If Carlos Delgado can Hit .400, then Barak Obama can be Elected President

At some point today, I thought to myself, “huh, I sure am glad that the Mets went out and got Santana, because otherwise I might be tempted to pay attention to/worry about this whole primary election thing, which, from the small pieces of information that I have gathered somewhat inadvertently, seems to be a total bummer.”

The election process, at this point, reminds me of the Mets two weeks ago when they had not gotten Santana and the club was trying to muster enthusiasm over the possible signing of Liavan Hernandez: a development, which under sane circumstances would be regarded as pretty much a disaster, emerges as a positive only by virtue of the absolute horror that proceeded it.

The one possible ray of hope would seem to emanate from Barak Obama, who distinguishes himself by having provided me with no particular reason to hate him. He seems sort of like Steve Trachsel would seem, if he pitched for the team that you rooted for and the other starters in the rotation were Jose Lima, Scott Schoenwise, Barak Obama and me: it’s not quite like he gives your team a good chance of winning, but he doesn’t really guarantee a loss so, hey, that’s something.

I was still glad that the Mets had signed Santana, (thus removing the temptation to transfer any psychic energy into supporting Obama) because the signing of Santana seems to bode more definitely well for the cause of Mets baseball, than the election of Obama would bode for the cause of things in general not going to hell completely. Santana definitely make the Mets a stronger ballclub; the Superbowl was clearly an excellent football game and I am completely glad that the Giants won. You can’t really ever reach that degree of certainty about anything in politics, which is one of the reasons that sports are great.

But, if through some strange all-American alchemy, it were possible to get Obama the Democratic nomination by sending Santana back to Minnesota, would I pull the trigger on that deal? I honestly can’t figure that one out. Fortunately, my Google Overlords have bestowed upon me the power of putting polls up on my blog, so you can weigh in-- that is if the process of voting in the primaries hasn’t exhausted your capacity to choose between two categories that are meaningless. (do bear in mind that the question refers to Obama getting the Democratic nomination, not becoming President of the United states)

FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH, the Mets are paying Santana $137.5 million for six years of pitching (an option exists for a seventh year, but whatever). In 2005, according to a Democratic Party Website, the Iraq war was costing $195 million a day. So, for the money that the Mets are giving for six years of Santana, they could afford to occupy Iraq for a little less than seventeen hours. (in 2005)

I am Jack’s Tenuous Grasp on Reality

First off, thanks to Dan for sending me the link. This is completely amazing.

Jack Kerouac created a personal fantasy baseball league, using invented teams and made-up players, which he played (presumably by himself) and modified, from the years 1937 (when he was 13) until 1965 (when he was 42, eight years after the publication of On the Road). Detailed biographies were created for players and coaches, and were kept in spiral-bound notebooks. The article is vague about how games actually operated: “He created a set of cards that, in combination with the skill level of the batter and pitcher, controlled the progress of the game, possibly in conjunction with the use of dice,” which yields a picture of the legendary beatnick, sitting in a cold-water flat, with a jug of wine and a Camel hanging out of his mouth, playing Dungeons and Dragons by himself.

There is, I believe, a cautionary tale about technology here. Kerouac’s system, a fantasy baseball league with one participant, has to be one of the nerdiest things of all time. It might follow, since this thing seems to have taken up a lot of Kerouac’s time over a thirty year period, that Kerouac, in some essential way, was one of the nerdiest guys ever.

However, because the technologies needed to enable serious, hardcore nerdyness had not yet been invented, Kerouac went on to literally write the book on being cool. Coolness would seem to consist of drinking, smoking, sleeping with lots of girls and being an ass about it, doing recreational drugs, hanging out with non-white people, and listening to jazz music; Kerouac not only participated in all these behaviors, but he helped make them popular with America’s youth. (a last component of Coolness, New York Mets baseball, wasn’t invented until 1962)

The increased connectivity of the world has provided many more options for people who want to participate in things like imaginary baseball leagues, and since Kerouac’s death millions of people have spent thousands of hours on things like videogames, internet fantasy sports leagues, and Dungeons and Dragons, all of which seem to share a certain spiritual kinship with Kerouac’s baseball leagues. Did On the Road only get written because no one had invented Playstation in the 1950s? I guess we’ll never know.

