It's put down as a strikeout on the scorecard, the backward "K" signifying a called third strike to end the game.
The record of the event doesn't admit the batter's angry glance back at the umpire, however integrally bound to the moment as it actually transpired.
"Glanced angrily at the umpire" must go and live in the realm of yarns about the game, where all the narrative threads that lead to and then out of that angrily given glare at its end can be found, tellings associated however loosely with the game noted in the record.
The yarn, given what people are willing to listen to over and over, may or may not last. It's nice to have a basic record at the very least, and what baseball-reference.com makes of baseball's basic records is an invaluable aid to anyone experiencing the rarely exercised impulse to make informed comment about the game, for whatever good that ever does.
November 08, 2010
November 07, 2010
What I Won
Many's the night I'd trudge the upper deck of Candlestick Park with the coffee urn strapped to my back, the heavy metal cylinder filled with a couple of gallons of atrocious once-hot miner's-camp-quality coffee I was expected to sell to the sparse crowd of regulars already overly familiar with its flavor who populated the upper deck of the place in those years. My supply had its uses in the mixtures they'd make of it with their bottle of something or other pulled as easy as you please in public from a pocket and poured into the solution of melted styrofoam and Foster's Restaurant Blend Coffee I had to offer. And of course there were always the innocents, the ones I'd never yet served the stuff, thinking to cut the uncanny chill of a nighttime game at Candlestick Park with what they'd soon realize they'd expected to be a much, much hotter fluid, however palatable. Even with all that I could expect to make $3.00, or, with a little rushing around from point of possible sale to point of possible sale, as much as $4.00 a night vending the stuff.
[In the freezing chill of the second deck at Candlestick at night, the starched white of the vendors uniform was soon enough splattered with errantly dispensed coffee. No matter how closely the cup was held to the spigot, there was always enough intervening wind to affect the discharge of the liquid stuff. Wet cold coffee covered the clothing of the coffee urn carrier at Candlestick.]
For most vendors, the night was done by the end of the seventh inning, all the crowd's appetite for popcorn or programs or peanuts or hot dogs having been pretty much accommodated for the night, the peak of demand settling in the third through fifth innings, then tailing off to the ignorably few potential customers in the eighth or ninth who weren't worth the trouble anyway. At the end of the seventh, most vendors would cash out and go home for the night, or come back out to the far end of the right field stands and watch what was left of the game if it was at all interesting.
Oh, the beer vendors, serving a constant demand, would come early and work as late as needs be, all through extra innings, sure, stationed at the exits to the parking lot at game's end in any case to get the last wave of customers before shutting down for the night.
But for the lad toting the coffee urn up and down the steps of Candlestick's steep upper deck, any hope for the immediate sale of a supply of coffee large enough to justify cashing out by the end of the seventh was met for most of the game with an informed resistance to the stuff among the regulars who made up the overwhelming majority of the smattering of people who ever sat in the second deck in those years.
Only with the passage of hours and innings, under the very predictable onslaught of a night's weather at Candlestick Park, colder and windier and somehow wetter without exactly raining, and, of course, as the night gets, darker, too, all on matching gradients running up through the innings, would even the most recalcitrant of regulars finally reach a point where they might seriously consider coffee, even knowingly cry out for some, if only for the cup to pour something stronger in. But that's the way it was every night. Aw, the coffee urn carrier in his coffee-soaked clothing, waiting through the long cold innings it took to make customers out of that crowd.
Worth it now.
[In the freezing chill of the second deck at Candlestick at night, the starched white of the vendors uniform was soon enough splattered with errantly dispensed coffee. No matter how closely the cup was held to the spigot, there was always enough intervening wind to affect the discharge of the liquid stuff. Wet cold coffee covered the clothing of the coffee urn carrier at Candlestick.]
For most vendors, the night was done by the end of the seventh inning, all the crowd's appetite for popcorn or programs or peanuts or hot dogs having been pretty much accommodated for the night, the peak of demand settling in the third through fifth innings, then tailing off to the ignorably few potential customers in the eighth or ninth who weren't worth the trouble anyway. At the end of the seventh, most vendors would cash out and go home for the night, or come back out to the far end of the right field stands and watch what was left of the game if it was at all interesting.
