How deep is your fandom

Mariner infielder Adam Frazier exuding the team's current level of energy and enthusiasm for life

I went to the ballgame tonight with my friends K & E, who are relatively new converts to the roller coaster ride that is the Seattle Mariners. Well, K is, anyway, E was half in the bag beforehand. But they're into it, and this year has been especially fun for them as well as lots of other longer-suffering fans as the team has been contending for the playoffs for most of the season. If the season ended today, they'd be in. (Sure, only because of Rob Manfred's BS expansion of the playoffs, but still, they'd be in.)

But as I've said a few times to various people over the past few weeks, there's still time for them to screw it up. The Mariners have psyched us out before, so it's easy to be jaded. And in the last two weeks, they've reminded us of why jaded is the default emotion for Seattle baseball fans.

From September 15th onward, the Mariners' schedule featured 20 more games, none against even remotely intimidating opponents, and on paper it looked like an easy cruise to a Wild Card berth—the top of those three positions, even. But what did they do? First the went to Anaheim to play the pathetic, perpetually snakebit and geographically confused Los Angeles Angels for four games. The M's lost three of them. Then they hopped up the coast to the East Bay and played the last-place Oakland Athletics. The M's lost two of three. Then a jaunt to Kansas City to play the 28-games-under-.500 Royals. The M's not only dropped two of three to KC, in the finale they blew a nine-run lead, allowing the Royals—who had topped ten runs in a game only five times all year—to score eleven runs in a single inning on the way to beating them 13-12.

Which brings us to tonight. I had by flukey happenstance gotten my pals and myself outstanding seats for tonight's game, right below the pressbox on the club level. The teams that the M's are competing with for playoff spots had already lost or were losing (though Tampa Bay came back and won in extras). The Mariners' big offseason free-agent star, defending Cy young winner Robbie Ray, was pitching against the visiting Texas Rangers, who were 22 games under break-even and ranked near the bottom of the league in most pitching categories. Time to right the ship and stake a claim to that postseason berth.

Naturally, they got shut out.

It would be one thing if the Mariners lost 5-0 to a pitcher having a brilliant game, or a team that made astounding defensive plays to keep them off the scoreboard. But no. This was still the Texas Rangers. And to rub salt in the wound, they even used the stupid "opener" strategy of starting a relief pitcher for the first inning or two before going to the guy that they expect to pitch the bulk of the game, a tactic that has so much going against it that it tends to backfire spectacularly. Nothing-special Triple-A callups pitched the first 5²⁄₃ innings and nothing-special veteran relievers pitched the rest, a total of six guys, all of whom looked rather "meh" on the mound. This is the crack staff that held the ostensibly playoff-bound Mariners to just two hits over the first six innings.

The M's would get three more hits before it was done, but one was immediately erased on a double-play and the others came with two outs (in the 7th and 9th) down 5-0 and were inconsequential nuisances akin to a single gnat buzzing one's hairline as far as the Rangers were concerned.

I get it, it's a long season. The guys have been playing hard for six months and they're tired. They're a little banged up (Eugenio Suárez was even batting with a broken finger). But tonight it looked like they weren't even trying. Like they didn't care anymore. And that includes their manager.

Sure, Scott Servais often appears not to care about his team winning games when he "strategizes," so that's not new. But here's what he did today. First, he made out a lineup card featuring a middle three that are all all-or-nothing guys: .200 hitters, more or less, that will bop a home run if they make good contact but strike out a lot more. (You could add a fourth consecutive guy if you count No. 7-batting Jarred Kelenic as all-or-nothing, but really he's still just an underachieving mystery surprise.) This is in keeping with the Servais (and Mariners in general) history of living and dying by the home run while giving no more than lip service to other methods of baseball offense and it annoys me. I'm not saying you don't use those guys in your order, I'm just saying don't bunch them all up together. So, of course, the first time the M's had an offensive threat it fizzled—Ty France and Mitch Haniger led off the home 4th with hits, the first of Seattle's night. Two on, none out, middle of the order due up. Home-run threats all, but incapable of much else. Predictable result: strikeout, fly ball, strikeout.

It's a crap photo, but the dude can play the sax.

At that point it's still just 1-0, not that bad. We get to the 8th at just 2-0 and Servais goes to the bullpen for his only lefty reliever, Matt Boyd—who strangely got the sirens and the light-show "Los Bamberos" introduction despite not being (a) a particularly hard thrower or (b) in to put out a fire of some kind or (c) in a position to hold a lead or even a tie—to face the left-handed-batting Corey Seager and Nathaniel Lowe. Not the worst move, but still a bit of a head-scratcher given the circumstance. Boyd promptly hits Seager on the wrist and gets Lowe on a foul out. Then the inexplicable: Servais has Boyd intentionally walk Adolis García to get rookie Josh Jung to the plate with two aboard, but not trusting Boyd to continue he goes to the ’pen again for Diego Castillo. Jung had already homered in the game and driven in the second Texas run with a hard single, but that's the guy Servais wanted to face and what do you know, Jung crushed another one deep into the night for a three-run bomb. Jung had all five RBI for his team.

Not done yet, Servais also made us channel Professor Farnsworth in the 9th, when the M's were trying to keep hope alive with two runners aboard and one out he went to his bench to send up pinch-hitter…Abraham Toro. Eh, whaa? Toro popped up, which was surprising in that he managed to actually make contact with a pitch. Last man up Adam Frazier tried to make it mildly interesting with a deep liner, but it was caught on the warning track to end things with a whimper.

But really, no matter what the manager chose to do or not do wasn't going to matter tonight. These guys didn't have it in them. They're dragging. Listless. Playing as if they are all feeling as I do in the midst of a black-hole episode that has all my senses seemingly encased in a thick layer of gauze.

