The guy who used to be Bob Dylan is still Bob Dylan. Only he can no longer sing. He growls and coughs and grumbles. Perhaps he can speak, but I can’t be sure of that. The only speaking he did on stage was to introduce his band, and even that was an affectation, a mumbled southern drawl.

This is not breaking news. In anticipation of his set, headlining the first night of Seattle’s annual Bumbershoot Festival, a dozen people warned me that Dylan’s voice is shot. But what I’d heard of his newer material made me think that even crippled, Dylan’s voice would still be recognizable; even smothered in gravel, it would still carry the insouciance and the wheezy essence of the 1960s or 70s or even 80s version. Needless to say it did not.

It took me until the second verse of my favorite Bob Dylan song, ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,’ to realize that he was playing it. This was partly due to the fact that like everything else on the set list, the song was rearranged as fuzzy country rock. (I actually enjoyed the arrangements; his band really brought it). But mostly it was due to the incomprehensible nature of the vocals. The cascading choruses of ‘Just Like A Woman’ were sung properly in what could have been protest by the audience, only to be repeated under the singer’s breath two beats later.

“It kind of reminded me of watching Ken Griffey Jr. play this year,” said my girlfriend after the show. And she was right. My emotions were similar to the ones I felt watching Griffey slink away from baseball this spring.

Early in the set, I was uncomfortably surprised by what I heard. Then I became angry. Who was Bob Dylan to be this absurdly, comically terrible? Who was Bob Dylan to unwind his own myth in such an unglamorous setting? We weren’t at Newport or the Isle of Wight or in the West Village. We were in Seattle in 2010 in a rundown stadium underneath the Space Needle. This was no place for massive betrayal.

Eventually I came to terms. This was indeed Seattle 2010. This was 40 years later. I had no right to expect any more of Bob Dylan than he was able to give. He clearly still enjoyed performing. His guitar and keyboard and harmonica abilities were undiminished. If people are still willing to go see Bob Dylan, why should Bob Dylan stop? I should appreciate the glimpse I was lucky enough to get.

Athletic greatness and artistic greatness don’t diminish in the same way. Athletes are slowly surpassed in ability by younger and fitter teammates and opponents until one day they become a liability. Like Ken Griffey Jr. in 2010, the former star must eventually face the indignity of his ineptitude. Either he is no longer able to contribute to a team or he is beaten in individual competition. The end may come at different times for different men, but it always comes.

Not so for musicians. A star musician can play on until performance is physically or mentally impossible. Sometimes this means death. A star musician whose teammates are disappointed in him can simply hire new ones. His fate is dictated by the market and the market for nostalgia is always steady.

Bob Dylan can play the same familiar songs every night – even incomprehensibly. Ken Griffey Jr. cannot hit the same home runs.

Related: One More Cup of Coffee, a Bob Dylan/old veteran themed term in the Rogue’s Baseball Index.

Whether you are a burgeoning tennis fan like myself or casual observer who digs good writing, his dispatches are worth reading:

The Sporting Scene

Fascist.

The question of badness amongst professional athletes has always fascinated me. The same goes for any celebrity — writer, actor, musician. How to react when a person whose work you admire leads a life that is not up to your own personal standards. Is a murderer who writes beautiful violoncello concertos  any different from a regular old murderer?

Obviously not. But that doesn’t make his concertos any less valuable.  Just as Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitism doesn’t make ‘Braveheart’ any less awesome, and Michael Richards’ racism doesn’t make ‘Seinfeld’ any less funny.  Which brings us to Mariners’ prospect Josh Lueke’s rape and sodomy charge. It doesn’t make his 96 mph fastball any less impressive.

I guess this is a question. To what extent can a person mess up before you quit admiring them? Or as a baseball executive, to what extent can a ballplayer run afoul with the law before you decide to stop paying them? Obviously off-field issues will have a greater effect on signability for maginal ballplayers, so let’s stick to the stars, the geniuses.  Let’s discuss.

The magic of attending a baseball game may begin when you present your ticket at the gate, but no spell can be cast without adequate preparation. Before the first pitch the would-be attendee faces a gauntlet of decisions, ranging from checking the schedule for the presence of the home team to pondering whether skipping work on a Wednesday afternoon to watch the 5-starter is really acceptable. The alchemy of preparation may have numerous permutations, but there are four ingredients of particular importance, namely: Who, What, When, and How. Without these, which arise for every game-goer, the stadium might as well not exist.

Image from flickr user "terren in Virginia"

Who am I going with?

