Periphrasis

Alex Rodriguez recently became the first player in MLB history to have 35 home runs and 100 RsBI in 12 consecutive seasons, surpassing the Bambino’s previous record. Of 11.

His response on being told of the feat after the game was, “Anytime you can do something like that in a Yankee uniform is special.”

Number of times A-Rod can do “something like that”: one. He now has the record. If he does it again next season, he’ll still have the record. If he doesn’t, he’ll retain the record until someone goes to 13. But since no one is particularly close–deeply thorough research shows David Ortiz has four, though that’s likely to come to end this year unless he starts coating his bat in flubber, and Ryan Howard is next at three–that can’t happen for at least a decade, at which point I’m guessing A-Rod will probably be in a serious nosedive productionwise to the point that I don’t think he’ll string together 14 35hr/100RsBI seasons beginning at the age of 44. So essentially, the “anytime” is one time, which is this time, right now. 

For a lot of reasons, athletes have difficulty articulating anything meaningful on their own achievements. They’re typically stuck in some LaLooshian middle ground of noncommittal cliches. A media that moralizes about boasting or brashness discourages them from being vocally enthusiastic about the thing they have dedicated their lives to and, presumably, love.

That leaves us, I guess, to do it for them. So, congratulations, A-Rod, on one more exemplary season in a Hall-of-Fame career.

Now go play some golf.

Saying What We Are Seeing

Literary theorist Stanley Fish illustrates a point about the realities of living in a postmodern world with an anecdote about Bill Klem, the “father of baseball umpires.” Klem’s behind the plate. The pitcher winds up, delivers, and the batter doesn’t swing. Klem is silent for a moment. The batter turns around and asks, “Well, was it a ball or a strike?” Klem replies, “Sonny, it’s nothing until I say it is.”

Fish’s point is that facts don’t exist in reality independent of observation, and recent events in officiating have reminded us that observation is, well, complicated.

Last week (I know–blogs are so timely), University of Washington quarterback rushed for a last-second, game-tying touchdown against BYU. Well, maybe not quite game-tying. Locker, understandably excited to find himself in the end zone, threw the ball into the air after the play, then leapt into a teammates arms. The officials flagged him for an excessive celebration penalty, backing up the PAT 15-yards. What is typically a fait accompli was instead blocked, giving BYU the victory by one. Ought the official have ignored the letter of the law and allowed Locker his, let’s face it, pretty harmless spasm of joy? But then, if a rule isn’t enforced, what’s the point of having the rule? And, while we’re at it, are we comfortable with a rule, enacted by the mostly white higher-ups of the NCAA, that punishes the mostly black (though not in Locker’s case) athlete for, as the rulebook states it, ”attempt(ing) to focus attention upon himself?”

A few days earlier, Major League Baseball, with the approval of the World Umpires Association, instituted a limited form of instant replay to determine disputed boundary calls such as fair or foul balls or fan interference. Along with Questec, a system of grading the performance of the home plate umpire by comparing it to pitch locations digitally tracked by a network of four cameras, many commentators take replay to be unignorable sign that the age of man is soon to end, and with it will go baseball’s folksy charm.

their job is to enforce the rules, but what is the role of an official? They watch games more intensely than any fan, but with no interest in the outcome. Their job is to uphold the rules in the name of fairness, but in asserting their authority, as in the Locker case, they often undermine our sense of fairness. They are looked to by players, coaches, and fans to make sense of the action, but even with their privileged onfield postion, they frequently have no better idea what just happened than casual viewers at home. And to top it off, they’re likely to be usurped by machines any day now.

I think Fish’s anecdote miscasts the official. Refs, umps, and judges aren’t metatextual figures who stand outside of and render judgment on the ongoing reality: they are part of it. They are absurd heroes. They have authority but no power, information but no understanding, commitment but no emotion. They keep vigil, watching what happens without caring, forever scanning the outfield for the Queen’s assassin.

Ecstatic Truth Scholarship: Wiffleball

There’s a fine line between living meaningfully and living in a fantasy world, between possessing a child-like sense of wonder and just behaving like an child. The authors of The New Enthusiast have no idea where that line is. To prove it, we bring you Ecstatic Truth Scholarship [ETS], a pastime that exists somewhere between soft science and drunken lies.*

In our first installment of ETS, we turn our gaze to a subject near and dear to our hearts: Wiffleball. The authors of this amusing little weblog have spent the better part of the summer in the warm embrace of this game, which has been described by (totally anonymous, probably imagined) luminaries as “the most noble conceivable use of plastic.” Huzzah to that, I say.