As we were making our way out of the stadium, we went by a guy playing the saxophone near the parking garage. He was belting out a pretty fine rendition of "How Deep is Your Love" by the Bee Gees and I wondered if he was making a comment on the Mariners and their late-season crash-and-maybe-burn. As in, hey, what a crap couple of weeks for these guys! They look like toast! But we'll love them no matter what. I think. Wait, will we? 'Cause we're living in a world of fools, breaking us down...

My friends and I still had a nice evening. It was a warm night out at the ballyard in good company with a terrific view from seats that are generally well beyond my price range, and I feel like I need to get at least one game per season in with these particular pals or things just go off-kilter, so totally worth it.

I just wish the team we came to see play had been up to the task.

Tagged Baseball, Seattle Mariners, Posted on September 28, 2022 at 1:38AM   |   Permalink   |     |  

2 Comments

New Rules

Commissioner of Baseball Rob Manfred, laughing maniacally as he continues to mold the game of baseball like a toddler pounding a lump of play-doh into an unrecognizable blob

He's at it again.

The Commissioner of Baseball, one Robert D. Manfred, has made it his mission to turn the game he is the current custodian of into something all of its previous custodians would not recognize. So far, he has instituted a swarm of smallish rule changes as well as a few huge ones to Major League Baseball and he's got more coming next year.

If I may paraphrase J. Jonah Jameson, the man is a menace.

Manfred simply does not like baseball, at least not in the sense of the game as a whole, balanced concept that requires strategic thinking and intellectual trade-offs to navigating the game. Nor does he value competitive integrity or the richness of detail. He likes simple. He likes not to have to think. He likes short attention spans.

Thus far, the Manfred regime has given us:

• The no-pitch intentional walk
• The "universal" designated hitter (ugh)
• Requiring teams to declare in advance who is a pitcher and who is not and imposing a limit on how many pitchers a team can carry
• The "zombie runner" in extra innings (which some of a certain age have humorously taken to calling the "Manfred Man")
• An entirely avoidable and self-inflicted labor stoppage that delayed the opening of this season
• Expanded playoffs, the first taste of which we'll get next month, which now allows nearly half the teams in the Majors into the postseason and devalues both the season as a whole and the winning of a division title
• Advertising on the fields, not just on stadium walls and scoreboard signage, but on the fields themselves (in foul territory and on the pitcher's mound)
• Advertising on uniforms, which we'll start to see in this year's playoffs and will be an everyday thing starting next year
• The three-batter minimum for pitchers (this one I actually don't have a problem with, though the reason it came into being is no better than the rest of this)
• Ugly unis for the All-Star Games
• Effective acceptance of the Houston Astros' cheating scandal with virtually no repercussions for the perpetrators

Starting in 2023 we will also now have:

• A pitch clock. No longer will baseball be the game with no clock, there will be one to mandate that pitchers and batters move things along regardless of circumstance. Well, not quite regardless—the clock will have 15 seconds on it when the bases are empty, 20 when a runner is on base. If a pitcher takes too long before delivering a pitch, a ball will be added to the count; likewise, if a batter steps out or isn't ready to go within eight seconds (he will be permitted to request a time out once per plate appearance) a strike will be added. Further, only 30 seconds will be permitted between batters; if the next batter in the lineup isn't ready to go 30 seconds after the previous play, he starts with a count of strike one. Despite this having been experimented with in the minor leagues in recent seasons, it remains to be seen how this will play out; it might be OK. Used to be that the players that were slower to deliver a pitch or who took "excessive" time at the batter's box between pitches were relatively rare, but today they're more commonplace and it will at least be interesting to see if this cuts down on so-called dead time without disrupting anything else. But the law of unintended consequences pretty much guarantees there will be issues.
• A limit on how often a pitcher can try to pick off a baserunner. This is a clear and blatant declaration that pitchers should not care about runners; Manfred has openly said he wants to "create more action," which apparently means preventing a defense from trying to get runners out. I love the stolen base, it's one of my favorite plays, but all this does is cheapen it.
• A restriction on where defenders can play. For the history of the game, only the pitcher and catcher were required to be at any specific point on the field. No longer. Two infielders must begin each play on either side of second base and forward of the outfield grass. No more shifting three infielders to one side, no more moving your second baseman into the outfield, no more four-outfielder defenses. This also is based on Manfred's desire for "more action," and because batters as a whole have chosen not to combat defensive shifts over the years, it probably will result in more base hits as fielders will be prevented form playing where they should be allowed to play. The language of the rule is vague enough that someone will at some point cause it to be clarified; it's intention is to maintain the restriction until "the pitcher releases the ball," but it also says the infielders "may not switch sides during the game." So when J.P. Crawford makes a great play running from his shortstop position to flag down a hard grounder on the outfield grass at the right side of second base, is he in violation of the rule? I think not, but someone will exploit the language to challenge such a play.
• Larger bases. The bases on the field will grow from 12" square to 15" square. This will be odd at first but quickly folded into expected norm, I think. Again, this is to give offenses a boost by making it that much harder to get baserunners out. The one positive to this is the extra area will give first basemen a little more of a safety margin on potential collisions on close plays at first, but this could have been accomplished simply by extending the base an inch or two into foul territory instead.
• The completion of the destruction of the American and National Leagues as anything more than labels. Manfred's predecessor started this process in the ’90s, but with this year's adoption of the designated hitter rule (pause for dry heaves) by the National League and next year's change in the schedule that has every team play every other team in both leagues during the regular season, the merger from two distinct entities into one is concluded.