Oh, the beer vendors, serving a constant demand, would come early and work as late as needs be, all through extra innings, sure, stationed at the exits to the parking lot at game's end in any case to get the last wave of customers before shutting down for the night.
But for the lad toting the coffee urn up and down the steps of Candlestick's steep upper deck, any hope for the immediate sale of a supply of coffee large enough to justify cashing out by the end of the seventh was met for most of the game with an informed resistance to the stuff among the regulars who made up the overwhelming majority of the smattering of people who ever sat in the second deck in those years.
Only with the passage of hours and innings, under the very predictable onslaught of a night's weather at Candlestick Park, colder and windier and somehow wetter without exactly raining, and, of course, as the night gets, darker, too, all on matching gradients running up through the innings, would even the most recalcitrant of regulars finally reach a point where they might seriously consider coffee, even knowingly cry out for some, if only for the cup to pour something stronger in. But that's the way it was every night. Aw, the coffee urn carrier in his coffee-soaked clothing, waiting through the long cold innings it took to make customers out of that crowd.
Worth it now.
November 04, 2010
Subhead Frustrates Understanding
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| No, You Go Crazy |
I get why these two guys are joyously embracing. They're teammates, San Francisco Giants, 2010 World Series Champions, and this page from the San Jose Mercury News is the front of a whole special section on the Series and its deciding game, the line score of which is printed above the picture of the two guys hugging. Fine.
But what's all this about 58 years of frustration? What frustration, and who held it all these years and for what exactly? I'm sure commenters have somewhere gnawed this question to rags and I'll add this:
The subhead reads, GIANTS END 58 YEARS OF FRUSTRATION, but of course the Giants won the World Series 56 years ago, in 1954, meaning that the frustration referred to in the subhead that is now ended must lie two years further in the past than that, not to be resolved by a mere World Series Championship in the meantime, but going back as far as some pivotal moment in 1952 in fact, 58 years ago, just as DeLillo would have us believe in Underworld, some irksome something persisting until this year's historic season put an end to it.
The precise nature of this frustration is left as an exerise for the reader.
November 02, 2010
World News Tonight
For a lucid account of game five of the 2010 world Series, I recommmend the BBC.
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| Giants 11- 7, Giants 9- 0, Rangers 4-2, Giants 4-0, Giants 3-1 |
November 01, 2010
San Francisco Beat
Here's Henry Schulman, the San Francisco Chronicle's Giants beat writer, the fellow whose job it is to follow the team around all year long reporting, by way of the Chronicle's Sporting Green, and in fewer than 600 words if at all possible, on almost every game the San Francisco Giants play throughout the lengthy Major League Baseball season. This is the last Giants game he'll have to report on this year, because, improbably, but according to Schulman's witness, known for its probity lo these many years on the beat, the Giants have won enough of them to become champions of Major League Baseball this year and won't need to play any more to prove it.
October 30, 2010
October 29, 2010
Texas Tagged Twice: Giants Lead Series 2-0
October 28, 2010
Study Shows Probability of Something Eventually Happening in A Baseball Game Approaches 1!
Last night Freddy Sanchez, appearing in a World Series for the first time, hit a double in each of his first three plate apearances, something no one had ever done before. Any batter who hits three consecutive doubles is realizing a marvelous improbability. Hitting two in a row is a rare event itself in regular play. But now there's a unique record of accomplishment against which to measure the first three at-bats of every future first-time batter: can you clear the unlikely bar that Sanchez set with his three World Series doubles?
October 27, 2010
A World Series Factlet: Attention Umpires
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent
If you can't say it, you do leave it silently unsaid; sometimes this is for the best, sometimes not, your purposes being what they are.
You may or may not have vocabulary adequate to express that of which "whereof" bespeaks. If you can't form the meaningful words thereof, if it's out of the bounds of what's expressible by you, everything you can say can be about something else but never quite that which you might have said on that for which you must now remain silent perforce, not having the adequate words.
Or, it may simply never occur to you, either from ignorance or preoccupation, to say anything at all on the matter. Whereof you know not, thereof you shall not speak, so to say.
Or you may be interrupted or distracted before you have a chance to say what you had to say, leading to a silence equalling the other silences collecting around the prospective word thereof.
Wittgenstein was into some pretty abstruse arguments in his little chapbook, the Tractatus, but this last one, good old proposition 7, is the one that certainly justifies but rarely predicts my own silence on this and a raft of other subjects.
