Continuing our examination of fashion sense for the intellectually demanding fan, we move on to Atlanta, home of the Braves since 1966.  Of course, when we think of Atlanta Braves baseball, most of us immediately think of the playoff streak, and the triumvirate of Maddux, Glavine and Smoltz.  Older fans will remember Aaron’s charge at 716.  Between these eras, there was Dale Murphy and not much else.  It’s strange that the modern Braves, after these peaks and valleys, have been so nondescript in comparison.

Still, there’s plenty of irony to be had in the baseball jerseys of the Atlanta Braves.

1966 Eddie Mathews: I am not a Braves fan, but I find Mathews fascinating.  Overshadowed by Aaron most of his career, Mathews feels like a afterthought Hall of Famer, the kind of guy people forget when they play Sporcle.  And yet you’ve got teams who don’t have a Hall of Famer at all, much less a dominant one.  Mathews played one year in Atlanta near the end of his career, and played well, making this a good jersey choice for the ironic and the unironic at the same time.

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Yesterday, Mr. Dayn Perry shared the story of the irascible Billy Martin and his irascible love for Realistic Hone-Video Baseball.  You may have found yourself wondering as to the identity of the second gentleman that would drive such a nice guy to such an uncharacteristic furor.  That man was none other than the famous author and editor of the Paris Review, George Plimpton.

The early eighties saw a pitched battle between the Atari and the Intellivision, holding up to society a mirror for the deeper international tensions that marked the era.  As in the Cold War, Plimpton and Martin waged a war of words, seeking to win the hearts and minds of the people.  Billy Martin played the part of the folksy populist, seeking to win America’s heart.  George Plimpton, recalling a fully-coifed Adlai Stevenson, employed logic to appeal to the minds of the citizenry.

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It is a well-established fact that the kids these days are somewhat entitled, what with their mp3s and their Kinects and their computer graphics.  Back in my day, we listened to mp2s and played migraine-inducing Virtual Boys and our video games sometimes didn’t even have graphics.  If you wanted to kill a troll, you typed the words “kill troll”, and the game narrated whether or not you were, in fact, successful in killing the troll.  Note: you were often not successful in killing the troll.

Among computer games, the interactive fiction genre began before people even owned computers.  Thirty-five years after people first typed “xyzzy”, the community is alive and well, or at least alive, dwelling in a strata of internet culture just beneath the basement from which the bloggers write about their sabermetrics.

Which leads us to our subject: three weeks ago saw the release of the first narrative baseball game.  Bonehead is written by Sean M. Shore, and tells the story of New York Giants first baseman and teenager Fred Merkle, whose baserunning gaffe in the final week of 1908 helped cost his team the pennant and dogged him the rest of his life.  Your goal is to re-enact that day, beginning with standing in line at the train station on the way to the stadium.

What’s interesting about Bonehead is the distinction it makes between you as the player and Merkle as the character, despite the fact that you are effectively acting as Merkle throughout the story.  The game makes it clear early on that Merkle is destined for misfortune, and that “winning” the game, i.e. playing it to its proper ending, brings about this misfortune.  Between passages of the game Shore weaves vignettes of Merkle’s later years.  Meanwhile, the game provides multiple opportunities to end the game another way, many of them averting ignominy.

Bonehead is free to play, and the game can be downloaded here.  The game file requires an interpreter to run, and they can be downloaded on the same page.

The following is an excerpt from the recently-discovered masterwork, written by hand on a single jumbo-sized two-ply toilet paper roll deep within the catacombs of Kaufmann Stadium. The exact origins of the piece are unknown, but it’s believed that the majority of the passages were transcribed from folklore by a drunken, unemployed Trey Hillman, who hid in the boiler room for weeks after his 2010 dismissal. As for the work itself, it is best read aloud, in a detached voice, deploying copious pauses and wielding a mindset that is ever mindful of the pointlessness of the human condition.

(56th Chorus, as told by Gil Meche)

At another hospital
I almost died
With bursitis
Craning backward at the Ruthian
Rooftops on the Bronx
And at my fellows

Bannister was dying of diabetes
Not enough strong blood
     I had too much.
Bass was dying of die-sadness,
Others had elbows
     Like my Uncle John.

