers know the plot of The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, because surely all y’all have seen Damn Yankees. Then it occurred to me that maybe you haven’t. Maybe it’s an old-fashioned show these days. High Schools must still put it on, yes? “You’ve Gotta Have Heart”, “Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Gets” and “(think about) The Game”. Well, anyway.

The plot, for those who don’t know it, is about a nice middle-aged man who is a fan of the Senators. This is the fifties, and not only are the Senators in the cellar, but the Yankees are in a stretch of dominance that is unparalleled. The book is published in 1954; the Yankees won the World Series in 1947, 1949, 1950, 1951, 1952, and 1953. They actually didn’t win the pennant in 1954 (the Indians won the American League pennant), but they won the pennant the next four years hand running, and nine of the next ten, for a total of fifteen pennants in eighteen years. Anyway, Joe sells his soul to the devil in exchange for not only a young healthy body but a supernatural ability to hit the ball. Joe then signs with the Senators in the middle of the season, hits forty-eight home runs in fifty or so games, and hits .545 while the Senators win every single game he plays in.

Yes, yes, yes. I was thinking about steroids, too.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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The baseball year is over (well, for some of us), and according to Chris Haft, who writes for Major League Baseball, the Giants have made a decision about top priority for this offseason.

The Giants, by the way, enter the last day of the season tied for last in the majors in runs scored (with the Nationals), 25th out of 30 in home runs, 15th in walks, tied for 28th in on base percentage, dead last in slugging percentage, dead last in OPS, and 29th in XBH. Oh, and our best hitter is not coming back, the fellow who led the team in homers, walks, OBP and SLG. There are a handful of young players, so there’s the possibility of improvement just by those players improving, but then there are a handful of old players, who are likely to decline. In other words, we had the worst offense in the major leagues, and we the roster we have signed for next year is significantly worse yet.

So, what is our top priority? Relief pitching.

Our relief pitching is 10th in ERA (which isn’t all that good a stat for a particular relief pitcher, due to some oddities, but isn’t all that bad a stat for a staff), 7th in Runs against, 14th in WHIP, 7th in SLG against, and 15th in OBA against. Not a good bullpen, but not an awful one.

So, how do we know that we improving our relief pitching would help?

“The Giants have played 93 games decided by two or fewer runs, most in the Major Leagues. Significantly, they're 39-54 in those contests.”

I am aware that Bruce Bochy has forgotten more about baseball than I will ever know. I’m just a schmuck with a blog. But it seems to me that if you have good pitching (Team ERA good for 10th in the majors, WHIP 14th, SLG against 7th, OBA against 15th), and you have lousy hitting, then you will play a lot of close games. This is not the fault of the pitching. If the Giants had scored more runs, those games would not have been close. If the pitching had given up fewer runs, those games would still have been close because we would have lost them 3-2 instead of 4-2. In those close games, by the way, they are 38-54; in the season they are 70-91, so they are 32-37 in the rest of the games. This surprises me: this team has won 32 games by more than two runs? How?

Look, this team getting below average offense at first base, second base, third base, shortstop and probably catcher. And the left fielder is leaving. That’s six lineup positions to fill. Sure, we could carry one slick-fielding weak-hitting position player. Conceivably two, if the fielding really is good, and it is. So. We need a first baseman, a second baseman and a left fielder, and maybe a catcher, just to pull our team up out of the bottom third offensively. Or we could worry about who is going to pitch seventh inning. It’s not easy to prioritize, but it’s not that hard.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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The sun had sunk entirely under the waves of the Pacific Ocean. Nobody was surprised by that. You could set your watch by it, if you happened to have a newspaper and a good view. You could, again, set your watch by the moment the sun crested the Oakland hills the next morning. Some things are like clockwork.

Other things, though, are not bound by the gears and cogs and hands of time. The greatest mediums cannot predict them. We can note their occasioning: nine minutes before nine of the clock, the seventh day of August. At eight-fifty, the crowd had hopes. At eight fifty-two, they had a memory.

They knew when the sun had gone down, they knew when it would come up. They didn’t know if the sun would shine on a Giant still tied to a number like a boulder, every pitch a peck at his liver. They didn’t know if it would grow again, that void inside, to be pecked at again tomorrow by another pitcher. Some things punch the clock, some things do not. And some things are timeless.

The sky was black, as black as if the sun would never keep its appointment in the East Bay. The ball stood out white against it, as fine a target as you could imagine. As fine as it was the last pitch, or the one before that. Our boy from Riverside had walked up to the plate twelve thousand, five hundred and thirteen times in the Senior Circuit. Maybe that’s not quite a hundred thousand pitches, or maybe it is. Seven hundred and fifty five of those hundred thousand pitches had landed over a fence somewhere, in the Bay, out at Candlestick Point, across the country where Three Rivers meet, on Waverly Street, in a swimming pool, in bleacher after bleacher in thirty-six ballparks.

People speak highly of the Venus de Milo. Some say that the Mona Lisa is the most beautiful thing in the world. And some prefer that perfectly timed sunset on the ocean side of a Gate of Gold. There are partisans for the Northern Lights, and they will tell you that not knowing when they will make their appearance only adds to the ethereal beauty. And some will tell you that the homerun swing of Barry Bonds is the most beautiful thing in a world full of beauty. A twitch of muscle, a moment in time. Unpredictable and inevitable. A white ball in a black sky.

Note: Your Humble Blogger wasn’t actually going to write about this again, but somehow the idea came forward that if Mr. Bonds had been covered by the sportswriters of 1907, rather than 2007, the reports this morning would have been very different indeed, and this note came from that idea. Of course, in 1907 Mr. Bonds would not have been playing Major League Baseball, no matter how good he was, and in 1907 Dave Brain led the majors with 10 home runs for the Boston Doves (now playing in Atlanta). Roger Connor was the home run king with 138, a record set in 1897 and not to be broken until 1921, when a certain Baltimorean hit 59 in a single year, and chicks have dug the long ball ever since.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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Your Humble Blogger is still blogging. Really. It’s just that real-life business and a comment-spam outbreak have combined to distract me for a while. But it’s cool.

I note, by the way, that Major League Baseball seems to be perpetuating a minor part of the bizarre controversies surrounding Barry Bonds and the Deathly Hallows Home Run Chase. They’ve been narrowly following the vitally important question of exactly what Mr. Bonds will be donating to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. The final news is that Bonds gives historic helmet to Hall, that is, “As promised, Giants slugger Barry Bonds presented the batting helmet he was wearing when he hit his 755th home run on Saturday night to a representative of the National Baseball Hall of Fame after the game.”

Just in case people forgot that he was an asshole and that Major League Baseball wasn’t worth watching, they wanted to make a bit deal about Mr. Bonds selfishly wanting to keep all the stuff he was wearing, and maybe sell it, later, for a gazillion bucks. Now, honestly, I think Barry Bonds is a bit an of asshole, and more than a bit of one, and I am not really weeping for him in all this. It’s just another example of MLB’s anti-marketing. Give it a rest, boys!

Mr. Selig’s released statement on the 755th homerun? “No matter what anybody thinks of the controversy surrounding this event, Mr. Bonds' achievement is noteworthy and remarkable.” One of the little ways Your Humble Blogger likes to entertain himself when reading the official releases from Major League Baseball on this topic is that they acknowledge the existence of controversy, but never acknowledge that the controversy is about anything. Notice that—what anybody thinks of the controversy. But clearly, if you think that Mr. Bonds has cheated, and think that the controversy is merited, then Mr. Bonds’ achievement is not so noteworthy and remarkable as all that, anyway, is it?

