Wordful Wednesday: The Baseball Codes
I'm a sucker for a good baseball book, and The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing, and Bench-Clearing Brawls: The Unwritten Rules of America's Pastime, by Jason Turbow (with Michael Duca), is an excellent baseball book.
I sometimes find myself defending my position that baseball is just inherently and obviously superior to football and basketball, and there are any number of justifications I can give. I can point out that in baseball, in contradistinction to the other two, you have to finish the game. No clock. If you're up by ten runs in the first inning, you still have to hold your opponent down for eight more innings.
Or I could point out that a superstar offensive player still has to wait his turn to bat. He doesn't always come up in the bottom of the ninth. You can't just pass the ball to Kobe and hope he can make something happen. That's awesome.
But more than anything, baseball is cool because it's old. It has history behind it. And yes, there are a lot of rules, but they don't cover everything that goes on during a game. For that, it has unwritten rules, the Code by which the players police themselves, their teammates, and the other team. 
As the blog for this book points out, we had an excellent example of the Code in a recent series between the Yankees and Tigers. Yankees left-fielder Brett Gardner took out Tigers shortstop Carlos Guillen (former Mariner, woo!) with a hard slide while trying to break up a potential game-ending double play. (Double play turned, game over, Tigers won, BTW.)
Now, no shortstop or second baseman is going to take exception to an opponent trying to cleanly break up a DP. However, Gardner slid so late that he basically tackled Guillen. He was within reach of second base, so the official rulebook didn't say he'd done anything wrong. But the Code says you don't try to injure another player.
(To be clear, Gardner wasn't trying to hurt Guillen, but his slide was dirty, even if it was unintentional.)
Sure enough, when Gardner came to bat against Tigers pitcher Jeremy Bonderman in the next game, he took one in the leg. He took the hit and ran down to first base. The announcers even commented that he must have known that was coming. The Tigers wanted Gardner to know that a dirty slide wasn't appreciated.
(Note: Bonderman didn't throw at his head. He hit him in the ankle. Not a beanball. Apples to oranges.)
Asked about the plunking after the game, Bonderman responded in line with the Code: "No comment." In other words, it stays on the field.
Retaliation is only one part of the Unwritten Rules, of course, though it's a major one. A player can expect to get brushed back or knocked down, or even drilled, when he commits any number of Code violations. Some will say that it's just a game, let it go, but they miss the point somewhat. In any line of work, there's a code of ethics that doesn't rise to the level that needs to be dealt with by the company that pays the workers. It's kept in house and dealt with person-to-person.
Of course, some of the Unwritten Rules are just plain outdated, or have at least fallen by the wayside. Time was, you'd find yourself getting brushed back if you tried to dig in against a pitcher. Now you see every player doing it. (BTW, my favorite tidbit, and a line I'll have to use, is Nolan Ryan's characterization of bad behavior on a batter's part as "asking for a bow-tie.")
Other rules are just plait out-of-touch with the way the game works these days. The idea that a team shouldn't run up the score is fine and dandy for basketball or football or any other clock-based game. But in baseball, you have to finish the game.
Case in point (BTW, the book covered this, but I remember it vividly), Indians/Mariners in August 2001. I was working in the backyard and had my pickup pulled in back there (filling it with dirt from a patio I was digging), with Dave Niehaus blasting on the speakers, enjoying the M's dismantling the Tribe.
They were ahead 12-0 after three innings. After the Indians scored two runs, the Mariners answered and still led 14-2 after five innings. By the seventh inning, Ichiro!, John Olerud and Edgar Martinez had been replaced by the M's manager. Game out of reach, right? Well, no, because the Indian's promptly scored three runs in the bottom of the seventh. 14-5.
Then four in the bottom of the eighth. 14-9.
Then five in the bottom of the ninth. 14-14. Yeah, you see where this is going, don't you? Ultimately, the Indians scored a run in the bottom of the eleventh to win the game. My blood pressure still hasn't come back down. The way I was ranting back there, the neighbors probably thought I was burying a few bodies.
