Baseball is a Demanding Mistress

It’s not easy being a Pittsburgh Pirates fan. Lost more than they won every year from 1993 – 2012, often a lot more. Now they’re good—made the playoffs for the first time in 21 years last fall—which doesn’t mean they’re any easier to watch. Literally.

The Pirates come to Washington to play the Nationals every year. The best thing that can be said about Nats Park is, it’s a ballpark, and it’s hard for a ballpark to suck. (Though I’ve heard Tropicana Field in Tampa makes an effort.) This year a two-game interleague series brought the Pirates to Orioles Park at Camden Yards, a true gem of a ballpark. I got two tickets for Tuesday (taking The Sole Heir) and two for Wednesday (with The Beloved Spouse). 

Tuesday it rained. Hard. With even worse rain predicted for Wednesday, I expected every effort to be made to get Tuesday’s game in. Both teams had open dates on Thursday, leaving a perfect make-up day. The Sole Heir arrived a few minutes before five. We took care of some logistics, and I went upstairs for a bathroom break while she moved her car to a longer-term space. She told me as I reached the bottom of the stairs from the bathroom: game postponed, rescheduled for 7:05 on Thursday. We salvaged the evening by waiting for The Beloved Spouse and going to dinner together.

On Wednesday it rained harder. We’re talking continuous rain, a couple of inches of standing water in my back yard, dams opened to relieve pressure. Game postponed at 2:30, to be made up at 4:05 on Thursday as the first half of a doubleheader. I was able to shift my work schedule a little, but no one else could on such short notice, so I went alone, something I hadn’t done since my army days when I lived fifteen minutes from Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. The forecast called for a high of 74, early morning low of 50, partly cloudy. I dressed appropriately and hit the road.

I arrived about ten minutes to four, got a pretzel and a Coke, and settled in. Pirates led 1-0, Charlie Morton cruising along when it started to rain. Then harder, until the tarp had to be rolled out for a half-hour rain delay, during which time I ate supper. (Sweet Italian sausage with peppers, fries, and another Coke.) Morton had nothing after the break and the Pirates lost 5-1, leaving 13 men on base. (That is not a misprint; thirteen men left on base.) Second game scheduled to start at 8:10.

I roamed the concourse between games so I was under cover when it started to rain again, harder now, drops bouncing off the concrete like bacon grease out of a frying pan. Game Two was delayed until 8:55. I got a snack of a hot dog, pretzel, and a Coke, which, along with my earlier sausage, fulfilled my weekly allotment of PLA. (Pig Lips and Assholes.) As I sat for the second game, I turned to the Pirate fan seated behind me—with her Orioles-loving family—and said, “After all this, Daddy’s going to be pissed if they leave another thirteen men on base.”

They left fifteen. Orioles starter Chris Tillman threw 49 pitches in the first inning, the Pirates loaded the bases with one out, and scored two runs only because Tillman walked them home. Pirates’ starter Brandon Cumpton hit the wall in the sixth and the Pirates blew a 4-0 lead. Orioles manager Buck Showalter, proving he’d paid attention to the selection of managers  Joe Torre and Tony LaRussa to the Hall of Fame, attempted to assert his qualifications by showing he can delay a game with pitching changes as well as either of them.

Bottom of the tenth, score tied at five. Orioles catcher Matt Wieters leads off. Weiters is a sore spot for Pirates fans. The hands down choice as best player available in his draft class, the Pirates passed on him to take pitcher Daniel Moskos. Pirates management at the time swore Weiters’s projected signing price had nothing to do with the selection; they thought Moskos was the better prospect. The Orioles representative at the draft pulled a hamstring running to the podium to get Weiters’s name in. Moskos had a cup of coffee with a Pirates team that lost 105 games a few years ago. Wieters is a switch-hitting catcher with power who plays Gold Glove-caliber defense. 

The Pirates countered with rookie Stolmy Pimintel. Alone at the game, I had nothing better to do than to watch Stolmy warm up; everything he threw was in the dirt. I wondered if this might be a problem.

Wieters stepped into the batter’s box at 12:52 Friday morning. Stolmy’s first pitch was in the dirt. The second was in the bleachers. I was on my feet and on my way home before Wieters touched first base, as soon as I saw the ball pass behind the foul pole and I knew it was fair.