Not one of these changes was made with the good of the game in mind. Every one has been with an eye toward getting bigger short-term profits for a business that already rakes in $10 billion in annual revenue.

Manfred believes that the game needs to be dumbed down and sped up in order to attract younger viewers with short attention spans. He thinks that making the game into something else will get him bigger television ratings. He things more playoff games will mean more TV money overall. He thinks that the baseball audience likes hitting and doesn't care about fielding and by making these changes to unbalance things a bit that people who do not watch baseball will decide they now will watch baseball.

Which is just dumb.

You don't say, "hey, non-fans, I know my game is slow and boring because it requires thinking and thus doesn't appeal to you, so I've dumbed it down closer to your level and made it a little bit more frenetic! You like that, right?" and expect to convert everyone. People who come to baseball come to it because it's different. Because if you know what's going on, that so-called dead time isn't usually so, there's actually tension and stuff going on strategically.

A pitcher worried about a stolen base threat on first was actually valuable to both sides if you understood the situation. Having the pitcher in the lineup made for decisions during the game and a thought process about building your team and planning a game that are just wiped out now. Having the option to dare a batter to hit the other way by leaving a whole third of the field undefended was an opportunity for both teams to exploit. Gone. Sure, few if any people will miss the Nomar Garciaparra-like ritual of stepping out of the box, re-fastening the batting gloves, and taking three practice swings like a mini-hokey-pokey before every pitch, but not many guys did that. 

Frankly, the 2023 changes aren't going to be as big a deal as the ones we're already seeing now (or have known are coming, like the jersey ads), which are far more damaging. The pitch clock, the shift ban, sure, I object to them on principle, but in the old days shifts were rare and few players took a lot of time between pitches anyway, so it won't seem too bad. The step-off rule, that I hate and can't figure why any pitcher would approve of it.

Still, I'd accept it all gladly if Manfred would use his new, negotiated ultimate power to impose changes without union approval to abolish the DH and consign it to a fiery death.

Tagged Baseball, Rob Manfred, Posted on September 13, 2022 at 6:30PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

Frequent flier miles

As part of the collective bargaining agreement adopted by Major League Baseball and its players' union earlier this year, a number of changes (mostly unwelcome) have come to the game this season and more are coming next year. The most egregious of these, of course, is the "universal designated hitter" rule that began this season, which is a crime against the sport. Other heinous changes include advertising on uniforms, which will either begin this postseason or next season; expanded playoffs, which we will see in a little over a month; and a tripling of the number of games devoted to Interleague-play, starting next year.

That last point became less abstract today when MLB released its tentative schedules for 2023. The new formula has teams playing clubs in their own division 13 times each (down from 19) and clubs from the other two same-league divisions six or seven times each (roughly the same as now), with the remainder of the schedule devoted to Interleague—teams will play every team in the other league three times, four in the case of its so-called "rival team." (One issue I can't figure—why 13 per intradivision team? Make it 14, take the those four games out of the same-league interdivision mix, which has seven games against four teams and six against the other six; make it equitable all around. That wrinkle is just dumb.)

As a concept, I don't object to this, at least not any more than I object to Interleague play generally; I preferred it when the leagues were contained unto themselves and only met at the All-Star Game and the World Series. Since it came into existence in 1997—as a gimmick to sell more tickets in the wake of the disastrous work stoppage of 1994, which itself was supposed to be the first year of expanded playoffs that were designed to be a gimmick to sell more tickets—it had been limited to 15-20 games ostensibly limited to a single division; greed got in the way of fairness, of course, and over the years it was tweaked to give extra games against opposite-league teams that sold more tickets in the major markets. The new norm of 46 Interleague games is much more suitably apportioned, with only one Interleague game differing from team to team; the current setup has been absurd when looked at in terms of competitive fairness for winning a title, so in a lot of ways the new system will be better.

Still rankles me a little, though.

Being a more-or-less traditionalist when it comes to baseball, I am sad to see the death of the two separate and distinct major leagues. Really, that kicked in this year with the metastisization of the DH cancer to the National League, but the new schedule just underlines the point. The American and National Leagues are mere labels now, the slow merger into one entity (which began in the '90s) is complete. So that's one thing.

The other issue I have is how it affects my hometown Seattle Mariners.

Just by nature of geography, the Mariners already travel a lot more than most teams do. Occasionally a schedule will have the Oakland A's or the Not-Really-Los-Angeles-You-Don't-Fool-Me-I-Know-You-Play-in-Orange-County Angels traveling more miles over the course of the year, but usually it's the M's. Seattle is an isolated outpost far from every other team's home, it figures they'd have the biggest travel burden. So I was concerned that the new normal would eliminate road trips to California and Texas in favor of more east-coast trips, and adding even more travel to the already well-traveled Mariners could be detrimental. But that's not going to be the case.

Looking at the ’23 draft schedule I see the number of road trips remains the same at 11. The M's make five trips to the Eastern time zone (one of which is Cleveland after Chicago then home, not bad; another ends with a stopover in Oakland on the way home, which isn't great but is probably better than shoehorning that Oakland stop in elsewhere) and six to the Central, most of which are paired with Pacific Time stops on one end or the other. And there are no instances of backtracking weirdness like they had in 2019, when they had trips that went Seattle-Anaheim-Minneapolis-Oakland-Seattle and Seattle-Dallas/Ft. Worth-Chicago-Houston-Seattle. The closest one to something like that in the ’23 grid is Seattle-Kansas City-Houston-Chicago-Seattle, which seems not as dumb/wasteful. Otherwise, all of the trips make geographic sense; ideally, of course, you would pair the visit to Phoenix with a stop in San Diego or Anaheim instead of Minneapolis (July 24-30), play in San Francisco back-to-back with a stop in Oakland, and get the Rangers and Astros on one jaunt. But it's a mess getting every date to fall into place with 30 teams, so I guess this is OK.