Now, twelve runs seems like a safe lead, doesn't it? Pulling Ichiro! and Edgar made sense, right? Why waste them in a laugher? But in baseball, once you're out of the game, you're out. It's not like basketball where you can sit your starters until it gets interesting.
I'm realizing that I'm not really mentioning the book much here. But I take that as a compliment to the authors, because their book made me think about baseball, which is awesome.
But getting back to the actual book, I found the section on clubhouse pranks to be absolutely hysterical. The fact that Bert Blyleven was so legendary for giving the hot-foot (lighting a teammate's shoe on fire) that the dugout fire extinguisher was marked "In case of Blyleven, pull" had me in stitches. And the "pig story" from the 1970s Milwaukee Brewers is just a classic. Ask me about it. If I can stop laughing long enough, I'll give you the lowdown. But the upshot is that revenge is a dish best served with a very dirty piglet.
I think the book could have benefitted from including some of the more recent additions to the Code, though I suppose the ones I'm thinking about are really more like Stupid Stuff Managers Do, like letting a close game slip away in the seventh inning while their best reliever watches from the bullpen. If you're paying him Closer money, get him in when the game is on the line, even if it's the late-middle innings. Oh, and don't pay money for a closer. You can get good ones for cheap.
Another thing that irks me is all the bunting that goes on early in games. In the National League, you'll bunt your pitchers whenever they come up, sure, but no other player should bunt before the fifth inning unless your team is really struggling to score runs (BTW, you might be struggling to score runs because you're giving away outs by bunting all the time).
Yeah, I've changed my mind. My idea stinks. The book was as close to perfect as it could be. Pick it up and read it.
(Besides, Rob Neyer covered the mangled roles of relievers in Rob Neyer's Big Book of Baseball Blunders.)
Next up is Gridlock: Why We're Stuck in Traffic and What to Do About It.
(Oh, and I caved and picked up The Last Olympian. But I want it known that I'm patiently waiting for my Hold Request for Mockingjay to come through.)
What the World Cup needs to learn from Isner and Mahut
Right away I should say that I appreciate the World Cup. I even dig soccer a bit. True, baseball is a better sport, but that really goes without saying, since it’s better than all other sports. But soccer is certainly more popular than all other sports the world over. Keep in mind, though, that Lady Gaga is popular. Popularity isn’t everything.
But I like the drama of the World Cup. What I don’t like is seeing games decided with penalty kicks. Finish. The. Game.
For those of you who don’t know who John Isner and Nicolas Mahut are, you probably don’t watch either Wimbledon or Sportscenter. Isner is American, Mahut is French, and they’re playing an entire tournament in one match. Neither of them is really highly-ranked, but the match they’re still playing is going to be famous.
You see, they started this match two days ago. Isner won the first set 6-4. Mahut won the second 6-3. They then went to tiebreaks in sets three and four, with each man winning one. And then the match was suspended for darkness (there’s only lights on Centre Court).
So yesterday they picked up the match in the fifth set.
And.
They.
Played.
All.
Day.
At Wimbledon, a five-set-match can’t end on a tiebreak. Which means you have to win the fifth by two games. Which means you must win a game on the other guy’s serve (called a service break). And these guys can’t do it anymore. (They could in sets one and two, but then they both started serving incredibly well…more than 200 aces combined for the match.)
The fifth set has now gone on longer than any other match in the history of Wimbledon. Nearly eight hours. And it was suspended a second time. As I write this, the match has resumed, and Isner just won a service game and leads 65-64 in the final set. Maybe he’ll break and this thing’ll be over.
(Update: Isner wins the final set 70-68. Think he’ll have anything in the tank for his next match?)
Keep in mind here that in a total blowout, 6-0, 6-0, 6-0, we’re looking at eighteen games. The fifth set has gone more than a hundred and twenty games.
It’s awesome. Soccer needs to learn from this. Make somebody win it in regulation. I understand ending matches on a draw at least until the championship game, and I would even argue that Wimbledon might be well-served in removing the “no winning on a tie-break in a five-setter” rule until the final match. But the World Cup should never, ever, ever, ever be decided with penalty kicks. There’s just no excuse for it. Go sudden death and make them play it out.