My personal box score: two losses, two rain delays, $41 in concessions (I ran out between innings for Cracker Jack during Game Two), 28 men left on base in 19 innings. Total elapsed time at stadium: nine hours, eight minutes.

The Beloved Spouse and I have tickets for next Saturday’s game at PNC Park against St. Louis. My Andrew McCutchen game jersey is already washed and ready.

Developing Genius

Interesting post over at Pitchers and Poets yesterday. (Any baseball fan interested in more than the same old bullshit would do well to check P&P out regularly.) Eric Nusbaum took sabremetrician and writer Bill James to task over an article James wrote for Slate Magazine, lamenting how we as a nation don’t invest the same effort to develop writers as we do to find baseball players.

Nusbaum’s right; James’s article is “interesting but extremely flawed.” I’ll not rehash each writer’s points here; they speak more eloquently for themselves than I could. I will attempt to add a couple of argument stones to Nusbaum’s side of the scale.

Before I begin, note that I have been a Bill James devotee since I first saw a Baseball Abstract in 1982. Aside from being the father of modern baseball statistical analysis, he’s a wonderful and entertaining writer, with a keen intelligence not limited to baseball. Several of my life attitudes have been adopted from things Bill James wrote, and I’m better off because of it. (Example: he once took “baseball men” to task for dwelling on what a player couldn’t do, instead of capitalizing on what he did well. Good advice when dealing with anybody.)

James drops the ball uncharacteristically in several ways in this article. Nusbaum catches most; I have a couple more. Wondering why Topeka can produce a major league player every so often, but never a Shakespeare, even though it’s about the size of Shakespeare’s London, misses the point completely. If using Shakespeare (or Dickens) as an example, the comparison isn’t with producing a utility infielder, or even a player who held down a regular position for several years. The comparison there is with Willie Mays or Ted Williams. Few cities of any size have produced players of their accomplishment. If Topeka has, please point him out.

James also errs in his locations. Shakespeare wasn’t from London; he was born and grew up in Stratford-Upon-Avon. Dickens moved to London when he was three, but another James example, Graham Greene, grew up in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. They moved to London when they were already developing as writers. The analogy to Topeka would better be served to cite players who played minor league ball in Topeka, of which I’ll bet there are several well known names.

My arguments here are a hodge-podge, in part because so were James’s. So it goes. I suspect editorial and time constraints may have prevented his normal level of research. His point is still well taken: we don’t produce writers in anything like the quantities we crank out ballplayers.

Well, duh.

We never will. No one ever will, no matter how hard we might try. First, there’s no return on investment for writers. Scout the right ballplayer and you stand to make millions of dollars. The number of writers who can make a publisher comparatively rich can be counted on your digits. Baseball teams own the rights to their players’ work for six years after the reach the show; writers can change publishers with their underwear if they choose. No publisher is going to invest the money and effort to develop a writer who might give him one book, then leave.

Another key element is that baseball players—any athletes—are easier to spot. Watch twelve-year-old kids walk down the street. You can tell with some certainly which are the better athletes. Put a bat in their hands and it gets even easier. Choosing talent at the highest level is hard, but weeding out the chaff at the beginning of the pipeline is relatively easy.

Now take those same twelve-year-olds and tell me which one can write. What does a writer look like? How does he act? You can’t even tell by how he speaks. (People like to make fun of athletes, but I’ve heard some entertainingly inarticulate writers.) You just can’t tell with writers until you read what they’ve written, and even then you ought to read quite a bit before you predict someone to be a guaranteed success.
Comparing writers to athletes is a pointless exercise, not unlike saying Topeka has a population similar to Port St. Lucie FL, so why don’t they have spring training in Kansas, too? That’s comparing sunflowers and oranges.

The truth is, we have about as many writers—and ballplayers—as we need, or there would be more of them. Lord knows I’m not an ardent capitalist, but if we as a people wanted more writers, there would be more. We’d buy enough books for more of them to make a living at it. We don’t. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, good or bad.  It is what is is, and inventing convoluted comparisons to show how we are lacking because we don’t create more of them is like complaining about the uneven distribution of sunlight throughout the year. I don’t like it, either, but it’s  not changing anytime soon, and we may not like it when it does.