All its readers know: FanGraphs is large and contains multitudes. NotGraphs is one of those multitudes.
Now, another one of those multitudes is FangRafs: images of players named Rafael (or “Raf,” for short) with fangs. FangRafs. Which, if one is inebriated or southern enough, may be pronounced in a way that is indiscernible from “FanGraphs.”
So, put on a garlic turtleneck, and behold.
“Top-left corner, second pack from the bottom,” my friend told me. He didn’t remember where he had heard it from, or why it worked. All we knew is that he was the proud owner of the Holy Grail of baseball cards: the 1989 Fleer Bill Ripken error card, the one with the expletive bared on the bottom of the bat for all the world to see. It was the ultimate taboo, a premature interruption of adulthood into our adolescence.
Of course, there were plenty of Holy Grails in that era of baseball cards, enough to occupy our feeble attention spans. There were the Gregg Jefferies rookie cards, the Dale Murphy reverse negative, and later, Ken Griffey, Jr. We looked at the numbers next to the names in our Beckett Baseball Card Magazines and dreamed our stock market dreams, anticipating the envy of a new generation the way we envied the adults whose collections hadn’t been thrown out.
It didn’t happen, of course. We became adults, and the forbidden terminology of Bill Ripken’s bat became just another everyday word in the lexicon. Meanwhile, a generation of parents, chagrined by the tales of zealous mothers past, saved those baseball cards in pristine condition, and the supply outpaced the demand of a dwindling base of collectors. Given the wide production of the late 80s baseball card sets, it isn’t a stretch to claim that there’s a Bill Ripken error card out there for everyone who wants one. They currently go for a couple of bucks on eBay.
This didn’t kill the collector’s spirit, however: the search for errors and variations has long lived in the human heart, and is not limited to the baseball card. Witness the 1955 Philadelphia Double Die, or the Inverted Jenny. The search just goes deeper, now.
As an intelligent baseball fan, you have surely by now read or heard the famous and apocryphal story of Rickey Henderson renewing his acquaintance with John Olerud. If not, here’s the original tale, as told by ESPN’s Tim Kurkjian:
In spring training 1999, Rickey Henderson of the Mets was reunited with first baseman John Olerud, who had been his teammate with the Blue Jays six years earlier. As most people know, Olerud had an aneurysm in college, which required brain surgery. So to protect his head, he was allowed to wear a helmet in the field. As the story goes, Henderson was talking to Olerud one day, noticed the helmet and said “You know, when I played in Toronto, we had a guy who wore a helmet.”
“Rickey,” said Olerud, “that was me.”
Now, for your enjoyment, please partake of three adaptations of this timeless yarn.
1.
It had been weeks now, but John never got used to hospitals. The stinging scent of disinfectant, the hollow glow of the fluorescent lights, the squeak of intern’s sneakers in endless tiled hallways: all of it felt synthetic, unnatural, unwelcome. John reached room A232, took a single deep breath, and pushed through.
[Author’s Note: Due to forces totally within the author’s control, such as the fact that he went to see a show last night, the results of Villanelle Week will be posted on Monday. This gives you a couple of days to polish off your half-finished poem or, alternately, a few extra days of suspense. Please schedule your lives accordingly.]
As evidenced by the Call to Action made by our Fearless Leader on Tuesday, we have in the midst of our poetics taken a moment to consider the essentials of our being. That is, we have asked ourselves and all of you, that defining question: “What is a NotGraphs?” You answered, dear readers, and you answered pithily.
Now I’d like to take a moment, if it pleases you, and if it doesn’t, to follow with a second query: “Why is a NotGraphs?” But first, an aside.
The Hall of Fame announced its 2013 ballot last week, and was nearly drowned out by a choir of angry crickets. The Hall is now facing its own equivalent of the fiscal cliff: fifteen players have legitimate arguments for induction, the writers can vote for a maximum of ten, and will probably vote for one or two.
Frustrations have been boiling over on Twitter, baseball’s stream of consciousness, where events played out like a Syd Finch textbook. You have your old, out-of-touch former baseball writer playing the part of the troll, trumpeting his ability to keep out “the druggies”; you have your young, impassioned bloggers desperate to feed him; and you have your eventual eyerolling from those above (or behind) the fray. This is stupid, they said collectively, each removing and polishing their metaphorical pince-nez. Personal awards are stupid. Caring about the Hall of Fame is stupid.
The Hall of Fame is stupid. But caring about it isn’t. The Hall of Fame, flawed as it is, is important.
For the last couple of months, I’ve been currently reading a biography of Adlai Stevenson, former statesman and bald person. Stevenson ran for President twice, in 1952 and 1956, and lost to the same guy both times by about the same margin. He had a gentle face and a keen wit: when he was on the campaign trail, he was once told that he had the vote of every thinking man in America. “That’s not enough,” he replied. “I need a majority.”
Over the past two years, we in Toronto had taken to calling John Farrell “President Farrell.” Fine, it was mostly only me who called him “President Farrell,” and I enjoyed it. Being a Canadian, I can admit it: I’ve always wanted a president. And Farrell was oh so presidential, especially when donned in a suit and tie. And, of course, there is his presidential jawline. As you can see, below, President Farrell has no neck, only a jaw.