Using a combination of time-tested research strategies (involving the Dewey, Library of Congress, and Bliss library classification systems), and also our own instincts, we’ve cobbled together some of the more obscure, fascinating history of Wiffleball.**

*Any resemblance between this and other works of similar bent, including those by Flaubert, the Pataphysicians, John Hodgman, or whoever did this, is most likely due to the fact that we have stolen the idea. I believe it was T.S. Eliot who said, “Mediocre writers borrow; writers who’ve never benefited from even one original thought ever steal.” 

**Ross McSweeney is not responsible for the any of the potentially offensive material that follows. He’s just a good guy doing what he can to get by.

Our findings include, and are probably limited to, the following:

The first ever Wiffleball game was actually played at the exact same time as the first ever baseball game, just one field over. It’s a fact!

That said, Wiffleball is actually based on a Native American game, which, translated into Latin, means TIMEO ANGLO-SAXONES ET DONA FERENTES.

***

Wiffleballs and -bats are manufactured in Connecticut, the New England state that borders Rhode Island to the West. Here’s a fun fact about Rhode Island: 97% of people on the West Coast think it’s actually an island.

***

Chinese people hate Wiffleball and freedom, in that order.

***

In the Roman dialect of Italian, there’s a word that sounds alot like “Wiffleball,” but is actually quite a crude suggestion about what your mother should go do with a rolled-up copy of La Gazzetta dello Sport.

***

Fantasy Wiffleball has failed to catch on with the general public the same way its hardballed cousin has.*

*Note: this marks the first time a native English speaker has used the term “hardballed” in a sentence. My hunch is, it won’t be the last.

***

Wiffleball is fun for the whole family—except if Uncle Marty is playing, in which case it becomes sad and sometimes even dangerous. 

***

Pitches in Wiffleball don’t have the same names as in real baseball. The hamball, the sleepyball, the staph infectionball, the dowryball, the papsmereball, and linimentball are all common and do basically what you’d expect them to do based on their names. One pitch, the Father Geoghanball, which was accused of sexually abusing more than 130 children, has been outlawed.

***

Speaking of Wiffleball pitches, Carson Cistulli’s FIP versus Ross McSweeney is historically great. I’m just saying.

***

Only the Ball Was White by Robert Peterson would be markedly improved if it were a history of legendary black Wiffleball players and all-black professional Wiffleball teams.

***

If Ray Kinsella’s father had loved Wiffleball instead, he (Ray) would’ve only had to plow under, like, a tenth the crop—a quater, tops. Think about it.

Epigraphs to a Book I Won’t Write

There’s a literary genre whose name I can’t remember. It’s not the Biji or the Notebook, like the internets is trying to tell me it is, although those are the closest things I’ve found. Anyway, the genre that I’m thinking of—and which maybe exists and maybe doesn’t—is pretty straightforward: it’s the collection and arrangement, by one person, of memorable quotations. Don’t say Book of Quotations, because that’s not it. I swear.

Anyway, I want to try a brief one of these [insert genre name here], because there are a few excellent sayings I’ve recorded and have neither the aptitude for, nor the will to try, integrating them into a longer piece.

There’s a central theme to this brief collection: the celebration of sport’s endless capacity for providing access to conspicuous acts of genius. There are other sorts of genius, of course, and, of course, sport itself is excellent for a number of reasons besides its transcendent moments (the existence of Joe Castiglione, for one). But sport is perhaps most exciting when it shows us how great we could be, because, at their best, athletes are able to provide elegant solutions to difficult problems almost without thinking.

I should stop now. Here are those quotes.

[BEGIN]

At Italian football matches—or at least Hellas Verona matches, provided Tim Parks isn’t lying—the fans chant facci sognare, or “make us dream,” imploring the players to perform the impossible. The fact that Verona’s players rarely perform the impossible makes this gesture even more significant.

***

In Take Time for Paradise, A. Bartlett Giamatti celebrates the improvisational nature of sport. He says that the excellent thing about sport is that the athlete is capable of doing not just what we imagined he might, but what we couldn’t have even imagined, because the precise circumstances had never presented themselves before this moment.  In such instances, we witness a player who performs, without thought, an act that, beforehand, was inconceivable.