Well, actually, it is. I mean, let’s be clear about this: for the last ten years or more, many of the great sluggers of the game have been (a preponderance of evidence leads us to believe) using chemical enhancements not legally obtainable without a prescription. Of those, two have hit 70 in a year. During those years, Mssrs McGwire, Griffey, Sosa, Palmeiro, Thomas, Rodriguez, Thome, Ramirez, Sheffield, Giambi, Bagwell, Helton, Gonzalez, Conseco and Belle (a bit earlier) have had tremendous power. Great, great hitters having great, great years. Doping? Sure, I believe it, some of them, some of the years. Hard to believe that they were all clean. And none of them—none of them—have touched what Barry Bonds has done. Not even close. So I suppose that his achievement even compared to what other “cheaters” have done in those years is remarkable and noteworthy.

And I think my last comment on the subject is this: it’s terrific that Mr. Rodriguez has hit 500 home runs. He is amazing, the best hitter in baseball, awesome, fantastic, etc, etc. But it’s just silly to predict that he will hit another two hundred and fifty home runs. I hope he does. I hope he busts the record, and that Ryan Howard busts his record, and ten we have thirty years of low-scoring baseball, and then another power burst and another fellow breaks the record. But career records are just ridiculously hard to break. I mean, first you have to do the incredible and hit 500 home runs, a Hall of Fame career in itself. Nobody does that. I mean, out of hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands, twenty-two people have done it. Lou Gehrig didn’t hit 500 home runs, and he slugged .632 in his career. Willie Stargell didn’t hit 500. It’s just incredible. But then—then, you have to hit another hundred, and nobody does that at all. And then after that, after you were great and then were great for another two or three years, then you have to hit another hundred. That means, now, that having reached a Hall of Fame career already, A-Rod will have to (a) step it up just a notch, and (2) keep it at that stepped-up level for at least five years. Now, now you are at 700. Another two years to go.

Like I say, I hope he does it, and I hope that in 2014 or 15 or 16 or whatever, if he becomes the Home Run King, people have some sort of idea of just how much better he has been than very, very, very good hitters over a very, very, very long time. And that he gives his helmet to the Hall.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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So. The Philadelphia Phillies lost their 10,000th game. It was bound to happen eventually. Gentle Readers may not be aware that baseball fans, when they talk about a pitcher with a great many losses on his record, will say that you have to be awfully good to lose that many games. And it’s true; a pitcher who isn’t awfully good won’t get a chance to lose fifty games in his career. Sadly, this does not apply to teams. Despite an astonishing display of awfulness from, say, 1918-1948, during which they only broke .500 in their 1932 78-76 fourth-place triumph and only broke .450 one other time and only finished as high as fifth in the standings three times, they continued to play major-league baseball, or at least to play against major-league baseball clubs. And eventually they recovered somewhat. They’ve still won more games than the Red Sox.

I’ve occasionally suggested that I would enjoy a relegation system for baseball where the bottom team or two in MLB every year (or every five years, or something) would be sent down to the minors, to be replaced by the top team or two from the minors. This set-up would make life interesting for bad teams in August and September. The problem is that it would utterly destroy the farm system. Speaking as a Giants fan, that would be ... well, I think I would enjoy a relegation system. But it’s not what we have, and I suppose it’s a good thing for the Phillies.

Just to point this out: if you played a hundred and fifty games a year for a hundred years, and you lost two-thirds of those games, that would be ten thousand losses. NBA and NHL teams play 82 games a year, NFL teams play 16. Premier League FA teams play 38 games a year. I think rugby Super League teams play 32 games. Major League Baseball teams play 162 games a year, mostly playing six days a week for six months. County and college teams have been playing cricket for a long time, but I suspect ten losses a year is a lot for a cricket side. Of course, in baseball there are no draws.

But my point about this is just that baseball teams play twice as many games a year as any other sport. There are a lot of things about the play of the game that evolved the way they did because it’s an everyday game. The rosters and the way pitchers are used, for instance. You could imagine a version of baseball where they only played one game a week, and each team was allowed only, say, eleven men on a roster, with an ace pitcher, like a quarterback, playing almost all of almost every game. Or a version played three games a week that used a game clock in some way, forcing much faster play. Or perhaps rougher play, never developing the rule that you can’t get a player out by throwing the ball at him. Maybe the amazing fielding we take for granted wouldn’t have developed; the worst-fielding team in the league last year made fewer than one error a game and converted 97.8% of chances, where a hundred years before, the best-fielding team made an error and a quarter a game and converted only 97% of chances, and in 1884 the Phillies (before they were called the Phillies—Kill, Quakers, Kill!) committed four and three-quarters errors a game, converting only eight of every nine chances. If they played once a week, maybe they wouldn’t have started wearing gloves.

It didn’t happen like that. In 1884 the Philadelphia team played one hundred and twelve games, losing 73. In 1907, they played one hundred and forty-seven games, losing only 64 (and coming in third!). In 1947, they played one hundred and fifty-four games, losing ninety-two (and tied with the Pirates). From 1975 to 1984 they went 862-693; my Giants in those years went 752-815. Base Ball became baseball, with closers and the rabbit ball and pinch-runners and gloves and the first two foul balls counting as strikes and the designated hitter and no spitballs and the rosin bag and lights and balks and the batter can’t call for a high pitch anymore, either. Ten thousand losses. You gotta admire that. Not so much the Phillies, although the truth is that they are more fun to watch than the Giants this year, but the league, and the country, and humanity in general. Ten thousand losses, and you know I’ll be rooting for them tonight.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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Heigh-ho, Gentle Readers, Your Humble Blogger is back again, all connected and whatnot. Love that phone company.

I know, I know, Gentle Readers, you were left without YHB’s deep-but-broad analysis of the Big News of the Day, and all. I know that it wasn’t so much of a shock as we might have expected, and that really, the outrage comes from the fact that we kind of expected it. But really. America’s national nightmare is just beginning.

He isn’t even the Neifi Perez of baseball without stimulants. Surely Major League Baseball should be hanging its head in shame, not flaunting all the so-called superstars who happen to have never tested positive. Neifi Perez. Neifi Perez. Baseball will never be the same.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yes, it’s every Gentle Reader’s favorite time, that bit where Your Humble Blogger writes a few lines about a bunch of videos. OK, fine, but look, I could be writing whole entries about this stuff.

• It’s probably a deficiency of some kind, but I think that the Kids in the Hall’s I've lost my indian drum! bit is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen on television. I’m not a huge KitH fan, generally, as their most skit-like things often don’t work at all, and their completely bizarre stuff either works or doesn’t, as bizarre stuff does. Oh, and if you don’t find it funny, don’t worry—it’s like Zippy the Pinhead. It’s not that you didn’t get it, it’s that you didn’t think it was funny. There isn’t anything to get.
• Why is it that (in movies, anyway), people think if they can just get onto an airplane with a suitcase full of money, their law-enforcement problems are over? I mean, Your Humble Blogger hasn’t ever worked in an airport, but it’s hard to believe the conversation doesn’t go something like this:

  FIRST SECURITY GUY: Damn, that’s a heavy bag
  SECOND SECURITY GUY: What the hell’s in that?
  1ST: Yeah, let’s open that fucker up!
  2ND: Holy Fuck!