President Farrell is, of course, no more, his term cut short, his office and administration abandoned in disgrace. And our Investigative Reporting Investigation Team’s Canadian office has secured for us a transcript of President John Farrell’s resignation speech, delivered to the Blue Jays front office, and broadcast live over the weekend at the SkyDome for a few select season-ticket holders.
Good evening.
This is the 19th time I have spoken to you from this office, where so many decisions have been made that shaped the history of the Toronto Blue Jays. Each time I have done so to discuss with you some matter that I believe affected the franchise’s interest.
In all the decisions I have made in my baseball life, I have always tried to do what was best for the Boston Red Sox; for Red Sox Nation. Throughout the long and difficult period of managing the Blue Jays, I have felt it was my duty to persevere, to make every possible effort to complete the term of office to which I, Alex Anthopoulos, Paul Beeston, and the entire front office agreed upon.
In the past few days, however, it has become evident to me that I no longer have a strong desire to justify continuing that effort. As you may have noticed, the Red Sox need a new manager. As long as they had a manager — yes, even Bobby Valentine — I felt strongly that it was necessary to manage the Blue Jays through to the conclusion of my contract, that to do otherwise would be unfaithful to the spirit of that deliberately difficult process that was my hiring and a dangerously destabilizing precedent for the future.
But with the firing of Bobby Valentine, and the mutual interest between the Red Sox and myself, I now believe that my purpose with the Blue Jays has been served, and there is no longer a need for the process to be prolonged.
I would have preferred to carry through to the finish whatever the personal agony it would have involved, and my family unanimously urged me to do so. But the interest of Red Sox Nation must always come before any personal considerations.
Last week, I shared a new statistic, called FAME, that measured the amount of acclaim that a player received during his career. The purpose of this endeavor was to compare the established greatness of players with the recognition of their accomplishments, and it produced a few minor revelations, namely that Yogi Berra was incredibly overrated in his time, and that Tony Phillips may not have actually existed at all, and was created as a psychological experiment by professors at Stanford who posted flyers on Oakland telephone poles reading “Tony Phillips Has a Posse”.
Yogi won three MVP awards, tied for the second most of all-time, yet never actually led the league in WAR. His FAME score, more than any other player, dwarfs his actual numbers. This led me to ask: what if the BBWAA were, retroactively, to cast off their intangibles and surrender to the droning hive-mind of the baseball accountancy? What if the MVP were awarded to the player who provided the most value to their team, regardless of context, over the hypothetical replacement player? What if John Larroquette were to be considered the greatest television actor of his generation?
As it turns out, the MVP in its current form is a perfect example of the inherent conflict between precision and suspense. Here, for the purposes of comparison, is a list of all players who won three or more MVP awards in their career:
One might detect, if one somehow had the inclination, a certain level of melancholy in some of my baseball writing. I assure you that this is in no way reflected in my love for the game in question, but rather a defect in my upbringing wherein my parents lamentably provided me no real tragedy with which to ground my craft. I am a Mariners fan, and this has done its best to to counter my unfortunate life of fortune, but I doubt it’s enough.
Perhaps this is why I took to baseball, rather than football or basketball; in football the offense and defense of a game is seen as a net zero sum, with only occasional flashes of unstoppable brilliance from either side. In basketball, where defense is still treated by the media with uncomfortable derision, offensive performance is quantified as varying levels of heroism, on a scale from zero to one. Only baseball, as Ted Williams remarked, is littered with failure. The best batters get out six times out of ten, and the onus of this is still placed on the shoulders of the hitter, rather than the will of the defense. We are not yet writing poems about the man who struck out Mighty Casey.
The purpose of this long-winded introduction, as you may have surmised, is to reflect on some of the writings of nineteenth-century philosopher and general malcontent Arthur Schopenhauer, specifically his unshakable opinion that the world is full of suffering. His best line: “A quick test of the assertion that enjoyment outweighs pain in this world, or that they are at any rate balanced, would be to compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating with those of the animal being eaten.” Misery is everywhere, and it’s unavaoidable.
It was the summer of 2001: I was working my first real job after college, standing behind a bank teller line counting sacks of money from local businessmen. I worked the same hours every day and wore the same five collar shirts and ties, all I could afford at the time, while the businessmen brought in the same deposits every day. I would go home, watch my hometown Mariners trot out the same five starters week after week, and play Sammy Sosa High Heat 2001 (it was so real!) on franchise mode.
I remember two main things about that game, playing it throughout the summer. First, most franchise modes are unrealistic, because as you become good at the game you win far more often than any team should. High Heat was good in this respect – the pitcher/batter duel was done well – but after a slow April my Mariners were on pace to win more than a hundred games. But then, running parallel to my fictional success, so were the real Mariners.
The second thing I remember about the game was Ichiro, because he wasn’t in it. Ichiro hadn’t joined the Player’s Union by the time the game shipped, apparently, because he was absent from the team’s roster. Instead, tucked away in the AAA club was a guy named “David Taguchi”. His stats were terrible, and it’s hard to blame them, because nobody knew how this Ichiro was going to adjust to the majors. I edited his stats, perhaps being a little too kind, although it turned out that even I had underestimated him. I don’t remember what Ichiro hit in my game, but it wasn’t as good as what he did in real life that summer.
