Just when I thought I couldn’t love President Obama any more than I already do, he goes and does that. After those in attendance shelled out $250 to be there, and after Boston contributed over $3 million to Obama’s re-election campaign.
The point is: You have to represent your team, no matter the time, or the place.
Four more years, yo.
H/T: Amanda Maher.
Frank Deford, a legend of sportswriting at Sports Illustrated for over half a century, was awarded the Red Smith Award for outstanding contributions to sports journalism last Friday. In his acceptance speech, he touches on the direction of sportswriting. One sentence in particularly speaks directly to what we at FanGraphs (and much of the “new sports media”) write.
I don’t want to see sportswriting be overwhelmed by statistics. I want to read about the heart and blood of athletes and their stories, which has made sportswriting so special.
Deford is absolutely right. Sportswriting needs the feature stories that allow us to see the stories of these athletes. We need Molly Knight on Matt Kemp. We need Chris Ballard on Tim Duncan. We need Jimmy Breslin on Joe Namath.
Seriously, if you haven’t read that Breslin story, drop everything and read it now.
The best feature writers make us feel like we’re in the room with our favorite athletes; like we can somehow identify with them as they perform absurd, superhuman acts on the field of play. It adds an immeasurable and necessary amount to our sports experience.
But I also think there are immeasurable stories to be told about the game itself. How it is won or lost, over the course of a season or a game or an inning or even one single play. I want — and surely Deford does as well — good, quality writing about both the players and the game they play for us.
I care about the guy putting up MVP numbers for his team, but I also care about what it means for his team and how it helps them win. I’m interested in the man who hits the walk-off home run, but I also want to see how and why it happened. Statistics — sport’s silent historians — are our vessel to that end.
Deford is right in another fashion: sportswriting, even when it comes to dissecting the game itself, cannot be listing numbers off a page. There is always more to it — some nuance, some insight that brings us above simply what happened and starts answering questions. Why? How? Answering these questions can move us too.
So yes, Mr. Deford, let’s not overwhelm the word of sportswriting with statistics. Let’s just allow them to do their part.
I know little about basketball. You throw a ball — much like every American sport — and there is jumping and falling and whistling. And they have steals too, but you actually get something for the steal (a ball). Keeping the stolen ball after the game, I am told, is bad form, though.
Anyway, it turns out there was a recent championship contest, and since the Bulls of Chicago were not involved, I had already cast the sport into a waste bin titled “No Derrick Rose makes me sad” — but my decision may have been premature. Tom Tango passes along this viral video, in which we see an advanced analysis owner — Mark Cuban — clobber most cruelly an old-school television sensationalist — Skip Bayless — during the post-championship live analysis.
“Maybe the world is blind / Or just a little unkind”: these lines — posited originally by Gary Portnoy, composer of the theme song for TV’s Punky Brewster — seem perhaps like the aimless lamentations of the peculiarly sensitive. Upon further inspection, however, Portnoy’s (ahem) complaint appears to be as relevant today as when Punky Brewster’s mother abandoned her at a Chicago, Illinois, shopping center in 1984.
Indeed, if Brian MacPherson of the Providence Journal is to be believed, recently acquired utility man Brent Lillibridge is trapped in Kevin Youkilis’s old locker and nobody cares.
Yesterday, with two out in the top of the ninth inning, in a tie game between the Brewers and White Sox at US Cellular Field, Nyjer Morgan was caught attempting to steal third — what he was thinking, however, every Brewers fan (and probably every other member of the Brewers organization) would like to know. (Sorry: for some reason MLB video didn’t offer the option to embed this clip.)
To make this NotGraphs-eligible, I’ve creatively recreated this play in my office at work:
The wind-up circus bear here represents the spirit that possessed Morgan on the play. The circus bear is an unpredictable soul, aware that it is display for the amusement of the masses, sometimes prepared to awe, sometimes lashing out against his own best interest. Such has been the dramatic career of Nyjer Morgan.
What we have done is assign cool nicknames to players rather than perpetuate the tired, lamewad practice of assigning cool players nicknames. This is the last time we shall do this. Why, multitudes ask? Because we shall soon introduce a new, equally insipid series called “Nickname Seeks Former Player.”
First, though, another glance at our Hall of Honouur, which is so stately, so regal, so much itself a celebration of the Norman Conquest, that an extra British-English unstressed “u” is required for proper spelling …
Hey, cheer up, R.A. Dickey! Sure, you crashed back to earth on Sunday night*. But not before you went off on a HISTORIC RUN OF DOMINANCE!** Brush off those pesky Yanks — it’ll turn around for you soon. And listen, so long as you’re just sitting around waiting for your “violent, weird, fickle” mistress, you should totally check out this mix I put together for you.
“Great players don’t need a psychiatrist,” [Ozzie] Guillen said. “I didn’t see Pete Rose talking with any psychiatrist, Paul Molitor or all those guys.”
“I was from an era in baseball when Budweiser and vodka took care of the psychiatric things.” … “You fail, you get drunk and you come back the next day to see how good it feels. The psycho guys—the doctors—they never played this game. They never wore the uniform. They never came out of a slump. They’re not used to it, so how are they going to help?”
You know who else doesn’t need a doctor? Pitchers with torn ligaments. Great players don’t need orthopedic surgeons. I didn’t see Walter Johnson talking with any orthopedic surgeon, Christy Mathewson, Satchel Paige, any of those guys.
Longtime readers of NotGraphs — and also anyone who’s visited NotGraphs even just once in their entire life — will know that, if the present site were to have something in the way of a patron saint, then the leading candidates for that role would be Dick Allen and Bob Uecker, the former because he’s a leisured gentleman; the latter, because he’s an equally leisured gentleman.
Indeed, it should surprise zero of us to learn not only that Allen and Uecker were teammates (for the 1966 and 1967 Phillies), but that they were also (a) close friends, (b) the authors, together, of no little merriment, and (c) the recipients, together, of multiple fines.
The pair reunited on air Sunday, with Allen in Chicago as part of a celebration of the 1972 White Sox (with which team and in which season he won the AL MVP award) and Uecker in Chicago in his capacity as the Brewers’ radio voice.
To say that Allen and Uecker burst into song during the former’s 5th inning appearance on WTMJ Radio would both (a) sound like a flight of whimsy on the part of the author and (b) be an accurate description of what actually happened.