Whether it’s the wife, a college friend, a co-worker, or an awkward uncle, choosing a partner or group of co-attendees is a precursor even to picking a game. While this is a relatively simple question, the process of making this choices says a lot about the potential attendee. For example, the less authoritative personality is not likely to choose at all, rather waiting for the game to come to him in the form of an invitation. The gregarious carouser, on the other hand, is wont to invite five or six friends, especially if he’s got someone to impress. The especially magnanimous, but secretly lonely, man will offer to buy everyone’s tickets and beers if only they’ll come along, while the lazy and anti-social man will just drag his wife along for fear of getting in contact with – and being rejected by – anyone else. One might justifiably wonder how he has a wife in the first place, but that’s beside the point.

Any one of us might be any one of those people at any time, or we might default to a single game-attending modus. Regardless, whether we follow habit or not, having answered “who” we proceed to “what.”

What game are we going to?

The all-mighty schedule imposes certain limitations on this question. If the home team is in the backwaters of Pittsburgh and Washington for the next week the game-going impulse will not be immediately satiated. If, on the other hand, the darkened dates on the calendar indicate a glorious 14-game homestand, the proverbial cup runneth over.

Having perused possibilities, choosing a particular one – or, hey, maybe two or three – is a relatively simple function of available money (lets call that “M”), and time and date of games (call it “T”). Taking the result of “Who,” (or W) as a coefficient, each potential game (“G”) is scored as follows: G = T / W*M. That is, the likelihood of going to a given game is equal to the convenience of the date, factoring in who is going and how much it’s likely to cost. I might have the formula slightly wrong, but I trust some enterprising sabermetrician will spot the error and correct it.

When do we get there?

The question comes with the all-important corollary, “What do we eat?” Ballpark food has its advantages, but price is not among them. On the other hand, there are some fans who insist upon arriving an hour before the game to sit around and watch players stretch and take batting practice, which makes a pre-game meal and drink a trickier proposition.

The other corollary, here, is “How are we getting our tickets?” Scalping is a viable option, but is best done right before the first pitch, when the fickle baseball-ticket market suddenly shifts in the buyer’s favor. A baseball ticket is a rare thing that can be worth as much as one hundred dollars one moment, less than ten a few minutes later, and nothing at all the next day. Finding the right time to strike is vital.

Buying online, or buying walk-up, on the other hand, requires a somewhat earlier arrival, as the line at the ticket-office is liable to make even the most optimistic fan despair for humanity. Questions that might arise, especially if first pitch is imminent, include: “How can it take so long for the guy in front to buy a single ticket?” and, “Why would they hire a deaf saleswoman?” and, if the home team is playing everyone’s favorite lovable losers, “What are all these freaking Cubs fans doing here? This isn’t Chicago!”*

*The reader should disregard this last question if he or she is, in fact in Chicago.

Are we there yet?

How do we get there?

Finally, the most important question of all. Having settled the simple stuff, the real getting to the park must be negotiated. Public transportation, a nice walk (if you live close enough), the horrors of driving and parking, or some combination of the three are all valid options. While location has a lot to do with the decision, here, it doesn’t change the finality. Once the car is fired up, the train is boarded, or those first steps out of the apartment have been taken, the stadium experience has begun. It’s only a matter of time before, settling into his seat, the stadium-goer can sit back and let the game wash over him, talking with his particular whos. Cue National Anthem, starting lineups, and first pitch. Put aside all troubles and worries, including the very effort of getting there.

As a coda, I want to address the absence of the other two classic journalistic questions: “Where” and “Why.” I have left these out because the former is exceedingly simple and the latter exceedingly complicated. In other words, if “Where is the stadium?” is an important question in your particular game-going experience, you’re clearly in an unusual situation. If “Why am I going to the game?” is an important question in the pre-game process, well, you’ll just have to answer for yourself.

For this podcast, we wrote a bunch of words on a piece of paper and dove in:

• Read a Poem
• Harry Potter
• Jim Murray
• Song Lyric Web Pages
• the Base Message
• Punk Rock Phase
• Baseball Style
• Jimmy Buffett

To download the episode, right click the link: Pitchers and Poets Podcast Episode 21

Link:

Some Common Weaknesses by Carson Cistulli

The bats were wooden, and the baseball players were young and green. The stands were mostly empty but for behind home plate–in the shade of the grandstand–where chatty ladies in hats and large sunglassed filled the spaces between the mens’ one-liners about hot dogs and heart attacks. The sun burned bright even as it set, there in the early evening in Cooperstown, New York.

