"In The Belly of the East": Tyler Kepner of the NY Times Slums It For A Weekend

As previously noted in this space, Kevin Gregg is the worst.

"For the fourth season in a row," Tyler Kepner writes in the Times, "the Blue Jays will almost certainly finish fourth while the Orioles finish last. Yet, in some ways, this was baseball in its purest form, the game for the sake of the game, with nothing to prove in the standings. The teams fought for three compelling days, one game ending with a go-ahead hit and the two others with the tying run at the plate." This is worth reading. For Kepner, seeing losing (or barely winning) baseball up close like this is something of a novelty, and part of me would like to resent that, but I can't. In unthrilling but steady prose, Kepner describes the genuine pleasure to be found in a well-played, hard-fought three-game set without anything resembling postseason implications on the line, played before relatively few fans, even. It is still baseball, and baseball can always be awesome. This puts me in mind of a friend's story about his late (as in, his 20s) conversion to baseball: at a nothing game in the middle of the summer between teams that obviously weren't going anywhere, this friend of mine was witness to an epic at-bat, one of those million-pitch encounters where everything close gets fouled off forever. This single at-bat won my friend to baseball. Sure, baseball was still slow and lazy and archaic and actually kind of bizarre, all of those things he'd thought before, but in the middle of all this strangeness and profound meaninglessness, the outcome of this particular at-bat could not have mattered more to this pitcher whose count was getting out of control, and this batter who was treating this plate appearance like it was the most important of the hundreds he'd have that year. My man was like, "Oh, OK, baseball. I get it now." It's easy to get baseball when you're watching the late innings in a close game seven of the World Series; it takes a different kind of character to really get baseball in a nothing game on a nothing day in a nothing season. For that, it takes my man Matty, or, indeed, Tyler Kepner of the New York Times. Kepner showed up on the Jeff Blair radio show (you can listen here) to discuss this further; Matty did not. 


Lots of great stuff here, including the annual ritual of Rookie Cosplay, but the real highlight for me is this:


"Johnson works a walk, and Gregg crumbles. A single, a hit batter and a wild pitch tie the score before the rookie catcher J. P. Arencibia wins the game with a pinch-hit single to left. In the clubhouse, Arencibia wears a Maple Leafs cap backward as he speaks for the cameras. Pitcher Brett Cecil shoves a hockey stick at him, and Arencibia knows what to do.

"'We played hard — all three periods,' he says, to belly laughs from reporters and teammates. 'I don’t think the third baseman was expecting me to go top shelf.'"

Beauty!

KS