Argh!!!…the Baseball…it burns!!!!
Quite a weekend we had. And okay, it’s true that my face resembles Spock’s at the end of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, after he repaired the reactor and was exposed to extreme radiation. But the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Besides, shouldn’t all real baseball fans (and coaches and assistants) look like Harvey Two-Face after a triple-header?
The problem was that we were playing baseball in the City League Tournament and June decided to show up, and it caught us unawares. Well, that and the team kept winning.
We started off Saturday morning against a tough team, with an ump who was calling a strike zone appropriate for your average five-year-old Hobbit. We outhit the other team, but they walked again and again. Bummer. But we soundly trounced the next team thanks to a homer from a certain boy who shall remain nameless but who shares a last name with me. (He homered twice and only struck out once in five games. In my unbiased opinion, he’s an easy choice for MVP. Though I do have to admit that while he might’ve been the offensive star, one of his buddies was the defensive wizard, pitching extremely effectively and making a couple of key catches of pop-ups.)
So we came to Sunday morning and were expecting to play a game. And play we did. Our boys were all of a sudden en fuego at the dish. Kids who hadn’t sniffed a hit all season were suddenly putting the ball in play. And if they didn’t reach base every time, they still brought in some runs. We even had three kids take one for the team in one game. And one of those kids got plunked twice. Tough way to get aboard, but it beats a strikeout…most of the time.
(I should also point out that Hobbit-zone-ump was not in play on Sunday.)
We also started two pitchers who hadn’t, you know, pitched at all the whole season, and they were just tremendous. I can’t recall now if it was the first or the second game we played, but all four of our pitchers absolutely slammed the door on that team, shutting them out 8-0 over five innings. You’ve gotta love it when your eight- to ten-year-old kids are getting through an inning on fewer than fifteen pitches. And this was against a team who had beaten us 11-2 or so in a game a few weeks back. Owned!
Ultimately, we ran into a very tough team in the Bronze Medal game and stood toe-to-toe with them before going down in five innings. But we softened them up for the championship game. But our boys earned that third place finish. Go Blue Sox!
Wordful Wednesday: The Castle of Llyr
Take any five-book series, and you can probably count on having strong feelings about the first and last, and then a mixture of impressions of the rest. Of course, my own opinions on The Prydain Chronicles are somewhat different, having great affection for books two and five. If anything, book one (The Book of Three), is the one I’m ambivalent about.
Well, I just finished reading book three, The Castle of Llyr, and I can honestly say that I was surprised. Now, this is probably my third or fourth reading of the book, but I honestly didn’t remember anything about it except for one particular scene. So you can imagine that I’d consider the book forgettable.
Not so! I don’t know if it was just the difference in reading it aloud to my son, but I really, really enjoyed The Castle of Llyr
this time.
The story is less complicated than the previous books, but it did something that I guess I should have expected: It focused on Taran. But, of course, it focused on Taran’s reaction to Eilonwy’s leaving Caer Dallben in order to become a Lady (she’s already a Princess, but a bit of a tomboy).
I do remember that reading The Prydain Chronicles was the first time I really identified with the idea of love and marriage being a cool thing. I just didn’t remember that those themes started to come out so early.
In this book, Taran once again grows more into manhood by accepting responsibility for someone he doesn’t really like, though the readers do like him. While Taran views Prince Rhun as a feckless fool, the reader can see that he’s really a good sort, just a bit scatterbrained and ill-equipped to be a leader. And he’s not entirely worthless, of course.
Once again, of course, Fflewddur Flam shines as my favorite character, and Gurgi as The Boy’s favorite. I prefer lines like this one:
“If there were a field with one stone in it he’d trip over it. A Fflam is patient, but there are limits!”
The Boy prefers this kind:
“Move aside heavy stone, evil, wicked little giant! Take away lockings and blockings! Or rageful Gurgi will smack your great feeble head!”
Actually, they’re both gold.