Old Dominican Runelvys
Had Tommy’s Awful Disease,
     the bloating of the belly
     by untamed thyroid
     And the endless wait.
     When it did end
     everything he threw
     turned to glass.

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A while ago I engaged in some sharing of my personal life, insofar as that personal life involved the Jason Kendall jersey in the back of my closet.  I’d like to continue that discussion in a direction that contains fewer Jason Kendall references toward a more broad consideration of how, exactly, the jersey relates to the fan experience.  I’ll predicate the conversation with two unassailable tenets:

• 1. Fans who remain fans during the lean years are truer, better, and are ethically superior to bandwagon fans.

• 2. Clothes make the man/woman.

Given that most of us lack the disposable income to purchase more than a couple of jerseys, it’s easy to understand why fans want to play it safe.  However, the jersey is an instantly identifiable opportunity to not only express individuality, but to dictate the extent of one’s fandom.  Carson touched on this concept in his recent essay on sabermetrics as hipsterism, presenting the hipster as cultural vanguard.  In this scenario, however, we are less interested in predicting and promoting what will be valuable in the future, but instead grounding our fandom in historical perspective.  The ironic jersey eschews popularity, instead celebrating the aspects of a team that a mere few would understand and appreciate.  It encapsulates the entirety of a franchise, the elation and the suffering, in a single terse word.

Today, we’ll begin our foray into fabric and collective sporting identity with the Arizona Diamondbacks.  Candidates are presented below; opinions and intolerable snubs are welcome in the comments.

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Sadaharu Oh’s autobiography is an enjoyable read, remarkable for its eloquence and candor.  He details his struggles with racism, having a Taiwanese father in post-war Japan, as well as his conflict with that very same father over his love of baseball.  In Chapter 4, he also establishes himself as a free-market capitalist who isn’t interested in money, and touches on the age-old dilemma: is parity the same as fairness, or is the amateur draft, as Buzzie Bavasi once called it, “a form of socialism”?  Oh (with David Falkner) writes:

In those days there was no draft system.  Thank God.  If there had been such a system, I never would have fulfilled my dreams.  I can look back on it no and feel this sense of tremendous blessing – one that includes the sense that I am somehow a person from another age – but I feel anger for what was ultimately surrendered.

The draft system, this peculiar lottery of talent that is supposed to give all teams an equal opportunity to stock their rosters, is one of the most unfortunate changes to affect modern professional baseball in Japan.

Imagine a young amateur player, as I once was, looking forward to playing professionally.  In the heart of that young person, if he has passionately followed baseball from his boyhood, is loyalty and longing. … What does it mean when that youngster , if he is good enough to be a professional, has no say whatsoever in what team he plays for?  What does it mean when the fans of a team see their management unable to choose players whose loyalties have led them to the team in the first place?  The answer in both cases is a tremendous loss in the charm of baseball itself. Read the rest of this entry »

They are not always terrifying arid deathscapes with low humidity, hungry fauna and heavy-handed political undertones.

I’ve spent the greater part of the past week consumed entertained by Out of the Park 12, the new baseball simulation computer game by the folks who brought you Out of the Park 11 and ten other quality titles.  Before I send up their meticulous craftsmanship for gentle ridicule, I should disclose that Out of the Park 12 is a really fine game, and I’ve written a review that says as much, in addition to trumpeting my ability to transform the 1977 expansion Seattle Mariners into World Champions.

Obviously, baseball simulators put the power in the gamer’s hands, much in the same way that flight simulators, WOPR, and the Power Glove have in the past.  In my mind, however, one of the most appealing aspects of the genre is that these games tend to create a surreal, shadowy universe where most, but not all, of the usual rules of the baseball world apply.  The experience is almost akin to being thrown into a Bradbury short story where there are still lemonade stands and elementary schools, but the sun only comes out once every seven years.   Only fun!

After all, don’t we all want to visit (but not live in) a universe where the following trade takes place?  (Note: enlargination is vital for appreciating the condensed humor below.  Proceed accordingly.)