All told, we get a season sum of 49,007 miles flown. More than this year's just-over 47,000 and last year's 48,400, but not as bad as I thought it'd be. In 2014, the Mariners' schedule had them flying 51,500 miles; I figured it would be that every year now. Glad to be wrong.

One other good thing: despite the news media calling it a "balanced schedule," it remains division-weighted, which I consider a necessity. For a while there, MLB used an actual balanced schedule (mostly) which made standings in a division artificial. At least this plan continues to make it meaningful to be a division champ. Now, if we could just get Commissioner Manfred and company to change the stupid new playoff format that lumps a division winner in with Wild Card teams to one that respects the division flag...

Tagged Baseball, Seattle Mariners, MLB, Posted on August 25, 2022 at 1:38AM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

My Favorite Marti—er, Mariner

Sam Haggerty steals a base against the Angels

Not long ago, on a day like this I would be spending a couple of hours writing an opposition primer for the series the Seattle Mariners are about to embark on for grandsalami.net. And then three or four people might read part of it. Wasn't a good ROI, if you will, which is why I'm not doing that today in advance of the Mariners' three-game set in Oakland vs. the Athletics.

But this is a landmark year for the M's and I'm following closely even if I'm not keeping up that site. Currently in position to make the postseason for the first time in more than 20 years, the Mariners have been fun to watch. Also frustrating to watch. Because they are still the Mariners, managed by a guy (Scott Servais) that by all accounts is outstanding when it comes to keeping up morale and handling all the egos but by all observable evidence is, shall we say, intellectually challenged when it comes to actual baseball strategy. But thanks in large part to personnel moves made by Servais' boss, Jerry Dipoto—and by a new rule in Major League Baseball that I do not like but works to advantage here, a limit on the number of pitchers a team can carry—Servias' strategic deficiencies have been minimized and the team is flourishing. (Relatively speaking.)

Having just swept the hapless Los Angeles Angels of Orange County Not Really Los Angeles at All, the Mariners play their next five games against teams at the bottom of the standings, Oakland (43-76) and Washington (40-80). Those two are in a race to see which will be the first of the 30 MLB clubs to be eliminated from playoff contention, so it looks like a good next few days.

Especially since there was a personnel move I expected to be made that wasn't.

The M's had been enduring a number of injuries and absences for much of the year and now everyone (mostly) is healthy again, which created a roster crunch. Some guys were going to have to be sent down or let go, and based on Servais' history with various players I thought that infielder Abraham "Fatty Tuna" Toro would remain with the team despite his near-uselessness this season, while utilityman Sam Haggerty, who had already been relegated to the minor leagues twice this year, would again be demoted. Because history.

Instead, Fatty Tuna got optioned out. I mean, that should have happened months ago, but instead Servais kept putting him in the starting lineup to provide a black hole in the order (.180/.239/.322 batting line in 84 games) while Sammy and his .369 on-base percentage stayed at Triple-A until the end of June.

I'd been a Sam Haggerty booster since the M's acquired him after the 2019 campaign. In five minor-league seasons he'd put up great on-base numbers and stolen lots of bags while playing solid defense at six different positions. He looked like a speedier version of José Oquendo. Here's what I wrote in his player profile over at gs.net when he was first called up to the Major League club in August of 2020:

No one paid much attention to the line on the transactions page when this switch-hitting infielder was claimed off the waiver wire last winter, but you might want to sit up and take notice now. Haggerty started his pro career in Cleveland's organization, but despite exceptional on-base numbers and stellar baserunning, he didn't hit much so the Indians deemed him expendable and traded him to the Mets for next-to-nothing. The Mets didn't respect his abilities that much either, despite a nice performance at three of their minor-league levels last year, and put him on release waivers. Thankfully, Seattle GM Jerry Dipoto thought he was worth a look and snagged Haggerty for the M's.

He was having a nice spring training before the pandemic shut everything down, but with manager Scott Servais' penchant for overstuffing his bullpen, there was no room for Haggerty when the truncated season finally got going. The M's finally promoted him from the satellite training facility in Tacoma in mid-August, though, and all he's done since then is hit, drive in runs, and steal bases. With Shed Long struggling to perform as an everyday player, Servais and the M's might be wise to give Haggerty a shot at that everyday second-base job.

Meanwhile, we'll keep enjoying seeing Sam get aboard and run the basepaths. One other observation: Haggerty has one of the best slide techniques of anyone playing now. Check it out next time he steals a bag—it's short, quick, and gets him back to a standing position right away in case of errant throws. It's a small thing, but with so many players sloppily diving headlong from eight feet away and struggling to either stay on the base after they get there or keep from hurting themselves and getting spiked, it's refreshing to see someone slide with such fundamental elegance.

Sam finished 2020 batting only .260, but it was a tiny sample size (13 games). He started the next year with the M's but did poorly (.186) and hurt his shoulder (or, maybe, did poorly because his shoulder was hurt), causing him to miss most of the season. This year he wasn't even given a chance to make the team out of spring camp over the likes of Toro and Dylan Moore (.202 career BA). So you can understand why I figured he'd get the short end of it again despite the fact that he's been the Mariners' best hitter since he was called up on June 29th (.330/.371/.536).