We actually finished reading this one on Amtrak Cascades on the way to Seattle. Very cool, that. But it made for a long day which capped an even longer long weekend. We were up at the crack of dawn Saturday and Sunday, taking Swimmer Son (aka The Pancake Eater) to a meet in Portland. It was a Sextathlon, where each swimmer in the various age-groups swam the same six events, and then were ranked based on their total time. The Boy was pretty happy with the huge second-place trophy he got. Check it out if you like.
And then there was the early morning wake-up for getting to Union Station on Monday. And the late night getting back.
Anyhow, I stopped into the Library yesterday and discovered that I’d lost track of some of my Hold Requests. You see, I like to request a book as soon as I decide to read it, but then set the activation date for it so that it doesn’t impact anything I’m currently working on. Then, I monitor those requests and re-set the activation date if my schedule doesn’t clear at the right time. But sometimes I get lazy and set a whole block of them to activate on May 15. And then they all show up at the Library on May 18.
So now I have five books out from the Library, and much as my common sense tells me to just return two of them, I fully intend to read all five in the next three weeks. Pending thumb-through, of course. But I think it’s going to happen. So those other two I’d recently checked out, which are actually on my To Be Read list, will just have to wait.
And so, I’ll reveal that next up is The Titan’s Curse, Book Three in the Percy Jackson series. It was the easiest choice among the five.
Trivia Hunt, One-Time Activation, Knee
This is your monthly reminder (though I didn’t remind you last month) about MentalFloss.com’s “How Did You Know?” 5-Day Trivia Hunt. It swings into action tomorrow, and it’s really tons of fun, with little bits of extremely frustrating mixed in. But if you work on it and I work on it, we can team up. Seriously…teamwork is encouraged. So be there!
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And now, a new feature: Things which make life unbearably entertaining. Today’s thing is this: When I go into the FIOS TV Central thingy online to set up a program to record (like, for instance, a Mariners game), I have to click this “One-Time Activation” button for Remote DVR. Every time. But they assure me it’s One-Time Activation, but what it means is one-time-every-time. It’s a new way of using the English language. Which probably shouldn’t surprise me, having spoken to their tech-support people.
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Well, it’s once again time for me to go in and have a doctor tell me what’s wrong with my knee. But it’s the other knee this time. Not the knee I bent the wrong direction while playing broom hockey (in high school) and snowboarding (ten years ago). So this is progress! But being able to exercise without pain would be a nice change.
A Hyper-Sharp Pencil, and the Dishwasher
I was thinking of writing a blog post about the strange, strange, strange dream I had last night, but I have to first get approval from the other party to the strangeness. And even then, it’s not going to happen. But it was boring anyway, having mostly to do with mundane stuff like running and swimming and fishhooks…and public nudity. How could that be a good post?
Instead, I wanted to ramble about something that occurred to me last night. I was watching The Pancake Eater sharpen a pencil, and it reminded me of how particular a certain best friend of mine used to be about getting his writing instrument just perfectly sharp. I’m talking “edge so sharp you can’t see the tip without a scanning-electron-microscope” sharp. In fact, his obsession with perfect sharpness got him into all kinds of trouble with Mr. Hellenga. “Dolezal, take your seat!”
(He also got in hot water for his walk-running to the drinking fountain. As background, perhaps you recall that if you want cold water from the fountain, you pretty much have to be one of the first kids to use it. Otherwise, you’d end up with a 
very tepid drink. My friend could make the fountain in about four seconds, but his race-walking qualified as running with basically all the teachers. But he could move!)
I’m not sure why I got to thinking about this, other than the fact that I have a piece of perfectly sharp pencil lead embedded, to this day, in my left hand. It was an accidental puncture, and it happened in seventh grade. I once tried to dig it out, but it wasn’t worth the pain. Ask me to show it to you next time you see me. It’s a nice, concrete memory of youthful obsessions.
I’ve never been a particularly obsessive person, other than as regards general hygiene and hand-washing. But that doesn’t count, because of the whole “next to godliness” thing. But I think if I had to pick an issue, I’d go with the loading of the dishwasher. There’s a right way to do it, and only I have the secret to it. Which might be why The Fair Elaine doesn’t enjoy sharing the duty with me. She’s gotten too used to me just saying, “Back away. Just back away.”