  At which point, either they just take the fucking suitcase or they call some real police in. My guess is they take the suitcase. I mean, here’s you, with a trail of dead bodies behind you (most of them you didn’t kill, I know, but tell it to the judge), and the airline tells you that your luggage seems to be missing, and they can’t explain it, but it doesn’t seem to have gotten onto the airplane back in Wichita Falls. Who are you going to tell that you are owed two million dollars in stolen money? Of course, you could just take it as a carry-on, because certainly nobody is going to question a fifty-pound carry-on that x-rays show contains nothing but bundles of paper the size of dollar bills. Particularly on an international flight. Nope. You get to the airport, you’ll be just fine.
• So, I finally watched Fever Pitch, and even though I had very low expectations, I was disappointed. For one thing, they totally did not show what it’s like to be a baseball fan. All the fans in the movie talk about being fans, but they don’t talk about baseball. Nobody started an argument by saying that Jason Varitek was better then Jorge Posada, or that David Ortiz should be playing first base so that Manny Rodriguez could DH, or that Mo Vaughn was a fat, lazy, overpaid selfish bastard who was a liability on the field and at the plate. I know that Mo Vaughn hadn’t been on the Sox for ten years at that point, but that is what being a Red Sox fan is like. There are guys in the bleachers who will tell you what a bum Harry Hooper was, and how Cy Young was a lazy, overpaid, bastard and they’re glad they got rid of him.

  For another thing, they totally did not show what it’s like to not be a baseball fan in Boston. I know the female lead wasn’t Boston born and bred, but the movie implied that she had been living there for five years, more or less, so when the male lead tells her he’s a Red Sox fan, she should know what he means.

• Ushpizin is a profoundly good movie. I disagree with the main characters religious opinions, and I don’t really trust the ending, but the religious struggle of a man with a vile and violent history and a deeply devotional faith is not only instructive but surprisingly cinematic. I was disappointed that Ben Baruch dropped out of the movie, though, as he was on his way to becoming one of film’s great schnorrers.
• In mentioning good movies, I saw and enjoyed I Know Where I’m Going. It’s true that it goes downhill after the opening titles, but that’s just because the opening titles are so unbelievably wonderful. And the rest of the movie is very good. If you like that sort of thing. If you don’t think that war-time British romance movies are swell, then you’ll probably be annoyed by the annoying things rather than charmed by the charming ones. Also: pipers.
• Your Humble Blogger’s reaction to the movie of the The History Boys, to no-one’s surprise, was primarily frustration that I am too damn cheap and lazy to have gone to see the thing on stage. Well, and it was the right decision, too. But, damn.
• The interesting part of The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada was the bit about making the murderer live with the slowly decomposing body of the victim. Very Lorca, if I’m getting that right. Sadly, there was a lot of other movie to fit that in. Ah, well. Lovely scrub brush. Sometimes I miss the desert.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 10:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (12) | TrackBacks (0)

You know, YHB hasn’t written much about baseball for a long time, mostly because I don’t have that much to say, but I happened to look at Jonathan Mayo’s last-minute projection for today’s amateur draft and was moved to ask Gentle Readers all: if you were MLB (the business entity), and you hired reporters to among other things get leaks from the constituent clubs to make news that you could report about your own events, would you want those leaks to be accurate?

On one hand, if the actual draft is now full of surprises, it makes their reporter look like an ignorant moron, and decreases the value of their news service. On the other hand, if the draft follows Mr. Mayo’s script, it decreases the value of their ESPN-televised commodity.

In other words, do you, as MLB, tell the front offices to clam up, to loosen up, or to lie?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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I first read The Dreyfus Affair: A Love Story back in 1993 when it came out in paperback. I saw a copy signed by Peter Lefcourt and thought it looked interesting enough to pick up. And I enjoyed it and all, but not enough to make me want to reread it for fourteen years.

It’s about a couple of baseball players who fall in love. Randy Dreyfus is married, and suddenly finds himself attracted to his teammate DJ Pickett, who (unbeknownst to him) is a closeted gay man. The two start an affair, which is eventually exposed and leads to plot complications. It’s quite a fun book.

The odd thing about reading it fourteen years later is seeing what has dated and what hasn’t. The attitude toward homosexuality has changed somewhat, but not all that much. There still aren’t any openly gay ballplayers in any major-league sport, although several have come out after retirement. I think that a fellow who found himself with a crush on a teammate would go through quite a bit of the same stuff Mr. Lefcourt imagines in this book. On the other hand, if such an affair were exposed, I can’t imagine the commissioner of baseball expelling the players from baseball. Certainly not during the season or the postseason. On the other other hand, I think the likelihood of a violent attack on one or another of the players is very high, possibly higher now than fifteen years ago.

But what has really changed since the book was written is baseball. Our main character is a shortstop on a pennant-contending team in the last year of his contract. He’s leading the league in batting average, hit a ton of home runs, had a ton of RBIs, fields well, is a young shortstop and is negotiating a three-year contract for $20 million. That’s a total of $20 million, more or less $7 a year. Just to give you an idea, in 2001, Alex Rodriguez, who was essentially all that, signed a ten year deal for $250 million. That was six years ago. Derek Jeter signed for 10 years and $189M in 2001, Miguel Tejada signed for 6 years and $72M in 2004, in 2005 Edgar Renteria signed for five years and fifty million and Orlando Cabrera signed for 4 years and $32M, Rafael Furcal just signed for three years and $39 million and Carlos Guillen just signed for 4 years and $48M.

Not just the money, though. The book was written in 1991 or so, and even though it’s set in 1998 or so, after the round of expansion that in real life engendered the Marlins and Rockies (but not the Devil Rays & Diamondbacks expansion, which was in 1998 in real life but no part of the book), there are only two divisions and the playoffs are one round and then the Series. More important and more subtle, Mr. Lefcourt doesn’t predict the offensive explosion of the mid-90s, so the numbers of homeruns are low. I don’t remember how many Randy Dreyfuss had at the end of the year, but I remember an implication that having 40 at the beginning of September was plenty to challenge for the league lead. When he was writing, Cecil Fielder was hitting 51 for the Tigers, which was a Big Deal because it had been twenty years since anybody hit 50. Since then, 21 players have hit 50.

Also, in an important game, the visiting team still had their closer pitching in the 12th. Not impossible, but surprising. More likely was the home team’s manager telling the batter to finish it, because their crappy relief pitcher was out of gas and he didn’t have anybody else. Actually, I really liked the manager, who didn’t give a crap about the gay thing, the contract, or anything except getting the runner from first to third.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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So I admit that I got to W.P. Kinsella through the movie Field of Dreams. I saw the movie lo these many, and a few years later caught hold of the book Shoeless Joe and was impressed not only by the book but by the substantial differences between the (very good) book and the (very good) movie. Eventually I sought out more of Mr. Kinsella’s stuff, and found a bunch of very good short stories, particularly the ones set in the baseball world, even more particularly the ones set on the small, baseball-mad country that shares the island with Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Marvelous stuff. I should find a copy of that collection, whichever one it was.

