Catching Up, Again

Well, since I last posted here, Team Euro spanked Team USA 18-10 to take the Solheim Cup for the 2nd time in a row and the 1st time ever on U.S. soil behind Caroline Hedwall's 5-0 record, 20-year-old Chiba native Misuzu Narita caught Esther Lee by going 65-65 over the weekend in the NEC Karuizawa 72 and beat her in a playoff for her 2nd career JLPGA victory, Christine Song won the Eagle Classic to become the 1st 2-time winner on the Symetra Tour in 2013 and leap to 2nd on the money list with only 2 events left on the schedule (in the last 2 weeks of September), and Hideki Matsuyama and Ryo Ishikawa finished 6 and 9 shots, respectively, out of the amazing playoff between Patrick Reed and Jordan Spieth at the Wyndham Championship.  I actually got to watch a lot of the Solheim Cup's 1st 2 days and was impressed with so many aspects of Team Euro's play:  Hedwall's fire, Pettersen's and Matthew's leadership, Ciganda's comeback, Hull's boldness, Recari's steadiness, Icher's and Masson's putting, and better-than-expected play from just about everybody else.  Most of the matches were much closer than they looked on paper; it always seemed like the Americans had trouble sinking the pressure putts and the Europeans made the most of their opportunities.

Meanwhile, the Constructivist family spent Saturday at an awesome beach with the CT Constructivists; then, instead of driving home that day, we stayed an extra night so the cousins could spend a little more time together, left late Sunday morning, stayed for a few hours in Fort Lee, NJ, made it to Williamsport, PA, just in time to watch the Tokyo (Japan)-Taoyuan (Taiwan) game in the Little League World Series (which Japan won in a nailbiter 3-2), and got home to Hamburg after 1 am.  The girls were fascinated watching boys only a few years older than they are playing baseball at such a high level and they enjoyed cheering for Japan.

Me, I turned around and fired my worst round of the season today in the Buffalo district qualifier for the NYSGA's Mid-Amateur Championship.  I now have even more more sympathy for Stacy Lewis and others who had trouble adjusting to Colorado Golf Club's fast, undulating greens this past week, as I was befuddled all day on and around Gowanda Country Club's tiny, hard, slick, usually extremely-elevated, and often inverted-bowl-shaped greens.  I just couldn't break the habit of popping my chips and putts that I gained over a season of playing at South Shore Country Club's incredibly slow and bumpy greens this summer.  Sure, touching my clubs only at 2 driving ranges in the past week (once with my brother's 3 boys and once with imoto)--not to mention being tired from our last-gasp-of-summer child-care/vacation visit and closing whirlwind tour of 3 states--played a role, but I actually was only a little bit off with my ball-striking (I had only 4 really bad full swings; the rest were very close to the fairways and greens if not on them).  Unfortunately, I don't think any amount of playing or rest last week would have helped prepare me for Gowanda's mental challenges:   trying to anticipate how my drives would run out on its usually-tilted fairways, clubbing myself and judging what kind of approach shot to hit, dealing with the thick rough around the greens that played havoc with my pitches and chips, and reading and executing my putts.  About the only thing I did well was stick to my game plan of playing the short, tight, tree-lined course aggressively, but that aggressiveness into and around the greens turned birdie opportunities into par saves, pars into bogeys, and bogeys into doubles or worse.  What's worse, I don't think I sank a putt longer than 3 feet all day.  Long story short:  it's a good thing I don't play golf for a living!

Speaking of which, it's back to a full-time work schedule for me the rest of the week, what with my fall semester starting up next Monday and all :).  But I'm still getting psyched up for the CN Canadian Women's Open, where teenagers Lydia Ko, Charley Hull, and Brooke Henderson will be among the golfers joining the best of the LPGA in Edmonton.  It's the next-to-last event in North America before the tour heads overseas for 6 straight events; the 2013 season then ends back on this continent in the middle of November.  I'm curious to see over these last 10 events whether Stacy Lewis will be able to challenge Inbee Park for Player of the Year and the money list title, whether anyone else will be able to step it up and try to keep pace with them, what will happen in the season's 5th major, what effect the Solheim Cup will have on those who competed in it, how long Paula Creamer, Na Yeon Choi, and Ai Miyazato can go winless, and whether Moriya Jutanugarn will be able to hold off Chie Arimura, Ayako Uehara, and Caroline Masson in the race for Rookie of the Year.  I'll try to avoid going on last fall and winter's extended sabbatical from blogging, but I'm not making any promises!  We've got a busy and exciting academic year shaping up at SUNY Fredonia and I've got a lot on my plate.

After Glow

Since I'm not a big hoops, hockey, or golf fan (although I do enjoy bringing the hate to a few of the male golfers who've pissed me off in the past by spewing some arrogant bullshit...and I won't mention any names like Singh, Lefty, or Montgomery), sports-wise all I can really do these days is bask in the after glow of the Giants beat-down of the hated New England Patriots in the Super Bowl a few weeks back. Mmmm...good times.

This time of year is my Sports Black Hole. Baseball season is weeks and weeks away. I appreciate basketball and do cheer heartily for my local team (Go Warriors!) and my school team (Go Bears!), but basketball really kind of stresses me out, so it's not good for my escapist diversion needs like football is. I cheer for the local hockey team (Sharks), but hockey is best live, and going to a game is not a financial reality.

Being a sports fan, one of my most-utilized escapist diversions is sports talk radio--flawed and oft-maddening as it may be, what with the endless parade of white male hosts bringing a near-uniform perspective. But for me, sports talk radio is really the pits this time of year. I guess the best I can hope for is that the Bill Belichick "Spygate" scandal has "legs." I could be nicely entertained listening to that drama for a while.

Anyway, in case you missed it, here's big-time Giants fan Carl giving his post-Super Bowl joy-rant. Good stuff!

Pitchers and Catchers Report

In America, February has two Groundhog Days: the one celebrated on February 2, when the presumably immortal Punxsutawney Phil either does or doesn't make his annual appearance in Pennsylvania, and the other Groundhog Day, later in the month, when pitchers and catchers first poke their heads up out of dugouts each year in Arizona and Florida, signaling, not the arrival of baseball season itself, but the nearness, the imminent arrival of the thing. Today's that day for the San Francisco Giants.