In fact, if you happen to organize a small writing group that meets bi-weekly at a local coffee shop, I encourage you to use this picture as a prompt: “write a two page short-short story that takes place on the morning of March 31, 2011, as the city of Chicago lies in rubble.”  Bonus points for including Jim Hendry screaming in anguish at the cloudless sky, a pair of broken eyeglasses in one hand.

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Dan Reichert is and always has been a trendsetter.  In 1997, he was the first of eight consecutive first-round picks deployed by the Kansas City Royals on starting pitchers.  In 2008 he became the first Southern Maryland Blue Crab to have his contract purchased by a major league club.  (He never made it back to the bigs.)  And now Dan Reichert is at the head of a new fad: abandoning one’s own name, likely because of espionage.

The 34 year-old righty, who hasn’t been in the majors since 2003, signed a contract with the Uni-Presdient 7-Eleven Lions of the Chinese Professional Baseball League of Taiwan (league motto: Nice Play).  He was cut before the season, but renegotiated a week later for a reported $9,000 a month.  Thus far in the 2011 season, his Lions are in first place (out of four teams) and he leads the league with 8 wins and a 2.39 ERA.  He also sports a 62.8% GB% in 83 innings.

But what’s interesting about Dan Reichert is that he’s no longer Dan Reichert.  The CPBL, in an effort to acclimate foreign-born players to the local fan base, provide these gentlemen with new monikers on the back of their jerseys.  Reichert, for reasons that do not officially exist, goes by “Robert 38”.

I searched for Robert 38’s performance on the CPBL website, enlisting the feckless aid of the Google Chrome translation feature.  Doing so provided me with the greatest box score of all time:
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Very few Feast Days take place during the actual baseball season.  The reasons for this are obscure and hidden from the masses, but from the underground are sometimes heard mutterings of “logistics”.

Life: Mike Brumley was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to wear silly clothing and provide a backdrop for the greatness of others. Brumley contains multitudes: he is known for being the least valuable member of the rookie class of 1987, producing below replacement level in eight of his nine major league seasons. He played seven positions and was above-average at none of them. His career underscored the truth that there is virtue in the absence of strength, and that there is tenacity in existence.  Said existence marches onward as a first base coach for the Seattle Mariners, combining advice for young inattentive people with a propensity for squinting.

Spiritual Exercise: Consider the Taoist philosophy of uselessness, as evidenced in the words of the Chuang-tzu: “Mountain trees are their own enemies, and the leaping fire is the cause of its own quenching. Cinnamon is edible, therefore the cinnamon tree is cut down. Ch’i oil is useful, therefore the ch’i tree is gashed.” The gnarled oak, meanwhile, is good for nothing, and thus it survives. Was Brumley’s success in life, such as it is, the direct result of his own obscurity?  To carry the metaphor a step further: is Mike Brumley a political animal?

A Prayer For Mike Brumley

Mike Brumley!
You lent Ken Griffey, Sr. your bat
As Unferth lent his sword to Beowulf,
Rendering yourself a footnote
To a footnote in history.
You are the patron saint of beat writers.

In your spare time, you lend credence
To the hoary old adage
That those who can’t do, teach.
Many of those who witnessed your early work
Swore to each other that someday,
You would spend your evenings telling runners
How many outs there are.

There are two outs,
You whisper into the night air.
There are two outs.
Run on anything.

Regardless of where you were Tuesday evening – staring at your grill trying to invent the perfect combination of steak and hot dogs, say, or combating the bottom-left corner of the New York Times crossword puzzle – you probably paused and looked skyward for a moment.  Perhaps the air smelled a little sharper, somehow, tinged with lilac, conjuring non-existent memories of ancient, pastoral hillsides.  Perhaps the pain under your shoulder blades waned, or you noticed a shade of emerald in your vision that you needed to remember, to close your eyes and lock away.  Somehow, though, life just felt right for a mere second, as if every atom were arranged perfectly, every effect the rightful output of its cause.

I promise you that it was not imagined.  At that moment, out by Cunningham Ridge outside Kansas City, order was restored.

(Clicking on the picture will transport you via magic to MLB.com’s video highlight.)

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