If you can't say it, you do leave it silently unsaid; sometimes this is for the best, sometimes not, your purposes being what they are.
You may or may not have vocabulary adequate to express that of which "whereof" bespeaks. If you can't form the meaningful words thereof, if it's out of the bounds of what's expressible by you, everything you can say can be about something else but never quite that which you might have said on that for which you must now remain silent perforce, not having the adequate words.
Or, it may simply never occur to you, either from ignorance or preoccupation, to say anything at all on the matter. Whereof you know not, thereof you shall not speak, so to say.
Or you may be interrupted or distracted before you have a chance to say what you had to say, leading to a silence equalling the other silences collecting around the prospective word thereof.
Wittgenstein was into some pretty abstruse arguments in his little chapbook, the Tractatus, but this last one, good old proposition 7, is the one that certainly justifies but rarely predicts my own silence on this and a raft of other subjects.
October 23, 2010
October 16, 2010
October 14, 2010
October 10, 2010
October 04, 2010
Baseball !!!
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| A Lesson in Lens Flare From The Giants' Official Photographer |
The San Francisco Giants won the National League West Division Sunday, the last day of the 2010 regular season. They improved on last year's record of 88-74 by an additional four wins, ending the season with the second-best record in the National League at 92-70. This is a good thing.
The National League's Pittsburgh Pirates, Major League Baseball's weakest club, won 57 games this year. It takes, unarguably, the assembling of a fair amount of talent to win more than a third of the games your team plays against the best ballplayers in the world. Sadly for true Pirates fans, a fair amount of talent is no match for the exceptional amount of talent assembled on the better teams in the National League.
Giving the Pirates a pass, the worst teams in baseball will win roughly four of every ten games played each year, and the best teams not quite six of every ten, with all the other middling teams spread somewhere in between. Every additional win over 81 wins is harder and harder to achieve. Winning 100 games in a 162-game season, just a fraction more than six of ten, is a relatively rare phenomenon in baseball, rarer than a pitcher winning 20 games or a batter hitting 50 home runs, singular accomplishments in themselves, and it didn't happen this year. The Philadelphia Phillies won 97, not quite as good a season as Pittsburgh's was bad, but certainly marking them as the favorite to advance in the playoffs leading to the World Series.
Great pitching, solid defense and some timely hitting is an age-old formula for winning baseball. The Giants benefited from the best pitching in baseball this year and a surprisingly solid defense, but only an average offense.
The San Diego Padres, built along the same lines as the Giants, had superior pitching and defense this year as well, and only five percent fewer runs scored than the Giants — not a horrible offense surely, not Pittsburgh horrible or Houston horrible or even Mets horrible at scoring runs, but no dynamo of offense like Cincinnati or Philadephia or Atlanta, either, — and it was almost inevitable that at least one team of that sort would advance to the playoffs. Being in the same division, the Padres and the Giants met 18 times during the year, and the Giants very average offense showed, throughout the season and again this past weekend, that it could win one of three games against the very best pitching in baseball. The Padres took the season series against the Giants 12-6, and they won this past weekend's series 2-1. Even excellent Giants pitching wasn't enough against the Padres this year: Jonathan Sanchez gave up one hit, a single, in seven innings against the Padres back in April and lost 1-0 to Matt Latos. A few weeks later he faced the Padres and Latos again, and gave up three hits in eight innings and lost 1-0 again, too. Latos, the Padres pitcher, won both games, and drove in the only run himself in the second game with a two out basehit. In the last game of the season Latos and Sanchez faced each other yet again, and this time it was Sanchez with the unexpected hit, a triple (!) that positioned him to score the first, and as it proved, the only necessary run of the game that clinched the National League West Division title for the Giants.
October 01, 2010
Giants Baseball: Torture
The Giants spotted the San Diego Padres six runs by the fifth inning and I made a quick retreat to the garage and succumbed to the ministrations of some Van Morrison: I found echidne's YouTube link to "Into the Mystic", and it was a balm. I looked on ESPN's MLB scores page and saw that the Giants had pulled four runs out of their hat to make a contest of the thing: 6-4. When "Into the Mystic" ended I used the little pictorial index of Van Morrison tunes at the bottom of the YouTube screen to scroll over to "Sweet Thing and The Way Young Lovers Do and I played those two, opening up a window with just YouTube in it, and playing Ballerina again in that window, too. By then it was the eighth inning and the ESPN Play-by-Play page showed the Giants had a couple of guys on base, two outs, and Torres, this night's Wille Mac Award winner for 2010, up at the plate.