This is a good first sign. Here comes the battery now, the artillery term naming the pair responsible for handling the projectile ball, whose movement, if the pitcher will ever stop just standing there and throw the thing, defines the action of the game, such as it is. All motion in the game is attendant on the potent motions of the famous baseball, and that ball's motion, for better or worse, is initiated by the very fellows who've shown up first to training camp, who make up the game's battery, to stretch and jog and horse around prior to the arrival of the rest of the team, to ease in to spring training itself, spring training a grueling round of practices, games, really vigorous stretching and really vigorous jogging and horsing around that with any luck will turn the club's players into a team and ready for baseball season itself, still weeks away, just as spring itself is or isn't due to arrive in that span, depending on what Phil may have had to say about it this year, which I regret to say I missed.

Summer in Chiba City II

Sorry for the cryptic comment at the end of yesterday's post. Almost everything's been great about our stay in Chiba with onechan's and imoto's baba and gigi, but just as I started to write that post I looked over and saw that imoto was starting to snack on some kind of medicinal creme. I got it away from her in a flash, cleaned her hands and mouth a bit, checked out the tube more closely, realized I couldn't read it, and raced downstairs to the tsuma and baba to ask, "Is this bad for babies to eat?" Apparently, although I thought I was being calm and sardonic, I gave the impression of being angry and panicked, so I kind of freaked them out, especially when I insisted they call the Japanese equivalent of a poison control center after the tsuma and I tried five different ways of washing imoto's mouth out more thoroughly. Turns out she got very little of what turned out to be a very weak steroid creme in her mouth and the folks on the phone told us not to worry unless she vomited or something, which she didn't do. Once we got her calmed down (after, not during, her bath), I finished the post, shut down the computer, and went to bed with the kids. She turned out to be just fine this morning.

So, yeah, yesterday's end wasn't the best--but it could have been a lot worse. And the beginning wasn't so great, either. I was so exhausted from a week with onechan and imoto's cousins that I went to bed early Sunday night and slept straight through the end of the Women's British Open. With them back in Okinawa by that time, we could sleep downstairs and give baba her room back, but that meant I didn't have access to the computer, either. And since we had to get to Tokyo early for my Fulbright exit interview--and stayed all day at Tokyo Dome City, in the amusement park/play area/shopping area surrounding the Yomiuri Giants' home stadium--I literally didn't find out that Lorena and Tiger won their respective tournaments until right before I found out that imoto was able to open a twist cap. That's how I missed the end of my own carnival. Nice.

Still, I can't complain. This was a week of firsts for imoto. In the weeks before we left Fukuoka, she'd become quite vocal, stringing together phrases and sentences in a language no one understood but which had the rhythms of everyday Japanese. For the first few days in Chiba, she was very quiet, but just before her cousins left, she began to use individual words. And not just the "Mama," "Dada," "Baba" variety--although even with those she was quite clever, as when I would stop her from doing something abunai, she would cry, "Mama," and then when mama would agree with me, she'd cry "Baba"--or "oichi" for oishi (delicious). No, these were the most powerful words in onechan's vocabulary, ones guaranteed to get any adults' attention around her--"itai" (ouch!) and "oshiko" (I have to go pee!). Sure, she uses them in any situation she wants to get our attention and they accrue any number of meanings beyond their dictionary definitions, but I'll save that kind of academic nitpicking for my last set of student papers. If you can't cut a 15-month-old some slack, who can you?

Speaking of which, we found out this afternoon that imoto can also use her container-opening powers for good, After lunch at a sushi place, we gave her a lollypop that she had gotten as a gift from the restaurant owners to keep her occupied for awhile, but she had other plans. She got it out of its plastic wrapping without our noticing, and was about halfway through it when we realized what she had done. By then, despite our anti-sugar position, we figured it would send the wrong message to take it away from her--appropriating the fruits of her labor, in a sense. Come to think of it, she also grabbed a popsicle from onechan the other day, so she has her own position on our anti-sugar position,

When you consider that imoto had just learned to roll over about a year ago and is now climbing stairs (with some help going down) like a pro, her changes since we left the States have been even more dramatic than onechan's. A few more anecdotes to drive this point home. Despite her dislike of bathtubs, she loves the inflatable pools that she played in at one of onechan's friend's houses in Fukuoka and that onechan, baba, and I inflated after the cousins left late Sunday morning. Since it was so much work to inflate, we've kept it up since then and today imoto had another clever moment. When a bee landed on her wrist, she calmly put her hand in the water--tsuma had to rescue the bee from a near-drowning! Don't get on imoto's bad side. She has ways of dealing with you. Like when she wakes up in the middle of the night and wants some opai, if mama's just that slow getting up, she gets a pinch in the back or side. (I witnessed that myself around 4 am today!) I've been on the receiving end of various scratches and chin butts, myself. And poor onechan's a prime target for both pinching and hair pulling. We just tell her imoto has to learn to be yasashi--right now she's more like Kuromi than My Melody.

Speaking of onechan, she's had a pretty good time since her cousins left, what with the pool at baba's place, the neighborhood Matsuri festival we took her and her sister to, her visit to Tokyo (even if it didn't involve riding any of the rides at Tokyo Dome City that she had her heart set on--she was too short for most and it was too hot for us to ride on the slow-moving ones she could have gone on), and her reunion today with her friend Yumi-chan at the nearby playground. With all the activity, we haven't had time to catch up with Uncle Bill's latest.

But now that the cousins are gone and we're back from Tokyo, my little summer vacation is coming to an end as well, so after one more LPGA post I'm going to take a break from golf blogging until we're back in the States. Until then, you can find us in the comments on posts like these.

Yet More Otaku Autoethnography: New Worlds

Last night I focused on cutting a page or two from my JASF talk to leave time for more Q&A for once...and most of the following ended up on the cutting room floor. So I'm giving it a "Second Life" here. Well, actually I turned it into a handout and expanded it, so it's not like it's really gone from the talk. But I will make a special one-time Mostly Harmless offer. I'll send the handout--FREE, using the magic of attachments--to anyone who figures out how to email me and uses the magic word.