Also, I've been negatively prejudiced by the Mariners' historical tendencies (in the Servais era as well as before) to live and die by the home run, and Sammy is most definitely not that kind of ballplayer. Sam is a throwback to the style of baseball played by the favored teams of my youth: a switch-hitter that relies on swiftness, putting the ball in play, smart baserunning, and exceptional defense. He might occasionally crank a homer, but it's never the plan. It's decidedly more fun than swinging for the fences all the time, and I'm surprised the Mariner brass even noticed.

But they did. At least, Dipoto did. “It may be the most fun that we have every day is smiling every time Sam does something else that’s just awesome in a game,” the Seattle GM said to a radio show earlier this month. Servais is still batting Sam at the bottom of the order for some reason (I'd bat him second), but hey, I'm glad he's starting at all. I'm glad he's on the team at all.

Sure, Seattle has bigger names—your Julio Rodríguezes, your Mitch Hanigers, your Ty Frances—and those guys are great. Love ’em. But me, I want more Sam Haggerty.

Tagged Baseball, Seattle Mariners, Sam Haggerty, Posted on August 19, 2022 at 6:15PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

The Grim Reaper comes for all

Vin Scully

I know, that's a morbid, depressing headline. But it's true, and as one gets older—and as I personally can no longer pretend I'm not firmly within middle age—the people in the world who leave us are more and more often people we have a personal connection with in some fashion. At 53, I'm not in the stage where I'm scanning the obits for people I know or anything, but I am in the stage wherein the public figures that reach their ends are a kind of contemporary.

Recently there have been a couple of those for me, and, naturally, my friend Erik beat me to the punch in writing up reflective memorials for them and I can't improve on his remarks. But I will say a little bit anyway.

For the great Vin Scully, longtime broadcaster for the Los Angeles (and before that the Brooklyn) Dodgers, who passed away on August 2nd at age 94, Erik noted the achievement of sheer longevity Scully accomplished thusly:

 One of the first games he broadcast for the Dodgers, when he was a mere stripling of 23 in 1950, was an exhibition game against the Philadelphia A's, managed, in his final year, by Connie Mack, who had been born in 1862, just after the Battle of Fredericksburg. So just those two men connected the U.S. Civil War to the present. Remarkable. If you want to put it in baseball terms: Connie Mack began playing professional baseball in 1886, and managed professional baseball from 1894 to 1950, at which point, at that exhibition game, you can imagine him tagging off to Vin Scully, who broadcast professional baseball games another 66 years. So it's 1886 to 2016. That's the entirety of the sport, really.

Vin was my introduction to baseball entertainment. I grew up in a minor-league town, where there was a Triple-A team affiliated with the Astros (and Rangers before that) and where the local TV station occasionally ran Padres games, but the local radio ran Dodger games. Nearly every night (or afternoon) in the spring and summer I could tune in to AM 1400 and hear the almost musical phrase, "It's time for Dodger baseball" in the dulcet tones of Vin Scully, followed by "a very pleasant good afternoon to you wherever you may be."

I never was a Dodger fan, but I was always, always a Vin Scully fan. There are/have been other good baseball play-by-play pros—your Jon Millers, your Gary Thornes, your Dave Niehauses—but there has ever only been one Vin Scully; no one has ever been as good at that job. Vin not only narrated the game for you, he made it art. He (and presumably his staff of minions) prepared so meticulously for every broadcast that he had stories about even the most no-name of journeyman callups to relate during breaks in the action. He famously lip-read arguments on the field between managers and umpires, substituting creative metaphors for the swear words when he interpreted for the radio audience. (My favorite of Vin's substitutions was “'that's fertilizer,' Lasorda yelled, ‘100% fertilizer.’”) He made the most inconsequential blowout game between teams long eliminated from the pennant chase entertaining.

Vin was also the regular TV guy on the NBC Game of the Week for much of my growing-up years, setting my standard for televised games as well as radio. He had a decent repartee with color commentator Joe Garagiola on NBC, but he was always best as a solo act, just chatting with the listener one on one. Or, as he put it himself, "I tried to make believe I was in the ballpark [grandstands], sitting next to somebody and just talking." In modern times, when thanks to the Internet and MLB.TV one had a choice in such things, when I had the option of watching a game with the Dodgers' broadcast feed or the opposition's, I would always choose the Dodger feed because of Vin. Heck, sometimes I would tune in Dodger games as background noise while doing something else, just for Vin.

Scully was the best for a lot of reasons, but one key element was a sense to know when to stop talking and let the moment speak for itself. He described his approach to the gig this way: "The game is just one long conversation, and I'm anticipating that, and I will say things like 'Did you know that?' or 'You're probably wondering why.' I'm really just conversing rather than just doing play-by-play. I never thought of myself as having a style. I don't use key words. And the best thing I do? I shut up."

Erik lists some favorite Scullyisms—“Bob Gibson pitches like he's double-parked”—but there have been so many that I both heard myself and read quoted by others that I couldn't pick favorites. But there is one that resonates more and more in my middle-age, from a game Vin did between the Dodgers and the Cubs in the late '80s and regarding the Cubs' slugging outfielder: "Andre Dawson has a bruised knee and is listed as day-to-day. Aren't we all?"

 

Nichelle Nichols

The other obit from this month that hit my world was that for Nichelle Nichols, famous for portraying Lieutenant Uhura on the original Star Trek, who died at 89 years old. Erik again has a better tribute. As a champion-level Star Trek nerd I of course know all the oft-told stories about Nichelle and her Trek history—how Martin Luther King Jr. convinced her to remain with the show when she was thinking of leaving; how she inspired Whoopi Goldberg and plenty of other young African-Americans just by portraying a competent professional on network television; how she didn't know ahead of time that her audition for Star Trek was for her former affair partner, Gene Roddenberry, whom she left because she didn't want to be the "other woman"; how Bill Shatner sabotaged the alternate-take filming of the alleged "first interracial kiss" scene with her, insisted on by network suits, to ensure that the kiss would make it on air despite NBC's worries about alienating racists in the South—and how she turned being typecast as Lt. Uhura into a way to reach out to the scientific community, working with NASA on minority outreach and recruiting several applicants who would become prominent astronauts and administrators for the agency (including shuttle astronaut Mae Jemison, the first Black woman in space, who "returned the favor," as it were, and appeared as a transporter chief on an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation).

