Among the many topics discussed during the course of Plato’s Symposium, one of the most significant is the question of when the Major League Baseball season actually begins. “Is it the moment after the previous season’s World Series is concluded?” Pausanias wonders. “Perhaps when pitchers and catchers report?” Socrates counters. Finally, Aristophanes lightens the serious tone when he offers, “I say it’s when Scott Boras utters the words ‘mystery team!'”
I don’t have to remind you, bespectacled reader, how hard laughter abounds at this particular juncture of the text.
In any case, the matter is of some interest to us here at Not- and FanGraphs, as it’s become customary for our Full-Time Employee Dave Cameron to keeptrack of those players who claim that they’re currently in the best shape of their respective lives.
Word from the Upper Middle West this morning reveals that the Minnesota Twins have announced a preliminary schedule for their 2011 Winter Caravan.
Don’t know what that thing is? Let a press release tell you!
Boom, blockquote:
The Twins Winter Caravan is one of the longest running and most extensive offseason team caravans in professional sports. It features teams of current and former players visiting schools, hospitals, corporations and service clubs during the day with a traditional “hot stove” program each evening.
Here’s the thing: I think we can all pretty much agree that the idea of players visiting schools and hospitals — it warms the cockles of the heart. Even if we look at such events cynically — i.e. that they represent little more than a PR opportunity for the organization — the kids still benefit insofar as hanging out with millionaires is always fun.
However, as is often the case, the morally virtuous path differs from the aesthetically excellent one. While everyone can feel good about smiling children, it seems as though what we really have here is a wasted opportunity. For I think the bespectacled readership would rather — much more than all the storybook-reading and high-fiving that assuredly occurs at such events — would rather test the limits of the Caravan genre.
Some suggestions, entirely off of my cuffs, as to how the Twins might more entertainingly utilize this opportunity:
• Facilitate a Question Time-style event, where fans are allowed to ask Ron Gardenhire about some of his more puzzling strategic maneuvers.
• Have Joe Mauer present a workshop on sideburn care and grooming.
• Perform a full-length stage version of Ivan Reitman’s 1988 comedy Twins. Cast Nick Punto as the Danny DeVito character and any other player as the Schwarzenegger one.
New Year’s Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.
— James Agate
The best part about writing for NotGraphs, a relatively new project still in its infancy, is — let’s not kid ourselves — the money. Capitalism’s a beautiful thing, and my piggy bank will soon be overflowing.
In all seriousness, what excites me most about NotGraphs is the potential of this here blog as we settle in and prepare to wow you in 2011. I’m anticipating one of those teary-eyed, Hillary Clinton-like moments when I announce that I have indeed “found my own voice.” Can’t wait!
What I’m interested to learn from you is: What makes an alternative baseball blog? What’s in an alternative baseball blog? We’re not going to repeatedly hit you over the head with our sabermetric hammer here at NotGraphs; that’s what FanGraphs is for. So what, if there is anything in particular, would you like to see from us in this corner? From me? I’d love to know. As Victor Borge once famously put it: “Usually I don’t do request numbers, unless of course I have been asked to do.”
Not long ago, Carson whipped up a wonderful little post that made me nostalgic for the florid sports prose of yesteryear.
For whatever reason, the game stories we read these days lack that certain something that you’ll find when you go spelunking through the archives of some venerable major daily. This isn’t to criticize the poor grunts who have to come up something interesting to say 162 times per year. Hell, give, say, Nabokov a steady diet of Diet Rite, Funyuns and airline liquor and seal him off in a foul-smelling press box for half his life, and the output will suffer.
So what to do? Here’s how we can improve your reading experience, refashion baseball journalism and vastly simplify the lives of our heroic and harried beat writers.
If I’ve failed to mention it previously, allow me to state vigorously right now that one use of NotGraphs will be to provide for the readership reviews of forthcoming (or recently released) baseball books. In fact, provided the good people of DeCapo Books — publishers of Jim Collins’ excellent Last Best League — provided they’re not lying liar faces from Liarville, I’ll soon have in my possession two books — Tim Wendel’s High Heat and Sean Manning’s Top of the Order — whose contents I’ll be very happy to consume and disclose in the near-ish future.
However, I don’t think it’s book reviews proper that I intend to discuss right now.
If I’m understanding correctly — and it’s quite possible that I’m not — but if I am understanding correctly, book reviews generally come in two forms. In the first kind of review, the writer serves, more or less, as a deputy for the consumer. His (i.e. the reviewer’s) job in this case is to acquaint himself with a text and relate to the people at home whether it’s worth their time and/or money.
In the second kind of book review — what we might, in fact, call “criticism” — the worth of the book in question is more or less taken for granted. In these cases, the author serves not as a deputy for the consumer, but as an Idea Man.
It’s borderline old news now, but, in the event that you’re interested, you might consider reading Christoper Rhoads’ WSJ profile of Cuban-baseball enthusiast/apologist Peter Bjarkman.
Bjarkman, a retired Purdue University linguistics professor, is at the center of what you might call — were you so inclined — a controversy. For while he’s become basically the leading English-speaking authority on Cuban baseball, authoring the definitive A History of Cuban Baseball, 1864-2006, he’s simultaneously decried in some circles as a Cuban propagandist.
