Hall of Famer

As a Braves fan who can remember him as a young rookie, I was happy to hear that Andruw Jones was elected to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

He used to draw flak for always having a big grin on his face, like it was somehow bad that he seemed to actively enjoy playing baseball.

My favorite Andruw Jones story was from early in his career, his second or third year when he was 22 years old, and rumors swirled that the Braves had turned down a trade offer from Seattle that offered the then-30 year old Ken Griffey Junior. Andruw told reporters that he was flattered but confused, saying "I'd trade me for Ken Griffey Jr."

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Legend...

You want a lesson in sportsmanship?

Ohtani waves his team off, averting a potential bench-clearing brawl. Then he goes over and banters with the Padres dugout, defusing tensions, goes out to take his place on first, chatting amiably with the San Diego first baseman... and when the ump calls "Play Ball!", he up and steals second.

Legend.

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Fastballs and Fast Lenses

Yesterday was the twenty-fourth anniversary of an unfortunate dove's encounter with a Randy Johnson fastball.

For those who didn't know, since he's retired from the Major Leagues, Johnson has gone on to become a professional photographer, specializing in sports, concerts, and wildlife. Turns out the Big Unit was a photojournalism major in college and cameras were his first love. The logo for his business is dank af.

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Rise of the Machines

"Robotic umpires", those camera systems that call balls and strikes at the plate, are getting their first try in the Major Leagues in Spring Training this year (they've been in use in the minors).

We’ll let you in on a critical secret that is about to get exposed. That strike zone called by human umpires in the big leagues may be a rectangle in theory — but it’s more like an oval in real life. That’s because many pitches up and in, or up and away, are not called strikes by human umps, even though they’re technically in the zone.

Note that this is only for Spring Training. The smart odds are on it not actually coming to the big show until after the next MLB labor agreement is finalized in a couple years.

Night Wolf will now barf up the Sun Maiden

Happy Winter Solstice to my fellow SADsers! We made it! 

 52 days until pitchers and catchers report!

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Fernandomania...

I mentioned the other day that the Yankees and Dodgers hadn't met in the Fall Classic since 1981. That year the Yankees won the first two games before a twenty-year-old rookie phenom from Mexico pitched a W in a complete game, turning the series around. 

The Dodgers won four in a row and the Series, the pitcher won the NL Rookie of the Year and the Cy Young, the first and only time a player has taken both awards in the same season.

That pitcher, Fernando Valenzuela, has left the building.

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Has it been that long?

The World Series was between the Yankees and the Dodgers when I was 9, 10, and 13 years old. Those are formative years when it comes to remembering things, I guess. The baseball history books I read were full of storied World Series between the two teams.

It's hard to believe that this year will be their first October matchup since I was in middle school.

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Charlie Hustle has left the building.

Pete Rose was controversial for a whole bunch of reasons, but there's also no denying he was one of the greatest to ever play the game.

After stints with the Cincinnati Reds, Philadelphia Phillies and Montreal Expos, Mr. Rose retired as a player in 1986 with 4,256 hits and a career batting average of .303, hitting above .300 for a season 15 times. Most baseball historians and stat aficionados presume that the combination of Mr. Rose’s skill and longevity — the average MLB career is about six years — will make his hits record impossible to beat.

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Scammer's Arrogance

So I'd gotten into playing a game called MLB 9 Innings on my iPad. I'd spend about thirty minutes or so after lunch fiddling with my team and playing the various game modes. It had become a part of my daily routine.

It's one of those "Free to Play" games where you'll need to occasionally spend money if you like winning and upgrading your team, and every other week or so, I'd buy a $4.99 or $9.99 pack of in-game currency or player upgrades.

Every once in a while Com2uS, the publisher, would double-charge my Apple Pay account. I checked on the subreddit for the game and other players had noted the same thing, but warned that if you asked for a refund, they'd give it to you but lock you out of your game account.

Then the other night I spent $4.99 on a pack of game bucks... and got charged for that and a $29.99 booster pack that I did not either ask for nor receive.

So I went and asked for my refund, which I got, and my account was locked, as I'd been told, and I now have that thirty minutes after lunch back as free time to do some reading or something instead of playing digital baseball, and an extra couple gigs of free storage on my iPad.

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The Moment

Once upon a time, the cover of Sports Illustrated was the showcase for some of the best sports photography in the world.

"For sports fans of a certain age, the memory of running to the mailbox to see what was on the cover of the latest weekly issue of Sports Illustrated is indelible. For decades, the magazine’s photographers, writers and editors held the power to anoint stars and deliver the definitive account of the biggest moments in sports, often with just a single photograph and a few words on the cover. It was the most powerful real estate in sports journalism."

Over time, though, it became less an exhibition of action photography and more and more of a celebrity showcase.

"“It became less of a news thing and more of a personality thing,” said Al Tielemans, a staff photographer for almost 20 years. He described an evolution of editors’ wanting the key moment of the game, and then a good photo of the star of the game, and then a photo featuring the most famous person in the game, and then finally just a headshot of a star."

SI laid off all its staff photogs in 2015, and now the publication itself might be a goner.