September 27, 2010
September 20, 2010
Annals of the Long Now
Among the interviews collected at the Paris Review site is a recent interview with John McPhee, where he allows that the sense of geological time he rubbed up against for twenty years creating Annals of the Former World (1998), associating with geologists who say a million years is the smallest plausible unit they can think in, has taken its necessary toll on his own perspective:
The fact is that everything I’ve written is very soon going to be absolutely nothing—and I mean nothing. It’s not about whether little kids are reading your work when you’re a hundred years dead or something, that’s ridiculous! What’s a hundred years? Nothing. And everything, it doesn’t evanesce, it disappears. And time goes on, and the planet does what it’s going to do.
September 18, 2010
Is That My Shoe You're Eating, Or Are You Just Glad to See Me?
Two idiosyncratic masters of filmmaking, Errol Morris and Werner Herzog, appear in conversation at the Toronto International Film Festival [via kottke]:
The rest of the lenghty interview, in four parts, can be found here.
My man Werner's charming, insistent, ingenuous bluntness would be tactless in a fellow who cared at all about such philosophical trivialities as tact when the precision of a sentiment is at stake.
The rest of the lenghty interview, in four parts, can be found here.
My man Werner's charming, insistent, ingenuous bluntness would be tactless in a fellow who cared at all about such philosophical trivialities as tact when the precision of a sentiment is at stake.
September 17, 2010
Baseball (!!)
With 15 games left on the schedule, the San Francisco Giants (83-64) took over first place in the National League's West Division last night, demolishing the hapless Los Angeles Dodgers of Los Angeles 10-2. It's there to be found out in the forthcoming final two weeks of play whether this proves to be the high point of the season for the Giants or instead a local maximum on a path ascending to the global maximum of the Championship of Major League Baseball itself.
Any victory is sweet, and any victory over the Dodgers is sweeter, but especially a victory clinching this year's season series against what are surely, even to the dispassionate eye, a bunch of bums. "Well, the lads beat the Dodgers that year," is all the good that can be said to salvage the memory of many a season for the Giants, more's the pity, as all the club's fans are aware. But it can be said of this season, now, at the very least. The Giants beat the Dodgers this year. Baseball has done some good again.
Any victory is sweet, and any victory over the Dodgers is sweeter, but especially a victory clinching this year's season series against what are surely, even to the dispassionate eye, a bunch of bums. "Well, the lads beat the Dodgers that year," is all the good that can be said to salvage the memory of many a season for the Giants, more's the pity, as all the club's fans are aware. But it can be said of this season, now, at the very least. The Giants beat the Dodgers this year. Baseball has done some good again.
September 15, 2010
Baseball (!)
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| The Popular Game of Baseball |
Sam offered me a ticket to tonight's Giants-Dodgers game at AT&T Park in San Francisco. Years ago, with my father and my mother's father, I went to a Giants-Dodgers night game at Seals Stadium. I don't remember how we got there, drove down Harrison and parked on some side street maybe, or took a jitney down Mission Street and walked. Today I'll be taking the bus over Hwy 17 to San Jose's Diridon Station, and from there the train to AT&T Park.
So there we were, sitting high up above and well back from the field not too far down the right field line, a young guy named Sandy Koufax pitching a pretty steady game for the Dodgers into the ninth inning that night, the Dodgers sitting on a two-run lead when lo and behold a rally broke out and the Giants loaded the bases. Koufax was done. My grandfather, who brooked no dispute when it came to baseball matters, begrudged, "This young guy's a good pitcher, Koufax" as Koufax walked off. Subsequent events proved the rueful truth of this judgement to all those who despise the Dodgers of Los Angeles. They brought in Art Fowler to face Leon Wagner, pinch-hitting for the Giants. Wagner, observing as he later put it that "the bags was bulgin'," stepped up to the plate and hit a grand slam home run into the right field stands that won the game for the Giants, 6-4. It remains to be seen what tonight's game has in store. Another wondrous victory for the Giants over the Dodgers would be fine by me.
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