I’ve mostly been using this space to write about politics/media/culture stuff, but most of the serious topics in the news at the moment are equal parts depressing and enraging, and I don’t want to be either depressed or enraged right now. So here are some more personal reflections.
The Pip (age 9) has gotten really into baseball of late, mostly because he turns out to be good at it. He played in the town rec program a couple of years ago, and then again this year (the intervening season was lost to the pandemic), and both years did the one-week summer camp run by the high school coach. This spring was the first time kids could pitch, and to my surprise he volunteered to try. He turned out to be really good at it— in one playoff game, he pitched two innings and struck out five of the six batters he faced. The sixth hit the ball sharply back at him, but he caught it for the final out. (And “Can we talk about that catch?” has now become a running joke…)
He also tends to be an early riser— when I get up between 5:00 and 5:30 he almost always gets up as well— and by his 8:30 bedtime is pretty wiped out. He refuses to go upstairs any earlier than the assigned time, though, despite being clearly ready to go to sleep, so we have to watch something calming on tv for the last hour or so. Baseball turns out to be perfect for that— it’s engaging enough to hold his interest, but the game is inherently slow enough to be soothing. So I’ve been watching a lot of baseball on tv.
This is kind of the third era of baseball for me. The first was back when I was around The Pip’s age, in the early 80’s. I played a little bit, but was never very good—I could throw the ball fairly hard, but I could never hit worth a damn, and quit playing entirely toward the end of elementary school. (I’ve always been tall, but was physically awkward well into college— there’s a part of me that remains amused that in our faculty pick-up basketball game I have a reputation for having really good hands, because I absolutely could not do that for years. My high school coach once told a teammate that if he was going to throw it to me he should make sure to throw it at my head, because then at least I’d stop it from going out of bounds.)
My father’s from the leading edge of the Baby Boom, though, so has always been a big baseball fan (he coached softball starting around the time my sister played, and for many years after), and the game was on a lot. I never really had the patience for baseball on TV, particularly as it was broadcast back then. I remember it would drive me nuts when he’d want to “just check the score of the Yankees game” because half the time that required watching to the end of the half-inning, since they would only flash the score up as they went to commercial.
The amount of dead time used to annoy me, too, especially when the announcers would fill it with inane chatter. I remember being really irrationally pissed off by a game in the 80’s where Frank Viola was pitching, and Tim McCarver as the color commentator told a long rambling story about some other guy in some other series who had done something sort of similar to Viola’s pitching, which ended with “…and you know what? That guy’s mother’s name was Viola!” That was emblematic of baseball commentary for me for years.
(Baseball in person was always way more fun than baseball on TV. This was in part because we had a cousin who worked in the box office at Yankee Stadium who used to set us up with amazing seats if we gave him a week or so of advance notice.)
I pretty much checked out of watching baseball entirely for most of high school and college, but I went to Maryland for grad school, and it was impossible to be in the DC area during the end of Cal Ripken’s streak and not get caught up in it. And then there was the Sosa/McGwire year, when the home run chase was big news every night. Both of those things have lost a bit of their sheen— the HR records because of steroids, Ripken’s streak because stats nerds will tell you it was just a selfish stunt— but at the time, they absolutely saved baseball. It’s hard to explain how disgusted the sports-watching public was with MLB after the strike season in 1994, but Ripken won people back, and then Sosa/McGwire was the biggest story in sports for four months. I mean, they got me to watch regular-season baseball games, which was a goddamn miracle…
It didn’t hurt that the Yankees got good at around this time. My father and grandfather were big Yankees fans, and my Uncle Dick (my father’s oldest brother) used to claim he was the biggest Yankee fan west of the Mississippi (he lived in Nevada and then New Mexico). To the very limited extent I cared about baseball at all, I rooted for the Yankees, so the arrival of Derek Jeter and the rise of their dynasty were big. I watched the clinching game of the ‘96 World Series in a packed bar with a couple of high school friends who were in town to run in the Marine Corps marathon the next day, and the next several years were pretty good.