Anyway, I had never got around to Iowa Baseball Confederacy, which is often talked about as being the little sister to Shoeless Joe, a somewhat inferior but still quite good ghost story about baseball, family and loss. Well, that’s crap. Confederacy is a brilliant book, scads better than Joe. Although I must admit I haven’t read Joe in donkey’s, so perhaps what is really going on is that I have grown into Mr. Kinsella’s novels, and that when I get back to Joe, it will be scads better than Confederacy, and then when I get back to Confederacy again, it’ll be scads better than Joe. I hope so. But I doubt it. I think Confederacy is just better. Spookier. More evocative. More dangerous. Bigger.

Joe is, after all, really just a story about one Iowa farmer who lost his father, and his quest to reconnect with him (or his memory). There are bigger themes, sure, and the quest touches our larger cultural senses of loss and acceptance, because it’s a good book, but the story is in the end about one Iowa farmer who lost his father. I don’t think that Confederacy is about one Iowa business man who lost his father, although Gabriel did lose his father, and that loss is again central to the book. The other one of Mr. Kinsella’s Big Themes, about the way the American Indian fits into our (North) American myth is also central, though, and that picks the book up into another tier, I think.

I don’t know, actually, whether many Native Americans (or citizens of First Nations, or what you will) read Mr. Kinsella’s stuff. The handful of Navaho and Apache that I went to school with or worked alongside in summer jobs were not big readers, or if they were, they didn’t communicate that interest to me. Not that I was ever very close to any of them, other than physical proximity, and the sort of impersonal intimacy that timing movements on a factory line seems to have. I have had chatting acquaintance with, as far as I know, only a handful of other tribe members in the years since I started reading Mr. Kinsella’s stuff. I could Google for information, but I’m afraid to discover that his reputation is as a racist, arrogant and offensive appropriator, which would sadden me if I were to learn it from an acquaintance, but irritate me if I were to learn it from the intarwebs. You know.

One last question for Gentle Readers: Are ghost stories generally considered specfic? Confederacy has not just ghosts but time travel, alternate history and elemental battles between gods, so I am happy putting it on the specfic shelf, but as a general rule, is a ghost enough to make something skiffy? I think Inside Job has nothing skiffier than a ghost (well, possession by the spirit of a dead fellah) and it won the Hugo, but then it was by an eight-time Hugo-winner, so that’s different, right? But is Joe, or Field of Dreams, for that matter, specfic or not?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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One of the great things about library book sales—well, I suppose any used book sale, but I seem to go to library book sales more often than other kinds, more often even than used book stores—is coming across some book you haven’t thought of for years, but loved at the time, and then buying it for a buck, reading it and finding out that it really is magnificent.

Or awful, of course, which is also interesting. Pennant Race falls into the magnificent category. It’s cheating a bit, in this case, because Jim Brosnan’s baseball diary is often mentioned as one of the great baseball books, second (in many people’s opinion) only to his earlier diary The Long Season. I am hoping to pick up Long Season at some library book sale some year soon, but for now, I’m just thrilled to have Pennant Race. If you like baseball at all, Gentle Reader, and haven’t read Mr. Brosnan’s books, there is a treat waiting for you.

Baseball is different now than it was in 1961, of course. The starting pitchers for that team included Jim O’Toole, who started 35 games and got two saves, and Bob Purkey who started 34 and saved 1. Of course, Mr. Brosnan, the closer with sixteen saves and 34 games finished, feels it necessary to explain what a save is, which he does by essentially describing it as a tool for contract negotiation. Which it is, but who admits that these days? Mr. Brosnan talks a lot about money, coming off a good outing with the confidence that his mortgage is safe and worrying after a bad one if he needs to find another source of income. I imagine things are different, now; the bonus babies in the Reds bullpen have a few thousand in the bank against a short career. After everything, the lowest-paid rookie in a bullpen these days should be able to feed a family for ten years on one year’s salary. And a good thing, too.

As I settled in to re-read the book I was looking forward to a few anecdotes about Frank Robinson, a source of great sportswriting copy over half-a-century of baseball. I was disappointed. It was clear that Mr. Brosnan did not spend much time with him. Most of that is that Mr. Brosnan’s natural home was the bullpen, and most of the book is set there, with the cast of relievers attempting to keep their minds on the game. Or not. Out of the bullpen, in the clubhouses, trainer’s rooms, hotels and buses that make up the rest of the book, he hangs around with, no surprise here, the relievers that he spends game time with, that he’s closest to. Fair enough. But I don’t think I’m entirely imagining a sense that the two also were kept apart by race—not that I think Jim Brosnan is or was a racist, particularly, but because the black players stuck together and the white players let them. That probably happens to some extent these days, although I suspect mostly it’s monolingual Anglophones of whatever race hanging around together and those who are comfortable in Spanish letting them. I have no idea. But—Frank Robinson! MVP of that Pennant Race, towering and possibly tragic figure in baseball history, and he would barely break the index. Hmph.

One last thing—it was a very strange experience reading about the games Mr. Brosnan’s Reds played against the Giants. It was almost as if he wanted the Giants to lose.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

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Sometimes, it seems, an umpire will blow a call. It’s happens. These things are, in fact, part of the game. And sometimes, when an umpire blows a call we can tell, sitting at home, that the umpire blew the call. It’s not a judgment call at that point. Either the ball touched him or it didn’t, either it hit the ground or it didn’t, it was on one side of the line or the other. The camera knows, the umpire does his best. What I’m saying, sometimes an umpire will blow a call. Umpires know this, players know this, viewers know this. It happens.

So, now and then, there is a proposal to take the call to the camera, or at least have some avenue of appeal, when the ump blows a call. Because nobody wants the ump to blow a call. It’s bad for the game. On the other hand, there are problems with the cameras as well, and there are concerns about the authority of the umpire and the rhythm of the game, and sportsmanship in general, so instituting such an appeal system does come at a cost. And every time the proposal is made, there are just enough people in the right place who judge that cost just high enough to defeat it.

And then an umpire blows another call. And everybody gets all upset.

Which is why Asif Iqbal said that the Pakistan Cricket Board’s opposition to such an appeal process “reveals a nostalgic respect for the values of the British Raj and Empire which some may find creditable but which I do not see as being in the interest of either Pakistan or Asian cricket. That was a value taught by our colonial masters because unless they inculcated that sort of servile discipline in us there was no way that 300,000 British civil servants would have been able to rule 300m people.”

Oh, Gentle Reader, did you think I was talking about baseball?

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

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In the middle of Anthony Lane’s nastily hilarious review of The DaVinci Code movie, he observes, “Movie history is awash, of course, with fine pictures that have been made from daft or unreadable books; indeed, you are statistically more likely to squeeze a decent movie out of a potboiler than you are out of a novel of high repute.”

Oddly enough, Your Humble happened to see a couple of very bad movies this past week, and I had a not altogether unrelated observation to make: Why do people remake excellent movies, but never crappy ones? There are loads of movies that had perfectly good concepts, but which were badly written or badly executed or badly performed, and you would think that a good film-maker would take one look at a movie like that, see where they went wrong, and be able to make a much better movie, a good movie in fact. Taking a movie where the writing, the performances, and the direction, are all magnificent and making even a halfway decent remake seems much much harder.

