Culture is a fickle thing. As with tulips, as with visible ankles, as with Kardashians, the collective mores of society ebb and flow. We are cyclical and forgetful beasts, all of us. Today we sleep our children on their backs and encourage breastfeeding; tomorrow we gently spin them in electrical centrifuges and bottlefeed them a mixture of Four Loko and POG. There is nothing good or bad in this; it’s simply the way of the world.

Currently, physical possessions are on the out. The hippies and the yuppies, their battles, are long-forgotten; now, indelibly stained on our retinas are the reams of yellowing newspaper and molding beanie babies of the cable show Hoarders. Property binds us; noble, Spartan poverty reigns. We’re nearing the nadir, the point in which anyone who bothers to keep three of anything is treated as neglecting some deep-seated psychological issue, and the more useless the object, the deeper the person’s shame.

Pat Neshek, as is so often his wont, ignores the prevalent tendencies of the day. He has his own missions. And one of those missions, one I feel bound to support, is collecting an autographed copy of every single card in the 1985 Topps set.
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As a child you thrilled at the life-like realism of Intellivision Baseball, the plink of the wooden bat, the ghostly Theremin of the pop fly. As you grew older, your tastes grew more sophisticated, and the video game industry responded. Soon you were buying your own players and building your own rosters, until you left the field behind and began running franchises through the glittery spreadsheets of Out of the Park and Baseball Mogul. But as you brought the 2024 Houston Astros to their fourth consecutive World Series, you began to wonder: what’s next? How do I add yet another layer to the metaphorical onion of my illusory baseball experience?

Prepare yourself for the ultimate challenge with Baseball Commissioner 2014. Instead of manipulating a single player on the mound or running a single franchise, you’re responsible for maintaining the esoteric concept of baseball itself. You decide how to manipulate the media when scandal breaks! You hand out the suspensions and decide how many games there are! You choose the wording in your press releases to maximize delivered connotation! You’re no longer a part of the game. You are the game.

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The NotGraphs Fireside Chats are a series of dialogues between two unimportant outsiders. Their primary focus: baseball, and writing about it. Please note that what follows is somewhat aimless and entirely TLDR. If you’re the sort of person who believes that metaphysical discussion of a subject ruins that subject, you should probably turn back now. What follows is dangerously reflective.

Today’s topic relates to a series of tweets made last Friday by Mr. Sports Journo (twitter: @BIGSPORTSWRITER), an anonymous career sports journalist. You can read a transcription of his monologue here. My colleague Robert J. Baumann and I will explore how we felt about these comments, and how we feel about an industry that finds little use in us, nor us in them.

Patrick: Friday morning I stumbled across a string of tweets by this anonymous figure, chronicling the state of sports journalism. He seems to think that things aren’t going that well, and that we’ve grown attached to the lifestyle of the athlete rather than the game itself. The journalist has succeeded in making him or herself the story, and twisted sports news into human interest and groundless opinion. Now that I’ve asked you to stop what you’re doing and read all this, Robert, how does it make you feel?

Robert: My initial reaction is twofold:

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Dave Kingman, a small-town
bowling alley with
wood paneling petrified
into real wood
food service staple colors
magenta and teal
coalesced into a single ashen hue
the treble of hair metal
whispered overhead
through tinny speakers

Dave Kingman, a rattle of knocked-down
bowling pin Budweisers
blurry group photographs all
duckfaces and teeth
eyeshadow twinkling like dying stars
twittering with bird-laughter
from the backs of rhinos
casting out slow drunken mute
furtive looks
eyes hunting for eyes

Dave Kingman, a plain of stained
colorless carpet
the urine-soaked restroom tile
the empty paper towel dispenser
hands wiped on jeans
and learning the chick with the tube top
 left ten minutes ago
the branches whithering
tomorrow already pressing
at the temples

Dave Kingman, a single pull-tab
at the end of the night
torn mechanically
liberty bell
liberty bell

Those with their finger on America’s iron-rich, throbbing pulse can agree on at least one shared sentiment: the nation has fallen in love with the bat flip. If anything, we’re left to wonder how it took baseball 150 years to reach this point, when the bat flip is such an American act, a distilled essence of emotion, of joie de vivre. Clearly, these GIFs are mirrors to our own soul, showing how much we’ve changed. How can baseball be the same when Rickey Henderson, embodiment of the id, never flipped a bat, and yet Josh Donaldson has?

I have personally spent hours, while mechanically attending to the welfare of a fragile newborn child, reflecting on the bat flip. I have chiseled into the forgotten, calcified sections of my heart. I have lain in the dying July grass and stared into the colorless sky, and I have found the truth of the matter. It is not the truth I sought, nor the one I was hoping for.

I do not like the bat flip.

Before the rage blinds your vision, and before Cistulli fires me and erases my archives from the NotGraphs canon, allow me to explain. First, my opinion is a purely personal one with no political or moral grounds; I am not foolish enough to stand against the current of American spirit. Instead, think of it as simply the feelings of a single man, perhaps egotistical enough (as all writers are) to believe that his small words are enough to create some connection with his fellow reader, and nothing more.

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There’s an inherent and irreconcilable conflict buried deep within the mechanics of every video baseball game, from Atari Baseball to The Show. No matter how immersive and smooth the graphics, how realistic the player traits and statistics, the paradox persists: we want a baseball game which is both realistic and that we can dominate. It’s something boyish within us, a desire to be 2001 Barry Bonds, to break the mold of expectations, to have little nonexistent digital journalists scrambling to explain our greatness.

