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My first piece of commissioned baseball writing is up over at The Score’s Getting Blanked. It’s an introduction to the baseball teams and their narratives.

Over the years, I’ve done a few posts on baseball here but they’ve been few and far between. (That’s what I use twitter for. Seriously — if I had to watch games with only Buck and Tabby talking about what was happening, I’d probably shoot myself. And, if not for baseball, I would’ve quit twitter some time ago.)

But I’ve resisted writing about baseball here because the fans scare me.

They demand evidence and plausibility, pay incredible attention to detail, refuse to suffer being bullshitted, are unapologetically partisan and want it all wrapped up in an entertaining package.

And I’m saying that as a science fiction writer.

But it looks like my piece went over well.

If this is your first time here, hi and all that.

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You don’t need to be a baseball fan to like the Bill James story. Actually, it may be easier to like him if you’re not a baseball fan. His insights still polarize people. Insights that overthrow established beliefs often do. It’s not uncommon to hear people claim that he wrecked baseball or that he makes it impossible to enjoy the game. It’s very much a religion vs science thing.

Bill James is like baseball’s Darwin.

Awesome Stories says:

While Bill James worked as a night watchman – at the Stokely-Van Camp’s pork ‘n beans plant in Lawrence, Kansas – he worked on his obsession with baseball statistics.  He published his first book on the subject – 68 pages of typewritten material held together with staples – in 1977.

Enter the Internet and now he works for The Boston Red Sox.

Without putting too fine a point on it, that book made the case that everything people knew about baseball was wrong. That they had no idea how to value players or statistics, were putting the emphasis on all the wrong things, that outright imposters were in the hall of fame and that baseball was full of false narratives. That baseball was a religion.

And, by the way, your childhood hero? The guy you wanted to grow up to be? He wasn’t that good. Just forget what you remember seeing and look at the math.

You can see why people, particularly people who don’t have the best grip on math, get offended by the whole thing. When you consider that athletics have often been the province of those who, for one reason or another, avoided intellectual pursuits, while intellectuals often avoid athletics . . .

Well, shit gets a bit combustible.

James says:

“There were certain things that Major League Baseball traditionally believed that I argued were nonsense. One, that you could evaluate a pitcher by his won-loss record. Two, that I — serious disagreement on what drove an offense.”

To this day, the battle is still being fought. Not so much in pro baseball circles but certainly amongst fans. Between old media and new. It’s ongoing.

Pitchers and Poets did a wonderful post about this struggle.

“The power of the priest depended upon the darkness of the mystery.”

If you’d like to hear an interview with Bill James, there’s one up here. For baseball fans, it’s worth a listen. For non-fans, you might still get something out of it. And, for newish fans with a fledgling interest in the game or who are revisiting childhood things, give it a listen.

You want to be on the right side. Bill James is the right side.

Or would be if he wasn’t with Boston. Fuck the Red Sox.

Via Getting Blanked

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Something from the 2010 season stuck in my head. Cito was being asked about Jose Bautista and a city and he said something to the effect of: ‘He likes it there, that’s where his tailor is.’

I can’t remember much more than that. But fuck you. It’s kinda amazing I remember anything. If you recall, at the start of 2010, Jose Bautista was not the best player in baseball. He was a utility player, scrap-heaped by some pretty crap teams and who Cito, inexplicably, had hitting lead-off.

But it stuck with me because I’m as interested in tailoring as baseball. (That’s why, when people mention Rajai Davis, the first thing I think of is not speed but his brown velvet suit.)

So it comes as little surprise to see that Bautista has two new, bespoke blue gloves to go with the new Jays uniform, which finally contains some blue.

Now, I’m not sure if this glove could be called true bespoke. It is a baseball glove and I don’t know what rules apply. But that’s my story and I’m sticking with it. He has a blue glove.

It’s awesome.

Via Drunk Jays Fans

Continue reading »]]> Ron Washington’s clubhouse speech to his team before Game Seven of the World Series has been leaked.

It’s just plain amazing. But who would expect anything less from Mr. Washington? He do what he do.

My favorite quotes from it:

“Motherfuck golf.”

“He pitch ball and ball cross plate, we gonna knock the shit outta it.”

“Ain’t nothing but a motherfuckin’ game we can fuckin’ play.”

Those, friends, are words to live by.

Continue reading »]]> According to unnamed sources from an opposing team (who threw the world series in 1919) in a far-fetched ESPN article that holds up to neither statistical scrutiny nor commonsense, the Blue Jays have been using a mysterious man in white to steal signs then relay them to their batters. It sounds insane. It is insane. But then we see the photographs . . .

Original photos taken from here.

There is a man in white. And he is raising his arm.

But there is no way of what he is signalling. Breaking ball? The plane? We may never know.

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I said on the twitter that I’d given up Edwin. But like most things relayed in 140 characters, that’s not the full story.

I haven’t given up on him as a player. I’ve given up on defending him as a player. He just makes it too hard.

Like, fuck’s sake Edwin, break me off something. A towering homerun. Just something.

Last year he played third and got himself the nickname E5. This means error at third base. It’s not a good nickname to have. But he was pretty good at coming up with the ball. His problems involved throwing the ball.

He often threw to the wrong side of the second base bag while turning double plays yet, by some miracle, never injured the second baseman. When he threw to first, Lyle Overbay, who was a defensive wizard, often bailed him out. Edwin was a bit of a mess out there. Not as bad as some people think but not as good as his numbers indicated.

This season he was supposed to be removed from third. He was to be the designated hitter and backup first baseman.

I thought this was a really good plan. I still do. There’s not much throwing at first base and Edwin can really catch the ball. I even believed that Edwin should be given every chance to take Lind’s job and become the everyday first baseman. And I like Lind. That’s how big of an Edwin booster I was.

Then, after spending his entire spring training practicing first, he was moved back to third.

This is my final defense of Edwin. He has been completely mismanaged.

He is in no way such a good fielder that he can spend spring practicing first base, be moved to third when the season starts, play there for over a month and then be moved back to first when there’s an injury. He’s not Johnny MacDonald.

There’s a lot to recommend Edwin as a ball player but versatility in the field is not one of his strengths. Moving Edwin around like this is insane. Could you imagine doing this to Lind? Would you start bouncing him between first base and left field then expect decent results out of either?

Edwin has been put in a position to fail and, unsurprisingly, he has failed.

The game against Tampa, where he made error after error, was just the perfect storm.

And I don’t want to pile on Edwin. I actually like him and I like rooting for him. I can’t think of anything this season I found harder to watch than than that game where he could have turned a triple play from third, screwed it up in more ways than I can count and then sat alone on the bench, talking to himself.

Or when his luck ran out and a wayward throw to second helped injure Jason Nix.

I don’t think he should be released. But Edwin needs to sit on the bench for a little bit. The management needs to realize that he is a DH and backup first baseman. That Edwin has no more business playing third at a major league level than Lind does in left field. He needs to do all his drills at first for a while and, only then, return to the field in a backup capacity. Doing anything else is not only hazardous to Edwin but to everyone else who takes the field with him.

Against Tampa, that bad underhand toss to first could have ended much worse than it did.

He’s not a closed book or finished story and it’s a long season. He should be allowed to hit his way back into our hearts. But it’s up to his play to defend his play now.

I’m not doing it anymore.

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In baseball, safety is separated by ninety feet of danger.

Touching the base, you are safe. The moment you lose contact with it, you are in peril. To score a run, you must navigate these ninety foot sections four times. If unsuccessful, you either get out or are stranded. If successful, you arrive back where you started.

Home.

In this, baseball is very different from many other sports. It’s not about getting deep into the enemy territory and doing something there. It’s not a counting coup. It’s about putting your men in danger and bringing them home.

Polyphemos tries to gun down a runner.

The odyssey home is a dangerous one. Full of gambles, sacrifices, heroism, thieving and mistakes by both sides. Sirens, cyclops and all that sort of shit. When you can take that extra ninety feet, you must. When you cannot, you must not. Knowing when to run and when to hold is of the essence.

The last Blue Jays manager, Cito Gaston, preferred to swing for the fences and jog around the bases, believing there was no defense against the long-ball. The new manager, John Farrell, has taken the opposite approach. Aggression on the base-paths and small ball. Manufacturing runs.

Aggression means failure will occur when trying to take a base rather than in trying to hold one. It means failure will be outlandish and public. It will be an obvious out rather than a theoretical ‘what could’ve been.’ This is the risk of being aggressive. Not just in baseball but in everything.

And the Blue Jays have run into some trouble with this new approach. Literally. Run right into it.

Baseball has no clock. It has outs. Every time you give an out away, you do not have it returned. And they’ve given away plenty of outs on the basepaths. Most of these have been reasonable. Aggression has its consequences. Men will get picked off. They will get thrown out. Shit happens.

Shit happening.

But there’s a not so thin line between aggression and stupidity. And this team has crossed that line a few too many times for my liking.

Aggression is taking that extra ninety feet when it is of equal or greater importance than the runner.  Stupidity is taking it when the runner is more valuable than the extra ninety feet. Everyone who has watched the Jays this season can point to an incident or ten where this line was crossed. Where even if the strategy was successful, it still would’ve been useless. But it wasn’t successful anyway because aside from being useless, it was also ridiculous.

The incident that springs to my mind is when the turtle in a tarpit  slow Juan Rivera tried to steal third against the Yankees in a one run ballgame and ended the inning with a strike ‘em out, throw ‘em out double play. A moment where the Jays had much more to lose than to gain from that far-fetched tactic and lost it all. And for what? Ninety irrelevant feet.

Yet, if the cost of aggression is obvious failure, the method is thievery, duplicity and sacrifice. For aggression to work, the line between it and stupidity must be crossed. It must sometimes be irrational. There must be an element of “Don’t you know I’m loco?”

If that line is never crossed, even aggression becomes predictable and the predictable is easily defended against.

The old manager was fond of saying “Lose one today to win two later.” I sometimes wonder if Farrell is thinking “Give up an out now to gain a run later.”

I think of the Rivera’s attempted steal of third above all other base-running errors because it gives the lie to that.  It shows that Farrell is either unaware of what it means to make the defense uncomfortable or does not know when he has.

The irrational had already worked. It was time to capitalize.

Juan had (somehow) stolen a base earlier in the game. The Yankees knew Farrell was loco. They positioned Cano right behind the bag to hold him on second, thus opening up a hole in the infield and showing they were defending against the running game. Just making them fortify third against the slow-footed Juan Rivera was success. It might even have kept AJ Burnett from using his curveball in the dirt thus giving Edwin something to hit.  That’s when you reap the benefits of aggression.

Instead, Farrell ran right into the trap.

And this is just one incident out of many. It’s the one that sticks with me because it reminds me of another aggressive commander and his failures.

Nelson with both arms and eyes.

Most people know Horatio Nelson for the Battle of Trafalgar. Fewer know that his importance and success as a commander was due to his aggression.

Before Nelson, naval battles were fought in a highly conservative fashion. Commanders were typically happy to sink a couple of ships then let their enemy’s fleet retreat. Having scored a point victory, they saw no sense in risking damage to their own ships by forcing the issue.

Nelson saw things differently.

He fought to extinction. After he sank a few of your ships and you started your retreat, he did not see it as victory. He saw you as weak. He pursued and risked all to destroy or take every last one of your ships.

He often did not wait for scouting or perfect positioning, preferring to attack immediately. A strategy that met with great success during the Battle of the Nile, when his enemy assumed he was sane and would not start fighting at dusk in waters he had just arrived in. His enemy was wrong. They were caught with many of their sailors on shore.

And their fleet was destroyed.

The Battle of the Nile. Fought by night.

Most people know that Nelson only had one arm but fewer know that he lost it during a failure. And that the source of his success was the source of his failure. His aggression undid him. Badly.

He attacked a well fortified position at Teneriffe without having enough men and, really, for nothing. Because of other events, the place had lost its strategic meaning and was not worth the risk of attack. Yet Nelson took this bad gamble, losing the battle and his arm in the process. He completely failed to learn anything from this blunder.

But, by that point in his career, Nelson had a record well above .500.

John Farrell with both arms and eyes.

John Farrell is no Nelson. He just has the same problems. (I have the same vices as many great men and none of their virtues. For example, I might be even lazier than Einstein but I’m not exactly jotting up a theory of relativity in my spare time.) At the time of writing this, Farrell has a losing record as manager.

He would do well to remember what St. Vincent said to Nelson before and after this ill-thought-out piece of aggression.

In the first instance, before the squadron left, he told Nelson:

I am sure you will deserve success, to mortals is not given the power of commanding it.

In the second, when Nelson returned in failure:

Mortals cannot command success.

Translated into baseball, you’ve gotta have the horses. If you don’t have the fucking horses, telling them to run isn’t going to do very much.

Nelson usually had the horses. He made sure of it. Most of his work was done before the battle. His men were exceptionally well trained and disciplined. He put most of his effort into preparation. His faith in his horses is what allowed him to be so aggressive. Nelson more often deserved victory than tried to command it. When he tried to command it, even he failed. Outlandishly, as aggression must.

Now Rajai is a horse. A fast one.

I can accept the errors of aggression that this team is going to make. They are dealing with a new philosophy. I can even accept the errors of plain stupidity that are inspired by the same aggressive philosophy. That’s just the nature of the beast. One has to accept that passivity can be just as stupid as aggression but that its failures are often invisible.

Contrary to public opinion, you are very rarely damned if you don’t. Not by the public at least.

What concerns me about Farrell is not that the team is running into outs nor that they do it when there is nothing to be gained, but that, when there is something to be gained from all of that, he still seems to be making the wrong call. When he succeeds in making the defense uncomfortable, he seems incapable of changing gears and taking advantage. That his aggression created what looked like the start of an AJ Burnett meltdown and created a bad defense. Then he interrupted that by running again.

It is not enough to force the defense to make errors. Like Napoleon said, you must also “never interrupt your enemy when he is making an error.”

A bad chess player plays for pieces. A good one plays for checkmate. John Farrell’s obsession with that extra ninety feet is not only playing for pieces, it is too often trading good ones for bad. That he does this is not the concern. That he does it all the time, with fingers crossed and without strategy is.

He’s playing checkers when other managers are playing chess.

The results are speaking for themselves.

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A machine out-reports a human but can a machine out-drink a reporter?

A computer program has written a better sports story than a human.*

But, in all fairness, the human did a really bad job of it. A really bad job.

TNW says:

NPR’s All Things Considered reports how writers at Gawker’s sports site Deadspin assumed that a story written on GW Sports about a baseball game had been written by a robot due to its failure to mention that in the game, a player had pitched a perfect game in the NCAA for the first time in almost a decade – pretty big thing to miss.

The human decided not to report on a perfect game?

Like, that’s a bit beyond doing a bad job. That’s like saying your robot car outperformed a human driver when the human was drunk, three days into a meth binge and had no brakes. Also, the human wasn’t actually in a car but was riding a bicycle backwards the rain. And the bicycle was really a cardboard box.

Still, the program did a good job. After being fed the raw data, here’s what it wrote.

Tuesday was a great day for W. Roberts, as the junior pitcher threw a perfect game to carry Virginia to a 2-0 victory over George Washington at Davenport Field.

Twenty-seven Colonials came to the plate and the Virginia pitcher vanquished them all, pitching a perfect game. He struck out 10 batters while recording his momentous feat. Roberts got Ryan Thomas to ground out for the final out of the game.

Tom Gately came up short on the rubber for the Colonials, recording a loss. He went three innings, walked two, struck out one, and allowed two runs.

The Cavaliers went up for good in the fourth, scoring two runs on a fielder’s choice and a balk.

That’s certainly comprehensible and gets to the heart of the matter.

It’s a bit dry but that’s easily corrected. Just write an algorithm that detects the race and size of players and then uses words like hustle, leadership, grit, talent and flash where appropriate. Then you got yourself some real sports reportin’.

*This software also did a better job of reporting than all of the stories about it doing a better job.  Each one of their headlines talked about a robot outperforming a reporter. I can see why, I mean it’s catchy and it certainly got my attention but it’s misleading to the point of being wrong.

Software is not a robot. And reporting is not just writing the story, it’s also getting the information to base the story on. Or it should be. Shit, being a good writer might be the smallest part of being a good reporter. Like, you should be adequate but beyond that? No one needs or wants you to be James Joyce.

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Bases loaded, two out, bottom of the ninth. Blue Jays behind by one run and the clean-up hitter, Adam Lind, at the plate.

He hits the first pitch he sees. Softly. To the first baseman. Game over. Blue Jays lose. Final score 4-3.

This sets the blogosphere, twitterverse and talk-radio to sudden debate. Should he have swung at the first pitch? Or should he have worked the count? Had he lined that first pitch into the gap to win the game, no one would be second guessing his approach at the plate. But he didn’t do that. He grounded out and ended the game.

Adam Lind is not judged by his approach but by the result. In a game that’s made of failure, this is unfair.

Even if it had of been a good pitch to hit and even if he had of hit it hard, chances are, it still would have resulted in an out. That’s baseball.

In the seventh inning with a man on third and one out, Juan Rivera comes to the plate. He just needs to hit the ball just about anywhere to tie the game. He takes the first pitch, which looked like something he could handle. He then fouls one off down the line, missing heroism by about a foot and half. Then he grounds out softly to the pitcher.

Other than a strikeout or an infield pop-up, it’s about the worst thing he could do.

And the mind turns back to that first pitch. That old what-if.

Every at bat is a negotiation. The pitcher has four balls and you get three strikes.

Knowing how to negotiate the count is a big part of baseball and big part of negotiating is knowing when to be aggressive and when to take a pitch.

Although Adam Lind grounded out, he did the right thing. The pitcher had nothing to bargain with. Walking Lind would have tied the game.  He was going to see a strike from a pitcher who looked hittable. You have to expect a first pitch fastball right down the heart of the plate.

Problem is, the pitcher knows you know this and you know the pitcher knows you know this.

In those schizophrenic circumstances, you just have to expect the basic. Lind did. But he got a slider out of the zone. And missed his chance.

Rivera just needed to hit a ball on the ground to anyone but the pitcher. Or a deep fly ball. Basically, he just needed to lay wood on ball.  But he took that first pitch and missed his chance. Then missed again by a foot and half. In baseball, that’s often the difference between a hero and villain.

You can be aggressive and fail. You can be passive and fail. You can do things right and have them go wrong and do things wrong and have them go right. There are more roads to failure than success. But one thing is certain, you will be judged by the result.

It’s unfair. But that’s baseball.

And if you keep taking a good approach at the plate, you will succeed. Not as often as you fail but less often than you otherwise would. Batters that keep reacting to their last at-bat, who adapt to what has happened (be it good or bad) instead of what is going to happen, who get obsessed with their result and not their approach, go into slumps.

Baseball is unfair but there’s no reason for the fans to be cruel. At least, not to their own players.

Both of these guys do their best in a tough business. By season’s end, both will have the ball bounce the other way and be hero of the game.

Just take it one pitch at a time and enjoy the ride.

This year’s Blue Jays are gonna give us a good one.