Take The Ladykillers. The basic premise is only OK: A group of criminals rents a room from a little old lady, steals a massive amount of money and then they split on each other and the little old lady thwarts them, resulting in the criminals getting killed and the little old lady winding up with all the loot. It’s a good concept, but it’s obvious on first glance that the movie depends on the execution. In the 1955 movie, written by William Rose and directed by Alexander Mackendrick, the wonderful performances by Alec Guinness and particularly Katie Johnson are untouchable. The screenplay is wonderful, the pacing is superb, and the supporting performances are all quite good, and have moments of brilliance. So even if a filmmaker is an absolute genius, and gets the perfect cast (which he wouldn’t), and all the money in the world, and everything goes absolutely perfectly, and every wild vision of the remake gets onto the screen just as it was in his head, you will end up with ... a disappointing, but pretty good movie.

Now, the Coen Brothers/Tom Hanks remake does not have all those things coming into place. Well, at least not in the first half-hour, after which I stopped watching. It wasn’t awful, it just wasn’t really ... no, it was awful. I like the Coen Brothers, or at least I absolutely adore about half of their movies, and I like Tom Hanks, but blech.

But my point isn’t really about this, as for all I said above I can’t really blame the Coen Brothers or Tom Hanks for wanting to remake the movie, and they clearly had a lot of fun with it, and a fair amount of people seemed to think it was good. No, my point is about the other lousy movie I saw last week: Mr. 3000. Now, this is actually a very clever idea for a movie: a baseball player who is a self-centered jerk quits in the middle of a pennant race when he gets his 3,000th hit, telling the assembled sportswriters that they can all go fuck themselves, now, because they have to put him in the Hall of Fame. Nine years later, he’s five votes short when the Archive discovers that a three-hit game got counted twice (don’t worry about it, it’s plausible enough for a movie) and he retired with 2,997 official hits. Faced with having to buy a ticket to get into the Hall, and his self-identity as “Mr. 3000” crumbled, he makes a comeback at 47 with his old team, now in the cellar, to try to get 3 more hits in September. Along the way he learns humility, teamwork, and all that he missed when he was in the game.

Bernie Mac plays the aging jerk, and he’s actually terrific, as far as he goes, but the movie is so badly written and paced and slapped together that it just doesn’t work. Even the good ideas (Paul Sorvino as the silent stone-faced manager, and Michael Rispoli as the sidekick) are butchered or buried. And even Mr. Mac isn’t so good that I couldn’t imagine somebody else, ten years from now, being even better. Worst of all, I have no sense that anybody connected with the movie liked baseball or baseball movies in the slightest. In other words, a remake would not only almost certainly be better than the original movie, but could very easily be a really good movie. But will anybody make it? No. Because nobody remakes crappy movies.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It’s been surprisingly easy not to blog. What has it been, a week? Your Humble Blogger has been traveling, although traveling in such a manner that it would have been fairly easy to slip in a Tohu Bohu note, if inspired. I haven’t been.

Yes, I know. The Vice President of the United States shoots a fellow in the face, the Republican Party eats its own liver over an incredibly minor matter of which profit-making company will shortchange our port security needs (I know! Let’s give the contract to Americans like Halliburton!), a woman was inducted into the Hall of Fame and my Terriers were ranked # 3 nationally. Lots to blog about. Plus I’m three books behind.

I’m not burnt out, at least not how I understand the term. I just haven’t felt like blogging. Part of that, I imagine, is that I have been spending a lot of time trying to get my lines in my head, which is slow going indeed. And part is ... well, I don’t know what the other parts are.

Actually, I suspect that one part is that I’ve been meaning for some time to write about lobbying, what it is and how it works and what aspects of it are good and bad for democracy, or at least for us. Which would be a lot of work. I mean, I could just shoot off my mouth, by moderately accurate, and make my point while getting at least a few things dead wrong. Or I could do some research. And really, if I’m going to do some research, it should be on eyewear from 1785.

Speaking of research, and wasting gobs of time that could otherwise be spent actually blogging, did y’all know that British Pathé has some 3500 hours of old newsreel footage available online? So if you want to watch footage of London-to-Paris air service in 1919 or Princess Elizabeth inspecting the damage after the Blitz, well, off you go.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

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A couple of recent January arguments about which is the Bestest Baseball Team Ever Ever Ever brought the usual sort of musing about what best can mean in that context, when it occurred to me to pose myself a question sufficiently different that I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it addressed: What was the best season ever for a team’s fans? Knowing that the whole thing is un-answerable, in large part because people, even baseball fans, even fans of the same team, are different, one to another, and that’s what makes the world interesting and fun, it’s still entertaining, I think, to ruminate on what the criteria would be that would put a team on the top of the list.

First of all, I think we have to leave out any team that doesn’t make the playoffs (or the World Series, or the Temple Cup, or in pre-postseason days win the Pennant). As much as my own favorite year as a Giants fan was 1993, I can’t say that I enjoyed that year as much as Braves fans did. So we need a winner, and I would think that winning out, that is, winning the World Series would be enough of a plus that I’m not sure any team that doesn’t win the Series would make a Top Ten. That said, I wouldn’t weight a Close Series Victory all that much over a Close Pennant Race Victory; the fans of the team with the CPRV would have more fun more days than those with bad league competition but a CSV. Also, of course, fans of a Great team will have more fun than fans of a Good team, so that comes into play as well.

But what else? I’m inclined to think that fans of a team that has grown up together, as it were, would enjoy the success more than fans of a cobbled-together team. On the other hand, the first Great Year in a while would be more fun than Yet Another Good Year. In other words, fans of the 2004 Red Sox had a lot of fun breaking the drought, but did so without many long player-fan relationships (such as Tim Wakefield’s, Jason Varitek’s, or even Derek Lowe’s). When my Giants won in 1954 (for instance), they had Wes Westrum (since 1947, regular since 1950), Whitey Lockman (since 1945, regular since 1948), Davey Williams (since 1949, regular since 1952), Hank Thompson (since 1949, regular since 1950), Alvin Dark (since 1950 as a regular), Don Miller (since 1948, regular since 1950), Willie Mays (regular since 1951, not counting service), and Monte Irvin (since 1949, regular since 1950). In other words, a fan in 1954 had been rooting for most of the same people for five years (although the pitching was new, with the exception of Sal Maglie); I would think that such a history would make a Big Year more enjoyable. On the other hand, the core of the 2005 Red Sox was together in 2003, so maybe that’s long enough, when it’s not just your drought but your Dad’s.

The great teams of the 20s were clearly more dominant than any team today can be, which causes trouble when comparing teams, but a different kind of trouble when comparing fan experiences. It’s great when your team is dominant, but too much dominance takes the drama away. How would you weight a close finish, versus a mighty winning percentage?

Also, how do you weight for likeable players? Worse, for superstars, whether they are likeable or not? How much fun are rookies? How much fun are All-Stars? MVPs and CYAs? How much fun were the 1980 Phillies to root for? The 2001 Diamondbacks? The 1945 (wartime) Tigers?