I never met Nichelle personally despite seeing her in person at a number of conventions. I've never been an autograph hound or anything like that, so didn't wait in line to speak with her and have her sign stuff, but I did enjoy her appearances and the occasions she would close out her bit with a verse or two of "Beyond Antares."

A class act, a quality human, and a loss to the world.

Nichelle had been in poor health for a while, it wasn't a shock to learn of her passing, but it still gave me a sad, as the kids say. We've now lost De, Jimmy, Leonard, Majel, and Nichelle from the original core crew, not to mention Rene Auberjonois and Aaron Eisenberg from Deep Space Nine.

I'm at that age. The obits are more often for folks that were somehow important to me now.

(Oh, and to answer Erik's question, Nichelle's character of Uhura got her first name, Nyota, non-canonically in novels in the '80s; it was only in the J.J. Abrams movie of 2009 that it was first used on-screen. Fanfiction attempted to name her "Penda" previously, but we can all agree the final choice was the better one.)

Tagged Star Trek, Baseball, Vin Scully, Nichelle Nichols, Posted on August 11, 2022 at 4:50PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

#FireManfred

You will never convince me that Rob Manfred likes or watches baseball.

— Julie DiCaro (@JulieDiCaro) February 10, 2020

It's small potatoes compared to the existential crisis of Republican totalitarianism, but today the commissioner of baseball held a press conference and I have opinions about it. See the deets at my other site.

Tagged Baseball, Posted on February 16, 2020 at 9:17PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

Potpourri

I don't feel coherent enough today to put together a cogent post on any particular subject, so here are a few fragments of thoughts on several topics...

• I didn't get around to doing my usual baseball postseason predictions, but if I had I would have predicted thusly:
  • LDS: Houston over Boston, Cleveland over New York; Los Angeles over Arizona, Washington over Chicago.
  • LCS: Houston over Cleveland, Los Angeles over Washington.
  • World Series: Houston over Los Angeles.
  So I'm batting .500 so far. Houston is, unfortunately, very very good, and I don't see them losing more than a few games the whole way. If anyone can beat them, though, it's probably LA; the Dodgers are crazy deep and might be able to keep the Astros in check, but it'd be an upset. So far, the playoffs have been fun but not that memorable save for the Cubs/Nationals Game 5, which was insane. Reminded me a little of the 15-14 game in the 1993 World Series, but the '93 game at least had rainy conditions and a wet field to blame the horrible pitching on; the Nats and Cubs were just playing as if hexed, which some Washington, DC, fans might think is plausible given the Nationals' seeming inability to win a playoff series no matter how may leads they take. One of the freakier games I've ever seen.
• My housing search has been going in earnest for a few months now, and I'm getting rather discouraged. When I was looking "unofficially" over the past year or so, before I had the money in hand to actually buy anything, there seems to be enough listings popping up every now and then to make me feel like this would be a relatively quick to-do once I had the cash in hand, but it's not turned out that way. Just in that time the market seems to have inflated to a disturbing degree, and I've started expanding my search radius outside of the city. I don't want to leave the city proper, but thanks to fucking Amazon and other big biz luring people here with higher-end paychecks and a lack of development in housing starts, I might not have a choice. Even if I continue to rent, things are bad — I got socked with the second rent hike of 20+% in the last few years recently, making staying where I am untenable in the long term. Goddamn Amazon.com... I'm having a look at a townhome near the edge of the city limits tomorrow at an open house. We'll see how that goes.
• In addition to Discovery, the premiere of which I opined on here and which continues to be solidly engrossing, I've been enjoying The Orville, The Good Place, Mr. Robot, and The Gifted on the TeeVee. I'm unsurprisingly disappointed so far in The Inhumans, though. Still, it's a good time to be a nerd with all the geeky TV series these days.
• I thought I had more brain droppings to write about, but my mental haze must be thicker than I realized. Bleh.

Tagged Baseball, TV, Housing, Posted on October 14, 2017 at 11:58PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

WBC Fever

My dad remarked that my latest batch of Facebook and Twitter postings were incomprehensible without context, and I expect that's so. The context? The World Baseball Classic.

The WBC has only been around since 2006. It's an international tournament kind of like the World Cup, except soccer nerds have had the World Cup a lot longer than us baseball nerds have had the WBC, so it's a way bigger deal—also, the rest of the world loves their soccer, but most countries don't know much about baseball. The idea behind the WBC is to change all that and grow interest in baseball gobally.

And it's working. Slowly, of course, but getting there. Baseball has been huge in some places forever, of course; Japan, Latin America, the Caribbean, Taiwan to a lesser extent. But now there are respectable leagues popping up elsewhere too. The Korean Baseball Organization doesn't have the history, of course, but is now at about the level of quality that the Japanese pro leagues were at 20 or 30 years ago. The Australian league is fledgling, but has produced a Major Leaguer here and there. And the Netherlands are now an international power; great players have come from Aruba and Curacau for a while, but now they're coming out of Amsterdam too.

I, of course, am a Japanophile, and the primary reason I love the WBC is that it's really my only chance to see players from the NPB (Nippon Professional Baseball) leagues do their thing.

