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| every night my dream's the same |
Hello friends! It has been some time, hasn't it, since last we spoke? If you can cast your mind all the way back to November last (first off: were we ever so young?), you may recall that we had just then enjoyed (to varying degrees, certainly) quite possibly The Best Postseason in Baseball History, as The Atlantic's Steve Rushin posited in his fine article bearing that very title (but with a question mark at the end [needlessly, in my view; needlessly]). I find no fault with his argumentation: it was certainly the best postseason of my own long experience (it occurs to me that the 2020s are the fifth decade of my baseball enjoyment), made all the more rewarding/untenable by the deep involvement of my favourite iteration (the 2025 one) of my favourite baseball team (the Toronto Blue Jays) by a lot (on both counts). That it ended as it did, well, that's baseball! And that is of course precisely what we have been without in these late-autumn and winter months since—baseball, I mean. Or have we though? Does not the offseason set before us a months-long opportunity for deeper study and engagement, unburdened by the baseball season itself and the many exigencies of its dailyness? Probably, right? So what have I been up to, baseball-wise? Great question!
I) The Literary
After a season richer and more harrowing than any of my previous experience, what better companion with whom to sort it all out emotionally than Roger Angell, the inventor, essentially, of baseball feelings in the contemporary understanding? To that end, I have spent time with The Summer Game (1972), Five Seasons (1977), Late Innings (1982), and, at present, Season Ticket (1988). It seems inevitable that I will turn my attention to both Once More Around the Park (1991) and perhaps even A Pitcher's Story: Innings with David Cone (2002) once Season Ticket is behind me. More exciting still: as part of the New Yorker's 100th Anniversary, the complete archives have been properly webified, and all Roger Angell pieces are there! Every one, so far as I can tell! This is a great relief, as I have misplaced the thirty-five-or-so years of them I photocopied over the course of several days at the Robarts Library at the University of Toronto in one of the early summers of this our present century. And while you need a New Yorker subscription to get absolutely everything (and hey, fair enough [maybe you could do it through a library, though?]), there are lots and lots of excellent things that are just there for everyone to see without one. Have a look! Before diving headlong into the Roger Angell œuvre, my first stop this offseason was the fairly remarkable Joe Torre/Tom Verducci The Yankee Years, which I have read several times now. Composed at a time when Torre was really quite bitter about the way it all ended for him in New York, it is a much more revealing book than you might expect, and Verducci's framing of everything offers us, almost incidentally, perhaps the best single-volume overview of what we have come to call The Steroid Era. From there, I finally polished off Robert Coover's 1968 The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., a postmodern novel of baseball simulation surely of interest to the postmodern baseball simulationist (if to perhaps few others). That there is a fairly gross and utterly witless undercurrent of misogyny to the whole thing is how you can tell it's a postmodern American novel of the 1960s! Ah, the life of the mind! Oh hey, on the topic of baseball simulation . . .
II) Simulacra/Simulation
In addition to some rousing games of ソフトボール天国 Softobōru Tengoku/Softball Heaven (the superior Japanese original of the already sufficiently awesome Dusty Diamond's All-Star Softball), in which I was able to defeat (before witnesses! I have witnesses!) the final "Amazons" team— a Nintendo challenge more daunting, in my experience, than defeating 8-bit Mike Tyson—and some delightful RBI Baseball with updated 2025 rosters (an extraordinary public service, the creation of these rosters), I spent a good deal of time playing a full season with the expansion Chatons de Montréal in MLB POWER PROS for PS2, and whilst setting astonishing single-season home run records with both Vernon Wells and David Ortiz en route to our World Series title before the multitudes gathered at Local Ballpark (the "Bean Tank" advertisement on the left field wall adding a crucial new term to the baseball lexicon [usage: "Vernon Wells with a three-run bean tank to put the Chatons ahead for good in the eighth"]), I have become completely POWER PRO'd: in addition the IRL Power Pros PS2 disc that has lived in my basement for many, many years now, I have assembled, well, an assemblage, I guess, of Jikkyō Powerful Pro Baseballs on my computer, and find them to be my favourite actually-controlling-the-guys baseball games ever, for sure. You know the way that some people are, understandably, about EA Sports MVP 2005, the one with Manny Ramirez on the cover, that those guys in Burnaby made one time? Or the way others are about MLB: The Show 2010 (the first of the back-to-back Joe Mauer covers), rather than anything that has come out since? Well, I