Or maybe it’s a reason to be hopeful. The granddaddy of all hepcats seems to have been born to have a pocket protector and an opinion about StarTreck—under the pressure of circumstances he became Jack Kerouac. So throw your X-box out of a high window, tell you buddies on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan-fiction message-board that they can get started without you, buy a bottle of the cheapest wine at your local liquor store and head on down to the nearest highway and stick up a thumb… and you too might start a social revolution.

Kerouac seems to have named all of his teams after American car companies. That sort of makes the whole thing perfect.

Posted late (Blame my neighbor's wireless)

This was written between the pen-ultimate and ultimate games of the season:

At some point it occurred to me that I have a valid passport, a little money in the bank account: hop a buss to LaGuardia, get on the first plane out of the country, away, anywhere where it would take only a minor act of will power to never learn the results of tomorrow’s game, or at least put it off until I had had time to grasp its irrelevance, to realize that my self and the game were separate, independent things, to be able to view it as a random, incidental occurrence.

It was an idea that was amazingly tempting and viscerally repulsive-- perhaps because I knew, from the instant that I had it, that there was no conceivable way that I would actually act on it. Still the realization that I had it in my power to step away, to turn my back on baseball, completely disassociate myself from whatever despair or triumph tomorrow might yield, was at once sobering and awkward.

There was something seductive in the idea of completely uprooting myself from something that I had followed so closely—abruptly amputating something that had almost become part of me; the idea of knowing nothing at all about tomorrow’s outcome seemed weirdly reminiscent of freedom.

For, after all, what really are the Mets? Are they simply the record, the box score? The twenty-five men on the roster? Perhaps. Also the coaches, the players in the minor league, the administrative offices, Omar Minaya, the Wilpons. Gary Cohen, Howe Rose, are not entirely Mets, but then again, perhaps they are more the Mets than the team itself, since it is mainly through their accounts (and not the Mets themselves) that the team reaches the world. Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling have to be considered in a slightly different light since they are former players, and helped form part of the history that had makes the franchise what it is. Are Wally Backman in his trailer, Doc Godden in prison, Roger McDowell-- now the Braves pitching coach, still Mets? The images of them in blue and orange, the memories that they still evoke, are, perhaps, more real and vibrant than whatever they might be currently doing with themselves.

And then there are the fans, the seething unwieldy mass that calls the team into existence. It is their capitol that ultimately finances the Mets, through tickets, hotdogs, and commercial time. More important, perhaps, than any financial investment, is the emotional investment, the desires and fears that they have projected onto the ball club. All of them see the team in a marginally different light, experiences the team in a slightly different way—and what could the team really be, other than the aggregate of all these feelings, the amalgamation of the impression that it leaves in the minds of its followers.

Then again, there is the feeling that all that is grotesquely too complicated; that the Mets are, in fact, merely the instant of play, in the moment that it happens. They are men standing on a field, and if we, and they, attach a certain importance to certain of their actions, if when one of them goes to a certain place we call it a ‘run,’ if when a ball is caught or falls we view it as either a success or a triumph, it is a dimension and a vocabulary that we have created ourselves, and that reflects but vaguely on the actuality of the situation: that a man in a uniform has been either aided or hindered in his efforts to run around in a circle.

LET’S GO METS!

Steroids, part III

Perhaps one person in fifty or a hundred is endowed with the abilities, both physical and mental, necessary to play baseball or any other sport on a professional level. For the vast majority of people, to watch any professional sport is to watch (and evaluate, criticize, demean, condemn or approve) people doing things, throwing a ball at ninety miles an hour for a strike, throwing an ephus pitch, hitting a ninety-mile an hour ball out of the park, beating the catcher’s throw to second, leaping in the air or flinging one’s self precisely at the ground to catch a fly ball, that they are almost existentially incapable of doing. An enormous part of the appeal of professional sports in a capitalist society is the affirmation that they provide, for the fan, of a hierarchy that is perceived to exist amongst human beings. The fan is on the outside, looking in, watching the few, the privileged and the gifted compete at their games. By enjoying a baseball game, a fan makes a statement that they are ok with both the existence of the hierarchy and also with their place at the bottom of it. By deriving pleasure from the experience of being a ‘have-not’ when it comes to pitching, speed on the base paths, or slugging ability, they are tutoring themselves in how to enjoy being a have-not in regards to other things: money, land, and political power.