I haven’t done the numbers, but at a guess, the final answer would be the fans of Ron Swoboda, of Ed Kranepool, Jerry Grote, Bud Harrelson, Cleon Jones, of Jerry Koosman and Tom Seaver and Tug McGraw, and of Gil Hodges, too. At least, if I ran the numbers, and the 1969 Miracle Mets didn’t turn up in the top five, I’d guess something was wrong with my algorithm. And if the 2006 Giants are in the top, well, if they are any fun at all to root for, it’s a testament to the game of baseball, that’s all I have to say.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

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Five Things I Have Been Persuaded to Change My Mind about Since College:

Note: These are not things that I have changed my mind about due to exposure (such as a newfound fondness for Early Music or the realization that there is a reason to drink decaffeinated tea). These are issues, mostly minor ones, where somebody expressed a view that I hadn’t held before, and I subsequently Changed My Mind based on that expression. I also include the presentation of new evidence as part of persuasion, if the evidence was (in my memory) arranged as a persuasive tactic, rather than being sort of independently uncovered. For instance, the revelation that the Ba’athists in Iraq did not, in fact, have a stockpile of chemical and biological weapons was not presented (to me) as part of an effort to persuade me that the invasion was misguided, although it would have been a useful part of such persuasion.

• Batting Average is inferior to On Base Percentage and Slugging Percentage as either a measure of past performance or a measure of future performance. Although in my teens I did more or less adopt the idea that a .300 hitter might be a “soft” .300 hitter, I generally took HR and RBI as a sufficient way to complement BA. It wasn’t until I started reading Baseball Prospectus and Baseball Primer (now part of the Baseball Think Factory) that I really Changed My Mind about BA.
• It’s OK to use literally as an intensifier, singular they, and hopefully to describe the speaker. By the end of my college days, I was becoming more of a descriptivist and less of a prescriptivist, understanding that much of prescriptivism was William Safire getting to decide who was in the Semi-colon Club. Still, there were some things that just bugged me. The boys over at Language Log have used a variety of means to persuade me to give some of those up, mostly historical examples. For instance, it’s clear that literally has been used as an intensifier at least as long as really, and that as they essentially mean the same thing, there is no reason to allow one and disallow the other. Words mean what people say they mean.
• Even if personal property is a fiction, it is both a useful and a necessary fiction. Don’t be alarmed, I still call myself a socialist. But even though I still have been unable to persuade myself that personal property exists in any philosophically meaningful sense, I have been persuaded (by Gentle Readers, among others) that any social system with a reasonable chance at either justice or stability needs to include some version of property rights (albeit not necessarily placing them at a high priority or considering them sacrosanct). To some extent, I must admit that this change of view is related to the aging process and the accumulation of Stuff that has gone along with it, but mostly I think it has been actual suasion.
• Damn, that’s only three. Hm. Steroids are bad for baseball. Mostly, I don’t much care, one way or another, but my previous feeling was that on the whole people wanted bigger, better athletes, and therefore it was in baseball’s interest to provide them. After the recent revelations, I think that a large amount of baseball’s fan base does, whether I agree with them or not, draw the line at performance-enhancing chemicals that are not widely available over-the-counter, and therefore baseball would risk alienating that fan base by encouraging or even allowing widespread use. And since baseball does, I think I perceive, rely more on its fan base than other major league American sports do, and less on casual ticket-buyers and television-watchers, they oughtn’t alienate their fan base. I’m not sure this really should count as persuasion rather than exposure, since mostly it was exposure (in conversation and on the Baseball Primer) to people who persuaded me that (a) they were fans, and (2) they did draw the line at steroids, and enjoyed the game less because of them. A combination, you understand.
• There really was an organized attempt by people within the Republican Party, using the Republican Party resources and structure, to subvert the will of the people in the Ohio Presidential Election in 2004, resulting in an essentially fraudulent choice of electors, and therefore a misfire in who holds the office of President. This is not, by the way, the Black Box theory, that holds that the machines made by Diebold did not count votes correctly, although that may also have happened. This is about closed polling places and otherwise suppressed turnout in predominantly Democratic areas, in a deliberate attempt to deny people their franchise. I know some Gentle Readers thought that was obvious from the beginning, and others still think it’s crazy talk. My own initial reaction was that such accusations stemmed from the frustrations of the Democrats at losing another election that they felt they ought to have won, together with the sort of wildcat voter-suppression activities that have always been part of the system. Since then, though, I have been persuaded that there really was an organized effort to suppress the vote, and that the effort was effectively organized within and by a profoundly corrupt State Party.

That’s five. I’m not sure I could come up with very many more. It would be easy to come up with Five Things I’ve Changed My Mind About Since College, which would include things such as my willingness to change the Hebrew in the prayerbook for greater inclusiveness, or that I actually do want to raise at least one child, but the fact that this is much harder to do makes it more interesting. I don’t think it’s coincidence that four of the five don’t particularly require me to change my actions, and the other just requires that I refrain from some complaining that I used to do. The things that involve actually doing something (like changing my diet, say, or my reading habits, or my purchasing patterns, or exercising, or like that) are more likely to change only after prolonged exposure, rather than through conversation. That doesn’t mean that rhetoric, as one aspect of the exposure, didn’t play a large part in that exposure, but it wasn’t sufficient. Of course, that’s all going by my own interpretations of my memories; it’s likely that others would have perceived different causes and effects.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

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Seems like every year at this time, I think to myself, “What a good year to be a baseball fan.” I know that’s not an altogether fashionable sentiment, but there it is. Here we are a week from the end and there are only eighteen teams with the big E in the standings, and two of those aren’t technically eliminated from the wildcard. Aside from the fun of the Sox and the Yankees, and the other Sox and the Indians, and the Phillies and the Astros, and even the longshot A’s and Mets and Marlins, my Gigantes have an outside chance to become an answer to a trivia question, and in the process bring up one of my deep philosophical baseball questions: what does it mean to call a team the best team in baseball?

In one sense, of course, one could define best to be more or less equivalent to champion, and to say that the World Series winner is the best. This argument begins from the idea that the goal of each team is to win the World Series, and that therefore the 29 teams that don’t win clearly and obviously failed at that goal, while the one team that does win succeeded, and the best team must be the team that best accomplishes that goal, that is, the winner of the World Series. This is a consistent definition, but a dull one. Furthermore, it gives you a definition of best that doesn’t imply a definition of better; logically, any two teams that fail to win the World Series are equivalent failures. Even if you allow that getting to the playoffs is in some sense closer to winning the World Series and therefore better, a really interesting definition of better, an idea of better that sparks the most interesting conversations, should allow you to compare any two teams, even the Rockies and the Royals, and talk about which one is better.

Furthermore, I don’t think that the goal of each team is to win the World Series. Or at least, I don’t want that to be the goal of each team. In YHB’s world, the goal of each team is to win as many games as possible. Of course, this is a pre-division idea—heck, this is a nineteenth century base ball idea. For me, the post season is post, after, the real season, and is really just an extended exhibition. Lots of fun, and I’m on the whole glad they do it, but really irrelevant. I know, I know, that’s not the way the teams think of it, and if I entirely disregard the way the teams define their goals, I’m living in a fantasy world. But it’s a nice world.

Here’s the question: If the Giants were to sweep the Padres and then sweep the D-Backs, finish at 80-82, roar into the playoffs with a healthy Bonds, Alou, Schmidt and Benitez with lots of off-days, knock off the Braves and then the Phillies (who not only nab the wildcard but somehow beat the Cardinals) and then smack the White Sox around and win the World Series, would they then have been the best team in baseball in 2005? Remember, they lost more games than they won in the regular season.