I've paid some attention to NPB for a long time, but it's hard to follow from afar. When I went to Japan in 2003(? or was it '02?), one of my first stops was the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum at the Tokyo Dome. It's a lot less impressive than the baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, of course, but it's still pretty keen and I got to learn more of the history of the NPB  leagues and players. I chose a team to adopt as My Team in Japan (I went with the Hanshin Tigers for several reasons) and went to a preseason game in Osaka. From then on I've tried to follow the leagues on the Internet, but it takes a lot of effort; my command of Japanese is rudimentary at best, and even less useful when trying to read it. I can decipher a box score well enough ("Timely Hit!") and identify most of the player names with the help of a Kanji dictionary, but I can't read a game story or the Nikkan Sports page except on the abbreviated English language site. And forget watching televised games, at least so far. Internet feeds of NPB action exist here and there, but are inaccessible overseas (e.g. here). Highlights make it to YouTube once in a while.

So when the WBC rolls around, I stay up through the night to watch Team Japan. Tokyo always hosts at least one round of the tournament (this year they had two), and Team Japan gets prime time there, so their games are at 2:00am here (3:00am after DST kicks in, as Japan ignores such foolishness). So I've Tweeted reactions to the six games I've watched in the wee hours from the Tokyo Dome the last couple of weeks since nobody was staying up all night with me to watch. :)

This year's team has a lot of new-to-me faces. Some of the old guard have retired or joined the American Major Leagues and opted not to play/were left off the team this year. But that's cool, as I'm getting to know the latest batch of stars. My new favorite NPB player is Hiroshima Carp second baseman Ryosuke Kikuchi. He's made numerous outstanding defensive plays in the tournament and I've looked up some of his Carp highlights. My kind of ballplayer.

 

 

The guy on Team Japan Major League scouts seem to have their eye on is Tetsudo Yamada, who had a huge second round; he's achieved what the Japanese call the Triple-Threes—.300 batting average, 30 home runs, and 30 stolen bases—two years running now. He's also a second baseman, so he's been the DH in the WBC. Yokohama BayStars outfielder Yoshitomo Tsutsugoh is popular over there, and it's easy to see why, but he doesn't fit the mold of the Japanese style that I like so much; he's a bulky, slow-by-Japanese-standards home-run hitter. He's like a more disciplined Greg Luzinski, if you will.

Anyway, the Tokyo rounds are over, and Team Japan is so far undefeated as they prepare for the semifinals in Los Angeles starting Monday. So no more 5am tweets about needing to pull Kazuhisa Makida off the mound because he's doing his best José Mesa impression, or making Phil Collins song puns for Tsu-tsu-Tsutsugoh. I do wish I'd been able to come up with a good joke linking Tokyo Giants catcher Seiji Kobayashi to the no-win scenario, though...

Tagged Baseball, WBC, Twitter, Posted on March 17, 2017 at 3:21AM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

Now What? New Year's Goals, Predictions, and Semi-Resolutions

Congratulations. If you're reading this, you've survived the unwelcome boil and ambitious killing spree that was 2016. I know, I know, it wasn't all bad; it only seems like it thanks to the plethora of public-figure and closer-to-home death and the election of a narcissistic marshmallow turd. But there were moments of good here and there sprinkled among the nightmares.

But all that's over now and it's time to engage in that cultural ritual of promising to be better at X, Y, and Z—the "New Year's Resolution"—and to show off our awesome precognitive powers and predict events of the coming Solar orbit, knowing full well that we will most likely not succeed in either resolving or predicting.

I've already blown one semi-resolution, which was to avoid "lost days" in 2017. I know revise the goal to be "keep lost days to less than 5%." A "lost day" is a manifestation of the screwed-up brain chemistry that prompts me to be gloomy and lethargic and generally wallowy (better known as clinical depression and colloquially referred to in these parts as The Black Hole), one that results in literally staying in bed all day rather than get up and engage in some facet of actual life. I've had a number of these lost days in the weeks since the election, both for the macro reasons of the impending Trumpification of America and micro reasons of personal discontent (of course, ascribing reasons to them so casually is a gross oversimplification, but I think one has to be "one of us" to really get that). Once in a while I suppose they can be helpful in riding out a Black Hole episode, but they can also be self-feeding parasites if too frequent.

Other goals for the year may include:

• Put more effort into strengthening/maintaining my social circle. It's taken some pretty big hits over the last several years and I prefer it doesn't take any more; the kind of efforts I'm thinking of wouldn't necessarily have made a lick of difference in those hits, but that's no reason not to try solidifying some other areas.
• Spend more money. I don't mean spend recklessly or frivolously, I just mean override my well-honed instinct for thrift every now and again. It's (somewhat) less necessary than it used to be, and though it still pays to be smart about it, indulge in a dinner out and don't worry about making up for it later...occasionally.
• Enjoy where I live more. I'm in this spectacular city/region and I don't get out in it often enough.(Related to "lost days.")
• Blog more frequently — say, weekly on average. There's certainly enough going on in the world that warrants attention, and I consume tons of pop-culture to opine on. Like, this week I read the first volume of the Brian K. Vaughan/Cliff Chiang comic Paper Girls, which is fantastic. Also the first volume of They're Not Like Us, which I didn't really care for.
• Keep up with the sketching. Fill, let's say, two sketchbooks this year.
• Build the cabinets I spoke of last month. Four modular units of three drawers each, and if those go smoothly and relatively quickly and don't run into unforeseen expense, make two or four more for expansion.
• Assuming the estate issues I've been dealing with for the last 15 months proceed at a reasonable pace and the means thus become available, upgrade my housing security. Market permitting, of course.
• Go somewhere that isn't southern California. For fun. Vancouver, maybe, or DC if the stink of orange marshmallow turd is out of town. (I'd say Tokyo, but I'm not affording that this year.)