The concept of challenge in any video game is a fine line. There are games out there that are far too easy (Mega Man 2) or far too difficult (Mega Man 9) and yet are still enjoyable, because they’re superior in control, graphics, or design. Average games that are too far to one side or the other, however, are set aside in neglect or disgust. This is particularly important for a sports game: we want to feel that challenge, of our ability to overcome it, to come out on top. But total victory, as fans of many major teams will attest, is hardly realistic. We as fans have the patience to live through years of futility and struggle for that one chance at glory. We as video game players do not. Gamers don’t enjoy failing seven times out of ten anymore.

Consider being a Mariners fan. If the game were a strictly representative, realistic depiction of the organization in its current state, there’d be no reason to play; you could listen to them lose on the radio and put up some crown molding or something. The baseball simulation faces a tricky challenge: create a universe that looks and feels realistic, but where the Mariners can still believably win multiple ballgames. It needs to challenge us but still, at the end of the day, make us feel like Billy Beane.

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As many of you know, over the past week, we at the NotGraphs Convalescent Home and Headquarters engaged in a thought exercise. Our goal: to build a team of avatars representing the NotGraphs aesthetic. Our results: more glorious than our collective and somewhat hyperbolic expectations. And now, urbane and attractive readership, it’s your turn to voice your opinions and witty rebuttals.

First, for the sake of reference, here are all of the authorial rationalizations for their picks:

Bradley Woodrum
Carson Cistulli
Robert J. Baumann
Jeremy Blachman
David G. Temple
Michael Bates
Patrick Dubuque
Navin Vaswani
Eno Sarris

Beneath the cut is a breakdown of the draft (fictional player denoted with asterisk):
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Presented below this meager introduction is the roster the Dubuque Dubuques, the most geographically centrist of the NotGraphs fantasy teams.

I am by no means a master of style, and so I came into the draft at a distinct disadvantage. You have to go into each draft with a strategy, the experts claim. I knew that competition over mustaches would be fierce, so I chose to tank that category and load up on spectacles instead, hoping to dominate the quotability category in the process.

What I love about this draft idea is that each of us has a different perspective on what exactly NotGraphs is, and our choice of players provides a reflection on that perspective. My own, perhaps unsurprisingly, is somewhat philosophical and meandering, so consider this your TLDR tag.

1.     Miguel Batista, SP (1992-2012).

If he had fallen to me at seven, I would have selected Rickey Henderson in a heartbeat. He’s not only my favorite player since childhood, but he’s also the perfect symbol for NotGraphs: unfettered, unrestrained greatness in word and deed. But let’s not dwell.

When you google “Miguel Batista poetry,” one of the results on the first page is a Yelp review of Batista’s website entitled “Miguel Batista should focus on his pitching, not his personal website.” Another link is Deadspin trashing Batista for admiring Kenny G.

Miguel Batista is plasma; he can neither be defined nor contained. He is permanent. When he returns to the majors (and he will, somehow) he’ll be the longest-serving player in the major leagues. He’s a poet and a novelist, not as some sort of exercise in elitism or to achieve some rarity based on society’s standards; he writes because he’s Miguel Batista. And as far as that goes, I wish I were as good at being Patrick Dubuque as Miguel Batista is at being Miguel Batista. There are worse goals.

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I’ve collected baseball cards since I was a kid. When I use the word “collect,” I really mean that I don’t throw away the ones I have. I’m not the sort of person who can justify a heavy investment in luxury items like baseball cards, lottery tickets, bottled beer, or plus-rated gasoline.

For someone who grew up at the rise of the junk wax era, my collection is and was pretty decent. When one of my father’s co-workers gave me a crumbling December 1987 Beckett Magazine, I sorted through my card and found that I owned the rookie card of a guy named Tony Gwynn. I took it to church to show my friends, and lost it. Later, I traded a ton of cards for a 1963 Carl Yastrzemski, which I always found difficult to look at because of the patch of sunlight on the tip of his nose, and which made him look like an elf. The card was worth $75 at the time. I took it to a card show, and had it stolen. Later on, in 1992, I pulled some fancy insert rookie card of Shaquille O’Neal, and it, too, was stolen. That one is hard to feel upset about now, given that it’s probably worth 20 cents. Still, I was a pretty stupid kid.

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A hundred and fifty years ago, Walt Whitman thrust himself into the literary scene, challenging us to distill the vitality within us, the truly American. Since then, we as a people (and particularly our high school English teachers) have sought the Great American novel. Moby Dick? Too ponderous. Gatsby? Too shiny. Grapes of Wrath? Too many tortoises.

But it turns out that our quest is in vain, simply because it’s already completed. We have the text that encapsulates our youth, our dynamism, our hope. We have Matt Christopher’s The Kid Who Only Hit Homers.

In Sylvester Coddmyer III, the titular hero, we have a mixture of Ragged Dick and Nicholas Nickleby, a boy with humility and heart, who tackles his difficulties with pluck and moxie. Unlike the modern brooding hero, Sylvester is a boy of action rather than words. He’s a self-made kid, one who gets out of bed each morning pulling handfuls of bootstrap. He doesn’t make excuses; he only hits home runs.

But by no means is Sylvester a flat character. He’s an everyman; to describe him too precisely would rob the young reader an opportunity to find common ground with the character, just as every teenage girl in 2009 imagined herself as Bella. No, Sylvester has weaknesses, and ones we can all understand. He likes pie too much, for example. Christopher gives a subtle nod to The Natural by having Christopher overeat pies and miss a game. We’ve all been there!

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