There were the Cooperstown Hawkeyes, the local side, and another team from another small New York town wearing forest green. They were likely the best players from their colleges, schools with names like Catawba Valley and Shippensburg; Civil War names. But this wasn’t the Cape Cod league. These kids weren’t on the fast-track to signing bonuses. They were playing so they didn’t have to live at home for the summer. They were playing to play, the way most of us did. They don’t make it big out of the New York Collegiate Baseball League.

My friend Paul and I were in town for the Hall of Fame, and only made it to Doubleday Field for the game because it happened to fit into our rigorous weekend itinerary. But there was also the appeal of watching an actual live game in a place where so much of the baseball is stuffed and mounted.

In other words, after a solid eight hours of peering into display cases, reading tidy little placards, and poring over newspaper clippings in the research library, Doubleday Field felt as wide as the Polo Grounds. The dust that a second baseman kicked up at Doubleday was living dust, an activation of all the incantations down the street in the museum.

(A note vis-a-vis the research library: they’re awesome, they’ll help you find out about whatever you want, especially if you give them a day or two of advanced notice. Also, the director of research at the library, Tim Wiles, sung Take Me Out to the Ballgame on account of the book about the song that he co-wrote. If you heard the kind of conversations he got to have during his workday at the library, you would be jealous. He talks about it in this episode of the Cover the Bases podcast.)

Doubleday Field leads a double life. Often, like medium-sized baseball fields nationwide, it plays host to modest events such as this Hawkeyes game, in which young people play ball in front of some parents and friends, and a light dusting of randoms like me and Paul, who could go for a little baseball, whatever the flavor.

But then there are those weekends when its kinship with the Hall of Fame pays off in glory. Some of those days are past, as the Hall of Fame game between two big league teams which is done with as of 2008. But on the Sunday of the very weekend we were in Cooperstown, there was the Cooperstown Classic Old Timer’s Day scheduled that would surely fill the stands and feature some of the greats of the recent past. We saw a few of these guys, in fact, at a forum at the local high school: Ozzie Smith, Rollie Fingers, Bob Feller (who I presume at 90-something years old didn’t pitch, but it wouldn’t shock me if the old curmudgeon did), Goose Gossage, Harmon Killebrew, Phil Niekro. Apparently Jeff Kent and Hard Hittin’ Mark Whiten were there too.

Point is, Doubleday Field still sees its share of grandiosity. That in itself adds a little sparkle to a humble game like the Hawkeyes matchup here. Knowing that pro players have attacked those close-in fences and kicked at the mound lends a little touch of the magical to what would otherwise be your basic summer league game.

We were not, of course, the only fans at the field. There were other goofy groups of men, who clearly had the same thought we did, the urge to watch some real baseball and the organizational wherewithal to find this one on the schedule. These weekend warriors were the ones in Carlton Fisk Red Sox jerseys and bright white sneakers. Nice cameras hung from their necks, and their pallor suggested paperwork over surfing.

And then there were the locals. Round about the third inning, the sun was pointed directly at my forehead, so we bought a few hot dogs from some softball players working concessions en route to the grandstand behind home plate, where there was a roof and some shade. Under the roof, the crack of the bat echoed a little and there was got a nice view of what everybody else was up to.

Down near the backstop, I thought I saw a scout with a radar gun, but it turned out it was a Coke Zero bottle in his hand. A row below us, a college girl stretched and preened her tan summer legs. A young girl with a brown lab puppy stood around as groups of people cooed and petted it.

On the drive home from my high school baseball games, my mom would talk about what my teammate’s families were up to: news about brothers and sisters and moms and dads, who got into what college, who was dating whom, who was going to military school. She was like a Pony Express rider the way she absorbed and broadcast all of that news.

“You know they’re tryinna getta liquor license for the field, huh?” said a bald, middle-aged guy who had a minute ago made an excuse for his second piece of pizza. “Finally have a decent party here. Serve beer.”

“They been trying for years,” said a plump woman settled in down the row from him. “They’ll get it this year. I’m on the alcohol board.”

Conversation meandered among them, with the woman providing the narrative drive and the three men down the row providing comic relief and nonsequitors. “Ochocinco!” the bald guy said at one point, for no apparent reason. “Ochocinco!”

When a foul ball shot back against the backstop screen, the woman said to the bald guy, “If they get ridda that net you’d have a lot more patients!” Then he told a story about a Lifesavers factory. It made sense at the time, if only just. It made sense was that we were at a baseball game and that a story was being told that someone had read in a newspaper.

Down below, the game got slow, the starting pitchers lost their handle. There are no lights at Doubleday Field, promising a foreseeable and merciful conclusion. But we didn’t wait around. We had some local beer in the trunk of the rental car, and a view from the motel porch that was calling our name.