Along with changes in my personal life that I alluded to at the beginning of this talk, these interests led me to begin getting more systematic in my engagements with Japanese popular culture around 2003. I began looking through a wider range of American writing for images of Japan. Not just Gibson and Stephenson, but other science fiction writers like Orson Scott Card, Philip K. Dick, Marge Piercy, and Kim Stanley Robinson wrote futuristic and alternative history novels in which Japanese people and culture played important, if often problematic roles, as well. In addition, I devoured travel narratives and memoirs like Elena Tajima Creef’s “Notes from a Fragmented Daughter” (1984), David Mura’s Turning Japanese (1991), Bruce Feiler’s Learning to Bow (1991), Cathy Davidson’s 36 Views of Mount Fuji (1993), and Kyoko Mori’s Polite Lies (1997). Even here, though, I was selective; having read criticisms of similar works by writers ranging from Roland Barthes to Dave Barry, from Pico Iyer to Lydia Minatoya, and from Karl Taro Greenfield to John David Morley, I simply avoided their writings on Japan. What I couldn’t avoid, I analyzed, criticized, and discussed, such as major Hollywood productions like Pearl Harbor (2001), The Last Samurai (2003), Lost in Translation (2003), and Kill Bill (2003-2004). But above all I devoured all the anime I could find in English on television or with English subtitles on DVD, from old favorites like InuYasha to new ones like Ghost in the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex and 2nd Gig, Full Metal Alchemist, Trigun, FLCL, Paranoia Agent, and Samurai Champloo, not to mention just about every Studio Ghibli movie I could find, along with films like Tokyo Godfathers and Millennium Actress and Metropolis.

As I was doing all this, I noted that I wasn’t alone--and the phenomenon wasn’t limited to animation. Disney and Studio Ghibli performed some kind of merger that ended up putting America’s biggest Miyazaki fan in charge of Disney’s entire animation arm; manga in translation was appearing in major national book store chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble; the video game industry was regularly reporting sales figures larger than the American film industry’s; Japanese superstar athletes competing in the U.S. like Ichiro, Matsui, Dice-K, Shigeki Maruyama, and Ai Miyazato were getting lots of attention from the U.S. sports media; and web sites, newspapers and magazines, and even scholarly journals were publishing copious commentary and analysis of all these developments. With the rise of “Web 2.0” technology like blogs, YouTube, and Google Video, even more networks for distributing representations of and images from Japan were spreading fast. Clearly, Japan had arrived in twenty first-century U.S. popular culture.

Now let's see if I that typhoon coming allows me to actually give the talk today. So far it's just blustery and drizzly (and weather.com is definitely low-keying this thing in its forecasts)....

On Bonds

It makes a wicked sort of sense to walk Barry Bonds.

The manager managing his team in the field against Bonds feels keenly enough the press of the lore of best play against his judgement of what to do when Bonds takes his turn at the plate: the lore is firm on this; the manager must not give a free base to the first guy up in the late innings of a close game. Don't let the batter reach base; make an out of his appearance at the plate. But late in the game the solid sense of that tactical injunction evaporates before Bonds at bat.

Late in a tie game every out has its vested place on the gradient leading up to the all-important final out. The first out in the 7th inning of a tie game is important, the second out in the 8th inning is very important, the final out, whenever it comes, the tie finally broken, is all-important. The final out gives a chance for the game to end, which otherwise might go on and on inconclusively forever should the tie continue inning after extra inning after extra inning as provided for in the rules of baseball, giving no small importance to each out recorded in those late late innings of the extra inning game to any of the remaining crowd that's hung around to see if that game-ending out will ever come. Managers in the National League have uniformly decided that its simply not worth trying to get that out, wherever it lies along that late inning close game gradient, from Barry Bonds.

One manager had his pitcher, late in a close game, send Bonds down to first base with the bases loaded, an almost inconcievable breach of common practice in baseball, granting the Giants a free run in that instance rather than allowing the decisive swipe of the bat of Bonds. The managers of the National League, in unspoken concert, changed the way the game is played when confronted with Bonds, who took a base on balls 230-some times one year at their insistence, a rate of almost three bases on balls for every two games played for the season. As much as possible the managers would not let him hit, willing to unleash on the game whatever mischief another baserunner might do rather than see him swing at a pitch.

Bonds at the plate has been exceptional, so exceptional that an exception to the known practices of baseball has been concieved and enforced just for him, contrary to the all the settled lore of baseball unequivocally reminding a manager that letting the other team have a baserunner is bad business, especially late in a close game, leading off the 7th or late in the 8th inning, say, with the score tied, and the probability of successfully getting even the best hitter out, based on all the evidence, is in the neighborhood of 70%, fair enough chances even for the prudent manager when who knows what will happen with another runner scampering around out there on the bases? So with bases empty you take your chances with the out, mm? And, yes, on the other hand with bases full and no outs, intentionally allowing the runner at third to advance while completing the double play, hastening the end of the inning at the cost of one run is ruefully acknowledged to be what's left of best practice under those circumstances. Outs are that important.

Oh, and at times, under the press of circumstances, when the manager's best hope is the admittedly wan hope that only a force play might revive the flagging chances of getting the three outs desperately needed to end the inning, then yes, especially with one out already in hand, an intentional base on balls, putting the force play in order and opening up the possibility of a double play, is a plausible enough gambit. Intentionally walking a batter to load the bases, putting the force play in order at every base, is the extreme expression of this gambit. Bonds has been walked under these circumstances, as have so many other players when the galling necessity of the gambit presents itself to the manager of the other squad in the course of the game. But Bonds is walked when other players would never be.

That one time, Bonds was intentionally walked with the bases loaded, with the force play already in effect at every base, the Arizona manager conceding on that occasion not only the run waiting at third base but the ruin Bonds would make of any hoped for double play if left to bat. Confronted by Bonds, the manager of the Arizona club abandoned what wan hope is ever offered when the force play is in effect at every base, and instead kept the bases loaded, gave up a run, collected no outs at all, and considered his team the better off for it for not letting Bonds have at the ball.

Bonds has been sent to first with a runner at third and no outs, contrary to settled practice. He's been sent to first with a runners at first and second, moving the extra runner into scoring position. He's been sent to first leading off late innings of close games, as mentioned, and sent to first late in tie games when any runner is a risk.