A seemingly erroneous perception about steroids is that they threaten the existence of this hierarchy and that ‘just anyone’ who takes steroids will become able to play professional sports. This is quite provably false: firstly, steroids have little effect at all unless they are combined with a rigorous work-out regimen. Furthermore, a close follower of the game will have observed that a player’s innate ability still seems to account for more of their successes or failures than their chemical intake: Guillermo Mota was on steroids at the time, but he still made a crappy pitch in game two that cost the Mets the 2006 NLCS; lots of players have taken steroids, but only Barry Bonds has hit more home runs than anyone else.

Still, the perception exists that steroids have the potential to serve as an equalizer and confer the coveted athletic abilities on ‘just anyone’ and the idea that they have the power to threaten or destroy the hierarchy of natural gifts must be responsible for much of the negative reaction against them, since the affirmation of this hierarchy is much of what draws fans to the game in the first place. The tragedy, of course, is when aspiring players buy into the fallacy-- when ‘just anyone’ actually goes and takes steroids in the vain hope that they will make it will make them a ball player, and finds themselves, at the end of the day, still not a ball player, but beset, nonetheless, with the medical problems that come from using steroids; indeed, it is mainly on behalf of this ‘just anyone’ that MLB is obliged to take drastic action to eliminate steroid use.

It is interesting, in the context of the above observations, to point out that some of the earliest and most widespread use of steroids occurred, with the blessing of the State, on Soviet Olympic teams.

Steroids, part II

Steroid use distinguishes itself from other forms of cheating in baseball, in that it has attracted significantly more attention from both the public and the baseball establishment; as far as I know there has never been a senate committee to investigate ball tampering. It can be argued, of course, that steroid use is more widespread and has had a more significant effect than other forms of cheating—this is clearly supported by the surge in power numbers that began in the late ‘90s and tapered off in the wake of testing. However, part of the reason that steroid use is so widely condemned and has attracted so much interest has to be because people consider tampering with a baseball and tampering with a human body to be infringements of a different order.

The human body was created in god’s image, and to modify it or alter it, to attempt to improve on the divine design, is a significant act of hubris. This same line of thinking is responsible for much of the historical prejudice against medicine, and while few people formulate their thoughts in exactly that way, it is a recognizable component in the reaction against steroids. It is interesting to point out that different alterations on player’s ‘god given’ bodies have almost certainly had a more pervasive effect on the sport than performance enhancing drugs. If the ‘pure’ game of baseball is played by players whose bodies have been completely unmodified, than Tommy John did far more to contaminate the integrity of the sport than Barry Bonds ever could. It is good that Pedro has already put together a Hall of Fame career, because if the medical science were even five years behind what it is now, his career would probably be over; Babe Ruth might have been half a dozen cortisone shots away from eight hundred home runs.

Of course, medical advancements theoretically only restore what had previously existed, at best returning a player to a previous condition, whereas steroids are supposed to improve upon what was already there. Still, if one accepts the premise that players were only meant to be so strong, it is hard to argue that certain players weren’t meant to succumb to career ending injuries.

Steroids, part I

This is the first part of an extended meditation on the use of performance enhancing drugs:

The “opinions and controversy” section of Bob Feller’s wikipedia article reveals two interesting facts about its subject: firstly, that Feller, like Billy Wagner, admits that cheating has been present through out baseball’s history, and himself admits to throwing spiters and scuffing the ball in certain critical situations, and secondly, that Feller is a vocal critic of Barry Bonds and has adamantly stated that he thinks that no steroid cheats should be allowed into the Hall of Fame(of which Feller is the second senior living member), particularly Bonds, Mark McGuire, and Sammy Sosa.

