There's an outstanding piece by Eric Liu in Slate today, in which he meets up with Seattle Mariners pitching coach Bryan Price to learn how to throw a circle change. As he warms to his topic, Liu brings up one of my favorite pitchers:
Today's pitchers are the latest in a long line of men who've taken the mound as professionals, and nearly every motion they make is inherited, the accreted sum of many generations of incremental tinkering. When you see someone come along like Orlando "El Duque" Hernandez, the fabled Cuban defector and onetime Yankee whose knee-to-nose leg kick strained the groins of people watching him, you realize how conservative an institution pitching usually is. El Duque is the exception that proves the rule.
El Duque's leg kick is a tool in his deceptive arsenal. Like other pitchers with unconventional deliveries -- I'm thinking of mainly Japanese throwers like Hideo Nomo -- the leg kick serves to hide the ball from the hitter, and prolong the period of anticipation before the pitcher throws the ball. It also distinguishes him from others, which can be a major advantage: if his pitches are thrown in a different way from everyone else's, he has a moment of confusion that he can work to his advantage. If everyone adopted a high leg kick or a karate-style crane pose, however, that advantage would gradually dissipate.
As Liu works on his change, he (naturally) finds frustration making it consistent:
After a few dozen pitches, my change-up was getting somewhat better but it was still very inconsistent. So Bryan asked me to start throwing straight four-seam fastballs. The good news here was I threw my fastball to the same spot consistently. The bad news was that the spot was where a right-handed hitter's face would be. I could feel the spiral of criticism start again. Why do I keep throwing it there? Why? Can't I get out of this rut?Just then, Bryan abruptly asked me to throw a change-up. I did, and to my surprise, I nailed it. It was the same change-up, same grip and delivery, as before. But the context was different. Now I was thinking of the change-up as an antidote to my wayward fastball. And now I was able to reel off three, then four, then five perfect change-ups, down and over the plate with perfectly deceptive presentation.
It struck me only later what Bryan Price had done. He'd used the fastball interlude as a distraction and had gotten me back onto my original objective -- throwing a good change. Like any good teacher, Bryan is a master of misdirection: working on a fastball to improve a change-up, using dry work without a ball to sharpen performance with a ball, and talking about how to keep a quiet head when, in fact, we were talking about how to keep a quiet mind.
Misdirection, alternation, unpredictability: essential tools in the pitcher's repertoire, and the teacher's. Juxtaposing a slow curve with a mediocre fastball makes both pitches better, simply because they are not the same. Timing and expectation is everything. There is a parallel to the visual arts, in which contrast is a vital element. A painting done in pure reds and browns is dull, boring, uninspired. But paint the corner with a splash of yellow, and your audience buckles its knees.
Posted by Chris at 07:26 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
It's a peeve of mine that smart people who want to write about baseball are so often numbers-obsessed. Stat fixation particularly poisons the baseball blog world. But Beth over at Cursed and First is a notable exception. In a new installment of an ongoing series about the amazing Red Sox postseason, she waxes existential considering the mysterious symmetries and unlikely events that brought Boston the title. Here she is on Game 1 of the World Series:
The first moment that has stuck with me like that is Mark Bellhorn's home run in Game 1. Perhaps not an insignificant moment, but still--it was only Game 1, and has since been overshadowed--and rightly so--by the Last Out by Keith Foulke, and the reappearance of the bloody sock, etc., all of which I appreciate...but the moment I replay over and over in my head--and sometimes over and over on my various World Series videos--is that clanging, clunking homer that won the Sox their first World Series game in nearly twenty years.What the retrospectives don't emphasize is the fact that Bellhorn had hit a pitch to the precise same spot moments earlier, foul. Maybe it doesn't really matter--but to me it does. Because without the letdown from "get out! get out! get out...!...argh, foul ball!" moments earlier, you don't get the element of surprise to the elation--and that's probably what makes the moment so sweet to me.