The wary manager grants Bonds first base knowing the probability of getting him out if he's pitched to is better than even, in hailing distance of 70% in fact. That chance is always worth seriously considering when facing some other batter, but not Bonds. In looking at all the evidence, the manager is confronted with the devastating other 30% of the time when Bonds has beat the ball with his bat. And that is enough. The manager foreswears such devastation, elects to have his pitcher send Bonds down to first instead. No other player I can recall has ever been treated in quite this way, with a blanket injunction against any pitcher in any case giving Bonds anything at all to hit under any circumstances if at all possible. In his time, the Giants own Willie McCovey was justifiably feared for what he might do with his bat, and managers were so disinclined to let him hit that for years he held the season record in the National League for being given the most intentional bases on balls, drawing 45 in 1969. In 2003, Barry Bonds totaled 120 intentional bases on balls.

Some people might be confused about how fair this is, not letting Bonds hit the ball, when that's what he's for, as if the still-living form of Bob Dylan were rushed out on stage and then not allowed to sing (producing for other reasons its own contrasting reactions of relief and chagrin on the part of those looking in, no doubt). But what's fair is a term of art in baseball, and what's fair never precludes the winning strategy, which over time has come to include in the rubric of the game "Don't Let Bonds Bat. Just Don't" as a unique, universally adopted codicil to otherwise settled matters of standard practice in baseball.

Sometimes, the manager concedes, Bonds must be pitched to. I've seen him bat a few hundred times over the years at games I've attended, and, yes, just as all those managers of opposing teams suspect for all the reasons, Bonds for years has been peerless at bat, just devastatingly acute with the delivered swipe of his stick to the detriment of the pitched ball when finally honestly offered. Once or twice during a game a pitcher might serve up such a ball among the vast majority of otherwise directed pitches tending to make Bonds have his base on balls instead, and suffer as a result all the negative consequences of trying to throw both a strike and a pitch he couldn't hit with the selfsame ball, leading in time directly to the other idea of not pitching to him at all, and as a fallback, should pitching to him prove unavoidable, to stack the side of the field where he'll most likely pound the thing with as many extra players as might be spared to chase the ball down. The standard array of defensive positions out there in the field was discarded in favor of one designed just for him, in case it came down to it and he did have a hack at the ball.

He probably wouldn't have hit 100 home runs that one year he was walked 234 times, but, who knows? What's true is that managers who sent their teams against him that year managed those games as if he might.

II.

For all of that, Barry Bonds has a curious celebrity. I've never met the fellow, and I have no evidence to contribute to the ongoing investigation into his alleged drug use that's getting all the press these days.

But because he is celebrated, San Francisco's own Dark Star, I'm aware of wide reports that he's a convincingly unlikeable sort with a forbidden history of performance enhancement ready to be pinned on him any day now if the feds get their way. Dramatic stuff, that, over and above the matchless baseball I've seen him play.

On the issue of likeability, it's hard for me to judge who'd be the most irritating to the other if Bonds and I were ever to meet. He may have all his great press clippings of rude behaviour going for him, and I in turn only an enraging practiced affability with which to stoke the fires of his irritation in return. I'm not denying Bonds would be the favorite, I'm just saying I own a store of inapt good cheer that's brought many up short over the years. If such a contest is not to be, well, I have small appetite for meeting famously irritating people anyway, or for being all that affable for prolonged periods, either. So I'll leave that question aside.

Barry Bonds made chumps of all the many players using performance enhancing drugs in baseball, all of them who went after that extra edge of muscle mass and reflex speed promised by the potions cooked up here and there in the industry serving America's fitness trade, and none of them going about it so secretly that the manager of a club would have no hint of why the fellow in the dugout with the shoulder muscles reaching all the way up to his ears has that peculiar vein popping away on his forhead. It was not so much a secret that was being kept about the use of the nominally prohibited drugs, as knowledge reserved for the clubhouse, set inside its white chalk circle, as it were, knowledge like who has jock itch or what's that phone number for the hookers which is never honestly addressed outside that space.

Many players, enhanced, managed to reach the major leagues and stay some length of time before they broke. And they did break, because the fitness served up by the concoctions they took was a brittle sort for the purposes of baseball, lending a particular vulnerability to the knee and shoulder and elbow of the otherwise enhanced player. They broke, and were replaced by others seeking in that same way for an edge to get into the major leagues and stay awhile.

I don't believe for a minute that Bonds with his storied self-regard was anything but offended when others, many of them enhanced, were spoken of as the best in baseball after a long while during which only his name was ever seriously mentioned when talk turned that way, agreeing with his own fully considered opinion on the matter I surmise, based on what he had done at bat, on the bases and in the field in his first decade in the major leagues. He stole hundreds and hundred of bases in that time, and he was so matchlessly fast to the ball in the outfield that again and again what might have seemed a sure double from the other team's batter was held to a single by his remarkable fielding. That's what those who gave him those Golden Gloves noticed when they chose him as best left fielder year after year: time after time the batter rounding first base witnessed ahead of him Bonds already throwing the adequate throw back into second, holding the hitter to a single instead of the two bases that had seem so sure off the crack of the bat. Bonds was peerless at that, at denying the extra base to the batter. He had his troubles when a better than adequate throw was required, but commonly he was at the ball and prepared to throw it back so quickly in the event only an adequate throw was needed. Bonds agreed, everyone agreed, he was the best. And even with all of that, he was named MVP for his hitting, not his fielding. Because, Bonds agreed, everyone agreed, he was a peerless hitter besides.

What stuck in the mighty craw of Bonds most sorely, I'm thinking, was all this talk of McGuire and Sosa saving baseball from the doldrums it had difted into follwing the baseball strike in 1994. Oooh, look, the darlings of baseball, and all those home runs! Those two guys were juiced. They were partaking of the conconctions. They had drugs in their systems, for enhancement! The celebration of their corrupted chase after the single season record of Ruth Maris went on and on that whole season with the two of them, McGuire and Sosa, blasting celebrated home run after celebrated home run to the obvious delight of all those paying the least attention, finally and forever and so marvelously laying to rest any question about the greatest number of home runs ever hit in a season. Except for the part about the drugs.

Bonds wasn't forced to demonstrate the truth that on any level playing field, as Bonds agreed, as everyone agreed, he was baseball's best. But he did do that.

Bonds chumped them all. They all enhanced themselves and performed marvels and then broke, but even performing at the utter possible limit of their enhancement he showed they were no match at all, no one was a match at all, for what he, Bonds, already best, could do enhanced.