This is, exactly, the problem with people who condemn steroid users for tampering with the integrity of the game: those in the best position to judge, frequently suggest that there was little integrity in the first place. In fact, scuffing a ball was in some ways a more deliberate and dishonest form of cheating, since it was deliberately breaking the clearly stated rules of the game (rules which came into effect after a tampered pitch killed the only person to die playing a professional game of baseball), and MLB’s anti-steroid policies are relatively new, nebulous and evolving. Yet to demand the exclusion of Whity Ford or Bob Feller from the Hall of Fame seems completely unreasonable, and to accept that the mass of ball players experience the fan’s reverence for the game, and are unwilling to look for any edge they can find to advance their careers and earn their livelihood, seems like unreasonable optimism.

Before this goes any further, I would like to state that ‘Sam’s Mets Blog’ is against steroid use, and feels that MLB should take whatever measures are necessary to eliminate, or failing that severely limit, its impact on the game of baseball. The reasons for this are that steroid use is insanely bad for you and if it is present it creates a compulsion for certain players to use, in order to compete against other users. Players should not be in a situation where they stand to gain a significant immediate advantage by sacrificing their long term health, or where doing so seems like the only way to obtain or extend a career playing against other players who had already made that choice. Furthermore, watching steroid users is not more rewarding or enjoyable for a serious fan, and the ‘power game’ that steroid use seems to enable is not the most interesting form of baseball—if steroid use is largely present, it creates a situation where players are poisoning themselves to provide an un enjoyable game, which doesn’t seem to be in anyone’s interests.

However, it is important to understand that the basis for objecting to steroid use more than other forms of cheating is medical and not moral, and that the idea that steroids have contaminated a previously existing integrity is somewhat specious. The integrity was probably not there in the first place; and then again, the idea of a profound honesty, in a game, that in the real politic of people's lives decides and means nothing, is a little bit of an odd one, particularly when people seem more interested in this integrity, of a thing that barely exists, than they are in certain other institutions with a seemingly more immediate effect on their lives.

Tom Glavine Wins 300

I know this happened a while ago, but it was fun, wasn’t it? Much more fun than losing two in a row to the Phillies. So take your mind off the current struggles and indulge in a little bit of recent nostalgia:

Suk 11, an iconic back-packer hostel. The only space available was in a dorm room. The place is as eclectic as you’d expect, winding rooms, plaster walls covered with graffiti, sporadic and ornate patches of wood, of which the management was viciously proud. Frequent, adamant and angry signs warned against writing on the wood, as well as smoking in the rooms, and sex tourism. “Honnymon, ‘97”, “Love u ladyboy, you changed my life, see you soon.”

The night before, Javid and I had gone looking for a jazz bar, and ended up in an odd pocket of Suckumvit rd, that was filled with Japanese bars and restaurants. In one of these, where we had stopped for beer, one of the Thai bargirls and I had ended up pawing each other across the language barrier; the management seemed to have resolved that I was going to take her to a short time hotel, but a connection got missed and Javid and I ended up staggering back to the hostel in a hostile and directionless argument.

Back in Suk 11, I bitterly repented not having gone with my new friend: not so much for carnal reasons as because every minute in the short-time hotel would have been a minute not spent in the oppressive stuffy, dormitory, surrounded international snores and a lack of air.

At some point mine host, who had gone out for food after we had both apologized for various behaviors, returned to the hostel. “Dude, I think I just fell in love with a girl,” he told me. I congratulated him and returned to my thankless parody of sleep.

Thus it was with no great difficulty that I roused myself at seven thirty in the morning. Suk 11 has accepted modernity readily, in an almost curt, simplistic way. Putting a 10bhat coin in a box (approximately 33 cents), will get you fifteen minutes of internet. The office where I had checked my computer was closed, so I went to a station of computers on the second floor and watched a couple innings on game day: I didn’t much care for the political overtones of waking up an international hostile with a baseball game.

The office opened at eight. I went out for bottles of green tea and a further supply of ten bhat coins. When I returned to the hostel, I gave myself a neat scare by telling the management that the stripe on my computer bag was red, instead of orange.

The lobby in Suk 11 opens directly onto the street; there is no outside wall, but only a railing and a barrier of plants. There are two tables, one by the opening to the outside, and one further in. In back of the second table there was a low table on which was laid out a spread of bread, jams and fruit. Coffee and tea were also available. I set myself up on the table closest to the outside, where an older, white bearded American was smoking Thai Marlboro Lights, and working on a Chinese imitation lap top. We discussed our computers for few moments: he was impressed by my “real IBM.”