have become that way—I have become at least that way—about Power Pros. I don't think I'd ever actually felt compelled to play every single game of a franchise mode season in an actually-controlling-the-guys baseball game before, but I sure did this time around, and, beyond that, the World Baseball Classic mode in 実況パワフルメジャーリーグ2009/Jikkyō Powerful Major League 2009 is probably the most fun I have had playing a baseball video game ever (young Joey Votto? on Team Canada? yes please!). There has also of course been a good deal of Baseball Mogul (and a little Out of the Park, but I continue to have much more fun with Mogul). This time around, I began with the formation of the American League in 1901, and moved the Athletics from Philadelphia not just to my city, but specifically to my neighbourhood; my park (like the actual park by my house) has become their park. On account of how I entered the economic and population data accurately, we do face certain (acute!) financial challenges, but have Moneyballed our way to the pennant in both 1902 and 1903, taking the World Series from the Pittsburgh Pirates in seven games in the latter (can we replace Nap Jajoie? no, but we might be able to recreate him in the aggregate). Have we fallen a few games behind the pace set by the Boston Pilgrims in 1904? Sure we have, but I'd much rather be us than the St. Louis Browns right now! Or, worse still, the New York Highlanders! Good luck to those guys! They're gonna need it! Running more Baseball Mogul, and listening to/reading any old Clay Dreslough interviews I can find (here's a great SABR talk he gave a few years back), and watching some pretty nifty videos at the Baseball Replay Journal YouTube account, has me thinking more than usual about the history of baseball simulation broadly, which (along with just being sort of old, and having been with all of this stuff for a long time now) has led me to reflect on . . .
III) Baseball Nerdery from A Lowkey History of Science Perspective
It's been five years now since FanGraphs' David Laurila asked Bill James to update the player rankings he published in 2001's New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract as the twentieth anniversary of that weighty tome's publication approached. (You'll recall, perhaps, that book being the partial début of Win Shares, a conceptually important but soon surpassed effort at an all-in, Wins Above Replacementesque measure.) Even if Bill James has largely spent the intervening decades being just an awful crank who beclowns himself fairly regularly with statements that are utterly indefensible (both morally and intellectually!), these twenty minutes or so with David Laurila are great fun, probably the only post-Carson Cistulli FanGraphs Audio material that I have returned to several times since it first aired (perhaps not an apt term in the steaming age). Put those two intervals together (the five years, and the the twenty before), and man, it has been a good, long time that I have been interested in all this stuff in this particular way, it occurred to me. There is, of course, an element of "yikes" to this, but also, I am feeling like trying to sort the chronology of all this stuff out, a little? Here's something concrete that occasioned a bunch of reflection along these lines a little while ago: one of the most useful sortable statistics available to you in Baseball Mogul, should you be looking to upgrade your batting performance at a particular position, say, is RC/27 (Runs Created per 27 Outs). Runs Created is an old Bill James statistic that you can complicate in any number of ways to make it both more precise and more accurate, but that you can express as simply as OPB (On-Base Percentage) times TB (Total Bases). If you do that on the level of the team, you'd be surprised how closely that lines up to actual runs scored (give it a try!). For most players, that super simple formula is good to within about 5%. Neat, right? Now divide that RC number by twenty-seven (the number of outs recorded, you will recall, by most teams in most baseball games), and you've got the number of runs you would score if your whole batting order was made up of that one guy. Compare that to whatever league average has emerged in the league you are simming, to name one of surely a million uses, and you're having a great time! OR ARE YOU, if you are doing anything other than playing Baseball Mogul, where RC/27 still thrives, or Out of The Park, where I am pretty sure it is still there but as I have not updated since the one that came out in 2020 I cannot say for certain? Outside of those very, very specific contexts, RC/27 has proven to be too beautiful for this fallen world of ash and soot, except if you go to Fox Sports, click on "Batting II" (it didn't even make "Batting I"!), and there you will see that an army of Aaron Judges would have scored 12.02 runs per game last year, whereas a like squadron of Shoheis Ohtani, though next in line, would produce a still-remarkable but comparatively scant 8.83 runs (they'd pitch better, though). And would you look at that, old man George Springer comes third at 8.54, a fair bit better than Juan Soto's 7.75. "Unc's still got it," as they say! See how much fun we're having already?