***

Uruguayan Übermensch Eduardo Galeano writes in Football in Sun and Shadow that “on the field you can … see, even if only once in a long while, some insolent rascal who sets aside the script and commits the blunder of dribbling past the entire opposing side, the referee and the crowd in the stands, all for the carnal delight of embracing the forbidden adventure of freedom.”

***

In his essay “Self-Reliance”, Ralph Waldo Emerson writes that, “There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be.” Emerson is not discussing sport specifically here, but one can’t help imagine that he’s talking about Franck Ribery.

***

Sherman Alexie mentions here, and (we’re led to believe) actually testified in court, that he thinks professional basketball players have taken the place of the Greek gods. He writes some other pretty great stuff, too, with which we might tangle at a later date.

***

Ross McSweeney has not yet written, but might someday write, that it’s actually we, the spectators, who’ve taken the place of the gods, and that, like the Olympic gods, we look down upon athletes (literally, in the stadiums) as a source of endless amusement.

[END]

I share these quotations by way of introducing a service that The New Enthusiast will be providing to anyone who happens to stumble across our modest webspace. We’ll be making a practice of alerting the Reader to any athlete who performs an act worthy of great praise.

As far as how to praise such moments, this is difficult. I’ve given it some thought, without much in the way of solutions. I’ve even tried it, but one wants the praise at least to approach the same level of rapture as the original event.

Athletes have a similar problem. Asked how he scored X number of points or hit a mammoth home run, a player responds only in vaguaries. “I just took my chances,” he says. “I tried to hit the ball hard.” It’s a difficult task for anyone, let alone an athlete, to explain. Were he being honest, the athlete might say, “I don’t know. I’ve been training my body my whole life, countless repetitions of the same act. I scored the points/hit that home run, because that is the one skill I’ve come close to perfecting.”

Elsewhere in Football in Sun and Shadow, Galeano recounts this episode: “A reporter once asked the German theologian Dorothee Solee: ‘How would you explain to a child what happiness is?’ ‘I wouldn’t explain it,’ she answered. ‘I’d toss him a ball and let him play.’” In that spirit, until I’ve figured out how to praise certain athletes or moments duly, I won’t attempt it. I’ll just make a record of it, hopefully by posting video on the right there ———————–>.

The Surprise of No Surprise

So last night I was eating a sundae and watching the Yankees nearly get no-hit by Brandon Morrow, who was making his first major league start for the Seattle Mariners. Caught up in the moment, the announcers performed an extended riff linking the Yankees’ futility against Morrow and the impending snapping of their 13-year-in-a-row playoff appearance streak. Eventually the talk turned to how inflated the Yankee payroll is, and how spending hundreds of millions of dollars doesn’t guarantee a playoff spot, and how you can’t buy a World Series, etc etc. I mean (I don’t mean, I’m just affecting the attitude of the announcers here), I mean, just look at the Tampa Bay Rays! They’re beating the Yankees and the Red Sox! And they only pay their players with preloaded CostCo gift cards!

Now, I like hating on the Yankees.  I do.  I really do. But, but, but–let’s try and have some accuracy in our criticism is all. And also, hey!– leave the Red Sox out of this.

True, the Rays have a better record than the Yankees. This year. For the first time ever. And how did they achieve this, while spending $160 million less? ‘Tis a miracle!

Well, yes and no. But mostly no. As Patrick Ewing almost said, the Yankees may spend a lot of money, but they have a lot of money to spend. They spent all that money signing scads of former All-Stars in an escalating arms race with themselves. Some of those signings worked out better than others–ahem–but here’s the thing: through it all, the Yankees made the playoffs. For 13 years in a row. The Rays did not make the playoffs. For 10 years in a row–or, in other words, their entire existence thus far. To maintain their streak, the Yankees had to find new players to complement their core of Jeter/Posada/Rivera. And since the Yankees were always in a pennant race, the essential attribute for these new players was that they had to be ready to make immediate onfield contributions. Which meant that they had to be older, proven, reliable veterans. Or, in other words, expensive. Or, in other other words, the Yankees became prisoners to their success.

Meanwhile, the Rays did not have access to Steinbrenner’s money. But, as Billy Beane and his legion of statbots demonstrated, money isn’t the only resource. And just as Beane discovered an arbitrage opportunity by hording undervalued on-base machines, the Rays took advantage of the resource that they had in most abundance: time. 