The thing is, the Giants that I can imagine actually winning the World Series have little to do with the team that played in April, May, June, July and August. Did I mention that Bonds would be healthy and have lots of off-days to rest? That Benitez would be healthy? I didn’t mention that we would have a major-league center-fielder, and that wasn’t true for most of the year. The team that had Reuter and Fassero in the starting rotation, that had Deivi Cruz, and Tucker and Ellison and Marquis Grissom in the lineup, that team can’t be the best team in baseball, can it? I’m not talking about Noah Lowry having an ERA of 5.07 before the All-Star Break and 2.59 since then; that’s the sort of thing that happens with real championship teams. I’m talking about the actual active roster, and whether the team that is represented on that roster is the same team as the one on the field in October.

In reality, of course, my Giants are not going to be on the field in October. In reality, the interesting question is not whether the Giants are better than the Cardinals (they aren’t) but whether they are better than the Twins or the Nationals. And just totaling up the wins doesn’t answer the question; I would look at the strength of the schedule, and at the luck involved. I’d look at the components of wins, the runs scored and the runs given up, and even at the components of those runs—the teams’ rates of outs and extra-base hits, the earned and unearned runs, the starters and relievers, the bench strength, the peripherals, all that stuff. I’d try to balance the strengths and weaknesses of the teams, and I’d totally fail to come up with a persuasively definite answer, but I’d have fun trying, which is the point. And I could do that with the Cardinals and the Angels, or whoever wins the pennants, and if I had a bunch of friends around to do it with, I’d enjoy talking about which was better nearly as much as I’d enjoy watching the Series.

Unless the Giants are in it, after all. Then it’s late nights in front of the TV, all by myself (most likely), eating my liver. And it doesn’t get better than that, does it?

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

So, rereading Cold Comfort Farm reminded YHB what a great job the filmmakers did creating the movie of the book. I'm very interested in the problem of adaptation, generally. I think it's one of the great challenges of our technological and social moment, when people want different versions of things in different formats, and there may be a real demand for a particular story, world and characters in the form of a book, a movie, a videogame, a website, an audio production of some kind, a DVD (which may be identical to the movie, but may not) and possibly others. I know, much of this is not new, and adaptations are as old as the theater, but the combination of a proliferation of forms, and a more or less discrete consituency for each form makes it both quantitatively and qualitatively different.

Anyway, that's all musing, but it does bring up a question as old as the moving picture: should an film adaptation of a book or short story be "faithful" to the original, or should the film makers cut loose? The answer, of course, is that either way can work, and that it depends on the book, the movie, and the team involved. That's a lame answer, but it's the right one. Luckily, though, the answer can evoke another question, or even better, a couple of Top Fives.

Top Five Close Adaptations:

• Cold Comfort Farm: Book by Stella Gibbons, film directed by John Schlesinger and written by Malcolm Bradbury. Not only do they keep almost all the plot, but almost all the dialogue is taken directly from the book. They do combine several minor characters, and cut out two or three sub-plots. Mostly what makes this perfect is the realization of the characters by brilliant, brilliant actors, primarly the magnificent Eileen Atkins as Judith, Ian McKellen as Amos, and Freddie Jones as Adam. Oh, and Rufus Sewell is the perfect Seth. The look of the thing is great, but mostly it is the book come to life, which is pretty much the definition of the category, right?
• The Maltese Falcon: Book by Dashiell Hammett, film directed and written by John Huston. It's good. It's very good. Oddly enough, Humphrey Bogart isn't much like Sam Spade (tho' he is wonderful), and Mary Astor isn't convincingly slick, but everybody else nails it. Again, it's the characters and actors that make this work so well, particularly Peter Lorre as Joel Cairo, Sydney Greenstreet as Caspar Gutman, and Elisha Cook as the gunsel, Wilbur. They chicken out at a key point, but they didn't have much choice, since it involved nudity and it was 1939 or so.
• The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh: Book by A. A. Milne (and The House at Pooh Corner), film directed by John Lounsbery and Wolfgang Reitherman and written by eight or ten people under the aegis of Walt Disney. I'm aware that some Gentle Readers will object to this film's presence on the list. Yes, there are songs (by Sherman and Sherman, and they are quite good) and some of the chapters have the plot all wrong, but on the whole they get the characters and dialogue very nearly right. They take a few liberties (the gopher is, as he says, not in the book), and most notably they get Tigger out of the tree in a way that is unique to animation. Still, the bulk of the movie (or movies, as it is really a series of shorts) is just a realization of the stories, and it works very well indeed.
• Scrooge: Short Story (A Christmas Carol) by Charles Dickens, film directed by Brian Desmond Hurst and written by Noel Langley. It’s been perhaps ten years since I saw the movie, and longer than that since I read the story (I think I’ll dig it out this year), but my recollection is that it’s quite a close adaptation. It works, in part, because Alistair Sim is so wonderful as Scrooge, but also because Dickens’ writing is incredibly cinematic, both in character and in atmosphere.
• The Shawshank Redemption: Short Story by Stephen King, film directed and written by Frank Darabont. This is one of a very few instances where I read a story, liked it, and then saw the movie adaptation and loved it.

By the way, I’m not considering adaptations of plays, obviously, and as with all Top Fives I am almost certainly forgetting something that ought to be on the list.

Top Five Free Adaptations:

• Field of Dreams: Book by W.E. Kinsella (Shoeless Joe), film directed and written by Phil Alden Robinson. They took the basic idea of the baseball field in the corn and undead evil pirate ballplayers (ok, undead dishonest White Sox ballplayers) and made an entirely different story around it. The book is about the protagonist's desperate and crazy attempt to be with his father again, and all the plot points are leading up to the father's appearance, and the closure that brings. The movie is about the fellow discovering that he needs closure with his father, and discovering that he really is a father at heart, too. And, of course, saving the farm. Anyway, by having different (but related) concerns than the book, the movie works, and brings something new to the nearly identical plot points.
• The Wizard of Oz: Book by L. Frank Baum, film directed by Victor Fleming and written by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Wolf. Teenage Dorothy and ruby slippers and singing, and the whole thing being a dream after all, but really the bulk of the movie is taken right from the book. Well, except for all the bits they left out, and the new bits. And what makes the movie, after all, is E.Y. Harburg's song score. That's the most creative, and what makes the movie a new and wonderful thing.
• Fistful of Dollars: Book by Dashiell Hammett (Red Harvest), film directed by Sergio Lione and written by Victor Andres Catena and Jaime Comas Gil. I know that this is more directly inspired by Yojimbo, which was also very freely adapted, but I haven't seen Yojimbo yet. Anyway, what both films do is take Mr. Hammett's basic idea of an unnamed outsider coming in to a corrupt and violent town and eventually cleaning it up by pitting all the gangsters against each other, and place it in another place and time. Some of the plot points are still there, in a way, but mostly the filmmakers just took the idea and ran with it. Of course, that's what they did with Last Man Standing, too, and that was dreadful.
• The Princess Bride: Book by William Goldman, directed by Rob Reiner and written by William Goldman. Perhaps it's cheating to have the screenplay by the author, but it works. Mr. Goldman writes himself a new frame, totally changing the audience's view of the story, and cuts mercilessly at the plot. At the same time, the actors do a marvelous job of bringing the characters to life, particularly Andre the Giant, Mandy Patankin and Wallace Shawn as the Gang of Three. Much of how well the change-of-frame works is due to Peter Falk as the grandfather, but the part is written to play to his strengths.
• The Big Sleep: Book by Raymond Chandler, film directed by Howard Hawks and written by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman. They make a total hash of the plot, and the whole thing is turned into a sort of screwball comedy, but dang, does it work. In fact, they make a good movie from an OK book, which is hard to do.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 8:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

OK, here's another question for Gentle Readers. As y'all are aware, YHB is a baseball fan, and although circumstances have prevented me from paying as close attention as I often do, and other circumstances have prevented my Giants from being any good, I still spend some hours every week reading about, listening to, or watching baseball. So when my recent travels happened to coincide with the All-Star Break, it was a relief. Not only would I not miss much baseball (as they do not play the day before or the day after the All-Star Game), but I wouldn't miss baseball much, if you know what I mean. It's always frustrating to read the paper and find no box-scores, and being on the road, I likely wouldn't read the paper and experience that.