This underscores the difference between the merely beautiful and the sublime. By any account, the Yankees played beautiful baseball in their absurd 1996-2000 stretch: 4 World Series wins in 5 years. Their 1996 win was arguably sublime, with its dramatic comeback victory and its status as their first title since 1978, but the 1998-2000 wins were merely picturesque. But the 2004 Red Sox were sublime in the best sense: equal parts tragedy and beauty, struggle in the face of generations of clanking, creaking losses and crushing disappointments. The sublime ineffably combines pain and the sense of beauty. You don't attain it with merely good play; you have to suffer in the process. By any account, the Red Sox met that criterion: Curt Schilling's bleeding ankle; Boston's three losses in the ALCS; Bellhorn's foul ball before his home run; Derek Lowe's scintillating performances as a starter after being relegated to the bullpen; Johnny Damon's grand slam in Game 7 of the ALCS after a long, horrific dry spell. Even some fans' fear that winning the World Series would diminish Boston's unique appeal qualifies this postseason as sublime, rather than beautiful.
After noting the mirror-image similarity of Bellhorn's homer to Carlton Fisk's 1975 walk-off piece, Beth goes on to muse about her search for post-hoc astrological omens to explain the Sox victories. She comes up empty, but then concludes:
I want to believe that there's something more to the world. More to the universe. I want to believe, looking up into the sky where a small white ball is hurtling off into the distance, that its much bigger brother millions of miles away is sending some sort of message, that somehow the alignment of the planets is connected with the alignment of bat and ball and glove and foot and base.I want to believe that this story, of the Red Sox, that has been unfolding for the last eight and a half decades, and finally bloomed into this beautiful, satisfying, serendipitous conclusion--a linear story, a problem and a climax and a resolution--means I can hope for anything similar from life in general.
But the moon doesn't mean anything. It's a hunk of rock in space. And ultimately, we decide our reality; among the most distressing aspects of the human condition is that the kind of closures and ultimate, healing understandings brought about by the 2004 Boston Red Sox are rarely afforded in life, and when they are, they are to be found in disproportionate number in the uncanny symmetries and epic metaphors of our games--the things we take (or are supposed to take) less seriously.
Excellent stuff.
Posted by Chris at 09:57 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Glorious Roger Angell, the New Yorker's kept sportsman, stepson of E.B. White, can always be counted on for sparkling baseball writing. He hits a new high-water mark for amazing writing about ball with his postseason summary. Somehow he manages to make the prose gleaming, the narrative gripping, and the strained comparisons to American democracy subdued.
At the 13th-inning climax of delirious Game 5, I was in my apartment watching the game, worrying about Jason Varitek's ability to catch Tim Wakefield's infuriating floater. I was screaming "Just throw your f---in' curveball" as three horrible, beautiful knucklers got away from 'Tek. Angell has the delicious pain of that moment on tap in this passage:
Low on fuel, the Ameriquest advertising blimp headed for the barn. The game's eventualities at last brought Wakefield on to pitch for the Sox in the twelfth. As a starting knuckleballer, he generally paired with the second-string catcher, Doug Mirabelli, a nanny for the wanton pitch, but removing the powerful Varitek from the lineup was not an option here. As we know, the knuckler devises its own flight path after it leaves the pitcher's hand, and Sheffield, the Yankee leadoff man in the thirteenth, struck out on a fritillary that darted away from his bat and Varitek's mitt as well, delivering the batter safe at first. A force-play out put Matsui there in his place, and then, oopsie, over to second on a further Varitek embarrassment, and-yikes!-to third, on still another sailer. Smiling wanly, the rooters foresaw a fresh end: the Red Sox eliminated by a butterfly. Sierra, at bat with two on and two out, swung through the three-and-two and missed it cleanly, as Varitek, a mastiff after a song sparrow, jumped at the ball and swallowed it clean.
Like the man says, read the whole thing.
(Hat tip: Beth at Cursed & First.)
Posted by Chris at 02:49 PM | Comments (0)
My father commented that the last two posts seemed connected by a common thread. I hadn't consciously designed them that way, but now I'll take up the implicit challenge and spell out the connections.
The posts frame two questions: (1) "Are video cameras good for baseball?" and (2) "Are strict, universal standards good (or possible) for software?" The problem underlying each question is a thorny one: What makes us different from machines?