Did I mention that Phil Niekro threw out the first pitch? Well he did, and throughout the game the PA announcer asked Niekro-related questions and if you ran up to his table with the answer you’d win a free piece of pizza. “There’s Phil,” said Paul as we found our seats behind home plate. I couldn’t make him out, though. He blended right into that small crowd.

To my surprise, Tutorpedia not only said yes to my nefarious, baseball-teaching plan, they were thrilled.  They even offered me free Oakland Athletics tickets so I could go to a game with my students.  And so I started crafting my curricula in my ‘spare time.’

Who doesn't love the Oakland A's?

Tutorpedia believes in project-based learning, and I believe in dialogue-driven classrooms, so my model was not, from the outset, stand up and lecture. Rather, the poetry curriculum was to be a series of conversations about famous poems, followed by activities highlighting techniques the poets in question were using, all culminating in the composition (and public recitation) of an original work of poetry. Likewise, the sabermetrics course was designed to give students the skills they needed to perform statistical analysis before sending them off to do independent research projects.

Unfortunately, after carefully putting together my curricula, I found out that no one was signing up for my workshops. And not only me, Tutorpedia was hoping to run dozens of workshops over the summer, and no one was signing up for any of them. Ultimately, three students signed up for my sabermetrics class, and none for my poetry workshop. So be it! If high schoolers would rather learn about wOBA and WAR than enjambment, simile, and pentameter, who am I to argue?

One of my three students ended up having to drop the course due to a family emergency, leaving us at a paltry two – and a brother and sister (and Yankees fans) at that – but nevertheless we trod onwards towards understanding and insight, or at least indoctrination into a different set of beliefs than those you get from watching the Fox Game of The Week. I say that in jest, partially, but it’s also a question. Is it possible to really get students to learn to think critically about anything – even something as trivial as baseball statistics – in just 16 hours of class time? And isn’t critical thinking what sabermetrics is supposed to be about? That’s the real can of worms, I suppose. As sabermetrics have grown more prominent, it’s not clear what the study is about anymore, let alone what teaching the subject means.

Certainly the origins of sabermetrics are in critical thought. At a time when no one questioned the power of batting average and the RBI, advocating statistics like OBP or, even worse, creating new ones like Win Shares, was the kind of heresy that required a great deal of level-headed, penetrating insight and at least a little gusto to boot.  Enter Bill James. These days, however, we have Fangraphs, Baseball Prospectus, the Hardball Times, Baseball Analysts, Baseball-Reference, and countless other websites devoted to providing information and analysis about baseball statistics. The old heresy is the new religion.

Which is not to say there’s anything wrong with sabermetrics – I wouldn’t teach it if I were so unfaithful – but rather it raises the question: which is more important, the thought process behind the study of baseball statistics, or the outcome of that process? Which is more important, knowing how WAR is calculated (as much as they let you know, anyway) or knowing more or less how to use it to evaluate players?

Another object of study: Win Probability graphs

I, for one, am persuaded that WAR is a better measure of a player’s value than almost any other single statistic, and WAR formed the basis of the research project – building an all-time Yankees roster – my students and I did at the end of the course. That said, my inclination as both an educator and as a baseball fan is and always will be towards process over outcome. Without the ability to think through a statistic, the statistic has no meaning to me other than the one that other people give me.

How to convey that in eight two-hour sessions? Well, it’s hard. I taught my students how to use excel and basic statistical tools like regression and correlation (which, to their credit more than mine, they understood), and I exposed them to a few of the many sabermetric websites. And in the end I saw that hard work rewarded by rapid – almost immediate – buy-in when we learned about WAR and UZR and ERA+. It remains to be seen whether my students will ever bring the tools of the skeptic’s trade – critical questions, excel speadsheets, and statistical techniques – to bear on the new numbers as we did on the old.  I hope I at least planted a skeptical seed, but the narrative of modern baseball statistics, it turns out, is quite compelling.

In retrospect, the course was perhaps a bit too practical. Maybe the better path towards critical thinking runs through a more philosophical approach. Maybe stepping even further back, teaching less and asking the students to explore more on their own, would have netted a more skeptical attitude. But, taking that approach, what do you do if the students come out the other end convinced that pitcher wins and runs batted in are awesome?  What if being hands-off means letting someone else do the brainwashing?