So my question is for any Gentle Reader who is a sports fan: do you find, in the sport you follow, the All-Star Game to be a highlight of the year, an amusing diversion, or a frustrating annoyance? Would you prefer if they didn't play one at all?

Not that I necessarily would prefer not having an All-Star Game in Major League Baseball. My real preference, might be to replace the current post-season with a barnstorm All-Star Tour, but that won't happen. And, you know, I have enjoyed the All-Star Game in the past, although I can't remember the last time I did. Maybe when the Big Unit threw one to the backstop.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As previously noted in this Tohu Bohu, the Venerable Order of Giants visit Colorado to play the Rockies on May 17. Your Humble Blogger is now pleased to add the information that the Pirates of Pittsburgh come to Pac Belle on May 9. Future matchups that also look potentially favorable include the Cincinnati Reds (July 4), the Kansas City Royals (June 7), the Fresno Grizzlies (July 12), the Rupert Mundys (August 8), the Arkham Inmates (September 18), the St. Sebastian’s School for Girls Titans (October 3), and the Lambeth Bishops (tentatively scheduled for 2008).

Sadly, against major league competition, we are 5-10.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Giants play the Rockies again on May 17th.

That is all.

Posted by Vardibidian at 6:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So, I played a fair amount of APBA growing up. APBA, for those who don’t know, is a simulated baseball game based on statistics, similar to Strat-o-Matic or Pursue the Pennant. The players are field managers, mostly, setting lineups and controlling things such as pitcher changes, pinch-hitters, and sacrifices. In the version I played in the late seventies and early eighties (a dice, cards and boards version) the manager also made all the decisions about steals, trying to score from second on a single, throwing to second or home, and so on. Player autonomy was very limited; I imagine in the modern computer versions you can give players the green light to steal when the chance is more than n, or even take into account players who make a habit of trying to stretch hits. Anyway, the point is that I managed some dozens of games before I was bar mitzvah.

The correlation between a misspent youth simulating ball games via dice or computer and a stathead take on baseball strategy seems to be high enough to accept the plausible causality. I’ve heard it said that a GM should, before hiring a manager, insist that the candidates play a 54-game sim season with the previous year’s team, to learn whether the fellah has any idea how to manage. And, you know, I have some sympathy with that. A lot of the insights of sabermetrics are well illustrated by that kind of sim. The value of OBP, for instance, or the dangers of giving up outs, either by bunting or by attempting risky steals. The frequency of the Big Inning (in a high-scoring environment), which makes that first run less important. The order of the lineup being less important than you’d think. The goofiness of the Save. The ideas behind the Run Expentancy charts (not to mention the Win Expectancy book we’ll see someday).

The problem, though, is that although it would be nice for the manager to be aware of all this stuff, it doesn’t prepare the manager for the actual game very well. Well, and there’s another problem, which is that very few managers are hired or valued for their in-game skills, but rather for their communications skills. The manager’s primary job, it seems, is as communicator, both as the team’s voice in speaking with broadcasters and as the front office’s voice in speaking with players. And, I suppose, as the players’ voice in speaking with the front office, although I suspect that is not high on the employment criteria. Other aspects of the communicator’s job are equally important, mostly keeping players happy and productive and having the good clubhouse atmosphere so beloved of curly-haired sportswriters. Some of that stuff really does have to do with winning games, by the way; I’m convinced that Dusty Baker (to choose an instance at random) had a skill to keep players on a winning streak, that is, to parlay a few wins into a hot month by kicking up players’ expectations of themselves, and keeping the players thinking they can win any game, even when they are down by four or five runs. It’s hard to know if that is real, but it’s what I perceived when Mr. Baker led the Giants. Of course, I’m convinced that Mr. Baker is a magnificent hitting coach who performed that job throughout his tenure as manager, and that helped the team more than the streak thing. But this has become a digression.

Anyway, the tricky thing to keep in mind is that in the middle of an actual game the manager always knows more than the statistics can tell him. In the specific case of the Run Expectancy chart, the manager knows the base-outs condition, but also, for instance, whether the pitcher has already thrown a hundred pitches. Whether the batter is fast or slow, and whether the runners are fast or slow. Whether the first baseman is a three-hundred-pound, eight-hundred-slugging block of immobility. Whether the batter can beat out a bunt, or at least come close enough to maybe force a wild throw. The manager knows (or can know) the batters OBP, and thus the likelihood he will make an out (although this is clearly misleading in many ways), and also the OBP of the next batter, and the next. The manager knows, or can know, not only the general information about platooning, but the specific splits of the batter and the pitcher, as well as the guys on the bench and in the pen.

Well, and all that may be included in a really good sim, but then the manager knows more than that. He knows where the wind is blowing, and whether the infield is in shadow. He knows if the batter has been drinking. He knows if guy on deck has the flu. He knows if the pitcher seems to be having trouble with his mechanics. He knows if the batter is smarter than the pitcher, or if the pitcher is smarter than the batter. None of that is going to be in the sim, and it would be disastrous for any manager to ignore all of that specific information to adhere to what the Book or the Odds tell him to do.

Sadly, of course, much of the specific information that the manager knows in any given situation is false. He may “know” that the batter hits worse if he’s been drinking, or that he hits better, depending on the manager’s feeling about drink rather than the batter’s actual state. He may “know” that the pitcher is weakening, when in fact he has been unlucky. He may “know” that a batter is clutch, when he has only been slightly better in the clutch than his normal stink-on-ice level. Or worse, of course; the manager may be remembering a memorable clutch hit and forgetting many clutch ground outs. The sim will not help the manager distinguish between what he knows that’s so, and what ain’t so, particularly if the sim is not accompanied by a tutorial in risk analysis, or for that matter statistical assessment (to identify the lessons that really are in the sim). So. The lessons of statistical analysis can overwhelm good decisionmaking. Of course, you could argue that this is only true if the lessons are learned incorrectly. True, true. And yet, there is little chance of them being learned correctly, or at least within a correct framework.

My point? Just that it seems to me that Felipe Alou’s use of the bullpen smacks to me of a stathead manipulating APBA cards. Yes, there is often a slight statistical edge to be gained by going through three pitchers in an inning. That edge may even (possibly) justify the cost in less flexibility in later innings. But unlike APBA cards, pitchers have good days and bad days, and even if you can’t predict which day it is for each of your relievers, I h