For the next two hours, I resembled a member of some obscure religious sect, in one of those ecstatic states that suggest both piety and mental illness. The two obstacles to my devotions were that the signal through Gameday Audio would frequently stop for periods for ‘buffering’ and sometimes go out altogether, and secondly that the speakers on my computer were nearly inaudible in the lobby that began to fill with international tourists and jazz music on a sound system. To remedy the latter, a Thai girl offered me headphones, but these just made the increasingly common periods of no sound at all far more frustrating, and I quickly returned them to her, and resumed sitting with my head cocked over my computer, rocking with frustration and excitement as I caught snatches of what seemed, increasingly, to be an excellent and historical game. I wish that I could say that I never offered my own commentary in an unhinged mutter or quietly applauded at certain intervals.

Ever since the sail-boat, people have been fond of thinking that various innovations have the effect of shrinking the world, that the increased connectivity somehow makes the world smaller. For me, this idea died that morning in Suk 11. Not many years ago at all, it would have been impossible for me to in anyway at all follow this game in real time; now I was listening to the same words, the same voice of Howie Rose who was being listened to in cars all over the tri-state area, in homes through out New York and New Jersey, on the boom-box in my parent’s house that had been taken out of my sister’s room after she went to college. But Howie Rose heard in Thailand is very little like Howie Rose heard in the states, a baseball game in the lobby of Suk 11, is not the same as a baseball game in America. Gameday Audio has not had the effect of shrinking the world at all: rather it calls into being an infinity of Howie Rose doppelgangers—which expands the world, rather than shrinks it—and indeed serves to remind us that different shades of Howie Rose are heard by different listeners at different exits on the turnpike.

And, indeed, without the increased connectivity of the web, the French tourists sitting on my left, and the Thai’s working in the lobby would have never seen the specter of the baseball acolyte—a vision that must have somehow expanded their world view, if not for any particular purpose.

The signal went out for the last time as Billy Wagner was pitching to the third batter in the ninth, and before long the final zero appeared in the line score: perhaps this was for the best, since while I had wanted to hear the final moments of the historic win announced, I was also afraid that if I had done so I would have wept.

The Commissioner is a Son of a Bitch

The first Commissioner of Baseball, or any other sport, was Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. His name was the only good thing about him-- actually a possible second good thing about him was the fact that he eventually died, paving the way for the integration of baseball. As a federal judge, Landis jailed Wobblies, including Big Bill Haywood; he also managed to get Jack Johnson, an amazingly successful boxer and the first super-star black athlete, banned from boxing and sent to jail on a Man Act conviction for mailing his white girl-friend a railway ticket—these sterling credentials inspired the team owners of major league baseball to offer him a job cleaning up baseball in the wake of the Black Sox Scandal. Landis was only interested in accepting the gig if he was given sole authority over all aspects of organized baseball. The owners couldn’t see how they would make money selling tickets to games that were widely known to be fixed, so they agreed to Landis’ demands and the office of Commissioner of Baseball was formed.

Due to his racism, and the fact that anyone who jailed Big Bill Haywood is an official enemy of Sam’s Mets Blog, Landis goes down as a particularly offensive commissioner. However, the Commissioner is almost by necessity a son of a bitch. Chosen by the owners, they are charged with keeping the fans, players, owners, advertisers and broadcasters working together in something that does not deteriorate into chaos or harm the bottom line. The commissioner is a little man who sits behind a desk and pushes pencils; he is charged with making sure the athletes—the big, the strong, the fast, the wild and the stupid—follow the rules. It is our love of athletes that draws us to sport, and the little man behind the desk pushing them around becomes a son of a bitch by necessity.

Current baseball Bud Sielig actually did something that I approve of this week by deciding to follow Bonds until he hits his record breaking home run. I’m not that big of a Bonds fan, and am not untroubled by his legacy, but it’s the damn home run record and Seilig’s the damn commissioner, so the guy might as well be there. It took Sielig long enough to decide to go, that his uncertainty about it allowed him to accuse Bonds implicitly, without actually coming out and making an accusation: exactly the sort of miserable, gutless behavior that is pretty much required of any commissioner. I hope that Bonds goes into a vicious slump that coincides with a hellish heat waive and that Bonds and Seilig both spend all of August sweating in ballparks and accomplishing nothing.