Consider this: While the Yankees were piling up division titles, the Rays were finishing last in all of baseball. Meaning that they got really, really high draft picks for a lot of years in a row. Those draft picks became Aubrey Huff, Carl Crawford, Evan Longoria, B.J. Upton, Delmon Young, Elijah Dukes, Rocco Baldelli, Andy Sonnanstine, and David Price. Heck, they even had superstud Josh Hamilton for three years before he had to take some time off.

A lot of teams draft really promising players every year, but none of them had Tampa Bay’s luxury of waiting to find out if that promise would be realized. The Red Sox drafted Hanley Ramirez, and all indications were that he’d be great. But the pressure to win now meant he was valuable to them not because of his future potential but because of the established players they could get in return for him on the open market. In this case, that decision worked out pretty well for everyone*. The broader point is that only time will tell if a highly-regarded young player will avoid injury, flameout, drugs, whatever, to actually become a major league player. Most teams can’t wait. The Rays could.

This luxury extended beyond the draft, too. The Rays were so awful–and with no hope of improving any time soon–for so long, it made no sense to hold onto middle-of-the-road veterans. Yet other teams, either legitimately locked in pennant races or deluded into thinking they were, were eager for exactly that sort of player. Victor Zambrano? Go right ahead Mets, he’s yours. Just give us one of your unproven prospects in return…say, the best pitcher in your farm league. Julio Lugo? Sure thing, Houston. That’ll cost you two prized prospects. 

So after 10 years of futility, the Rays are first in the AL East (though, maybe not for long…). And that is exciting. But it really shouldn’t be a surprise. Their farm system had been consistently ranked as the best in baseball for a number of years. Couple that with the fact that they had absolutely no incentive to mortgage their future by trading those prospects for veteran players, and an astute analyst might conclude that, sometime soon, the Rays would start winning a lot of games. In fact, many analysts did say this, though the Rays are currently exceeding even those bullish predictions.

The point is that there aren’t any real miracles in baseball (sorry!). In the post-Moneyball era, it’s time to stop thinking of money as the only tradeable resource teams have in the marketplace. A smart team with realistic ideas about the future should be able to compete at just as high a level as the Yankees.

******

That isn’t to say that money isn’t a hugely important resource. I’ve heard some talk on various broadcasts and websites about how the fact that so few “big money” teams are heading to the playoffs is somehow a rebuke of their profligacy. Well, sort of, but not really. Let’s take a look at this chart for a minute.

With the two highest payrolls, the Yankees and the Tigers are unlikely to make the postseason. The Mariners and Braves, the 9th and 10th highest payrolls, are definitely not.  Of the remaining 6, 3 are either definitely or very, very likely to make the postseason (Angels, Cubs, Red Sox), and the other three are pretty likely, though maybe not (Mets, White Sox, Dodgers). So possibly 6 of the top 10** highest payrolls are playoffs-bound, which are pretty good odds.

**Obviously, on a list where the 2nd highest total is closer to the 22nd highest than it is to the 1st, groupings like “top 10″ are arbitrary and pretty much meaningless, but I’m trying to make a point here so bear with me.

Also, many of these teams are in direct competition with one another for playoff spots on a divisional basis. Which is to say that since each division can only send one representative to the playoffs, not including the Wild Card, then if one team makes it, the other necessarily cannot. For instance, the Yankees (#1), Red Sox (#4), and Blue Jays (#12, but only $2 million out of the top 10) can’t all make the playoffs at the same time. Same with the Mets (#3), Braves (#10), and Phillies (#13). Also, unless the Wild Card comes out of the AL Central, either the Tigers (#2) or White Sox (#5) was likely to stay home before the season even began. 

Some teams spend a lot and win, others spend a lot and lose. Same goes for teams that don’t spend a lot. So I guess my point is…spend a lot of money? No, that’s not exactly right. I guess my point is that there are certain narratives that, for some reason or another, people want to be true and, like a drunk man leaning on a light post, they look for statistics that give them support rather than illumination. For a while, the narrative was that the Yankees bought their championships. Now that they are losing (or not winning as much) the narrative goes that overspending is foolish and futile. Neither story is true.

What is undeniably true is that the Yankees are freaking jerks.

*XYZ, Josh.

The Myth of El Mejor Gol del Mundo

Upon re-watching it in Amando Maradona.

Three monkeys, hitting keys on typewriters for an infinite amount of time, will almost surely produce Hamlet.

Three William Shakespeares, working in concert for an infinite amount of time, would be hard-pressed to produce a moment like el mejor gol del mundo.