My negative answer to question (2) stems from the fact that machines do not, as yet, possess any kind of generative, creative capability. They lack the associative intelligence that is critical for bridging separate domains of study; they can only deal with the objects that are directly modeled for them by the programmer, and can't perceive the homologies of structure between different modeling domains. Your checkbook software, for example, can't handle your datebook needs, even though there is a homology of structure between a checkbook entry (time, date, to whom/from whom the payment was made, etc) and a calendar appointment. If your computer had intelligence like you do, it could adapt to your needs by realizing the structural similarity between the different types of data you are giving it. Instead, it has to be programmed individually to respond properly to the requirements of different activities or data structures.
The generative capacity is intimately linked to our faculty of free choice. To sum it up in the language of Sartre, whose Being and Nothingness I've been reading recently, consciousness has being, but yet is not a thing in the same way a table is a thing. Consciousness has the peculiar ability to transcend its factual existence as a thing (a brain) and posit possibilities that it is not (a mind). Our brains are things, organic substances full of fermenting chemistry, but yet our minds are something else: they have the capacity to negate being, to go beyond what is given and make choices. This choice-making ability, the possession of an interior negation, shows up in part in our capacity to generalize from one world-model to another. A mere understanding thing, one which lacked the capacity of negation, could never transcend the factual givens to make a generalizing leap across disparate domains. In other words, without freedom, a thinking computer could not truly think. It would forever be stuck at the level of the models given to it.
What you see with advocates of video review in sports is a wish to correct for human fallibility, to constrain human choice and judgement under the (supposedly) objective eye of a machine. Instant replay does this already in football, which is a sport heavily given over to the machinization of human activity. (This is no coincidence, considering football's allegorical reenactment of military operations.) In football, everyone has their assigned and specialized routine, and orders are given by a team of coaches linked up by headsets; there is very little room for creative action on the field, because all the possibilities have been worked out beforehand and drilled into the players' minds with a set-play handbook. The players are following a script, and the referees are following a script too -- a script that is subject to instant correction at the hands of the video replay unit. It's telling that when a referee goes to review a play, he has to bend over and submerge himself in the black shroud of the replay machine.
While replay is an interruption to football, it is not so directly antagonistic to the spirit of the sport. But in baseball, the disruptiveness of video review arises from the centrality of human choice. The whole core of the game consists in the batter's being given a strictly limited number of opportunities from which he picks a pitch to hit. From this limited three-strikes and four-balls set piece (notwithstanding foul balls) he must find a pitch that is acceptable to him, or strike out. He gets a finite set of chances, and he must choose -- even if he chooses not to choose and strikes out looking. There is an infinity lurking as a possibility in this finite set of choices, which is the possibility that an at-bat may go on forever (the batter can foul off as many pitches as he likes, if he can reach them). This infinity-wrapped-in-finitude mirrors the human condition as an organic (limited, contingent) being which can make free (infinite, undetermined) choices. By introducing an element of mechanical judgement onto the field, this whole beautiful structure of freedom is turned into a machine-operated contest, where the machine's opinion becomes the root and standard of the human activity.
Similarly, with a universalist approach to software standards, you see humans engaged in structure-making that essentially capitulates their thinking human nature to the formal, rigorous nature of machine "thought". Scot's comment to the effect that machines are stupid and so we need to provide them with formally-defined inputs is absolutely correct. But that contention hides the fact that we are lowering our standards to the level of the machine we are supposedly controlling. By adopting and propagating rigid standards we become like the machines we operate, and thereby lose something of what makes us unique as thinking, negating, creatively generative beings.
It's absolutely true that defined standards have utility for programmers. It's much easier to program when you have a framework for how to define your data, organize your code, name your variables, and so on. But this is the same as saying it's easier to be a machine than to be a human being. Computers are limited, stupid, mechanical machines, while humans are free, unlimited animals. It's essential to keep in mind the difference, even as you adopt machine-talk in order better to cope with the limitations of the machine-intelligence.
Posted by Chris at 05:48 PM | Comments (0)
Roy Edroso says "je refuse!" to video review in baseball, with a plea for the charm of the old school:
I'm an old crank and I want players to wear baggy pants and have names like "Cap." Well, not really. But too much tech is too much tech, and baseball's threshold of too-much is lower than that of most other endeavors.