Errors of Transcription in Baseball

It's not enough that the baseball reporter, even the previously praised Henry Schulman of the San Francisco Chronicle's Sporting Green, simply and clearly transmit the story of the game's progress to the reader, although it's not much of a story without that. No, in addition it is expected that tidbits of talk about a just concluded game from those who shaped its outcome will be presented by the reporter as well, requiring Schulman, for example, to visit Giants and others who might have cause to say something about the event that's just played out, and transmit those collected comments to the reader as well.

Schulman quotes Giants manager Bruce Bochy following Opening Day:

It wasn't an auspicious start," he said. You hate to have a game like that for your opener, but you're going to have to wash it off. A lot of guys got work out there, got their feet wet.

Bochy nicely leaves unmentioned what it was that wet the feet of a lot of guys working out there, but manages to recommend a prudent clubwide washing nonetheless.

We have to throw the ball a lot better. We made a lot of mistakes out there.

A comprehensive list of the teams shortcomings is in the boxscore, Bochy singling out errant throws for special mention in his comments.

Here's an interesting perspective on such jobs of transcription by Mark Liberman of Language Log called Journalists' Quotations: Unsafe In Any Mood, which highlights one opportune moment in baseball reporting when the subtly mangled quote cannot help but slip in between the uttered word and its printed form.

Such willing errors of transcription are mostly harmless, for all I know. They may arise out of a common professional courtesy extended by baseball reporters to subjects they interview, the grant that something near what was sensibly meant by the subject will somehow make its way onto the page whatever way it's put.

It's easy enough to imagine Schulman's quotes sometimes stretched out on the rack requiring meaning of what's just been uttered, Schulman offering up to the readers of his report a determinedly sensible stretch instead of the train of words which, as originally joined, make no good sense at all.

It's also easy enough to imagine a manager like Bruce Bochy, provoked to discuss the Giants performance on Opening Day, saying just what is meant by the words quoted by Schulman above.

A Quick Comment on Golfy Media

Peter's baseball posting is inspiring me to put something together on the way my parents met, my experience as a kid at Candlestick, my childhood love of Jim Mason and Bucky Dent, my failed dreams of getting beyond Little League as a shortstop and pitcher, and my work as a research assistant on Arnold Rampersad's bio of Jackie Robinson, not to mention my experiences taking the family to minor league ball in Western NY and here at the Fukuoka Dome to see the Softbank Hawks. Someday! Before that, I have an idea about surveying the strengths and weaknesses of the various ranking systems for golfers via Moneyball. Anybody got other ideas about bridging the golf-baseball divide at Mostly Harmless?

For now, let me just throw out a few links to the LPGA money list, Rolex Rankings, Golfweek/Sagarin LPGA Performance Index, the tournament site for the Moira Dunn-territory Corning Classic (which just happens to be off my least favorite road, Route 17/86--it's almost killed me a couple of times--but don't let that stop you from checking out the field and official preview, or noticing that it's still a strong field despite only 3 of the top 20 on the money list being in it), and Hound Dog's tournament preview--and tell you a little story about the Japanese media while you wait for the pre-tournament interviews to be loaded onto LPGA.com.

Ryo Ishikawa, the youngest winner ever of a Japanese professional tournament (and maybe in the world--has anyone in the U.S. media bothered to fact-check this claim from the Japanese media?) at age 15, is getting the full SMAP Japanese media treatment, with camera crews even going to his high school to track him down. He gets asked questions like, "What is your type of woman?" (and laughed at when he says, "Someone who will support me when times are tough," because the interviewer was really asking him to name a celebrity). He says he wants to compete with Tiger Woods someday, but lately he just wants his normal life back. Sakura Yokomine, meanwhile, who only broke Mi-Jeong Jeon's 3-tournament winning streak on the JLPGA, would enjoy a little recognition for her accomplishment. Not happening. Apparently even Sakura get upstaged.

The Early Season's end

(May 18) They're just past the quarter pole in the long long slog through the baseball season, the San Francisco Giants are.

The club's record stood at 20-20 on Friday, 40 games played of the scheduled 162, and although the remaining games may play out for better or worse in the event, finishing the season with half those games won would constitute an improvement over recent seasons, providing a measurable personal consolation I admit for dashed hopes that the club might do much better than that this year. In that respect at least, so far, so good.

Concerns aroused on Opening Day that the club might do worse or even much worse for the rest of the season have frequently enough been validated in miffed play and missed opportunity, with the acknowledged intervention of the admittedly remarkable feat of some athlete on the other team's squad also bearing its own responsibility for the bad outcome now and then.

The experienced, not to say grizzled, veterans of baseball collected on the Giants' lineup this season were gathered there with an eye to avoiding just such calamities with a steady (but it was hoped non-too stolid) season's play in the field. Half the time the assembled Giants squad can't yet meet this expectation. Maybe the warming weather of midseason will limber them enough to cause improvement.

Predictably, Giants relief pitching has coughed up a bunch of games, a likely trend for the foreseeable future with that staff, so any improvement will have to come from somewhere else in the squad. Hit into fewer rally-crushing double plays, move the guy along, make the other team beat you, don't beat yourself, catch that ball, make that play, all that sort of talk needs not only to be taken to heart but more adroitly practiced if the team is to be any better in the balance of the season than it's been so far. Waiting around for the presumptively drug-depleted Barry Bonds to crush yet another home run is a handy tactic the Giants have available, but not a strategy for winning a majority of the club's remaining games. The Giants recently called up outfielders Lewis and Ortmeier from their Fresno AAA club in the absence of injured Dave Roberts. Lewis hit for the cycle in Denver, with a home run, a triple, a double, and not just one but two singles. Veteran outfielder Randy Winn has responded by delivering a week's worth of sharp appearances at the plate himself.

The starting pitching could hardly be improved. It's been admirable. Even the vaunted left arm of Zito seems to be coming around after its disastrous introduction to the team and its fans on Opening Day. It will be interesting to see how it responds to his start tonight in Oakland against his old team, the Athletics, here on the verge of midseason, that long middle of the scheduled games overlapping summer from Memorial Day to Labor Day in America.