And yet the modern world seeks to deny you such pleasures. Witness this December 12, 2008 post by FanGraphs Dark Overlord Dave Appleman, innocuously titled "wRC and wRAA." Weighted Runs Created? Weighted Runs Above Average? I love those guys! Those guys are great! They'd never hurt me! No, they wouldn't, but Dave Appleman would, purportedly in their service: "Tonight we’ve completed the phasing out of Runs Created (RC) and Runs Created per 27 Outs (RC/27). In their place you will find two run stats based off wOBA, which is a sounder metric than the previously used Runs Created." Sounder, sure, but as neat? Anywhere near as neat? And even if it was, why get rid of RC/27? Fielding Independent Pitching is a sounder metric than Earned Run Average, but you didn't ditch ERA! You still have that one there! Among others that we know longer esteem all that highly! "Big thanks to Tangotiger," Appleman continues, "for both creating the stats and walking me through how to calculate them correctly!" (Curse you, Tom Tango [also not his real name], whom I remember well from the boards; even before I knew it was you, I knew it was you.) And so we're left scrounging around "Batting II" at Fox Sports, of all places, for RC/27, as it has held no place of privilege—indeed, no place at all—at FanGraphs since late 2008, and, to my not inconsiderable shame, I can't for the life of me remember if it was ever even a thing at Baseball Reference.
Ah yes, on Baseball Reference: for about a week in January, I spent an absolutely inordinate amount of time on, in, and around Baseball Reference as I decided to finally sign-up for an account to play the Immaculate Grid game in a way where it would track first my stats (they're pretty good!) and also which guys I pick the most to fill out the various squares (by kind of a lot it's two-time Nova Scotia Senior Baseball League MVP Matt Stairs! [he tied for the NSSBL league-lead in saves, too, in his first MVP season {1987}). As an outgrowth of playing the better part of a thousand grids in a matter of days, and clicking through to who-knows-how-many different guys' pages, it really got me thinking about the whole edifice of the thing, and how pleasantly unchanged it is, in terms of its basic presentation (you can query it in a zillion ways now; I just mean the way it looks and feels), since I first started visiting it in 2001 (I do not think I visited in 2000, the year of its founding). This led me to seek out all recent material I could find on Baseball Reference founder Sean Forman, which I found to be pleasantly in keeping with what I remembered of him from those early days (of Baseball Primer and the baseball priming it so oft occasioned). Stating his goals simply one time, Forman said that the project was essentially to connect the pages of The Baseball Encyclopedia, a copy of which (first edition! 1969! great condition! these remain fairly inexpensive!) sits beside me as I type this (Roger Angell reviewed the 1974 second edition as part of a New Yorker piece, bemoaning its sad inferiority to the first, then added a cheerful note when that essay was later collected, once the 1976 third edition had righted many if not all of those second-edition wrongs).
In short, I have been trying to reconstruct my own personal engagement with (gestures broadly) all of this, which has led me to try to reconstruct aspects of the history of these things in general so far this century, much of which, unfortunately, has been documented much less thoroughly than Dave Appleman's (lamentable, lightly offensive) late 2008 note about RC and RC/27. A precursor to all of this reflection, actually, was a notable walk to the store where I attempted to lay the groundwork for a screening of Moneyball by asking my exceedingly patient teenaged interlocuter, "Not that you'd ever need to, but if you had to limit yourself to one single baseball statistic that was the most important in evaluating batters, what would it be?" When the answer returned was "it'd have to be Wins Above Replacement" as though this were self-evident (it is! if you were born this century!), I was struck by how much has changed in what is really not all that long, but which is also long enough to begin to consider it all historically, a little? Hey, do you know what else is both i) little and ii) historical? Well, I'll tell you . . .
IV) Old Baseball Cards, Which Are Cheap and Plentiful, The Way I Do It
Team sets! Why not just put together team sets! Of your favourite team! You already have so many of them, if you are willing to un-set your existing complete sets, and that'll get you started! From there, you can find team sets readily available from online sellers, or just build them out of listings of common cards, and so long as you are looking at things from the last fifty years (rather than before), and provided you are after no rookie cards of Hall of Famers (an Expos team-set-buildist is a little bit cursed in this regard; the Blue Jays team-set-buildist is in this respect comparatively unencumbered [a further note on rookie cards: if you look at baseball card pricing guides from as recently as the late 1970s, rookie cards weren't valued in any significant way, and were roughly on par with cards of established star players in a given set! Rookie cards are a social construct! You can simply refuse it! It only has the as much power over you as you grant it!]). Common baseball cards are interesting, in that nobody values them especially highly, yet at the same time they are valued highly enough to be kept tidy and neat for decades, listed for sale, and then mailed to you for scarcely any dollars at all (plus shipping, which is only fair) compared to the price of packs of just about anything current you'll find at the store (if only Topps would sell one series a year of no-insert, guaranteed-to-be-worthless cards for like two bucks a pack, I would buy a box or two every year; but no, they will not). I'm telling you, friends: team sets. Team sets.