I like the baggy pants, high socks, and funky names as much as the next crank. It's one reason I like the players with old school affectations like Nick Swisher or Barry Zito or even El Duque. The latter has the cojones to tug his socks high, wear cashmere turtlenecks off-field, and use an absurd swanlike windup. He even throws an eephus pitch, the very antithesis of modern power pitching techniques.
Edroso says that video review would slow the game down too much, and make mere mortals of the umpires, who are supposed to be Jehovan authorities on-field. I heartily agree here. But I have to disagree with him when he says that the batters' stepping out of the box is contributing to the intolerable slowness of baseball. The between-pitch routines are absolutely essential to the subtle psychology between batter and pitcher. Each is trying to upset the other's rhythm, timing, and routine. With each aware that the other is doing this, the guesses and second-guesses and third-guesses and nth-guesses stack upon one another in an infinite regress unmatched in any other sport. "He knows I like to hit a first-pitch fastball, so I'll probably see something else, but he knows that I know that he knows this, so perhaps he'll surprise me with exactly what I want." And so on. Without the cat-and-mouse stepping in and out of the batter's box, or on and off the pitcher's rubber, this self-contained mutual guessing would fade into the background, and the pitcher-batter relationship would not have nearly the subtlety it does.
Video review would violate the relationship too, by injecting a new element to upset timing. The pitcher and batter provide the timing for every play. Without their mutual agreement, there can be no play. If video review is allowed to interrupt the game, their centrality is destroyed. New tools like Questec pitch tracking, which lets the league penalize umpires for bad ball/strike calls, works non-invasively: the information is collected and only released to the umpire after the game. It's standing over the umpire's shoulder, yes, but it isn't speaking. Video review would produce a new and disruptive "voice" on the field, one which would drown out the pastoral quiet and self-contained simplicity that defines the game.
Posted by Chris at 10:57 AM | Comments (0)
So I went with Marcus to see the A's battle the Mariners at the Coliseum last night. Taking the game as an excuse to get some schoolwork done, Marcus kept a scorecard and jotted notes on the game.
The rookie-heavy A's were leading 2-1 in the eighth inning on some masterful pitching by Rich Harden when he gave up a single and a double with one out. In comes Ricardo Rincon to strike out the next batter. Then Ken Macha drops Rincon for the more favorable righty-righty matchup of screwballer Jim Mecir against Jolbert Cabrera. Bang, Cabrera drops a single to right, scoring both runners. The next batter hit a single, but Mark Kotsay's throw from the outfield was wild, allowing Cabrera to score. 4-2 Mariners, and the game seemed less close than the score. A's fans started bailing out almost at the moment of Kotsay's wild throw. To add insult to injury, the loss dropped Oakland to second place in the AL West race, with no chance of the wild card (Boston has it wrapped up).
The A's September has been full of mental mistakes and lackluster hitting. And the Coliseum has a persistent stink of garbage in the air. Maybe the cleaning crew isn't up to snuff, or the Coliseum neighborhood is just filthy. Marcus chalked it up to the smell of bad baseball being played. With this stench of failure in the air, we didn't even get to see Ichiro set the single-season base hits record. A disappointment all-round.
Posted by Chris at 07:40 AM | Comments (0)
Now this is interesting -- and a welcome relief from the endless news of atrocities that's par for this week. (Others have blogged more eloquently about it than I can.) A baseball historian discovered a document that pushes the origins of baseball back as far as 1791. The place is interesting, too -- Pittsfield, MA, just half an hour from my alma mater. Naturally, the document mentions baseball only to damn it:
For the Preservation of the Windows in the New Meeting House no Person or Inhabitant of said Town, shall be permitted to play at any Game called Wicket, Cricket, Baseball, Batball, Football, Cat, Fives or any other Game or Games with Balls, within the Distance of Eighty Yards from said Meeting House.
Baseball is an indigenous American mutation of an imported cultural pursuit -- like, say, the blues, or country music, or apple pie. This document shows that it goes back at least as far as the early American republic and, I would imagine, a good bit earlier. Not surprising, really, but definitely thought-provoking.
Posted by Chris at 07:34 AM | Comments (0)