As for my powers of prognostication, let's see...

• Fully half of the Trump cabinet will get confirmed even though they're completely unqualified, and before the end of the year Republican congressional leaders will be criticizing them for ineptitude and/or corruption without irony.
• Spider-Man: Homecoming will be terrific. Justice League will suck. Wonder Woman and Star Wars will both be OK.
• The Seattle Mariners will cruise to a division title on the strength of Rookie of the Year Mitch Haniger and slugging 1B Dan Vogelbach.
• OR The Seattle Mariners will wallow in mediocrity for another season thanks to the inexperience and poor showing from their entire outfield.

I'm afraid to make more political prognostications except to say it's gonna be a shitstorm full of lawsuits, corruption charges, and diplomatic damage-control.

How about everyone else? Goals? Predictions?

Tagged The Black Hole, Baseball, Goals, Posted on January 2, 2017 at 1:16AM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

Cubs No More

With their victory in the National League Championship Series, the Chicago Cubs have died.

For more than half a century, the Chicago Cubs have been synonymous with futility. It's been a cultural touchstone. No matter how much they might tease with moderate success, ultimately, the Cubs will disappoint. Americans with no interest in baseball still have some sense that the Chicago Cubs equate with losing. Along with death and taxes, one thing you can rely on is that the Cubs always fail.

Not any more.

The Chicago Cubs have won the pennant and Americana has lost a quintessential element.

The Cubs are not like the Red Sox. When the Boston Red Sox finally won a World Series championship in 2004, 86 years after their last one, it was an event, sure. But the Sox didn't have Cub stink. Boston had won a number of American League pennants since 1918, had been contenders much of the time; sure, not having won the World Series in all those decades was a sore spot, but "Red Sox" never equated to "hopeless." The Cubs were special in that regard. It pervaded our culture.

Even last week's episode of "The Simpsons" contained the line "A drought of Chicago Cubs proportions." Those references now mean nothing.

I congratulate the long-suffering Cub fans. The introductory video before this evening's World Series Game One between the Cubs and the also-long-suffering Cleveland Indians (last World Series championship: 1948) was fun and gave a little warm fuzzy. I appreciate the feeling of "FINALLY" among loyalists who were devoted to the teams of Kerry Wood, Ryne Sandberg, Andre Dawson, Rick Sutcliffe, Ron Santo, Ernie Banks, and the rest. But I also mourn our loss -- the obsolescence of the Cubs joke in "Back to the Future Part II," the erasure of the acronym CUBS (Completely Useless By September), the quaintness now associated with Steve Goodman's wonderful song.

Goodbye, Cub futility. You will be missed. The Chicago Cubs are dead. Long live the Chicago Cubs.

 

Tagged Baseball, Posted on October 25, 2016 at 11:53PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

Random Thoughts

At the risk of stating the obvious, I've not been good about maintaining this blog. Many topics have been worthy of jotting a few sentences about, and yet... Well, I'm here now. So, some flotsam and jetsam from my head as I wait for my car to be serviced in advance of my next rip to SoCal:

• My mood hasn't been great lately. No particular reason, at least none on top of the stresses and bummerific context of my being a Trustee of my mom's estate. Last month there was an incident that triggered an eruption of buried/suppressed rage that was surprisingly powerful and not especially useful. Even when it seems justified, anger of that degree gets in the way of, you know, addressing the problem. But that was then; more recently I've just been in a foggy sort of stasis, for lack of a better term. I'm no stranger to dour moods, and this isn't a severe example by a long shot, but in some ways this sort is more frustrating. I always want to make sense of things, and when staying focused on anything is an elusive task it's impossible to feel like things make any sense. If that makes sense. Which it probably doesn't. Because I'm all over the place in my head right now.
• So, let's talk about baseball, since that is something I can make sense of. Having the playoffs on during this time of foggy ennui is a good thing, it's helpful, but what isn't helpful is the Toronto Blue Jay offense. I really want to like the Jays. I have a great affinity for Canada, for one thing, and they're the only north-of-the-border team in the bigs; they also have a few individual players I like a lot, from ex-Mariner Michael Suanders to Troy Tulowitzki to J.A. Happ, and I have tended to enjoy the company of Blue Jay fans when they come to Seattle to see the Jays play the M's. Sadly, they are built around a one-dimensional offense dependent on the home run, which is so not my style. Also, not good enough to beat the Cleveland Native American Caricatures. Toronto's down 0-3 to the Clevelanders, and while there is Cleveland shortstop Francisco Lindor to appreciate I just can't find anything redeeming about Cleveland winning the American League championship. Bleh. Come on, Blue Jays, be the second team ever to rebound from 0-3! Meanwhile, the Cubs/Dodgers clash in the National League Championship Series has been outstanding -- Javier Baez even stole home! -- and I await the inevitable freak occurrence that prevents the Cubs from winning a pennant. They're clearly the better team, but if they are to maintain their essential Cubness, they must not win. With a pennant, they would cease to be the Cubs.
• John Oliver has been the saving grace of this year's presidential campaign, and this week he tackled the problem of otherwise thoughtful people choosing to vote for protest candidates Jill Stein and Gary Johnson. I say problem because the people I've personally encountered that are supporting one of those two maintain that their choice is principled and Stein/Johnson is actually the best person running. I call bullshit on that, and so does John Oliver, who points out in glorious fashion that both Stein and Johnson are totally incompetent.
  
  

Tagged Politics, The Black Hole, Baseball, John Oliver, Posted on October 18, 2016 at 12:30PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet