The other day Melanie sent me a link to “Safe at Home in Late Capitalism,” which you can probably tell from the title is a review article by GF alum Ryan Lackey about The Cactus League, a baseball-themed novel by Emily Nemens.
I read it right away — Mr. Lackey’s review — and thought I should share it with you, since he’s a Bruin and the review is about baseball, and impressive in vocabulary and composition. But I didn’t do anything about it right away. Busy, and Lackey reaches pretty far out of his way to point toward political/economic policy points we might differ on.
Correction. I’ll speak for myself. He aims at politico-economic policy points I differ on.
Since I am pretty sure we in this league will disagree about those points, I don’t propose to discuss them. But I do still recommend you read Ryan L’s review. The Cactus League sounds interesting, even if Ryan has over-read it. And he’s one of ours.
But what I really want to recommend is to follow the primrose path I took yesterday. From Lackey I jumped to Kieren Satiya’s review article entitled “Going Deep: Baseball and Philosophy.” It caught my eye, and I thought of Phil. Satiya reviews three books: Keith Law’s Smart Baseball, Mark Kingwell’s Fail Better, and Stacey May Fowles’ Baseball Life Advice: Loving The Game that Saved Me.
I own Smart Baseball, and have read most of it. It’s Keith Law: knowledgeable, widely read, generally solid on sabermetrics, and a tiresome know-it-all who has trouble disagreeing without sneering.
I think I quit near the end when Law went out of his way to dismiss Jack Morris as a poseur unworthy of the Hall of Fame. He called Morris “a thoroughly average pitcher” (p. 218). This phrase is one line below a chart reporting Morris’ career rWAR as 43.8.
Morris’ fWAR is 55.8, 65th all time for MLB pitchers. Maybe it’s low for the Hall of Fame — but the next 10 pitchers are Bret Saberhagen, Luis Tiant, Whitey Ford, Red Faber, Ted Lyons, Curt Simmons, Sandy Koufax, Bobby Mathews, and Felix Hernandez. “Thoroughly average” is just mean.
So maybe you can see why the fact that I generally agree with Keith Law was not enough lubricant to get me through his entire book.
I am also familiar with Fail Better. I wasn’t sure that I actually owned it, but after 20 minutes searching I found it on my shelf. I apparently have not read it. The title and theme — that failure is inevitable, and a grace if we learn to fail better the next time — are attractive. A blurb on the back goes like this:
Fail Better is baseball considered personally, historically, poetically, formally, legally, critically, politically, linguistically, ethically, geographically, metaphysically, nostalgically, morally, and aesthetically.”
So I probably should read it.
Satiya gives less than a paragraph to Baseball Life Advice. So why is it even in this review? Surely not just to have a token female author?
The coolest thing in Satiya’s review is this little gem: philosopher John Rawls was a baseball fan. I hadn’t known that.
…
We need to go back to Ryan Lackey.
Ryan mentions several other baseball novels, of which four were familiar to me: Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, WP Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe and The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, and Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding. You should suspect me of lawyerism when I say I am familiar with these four books. I have read not a word of the first three, although I have seen the movie versions of the first two multiple times, and have a copy of The Iowa Baseball Confederacy. Now that I’ve found it again, maybe I can read it.
I used to have a copy of The Art of Fielding, given to me by Melanie as a gift, on someone else’s recommendation. I decided 2/3 of the way through it was not much about baseball and a lot about sex. At that point I gave up on it ever getting good, and set it aside with intention to throw it away.
I do not throw away books lightly. I think I ended up loaning it out with instructions not to return it.
At this point — this was this morning — I idly clicked on a link to another article (“Distant Sports” was the title). This proved to be a collection of classic games/matches/contests from a variety of sports that would be worth looking at if one was idled by the coronavirus shutdown. Most of the links are to lesser sports like tennis, soccer, football, hockey. But two baseball links stood out: the Blue Jays’ World Series-clinching Joe Carter home run, and a meaningless Mets at Braves game on July 4, 1985.
I chose to sample the Mets / Braves game. Why? Because the link was to a key moment in the bottom of the 18th innings, at about 3:20 AM on July 5. There were an impressive number of fans still in the stadium. The Braves were trailing 11-10, and were out of position players. So reliever Rick Camp had to bat with two outs and no one on. The announcer says, after strike one, “If he hits a home run, this game will certified as the nuttiest in the history of baseball.”
Check out the link . Or if you want to watch the entire game , here’s a link to the entire thing. Or if you want just the key at bat with better video and sound quality, try this link, and go to 1:38:34. (The first link goes right to the start of Rick Camp’s 18th inning at bat. The second link starts at the beginning of the game and shows mostly the pitches that resolve the at bats. The third link starts in the 10th inning. I believe it shows all the pitches.)
As Rawls (and others) pointed out, baseball has no time limit. An 18 or 19-inning game can take as long as it wants. In principle, any baseball game could be eternal.
I suppose, in principal, the wait for baseball could also be eternal. What we need is the anti-Rick Camp, the unlikely hero who steps up to the plate and suddenly ends our tedious wait for baseball.
(By the way: I didn’t know about Rick Camp and this game before this morning.)
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