UPDATE: (May 19) Hardly had the notoriey of the first day of the season fallen satisfactorily from immediate recall than Barry Zito reproduced last night in Oakland as best he could the exact flavor of his bad first day on the job just across the Bay. Not all of the 15 runs the Athletics scored last night were scored against him, but he did set the tone.

UPDATE: (May 19) The Giant's 7th inning from tonight's game is curious:

B Bonds singled to right. O out OAK 3 SF 0

R Klesko lined out to center. 1 out OAK 3 SF 0

B Molina homered to left, B Bonds scored. 1 out OAK 3 SF 2

M Sweeney struck out swinging,

M Sweeney safe at first on wild pitch by D Haren. 1 out OAK 3 SF 2

M Sweeney stole second. 1 out OAK 3 SF 2

O Vizquel popped out to third. 2 out OAK 3 SF 2

M Sweeney to third on wild pitch by D Haren. OAK 3 SF 2

K Frandsen grounded out to shortstop. 3 out OAK 3 SF 2

Sweeney showed some pep in his progress around the bases in that inning, beating it on down to first when the pitch he swung at and missed for strike three eluded the catcher, then successfully if improbably stealing second base from there, and then once again on his own initiative going from second to third on the pitcher Haren's second wild pitch of the inning. Sweeney didn't complete the circuit of the bases for a run, but more than made up for striking out in the first place, turning his missed stroke into an apperance at third base with no appreciable help from the two who followed him in the lineup.

Each game of baseball evolves uniquely from the press of its bounding rules on the activities of its wilfull participants. Often enough a nice, nice, bit of play leads nowhere, as was the case with Sweeney's advance here. The score for the inning remained the same from his failed hack at the ball to Frandsen's mistruck grounder that conclusively ended the thing at last, the same score it would have been had the catcher simply caught the ball Sweeney missed in the first place. It was nice, nice, baseball, even though effectively it might as well not have happened at all.

UPDATE: (May 21)

Good pitching beats beats good hitting, and visa versa—A truth universally acknowledged in the lore of baseball.

In spite of the repeated comic lapses of Zito's left arm, the collection of starting pitchers on this year's Giants squad is better than any they've gathered together in more than a decade. Yesterday's series (and road trip) ending game in Oakland featured Matt Morris, pitching one of the best games pitched so far this year in all the National League, giving up 2 hits and a run in nine innings and credited for the win. Morris is now 5-1, and but for the previously mentioned tendency of his team to play quite poorly at times, could as soon be 7-1 or 8-1 instead.

The Giants, past the quarter mark, are now 21-22, within striking distance of mediocrity. With good play tonight against the Houston club they'll have it in hand, satisfying my own admitted minimal standard of appreciable improvement on their part for the year, the winning of all of the games half of the time. Achieving that, and some nice play like Sweeney's the other night, would make for a bearable season, I'm thinking.

A Second on the Triple Play

J.P. Stormcrow comments :

It was back in 1920, player named Bill Wambsganss - (to be an Indians fan you learn to go way back and seize on whatever you can - can I add Tris Speaker to my fantasy team?)

Mr. Wambsganss, a.259 lifetime hitter and perhaps not fully internalizing his likely position in history without the play, once lamented:

Funny thing, I played in the big leagues for 13 years, 1914 through 1926, and the only thing that anybody seems to remember is that once I made an unassisted triple play in a World Series. Many don't even remember the team I was on, or the position I played, or anything. Just Wambsganss-unassisted triple play! You'd think I was born on the day before and died on the day after.

Forgotten yet essential players of Major League Baseball, each and every one of the quartet of them who participated in the World Series's only unassisted triple play.


The lot of them have unremembered names, in the main known only to specialists in baseball lore. Only the player who delivered the rarity, Wambsganss, a name that should be remembered for its own kind of rarity, for being the name of anything at all, is commonly mentioned in the unlikely event converstion turns to triple plays and someone bring up the one in the World Series. The story about the triple play in the world series is named for him, he has a Wikipedia page, which is likewise an unlikely name for a Wikipedia page.

In the fifth inning of Game Five of the 1920 World Series played at League Park, Wambsganss caught a line drive batted by Clarence Mitchell, stepped on second base to retire Pete Kilduff, and tagged Otto Miller coming from first base, to complete the first triple play, completely unassisted, in World Series history. Earlier in the game, Wambsganss' teammate Elmer Smith hit the first grand slam in World Series history off Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Burleigh Grimes, in the first inning with none out. The historic blast scored Charlie Jamieson, Wambsganss, Tris Speaker, and Smith. After managing to score a run in the ninth inning, Brooklyn fell to the Indians in an 8–1 loss. Cleveland winning pitcher Jim Bagby also helped himself by hitting a three-run home run in the third. It was the first home run hit by a pitcher in modern World Series history.

The lot of them are identified in an image from the Library of Congress on the Wikipedia page, the four of them off slouching by the dugout where the camera takes a good look at them for posterity. Each of them essential to the play, of course, each needing to be stationed just so for the utter rarity of an unassisted triple play to be consumated. The names of Miller and Kilduff and Mitchell commonly go unsaid, subsumed in the likier mention of the unlikely name of Wamsganss.

Bill Wamsganns played in the American League for 13 seasons from 1914 to 1926, mostly for the Cleveland Indians, but also for the Boston Red Sox and the Philadelphia Athletics. He was a second baseman who made 375 errors, hit seven home runs, and batted .259 in that time.

375 errors, even spread as thinly as possible over thirteen seasons, is a lot of errors each season. A whole lot of errors. However much he sustained the game by suiting up each day for thirteen years in the service of keeping American League baseball going, and however much those seven home runs must have come in handy at the time, still, would he really rather be remembered for a career of commonly chancy fielding or for having had an uncommon chance at fielding, making him the unlikely-named thing for that named unlikely thing, the unassisted triple play in the World Series?

On the triple play in fact and fancy

"I was not successful as a ball player, as it was a game of skill." —Casey Stengel

I won't let the week pass without publicly celebrating the astonishing unassisted triple play completed by Troy Tulowitski of the Colorado Rockies ballclub this past Sunday. Even the notoriously foreign newspaper The Guardian couldn't fail to take proper note of the thing on its website. What an unusual, remarkable event.