"The internet, and social media platforms like Instagram, mean that more photography is showcased to more people than ever before. Now that fans see every angle of every game, with highlights and shots available instantly on social media, no single image has the same power that Sports Illustrated’s cover once did."

Checking their online schedule, it looks like the first weekday matinee home game for the Indianapolis Indians is on Wednesday, April 17th. I guess I'll mark my calendar and get ready to go larp as a sports photojournalist...

Projectile Monkeys

From the time our Australopithecine ancestors took to bipedaling their way across the savanna, our signature trait was being able to throw things at other things. 

By the time H. erectus came along, the orientation of the shoulder to the torso, the twist to the humerus, the tendons and ligaments to store energy, and the waist mobility that lets us throw from the hips were all there. Our fastballs have just been getting better ever since.

Humans are the only primates that can throw the way we do.

Sure, our chimpanzee and gorilla kin are much stronger, but they throw like wimps. Only H. sapiens throws hard enough to kill.

In fact, the fastest motion generated by the human body is the rotation of the humerus during a hard throw.

Our projectile-oriented nature is thought by some to be a reason hunter-gatherer societies tend to be more egalitarian, less hierarchal, than either the typical primate troop or later, settled agricultural or urban ones. If one or two dudes in a hunter-gatherer tribe got too big for their britches, it was too easy for the rest of the group to stand off at a distance and pelt him with rocks...or spears, or arrows.

"Boehm has discovered that, among the tribal and hunter-gatherer human societies he studies, the development of projectile weapons is a key step in the growth and maintenance of equality: it puts the strong at greater risk from the weak. Such weaponry is one reason that human societies are more equalized than those of other primates.

But weapons aren’t enough to make equality last. Boehm finds that, to really maintain the new social order, the dominated need to trust one another. They must have stable social bonds and anticipate a long future together. Most important, they must be able to communicate effectively."

I first ran across the ideas Boehm is talking about in the Peter Turchin book, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend doing so.

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Written in the Book of Lore

I've related the tale here on the blog about the time my dad sprung me from school to see a Cubs game at Wrigley Field before they installed lights in the old ballpark.

Thing is, I couldn't remember the exact day, and I also couldn't remember who the opponent was, but I do remember one thing: Dave "King Kong" Kingman was batting for the other team. I will not forget that nickname, or the sight of that 6'6" dude standing at home plate.

Well, doing a little bit of research, Kingman started the '77 season playing for the Mets and got traded to the Padres. But he didn't get traded until June, by which time we had already moved to Georgia, because I finished the last month or so of the school year in ATL.

So it was a home game against the Mets on a school day in April or May, and there was only one of those. The Cubbies opened the season with a 3-game home stand against the NY Mets: 4/7, 4/9, 4/10... and the 9th & 10th were Saturday and Sunday.

So dad took me to the Cubs' opener in 1977 against the Mets. That's pretty frickin' cool.

Put me in, coach!

I've mentioned that the nearest IndyGo Red Line station is about a five minute walk from the house. From there it's about a twenty minute ride to the Statehouse station on Washington Street, and then a fifteen minute walk to Victory Field, aka "the Camden Yards of the Minor Leagues".

Ever since the Red Line went in, I've been promising myself that I was going to grab a camera and get to an Indians day game, but never got around to it. On a whim, earlier this month I checked the schedule and noticed that there were only two weekday day games left this season, so...

I mentioned it in a photography group on the Book of Faces, and my friend and fellow Hoosier shutterbug, Jordan, said he'd be up for it, so plans were made to catch yesterday's matinee against the Iowa Cubs.

I hopped off the bus, strolled to the stadium, and found Jordan having staked out our seats and noshing on the best-looking Chicago dog this side of Wrigley Field. 

Folks, you can't get seats like these for eighteen bucks at Yankee Stadium, let me tell you.

It was blistering hot, and we had the lower part of Section 107, right behind third base, to ourselves. That meant having a view like this when the catcher ran down a popup. (The blur in the bottom of the photo is the dugout railing.)

The Indians are Pittsburgh's AAA team, so you've got a mix of journeyman minor leaguers, some of whom have had brief stints in the big show, as well as up-and-coming recent draftees and rehabbing Major Leaguers. It's real baseball for sure.

I was using the 70-200mm f/4L IS on the Canon EOS 7D, since the 1.6X crop factor on the 7D makes it effectively a 112-320mm lens. I think next time I'll use the 70-200mm f/2.8L and the 2X extender on the 1D Mark IV.

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Opening Day!

I think I'll follow the Cubbies a little closer this year.

I haven't watched a lot of Spring Training, so I'm not sure how I feel about this whole "pitch clock" nonsense. In principle, I'm opposed to allowing clocks anywhere near the game of baseball, which is a perfect game that exists outside of time.

We'll see what real effects it has.

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Over the hump!

To those of us who get the SADs, we've made it past the solstice! The days get longer from here.

We're only a couple months from the first crocuses and Spring Training. 

Just fifty-three days until pitchers and catchers report!

Coming soon to a lawn near you!

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Existential Questions...