Anyway, it’s Basketball Commissioner David Stern who is really pissing me off this week. Recently it was revealed that one of the officials, Tim Donaghy, was a compulsive gambler, with mob connections, who had been betting on games that he officiated and making calls to alter them. I spent most of the winter listening to NBA fans crying about how poorly officiated the games were and how disgustingly little the league was doing about it. I was never really sure if they had a point, but they did. As Basketbawful (a good read and an inspiration to start this blog) points out, this proves that the officiating in the league in general is so god damn bad that a cheating, gambling, psychopath can fit right in with all the other crummy officiating: the NBA never found out about the guy, until the FBI filled them in. What makes this completely frustrating is that the David Stern regime has routinely sided with officials against players. It is important to understand that in basketball this has an overtone that is not quite present in other sports: an integral part of the spectacle of the NBA game is watching the large black men at the mercy of the calls and whistles of the officials, who tend to be shorter and whiter than the players that they adjudicate.

In an insultingly irrelevant press conference, Stern, however, admits no responsibility for any of this, and acknowledges no larger crisis in the league’s officiating. Instead, he wastes everyone’s time by describing the (obviously completely worthless) methods that they had in place to ensure that the thing that had already happened wouldn’t happen.

COMMISSIONISTIC FOOTNOTE: For the first years of his job, Sielig was the acting Commissioner and not the official one, which meant that the position was technically vacant. The owner of the Texas Rangers, a one George W. Bush, spent a fair amount of time angling for the job. The corollary to this little factoid seems to be the old ‘what if Hitler had been a successful painter? Would he have just done that with his life, and never been a dictator?’ question, which was the very debate that inspired a high school history teacher of mine to curtly tell the class that hypothetical history was a waste of everyone’s time. But would a country that at least felt like a democracy and wasn’t involved in pointless, murderous wars be worth living in if baseball had been reduced to a miserable, totalitarian travesty? Would I be willing to make that trade-off? Yes, yes I would.

The Called Strike in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

For all the other changes that have taken place in baseball in the last decade, there is one aspect of the game that has reached dizzying new frontiers and gone relatively unnoticed: namely the ability to know for sure weather or not any given pitch was actually a strike or a ball. Previously, a pitch existed only in the moment in which it was thrown and the only mark that it left was the call made by the umpire-- now nearly every pitch made in baseball is recorded and subject to the scrutiny, not only of fans and announcers, but also of players, coaches and umpires who look at tape for a greater understanding of the game.

In terms of the actual ramifications of this new knowledge, perhaps the most practical implication is the use of the QuesTec system in certain ballparks (of which Shea is one). However, it seems that the televised replay becoming an increasingly prominent feature in more and more fans experience of the game should probably be regarded as the frontier on which this change began. With evidence to back them up, announcer’s claims that the home team was being victimized by the umpire lost their air of paranoia; and the fact that any fan watching on television could tell that the umpire did not constitute an absolutely irrefutable and impartial source of judgment, was probably what lead MLB to the QuesTec experiment.

It is important to keep in mind that the QuesTec system makes no changes in the game in real time. It only records the way in which umpires interact with the strike zone, and forces them to take that information into account the next time that they call a game.

And, while many pitchers claim to be victimized (good ol’ Curt Schilling once smashed a QuesTec camera with a bat), the relatively un-invasive way in which this information has been assimilated into the game constitutes a rare instance of Major League Baseball clearly understanding the somewhat complex ideas behind the basic realities of the sport. Specifically, strikes come into existence only by being called by an umpire. The location, in actual space, of a pitch has nothing to do with the call; the only important thing about a pitch is the impression that it makes on the umpire (ahem, Paul Lo Duca). The activity called “pitching” can only be said to take place in the presence of an umpire to call strikes—otherwise, one is just throwing a ball.

The images that they show us then, the stopped frame showing the birds eye view of the batter with the little blur of the ball clearly hovering an inch or so on the outside of the plate, are lies. Or perhaps, they are merely a record of nothing, ghosts of a moment that persist in a feeble contradiction of the truth.