A perfect game is a rare rare thing; in all the overmeticulously documented annals of the game of baseball the number of perfect games is small, very small indeed. Admittedly the tendency of the game is for the batter, on appearing at the plate, to make an out in any of the ways provided by the rules of the game and retire from the field.

But, interspersed among all the regularly hopeful comings and understandably dejected goings represented by those outs, and in spite of the strongest possible indications otherwise to the uninitiate, who may be forgiven for believing that since nothing is apparently happening, nothing apparently ever will happen, by and by during the course of a ballgame something else will happen besides another out, that very something's probability supported by the vast available library of recorded instances of the game in which it is evident that baserunners will in almost every instance take their bases eventually in some inning or other of the game, finally to interrupt the otherwise consistent failure of the team at bat to make much of anything but an out of its batters' appearances at the plate.

Over the past 130 years of Major League Baseball history, there have been only 17 official perfect games by the current definition (approximately one every eight years); the status of the two that took place in the 19th century is debated by baseball aficionados, as the rules and playing conditions were markedly different from those of the so-called modern era beginning in 1900. In sum, a perfect game is thrown once in about every 20,000 major league contests.[…] For comparison, more people have orbited the moon than have pitched a Major League Baseball perfect game.
—From Wikipedia

Discounting those disputed couple of perfect games in the 19th century if we must leaves us with a scant 15 certified and true instances of the thing occurring in all the recorded games of Major League Baseball going all the way back to its beginning.

And in all those years there have only been 13 unassisted triple plays, making the recent beautiful feat of Tulowitski of the Colorado club rarer even than that rare rare thing, a perfect game.

In the foggy ocean side of San Francisco, on one of its streets, I learned the urban variants of the game of baseball, those subsets of its skills of throwing and running and catching and hitting, the fundamental glove-optional subsets of the game of baseball that fitted into the container of the urban street, giving due deference to the inevitable broken window or ball lost on the roof entailed by the public exercise of those fundamentals right there on that street instead of taking the whole lot of it down to a playground as was often suggested.

And of course with all the fundamentals there was the talk about the actual game of baseball itself, talk about the the way the fundamentals of the game came together when played out somewhere else, on a properly laid field with its level lawn between the marked foul lines and the familiar diamond formed by the bases and the little mound where the pitcher perches on the slab set right there at the zero point of the whole enterprise, the full enjoyment of which the utterly urban scheme of our street denied us. We had the parts of it, Strikeout, and running bases, and fielding the erratically bounding ball before it went under the parked car, but little enough experience of the whole, except by what was passed on in talk of baseball, supported by the well kept raft of record and rumor of notable players and what they'd done elsewhere, on baseball's actual field of play.

This is not to say that local experience went undiscussed. For howevermuch the sweet sacramental seeming-singularity of the idea of a triple play thrilled us once we could explain the idea to each other and did, demonstrating our understanding of the concept and appreciation of all the necessary contingencies fulfilled to make way for the unfolding of that unlikely event, to see, to be witness to the locally famous catch made by Bill on the street, for example, Bill chasing a fly gone suddenly aslant where it met the telephone pole, Bill reacting with the gloved hand so swiftly that the ball was intercepted on its new trajectory in the instant, just as its watchers' instant suspicion that the catch must not be possible was intercepted by the evidence before them, that was to witness a marvel of improbability rarer than an unassisted triple play in the agreed view of its witnesses, a baseball play unlikely to be ever seen again, truly singular.

Although I've witnessed many truly singular plays in baseball, I've never witnessed its rare yet replicable triple play, or a no-hitter, for that matter, let alone a perfect game, and I don't expect I ever will. They are of a different, nameable unlikelihood from that of the irreplicable play of Bill, for example, which has a story, but no formal name in baseball.

Plying the Percentages

In the spirit of Opening Day the Giants stumbled along for the next week and a half with that same awkward brand of ball that caused them to cough up the season's first game and earn the public derision of all who follow them, as discussed below. 2 and 7 after the first nine games. 2 and 7!

2 and 7, a ratio of wins per game played (.222) to which even the poorest team in the long annals of the game couldn't descend consistently over the course of an entire season. Even with all the storied ineptitude they brought out onto the field, the most laughable of the early New York Mets squads was never that bad, they were never .222 bad over an entire season.

Knowing that, even if this year's Giants club were to match the established record of Met ineptitude, stretches of better play should be expected to break out here and there after a 2-7 start just to bring the average up to the previously established sub-standard of a season's worth of poor play registered by the Mets.

Particularly I care to attend to Visquel's play whatever the outcome. He's the best Giants shortstop I've had a chance to watch, going back to their Seals Stadium days. I remember the dire times with André Rodgers in the lineup, who Prescott Sullivan in the San Francisco Examiner suggested might benefit from an apron sort of thing to keep the ball from going so consistently between his legs. Visquel is a great shortstop. He has the tremendous talent out there on the field for all the running and catching and throwing required by his position. Often he proves by demonstration that yes, the human form can in fact execute some adroitly made move or other that no one had bothered to think posssible before. So, there is Visquel to keep an eye on.

Although, now, after nineteen games, the Giants are 11-8. There are many, many ways to combine wins and losses that will lead to a record of 11-8 (.579) in any strech of nineteen games of the schedule, and snappy ways to figure out all the possible combinations of wins and losses that will get your team there, and among those combinations the small set with its few ways to distribute 9 wins among the next ten games, when the team's started off 2-7, to get to the desired result.

No ballclub wins nine of ten games consistently, but the Giants did just that, won nine of ten and the last seven in a row. Already this season the Giants have ranged from unpardonable to unbeatable, from the subperformances following Opening Day to the brisk dispatch of the despised Dodgers over the course of the past two nights, extending the ballclub's win streak to seven games and featuring, last night, yet another home run from the presumptively drug-depleted Barry Bonds.

Over the course of 162 games, .579 would be roughly 94 wins, and 94 wins is a good competitive count in this year's hunt for a place in Major League Baseball's playoffs. Any team in the NL West that can keep up an 11-8 pace over the course of the season is almost assured of winning the division.

Still, the bullpen's pitchers are going to cough up a lot of games late. Can't be helped with the staff they've got, I suppose, though just hearing the name of any of them pronounced after the seventh inning, even this early on in the season, forces an expression of real alarm from my throat. The rotation looks strong, though, there is that.