I suppose the answer, on some level, comes down to the students. Because I was working with a brother and sister who were at least familiar with the existence of Moneyball, I knew they had the potential to dive into concepts like WAR, wOBA, and UZR, but when our initial discussion turned up batting average as THE statistic of choice, I also knew we had some work to do before we got there. Considering the slightly younger-than-anticipated enrollment (I expected high schoolers and got middle schoolers), we had to begin at the beginning, building regression tables to show that, in fact, OBP and SLG correlate way better with winning than batting average or homers.

As I dove into these analytical and pedagogical depths, considering and reconsidering both the statistics I was teaching and my approach in teaching them, I was called back to another world as we were working on the final project. The sister wrote a limerick on the board in a moment of whimsy, likely tired of comparing Red Ruffing’s ERA+ to that of Roger Clemens.

“How do you like my poem?” She asked me.

“That was supposed to be the other workshop,” I told her.

Just a quick link, I wrote a blog post over at AlwaysBeSuited.com, a new men’s fashion and style concern from my friend Dave. The subject is Connie Mack, for 50 years the uber-manager of the Philadelphia Athletics and since then the baseball legend, and his preference for suits in the dugout:

Connie Mack remains an icon of style in an otherwise uniform environment. Mr. Mack, as everyone called him, was a businessman and a baseball man who coached the Philadelphia Athletics for 50 years. No coach has won more games, over 3,500, and no coach has looked better doing it.

He wore a tailored suit and the hat to match in the dugout, for every single game. He was rarely, if ever, known to waver from that uniform, a gentleman among the brawlers and ruffians of the early century. Only the baseball scorecard that he kept at hand and used to direct his outfielders suggested his occupation.

Here are a few facts and quotations, Mack-related and detachable collar-related, not all of which made it into that post:

• Mack managed the same team, the Philadelphia Athletics, for 50 years. His attire matched the respect he required of his players, who referred to him only as Mr. Mack. He managed five teams to a World Series victory.
• “[Baseball] is a game which is peculiarly suited to the American temperament and disposition; … in short, the pastime suits the people, and the people suit the pastime.” – Charles A. Peverelly I enjoyed the reference to suits, if only for the pun
• Columnist Red Smith wrote: “Many people loved Mack, some feared him, everybody respected him, as far as I know nobody ever dislike him. There may never have been a more truly successful man. He was tough, human, clever, warmly wonderful, kind and stubborn and courtly and unreasonable, proud, humorous, demanding, unpredictable.” According to the stories, he was as willing to offer up as ass-kicing as he was to extend a helping hand.”
• 1912: The Yankees introduce pinstripes for the first time, though it’s a myth that they added the stripes to thin the ample figure of star hitter Babe Ruth, who didn’t play for the Yankees until some years later.
• The detachable collar was invented by a woman in Troy, New York, in 1827. Hannah Lord Montague, frustrated at the gnarliness of her husband’s shirt collars, decided to cut one of them off, wash the crap out of it, and sew it back on. A friend noticed the innovation and made it into a product. When a collar is detached, you can starch it until its the hardness of a pine board, and thereby gain the sternness of appearance that a commanding presence like Connie Mack would prize.
• “I remember: Connie Mack always in same dugout seat in business suit, with high-starched collar, scorecard in hand, waving his outfielders into position.” – Allen Lewis, from the Philadelphia Inquirer, featuring memories of Connie Mack Stadium upon its closure

In this episode of the podcast, we rehash the rehashing of the Clemens-steroid situation, talk up the Derrek Lee trade a bit, give due praise to Moises Alou and delve into the best of the 2nd generation major leaguers.

To download the episode, right click and Save As here.

Applicable PodLinks:

The Hold Steady

Roger Clemens and perjury and blah blah blah

MLB.com’s story on upcoming 2nd generation players

Dante Bichette

Ed Sprague

Tiny and Bobo the Clowns (Not Safe for Sanity)

Well, I wasn’t the only one to take notice. Others out there, the taste-makers of the sports writing establishment, found Nusbaum’s blip on the radar as I did. They felt the same chill when they read about Jaime Irogoyen’s passing, and about a community’s need for the game. And the taste-makers acted.

Now, I am proud as hell to announce the coolest thing ever:

Glenn Stout, series editor of The Best American Sports Writing anthology, and this year’s guest editor, Peter Gammons (!), have selected Eric Nusbaum’s piece, “The Death of a Pitcher,” to appear in this year’s edition, The Best American Sports Writing 2010.

Eric works his tail off for this blog. He works his tail off to create engaging stories, and he’s a pleasure to work with. I couldn’t be happier that he’s been picked for such a substantial collection of writers and writing. He deserves it.

The edition is available for pre-order on Amazon, releasing on September 28, 2010. Check out the entire lineup of writers and work on Stout’s blog.