The peak for me was probably the 1998 season, when I spent the fall months in Japan. Thanks to the time difference, the baseball playoff games mostly happened in the early morning in Tokyo, so I would listen to the radio call on the Armed Forces Radio station out of Yokosuka while I got up, ate breakfast, and got ready for work. The slow pace that makes baseball maddening on tv makes it a great game for radio, and listening to the playoffs and World Series was a great way to keep homesickness at bay. Also, the Yankees bulldozed everybody that year, which was fun.
When the big steroid scandals swept through baseball, and then the Yankees fell off, I pretty much stopped paying attention to baseball again for a good long while. Until, well, now, when The Pip has developed an interest.
Watching baseball in 2021 is a radically different experience than my memory of watching in 1981. For one thing, the density of information they provide you is incredible. I remember needing to watch to a commercial break to even get the score, and often not being sure what inning it was, but now you’ve got the inning, the score, the count, the outs, the base runners, and stats for both the batter and pitcher on screen at almost all times (or, as in the photo above from very early in the inning, team stats). When a pitch is thrown, you get the speed and style instantly (4-seam, 96 mph), and they regularly put up the full sequence of pitches to the current batter. It’s amazingly rich in data.
(This is part of why I have a chapter on sports stats in Eureka, because I think the sheer quantity of numerical data fans handle with ease gives the lie to the idea that ordinary people can’t handle math. Which, to be fair, is not an original observation— Carl Sagan said something similar back in the 80’s.)
The other thing that makes it dramatically different is the availability of the Internet. I’m mostly watching games with The Pip, who of course has all manner of questions. And I have a smartphone that gives me instant access to all manner of answers. So, when he wants to know the most runs ever scored in a professional baseball game, or an explanation of what happens if the ball gets hit into the rafters of a domed stadium and sticks there, I can get it. (The answers are “36” and “ground rules double,” respectively.) If I’m being honest, the actual information involved probably isn’t a whole lot different than the historical trivia Tim McCarver used to annoy me with, but because it’s in response to our questions that came up in the living room of Chateau Steelypips, it feels very different.
Of course, the drawback of resuming watching baseball in this specific moment is that the Yankees stink. Well, OK, they’re above .500, but they’re aggressively mediocre, and that’s not what this particular franchise demands. Especially when the Red Sox are good…
(Kate’s from Boston, so the in-laws are Sox fans, but The Pip is staying true to his paternal heritage…)
But, then, this is kind of a throwback to my own childhood, because the Yankees of the 80’s weren’t all that great, either. So The Pip is not only getting introduced to quirks of the game like the Infield Fly Rule, he’s getting an introduction to the cynical fatalism characteristic of New York fandom. When the announcers excitedly announce that the batter now stepping into the box represents the go-ahead run, and I say “Don’t worry, Stanton will ground into an inning-ending double play” and it happens, well, that’s another great father-son bonding experience around the game of baseball. America, f*&k yeah.
And, you know, he’s starting to get it. Last night, I finished doing a Zoom thing for Admissions and came into the living room to find The Pip watching the replay of the Yankees-Rays game from earlier in the day. It was the 4th inning or so, and the Yankees were down 4-0, and when I came in, he said “Hey, Dad, check it out. Typical Yankees, huh?” That’s my boy.
(I told him it was a replay, and the Yankees went on to give up 10 runs in the 6th to lose 14-0, then we switched channels to watch rugby in the Olympics instead. We’re not masochists.)
So, anyway, that’s where things stand with me, The Pip, and baseball. I don’t know how long he’ll keep it up, but it’s fun right now. And a few years from now, when his attention span’s a little better, we’ll break out Field of Dreams for a movie night, and I’m pretty sure he’ll choke up at the right points…
There’s a bit of wholesome Americana to end the week. If you like this sort of thing, here’s a button you can click to get it sent to your email at irregular intervals:
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And if you’d just like to make fun of me for liking a team that leads the league in grounding into double plays, the comments are open.