A blogfriend from my old stomping grounds, which is to say a fellow Atlanta Braves fan, asked a complex question yesterday:

"Do we cheer for the Phillies because we always cheer for the NL? Or do we cheer for the Astros because they are playing the Phillies?"

I mean, traditionally, if your team doesn't make it to the World Series, you cheer for the team from your team's league. Just like you cheer for your team's conference in the Super Bowl if your team doesn't go all the way. It's usually a no-brainer. But the Phillies, man... I've got a grudge against them going clean back to 1993.

I remember listening to the final game of the '93 NLCS on the radio, working a late night temp job collating papers at a legal firm on the something-teenth floor of an Atlanta office tower.

Besides, I remember when the Astros were in the NL, back in the era of the Killer B's, and our rivalry with them may have been intense, but it was brief.

Screw the Phillies.

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Good Sports

Here's the scene...

Outstanding young men. https://t.co/284Cz83e1Y

— Chris Cypert (@MrChrisCypert) August 10, 2022

Chris Cypert, who is as close to a walking, talking Captain America as you're likely to encounter, is qualified to judge outstandingness of character in young men.

This moment caught our collective attention for just that reason, outstandingness of character on display. It's a much more scarce commodity than we'd prefer, these days.

I'll let Matt Labash explain:

News anchor after news anchor closed their shows with it. The very people who seem to spend 95 percent of their lives amping us up with fear and paranoia, distrust and anger, took a moment to bask in the glorious humanity of this little episode.

I know the feeling. I did too. I wasn’t just moved by Jarvis’s act of generosity, but by Shelton’s breaking down over the damage his errant pitch could’ve caused. As a manly man, I generally discourage public displays of tears. I tend to limit mine to funerals and Celine Dion concerts. And yet, watching someone feel genuinely remorseful for what they did, even if it was only a mistake, was strangely refreshing.

We are unaccustomed to that – we have become unaccustomed to all of this – because public life is no longer populated by people committing quiet acts of heroism and gallantry and graciousness. We have instead become acclimated to boorish jackasses stoking grievance, claiming victimhood, and pinning the blame on others when they should be assuming blame themselves. No names - it would take too much space to list them.

That is why, I think, what would’ve been a throwaway feel-good little league story a few decades ago, feels like a major morality play now.

Can I get an amen?

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Hard truth about baseball.

The nerds have killed baseball by turning it into what one commenter called "outdoor Excel" and it will never return to its former glory. Matthew Walther offers a modest proposal to treat it like the historic landmark it is:

Opening day of the Major League Baseball season, which falls on Thursday after being delayed for a week by a labor dispute, is as good an occasion as any for fans of the game to come to terms with certain hard facts. I am talking, of course, about the inevitable future in which professional baseball is nationalized and put under the authority of some large federal entity — the Library of Congress, perhaps, or more romantically, the National Park Service.

Like the Delta blues or Yellowstone National Park, baseball is as indelibly American as it is painfully uncommercial. Left to fend for itself, the game will eventually disappear.

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We need to stop pretending that baseball has a broad-based enthusiastic following and begin to see the game for what it is: the sports equivalent of collecting 78 r.p.m. records. Baseball is America’s game only in the sense that jazz is America’s music or that Henry James is America’s literature. It is time that we acknowledged this truth by affording baseball the same approbation we reserve for those other neglected cultural treasures.

It might be a hard sell for some fans, but ultimately a world in which the game not only continues but also does so free of commercial pressures would be a merrier one. Among other things, the league could abandon its doomed attempts to attract more viewers by mucking with the rules for extra innings and introducing impure practices like pitch clocks, signal transmitters for catchers and the universal designated hitter.

RTWT in all its Swiftian glory.

Overstocked.

From the satellite view, it looks like Brookings, South Dakota has something like twenty or twenty-two softball fields. It's tricky keeping track of them all and I kept losing count. Just at a rough guess, that's enough to let something like ten percent of the town's population play softball all at once.

Three baseball diamonds, too. (In general, you can tell them apart because baseball diamonds tend to have grass in the infield.) Bob Shelden Field, home field for Brookings High, is pretty grand. Nicer than the college diamond across town and nicer than some some smaller minor league fields I've seen.

They obviously take their ball games seriously there.

Baseball diamonds and softball fields, like golf courses, are immediately identifiable from the air. Football fields and soccer/rugby pitches less so, in that you have to zoom in to a resolution that shows goalposts and lines to tell a large rectangular field from one used for sport. They're most easily spotted if they're part of a school's athletic complex and surrounded by the distinctive oval of a track. I'm at a loss to tell a cricket field from a random lawn with a rectangular patch in it.

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And So It Goes...

I was driving home from a short work trip to Ohio when I heard the news of Hank Aaron's passing on the radio. It left me unexpectedly verklempt.

Watch Aaron's record-breaking home run here. Do you see what he didn't do? There was no exulting at the plate. No standing there and watching to see where it went. The Hammer hit the biggest home run in baseball and started legging it towards first like it was just another hit. That was sportsmanship. 

Of course, back in those days if you'd had the gall to stand at the plate with your arms raised and watch your home run leave the park, the pitcher would have put the ball in your ear on your next at bat, whether it had been your first homer or your 715th...