[UPDATE: Last night the Giants completed a sweep of the Dodgers in Los Angeles, coming back after being down 3-0 early to win their eight game in a row, 5-4, boosting the club's record to 12-8 and tying the Giants for a share of the division lead. Very satisfying, very satisfying indeed.]

Press Bias in Baseball

Of course I always hope the Giants win, but especially on Opening Day, with all the festive bunting draped all over everything and all. The Giants had their expensive new guy with the left arm out on the mound on Opening Day, backed by their retooled squad, a packed house, perfect weather, blah, blah.

They played bad. Game Spoils Opening Day, read the Chronicle's front page headline, with a big page-spanning No, Really, Play Ball sprawled across the top of the sports section, The Sporting Green as it is known in the Chronicle.

If a minimal requirement of a major daily newspaper is sufficient staff for a few of them to be devoted nearly full-time to the task of writing healdines and captions, then the Chronicle meets and often exceeds that standard. It has plenty of people working for it, and some make up the front page crew authorized to fashion its front page headlines, while at the same time somewhere nearby the others of the editorial staff assigned to the sports page crew toil away crafting the pithy nuggets of their own. The reporter on a major daily newspaper, the journalist who files the story itself, such as it is, doesn't write the headline or the captions accompanying the story. That headline belongs to somebody else, with occasionally the noticeable tension between the headline and what's actually being reported visible to the passably close reader of the two.

In this case, in this opening day's Chronicle, the one printed the day after the galling particulars reported there, there is a happy congress of all three staffed functions here, a disparaging unanimity of report made manifest in the first paragraph of The Sporting Green's
account:

Start with a quart of awful and add two teaspoons of hideous. Throw in a dash of miserable and you had the recipe for the Giants' 2007 opener Tuesday. The best they could do with this foul-tasting stew was dump it in the trash and hope to start fresh with new ingredients tonight.

—Henry Schulman in San Francisco Chronicle, April 4, 2007

Henry Schulman is the Giants beat writer for the Chronicle. He's assigned to the team, follows them around and files a story after each game, summarizing the action. He's been at it for mumbledy-something years now.

Sports writers have the freedom of the press. Pointedly, they're allowed to build a lede for their stories with judgements, as Schulman did in his Opening Day article. All the familiar supporting documentation for his judgements is readily available for easy inspection right there on the inside page where his article concludes: there's the clubhouse chat, there's the standard box score, everything there required to buttress his asperity.

As I said, Schulman travels with these guys. He sees them every day and he has the pulpit of the sports page to tell the world anything and everything he might want to reveal about them, and I'm sure over the years he's developed a sense of what he's willing to disclose about the players of this game he's paid to watch and what he isn't. But, as for reporting on the game, clearly he's accustomed to writing what he witnessed with no punches pulled, and the players must expect that of him, too.

Last night on the Daily Show, John Stewart interviewed Matt Cooper, who operated under markedly different conditions inside the Beltway in Washington, D.C., working for one of Time Magazine's flagship bureaus, vending its version of what passes for news of the White House. He was one of those given the famously leaked name of CIA worker Valerie Plame Wilson by a name he was reluctant to pronounce in public because of the bond of unrevealability established between Cooper, the White House beat writer, and the unnameable one in the Administration who had passed along the officially reserved name of Joe Wilson's wife.

Cooper collaborated on a story with a couple of other writers for Time Magazine, each of whom knew, as Cooper did, that the unnameable was Karl Rove.

The story, in fact, hinged on the simple fact that Karl Rove was the one that Cooper hadn't named. The three collaborators wrote a story pretending they didn't know that salient detail, a lapse in reporting but necessary to the copy eventually published by Time.

Henry Schulman has his informed witness of Giants games published in the Chronicle's Sporting Green. There's enough entitlement left in his version of freedom of the press that summary judgement, when due, will fall swiftly where it may on those thrilled and on those agonized by the report.

But this is not the case with the Washington press corps, so demure in exercise of its freedom that three of its members can agree that due diligence in protection of a source requires them to ignore the one fact known to all, as if the Chronicle had determined in its coverage of Opening Day to leech all reference to the pratfall of a loss it turned out to be from its pages, and insert instead a report of the day known by the front page crew, the sports page crew, and the journalist crew to be a false unsupportable lie.

Matt Cooper, in short, is not Henry Schulman.

Springing

My first union job was working as a vendor for the Harry Stevens concessions company, which proudly and maybe even accurately claimed to be the inventor of the hot dog. Or the hot dog bun, or the bun/hot dog combination, I forget which. It's been a long time.

The Harry Stevens company followed Horace Stoneham out West when he moved his Giants ball club to San Francisco, and because I lived in the right parish at the right time, and the manager of the company, Mr. Kelly, looked to his daughters' schoolmates for workers, my brothers and I found ourselves staggering around Candlestick Park during baseball season selling what passed for edible food in those days: popcorn and soda and peanuts in the shell and "coffee" and occasionally, yes, hot dogs, although hot dogs were usually taken out by vendors with more seniority. I worked hundreds of ballgames.

Which is only to say that when it comes to baseball, particularly when it comes to San Francisco Giants baseball, I feel the same abiding attachment of anyone who's drawn a paycheck in any field feels toward that endeavor, even though it's been decades since my last transaction involving a paper cup of lukewarm beverage on 20% commission.

…Spring arrives, and hope.

I admit it. I hope the Giants win on Opening Day, and on the succeeding day I hope they'll win then, too, and then on the day after that I hope they'll win, again, and by the intractable rules of mathematical induction it's pretty clear that the element of hope is being distributed equally along the entire range of Giants games each and every season on a day-to-day basis. In sum, I hope they'll win every game. I have no reason to think my hope can be realistically satisfied, but there it is.

On the other hand, smart people like Bill James have spent years now trying to put the analysis of the game of baseball on a firm statistical foundation — a very rational impulse considering the time, effort, and money people have lavished on the game over the years. Who wouldn't want to have some basis for believing that player X on Club Y is going to deliver Performance Z based on the range of possibilites allowed for by the game? If only there were some successful system for understanding why things turn out the way they do, it could be applied directly to discussions of the game and its players. Then the likelihood of my hope could be plotted against cruel reality, assigned to some confidence interval or other, and the grave leveler of sober expectation used to tamp down the hope which, unbidden yet inevitable, springs.

But still…