V) The Literary Again, But In French This Time
I continue to make my way through l'édition intégrale (1969-2004) of Il était une fois les Expos by Jacques Doucet and Marc Robitaille, and I'm all the way up to 1987! That's like seven-hundred pages in! Only five-hundred or so to go! It is both a lovely read, and also a dark one, because the authors—both of whom clearly love the Expos as much as anyone can love a baseball team—do not shy away from just how early and just how doomed everything was: le Stade Olympique was only ever a miserable boondoggle that kept you miles away from the field (unlike the intimate and mourned Parc Jarry [my mother went once, before I was born]); virtually nobody would show up to Expos games in the spring until after the Habs were knocked out of the Stanley Cup playoffs (which, in those years, was often late); ownership immediately regretted and bemoaned paying Gary Carter any money at all (not great for player relations!); André Dawson, after he left town for Chicago, was so relieved to play in front of fans that did not boo so much (I have always felt a kinship with André Dawson, as his name appeared on a glove of my youth [the finger parts never felt great but I did not hold it against The Hawk then, nor do I now); and as early as 1986 there were serious concerns about the long-term viability of the team as a business—none of this is any fun! But amidst all that sadness about baseball, there's still the baseball itself, and the month-by-month, week-by-week, series-by-series accounts of each season of Expos baseball are so enormously fond that I am enjoying this as much as any non-Roger Angell baseball book I have read. It is a shame that no English-language edition has appeared in the fifteen years since Doucet and Robitaille finished their extraordinary work, and I wonder if the comparatively slim Up, Up, and Away (the title goes on from there, but it's awful) by the rightly disgraced Jonah Keri that came out a few years later satisfied whatever English-language appetite that may have existed for Expos history. A shame! Perhaps Les Éditions Hurtubise will have a change of heart about it at some point? Until such, personal translations for private use are as close as we'll get, I suppose.
VI) Cinéma, But Only Lightly
You have perhaps heard of Eeephus, a small film by Carson Lund that played the festivals and was enormously well-liked critically? I enjoyed it, but I think I am even happier about its reception than I was with the actual film itself, maybe. It's nice when a movie of this modest scope and scale garners as much fond attention as Eephus did. I was surprised but pleased to hear Will Sloan of The Important Cinema Club list it as among his favourite films of the year. The GUYS guy loved it, too. Bill Lee's appropriately Bill Lee-ian cameo in the film led me to watch Brett Rapkin's 2016 Spaceman biopic (it's on Tubi) with Josh Duhamel (as the titular spaceman), which, oddly enough, I hadn't done before. I found it well-intentioned but careless, full of unidiomatic French baseball expressions and signage (needlessly so! Baseball Reference has you covered! Jacques Doucet coined a lot of this stuff! it's all coming together!) and seemingly nobody who could pronounce "Longueuil," which came up a lot (Eric Gagné, who appeared briefly, no doubt could have, but the script did not call upon him to do so). (I watched Bull Durham [also on Tubi!] real quick right after on that same night to restore my faith in the potential of baseball cinema.) As a further and final instance of everything coming together here, which I mentioned a moment ago parenthetically but will now say openly and unencumbered, only recently did I learn that the 2009 edition of Baseball Mogul was marketed as Bill 'Spaceman' Lee's Baseball Mogul 2009, with a cover that more than overcomes any deficiencies in its graphic design (if any can even be said to exist [I claim no expertise]) with the bold inclusion . . . of tarp.
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| my friend Mike looked into buying a sealed copy just to watch the surely disappointing DVD but it was like thirty bucks |
Amazing, right? I even found a less cluttered version of that same cover image, where you can see that Bill isn't wearing a glove, which removes the possibility that what he is trying to do in that photo is track a pop up or fly ball:
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| deep tarpcore æsthetics |
And so we will end here, I suppose, as we began this post, with sports photography of exceptional quality and accomplishment. If you scroll all the way back up to that Muppets shot (of unknown provenance, I am afraid), you'll note that not only is Kermit a lefty, but that Fozzy is that rarest of bears, a left-handed catcher! Look closer still, and you'll see that Animal, batting left, has taken a cross-grip on the bat as though he were a young Henry Aaron before he was coached out of the habit (it all worked out well enough for Henry Aaron; I'm not knocking the move). These are the sorts of details the off-season provides us an opportunity to weigh and consider, and I am grateful. Pitchers and catchers do report this week, though.
KS
