2021 Game Two: Yankees 5, Blue Jays 2

 

My friend David's insistence that this year is
make-or-break for Gary Sanchez has lit a fire
that will consume us all

The principle virtue of following a baseball game not on television, nor even mostly on radio, but primarily through play-by-play updates on the Gameday application is that it transforms an actual unfolding Major League game (occurring, we are assured, in the primary world of our experience) into a text-based simulation. Text-based baseball simulations are of course enormously compelling in and of themselves, and one comes to appreciate, in time, that they are scarcely more artificial than the locus of artifice that constitute "actual" baseball of the kind that's on TV and that we agree to discuss (we do not, as a rule, discuss our text-based baseball simulations except with a special few). Could we not say of the text-based simulation of baseball what Ken Snyder once said of the text-based simulation of the social world that constitutes the novel? That is, that its (their) function is "not so much to reflect 'reality' as to 'pierce' it (Lukacs); or to break the reification that is called 'reality' (Butor). We live within narrations, 'stories' of life within which and from which we derive 'a conduct of life.' When these stories lose their imaginative strength, their inspiring force, they collapse to cliche, to stereotype; they become 'reified,' that is we are tempted to take 'reality' as being real and final, when 'reality' is simply an imaginary/symbolic construct with tremendous ideological force. In a sense what is called reality is no less 'fictive' than what we call fiction. The difference is that the fictive of 'reality' is realized by force, is actual in the sense of its many contingent, felt acts, whereas the fictive of fiction is imaginative, allegorical, felt as an aesthetic response not a contingent force. But it is potentially 'critical,' can be the source of change." If that last part, which seems entirely decorous to the aims of the novel, seems to overstate the case for text-based baseball simulation, consider that the still-nascent "opener" trend by which an ace reliever starts a game rather than finishes it, as outlined in a fine piece by Zach Kram, was totally a thing that that same author experimented with in Out of the Park Baseball years before and could not believe had been made "real"; and consider too that I first found my way to that article through this also fine piece on the current state of the LOOGY in an article that credits Baseball Mogul-creator Clay Dreslough for his research in this crucial field of study (Steve Treder, too, who has been around since at least the earliest Baseball Primer Days). 

Think about it. Think about it. 

But even if you won't (and hey, I get it): Marcus Semien hit a home run and stole two bases, Ross Stripling did not pitch terribly, and the bullpen was pretty good again, so I do not find myself in the business of especially minding today's 5-3 loss to the Yankees, the details of which arrived to me in a mode that probably pierced reality at least a little, and possibly a lot? T. J. Zeuch throws tomorrow, and you like to see a groundball-pitcher on the bump in Yankee Stadium.

KS