What about you? Any strange obsessions? Or lingering puncture wounds? Or dreams of running in the buff? (Oh, I wasn’t going to write about that.)
Hockey, Ice Skating, Teach Dad?, Cashew Cream, Validation
So I was definitely rooting for USA to win that Hockey game yesterday, but I can’t deny it was an awesome game. And I definitely would’ve felt worse for Canada missing out on the gold.
The Pancake-Eating Son has suddenly become enamored of hockey. He so enjoyed the Winterhawks game I took him to that he told me hockey was now his favorite sport.
In fact, he told me he wasn’t really interested in baseball anymore (!) but would rather play hockey.
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I figured he should try ice skating first. So, I packed him into the car and drove out to Sherwood Ice Arena. (We can get there in about four traffic lights. I love taking the back roads).
Long story short, hockey has fallen out of favor somewhat, though the boy still wants to take in a few more Hawks games.
Now, if we lived in Alaska, I’d have had the boy skating at age three or so, so he’d be like his old man and not really remember learning to skate. And he’d absolutely be playing hockey. It’s just an awesome game to play, and no other sports accomplishment feels as good as scoring a goal (at least in my experience).
(Confession: I’ve never relished the idea of watching outdoor hockey like my dad did so many times.)
But back to the skating. We got there about an hour before the public skating session was over, so we got to pay a reduced price. And we got our skates on and stepped onto the ice. Immediately, I knew something was wrong. The skates were too dull. Or the ice was too slick (it had just been resurfaced).
Or perhaps it was just that it’d been, oh, eighteen years or so since I’d been skating. Of course, it didn’t take too long for me to get my feet under me and get a feel for how the blade goes on the ice. I even managed to flip around backward and cross-over and stuff. Sweet. And I remembered how to execute a good hockey stop (spraying the boy with ice shavings).
But once I got the boy out there, he couldn’t make the transition. And I’ve never taught an eight-year-old to skate. A forty-year-old, yes, but more on that later.
There were tears. And petitions that could we please go home? But I had paid a bit of money to get us in there, so I had the boy just watch his old dad skate awhile. Eventually he manned up and ventured out with me again, and we made one complete circuit of the ice together. There was even some grinning.
Still, I’m not sure if he wants to go again. But if we do, we’ll have to bring a photographer with us.
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As I mentioned above, Dad was the designated Hockey Parent back when I played. And in Anchorage, that means outdoor practice and outdoor midweek games. In short, it means dedication. The weekend games, played at Ben Boeke Ice Arena or UAA were a bit easier on a parent. But the outdoor ones made you think of “The Cremation of Sam McGee”.
One of the best parts of an outdoor game is that sometimes, Dad would take me out for donuts and cocoa after a game. Even if we lost. Which was most of the time.
The thing I really admire about my dad, looking back, is that he tried to learn the game so he could engage with me on it. To the point of taking to skates at age forty-and-then-some. I had already, with help of another friend, taught a third friend to skate (so we could play one-on-two hockey, which is awesome), so how hard could it be to teach Dad?
Hard. Especially on Dad. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s still sore from some of the bruises he got. Because ice, while being nice for skating, tends toward hard when you fall on it. And I’m not sure we outfitted him with proper pads or anything. Pretty much just skates. (BTW, Dad, do you still have those skates? I’d take them off your hands if you do, if they’d fit my big flippers.)
Looking back, it’s probably good we never tried to teach Dad to downhill ski. Because we weren’t very good teachers.
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Completely out of left field here, but we discovered that Cashew Cream really works. Rewinding a bit, recall that we’re a semi-veg family. We try to eat meatless fairly often. So we tend to give Vegetarian/Vegan cookbooks a look pretty often. Well, one of the magical veg ingredients I saw in one such volume was Cashew Cream. Basically, you make thick Nut Milk with raw cashews. And you use it in place of cream.
Well, we made some pretty terrific semi-veg Potato-Leek soup (we used Chicken Broth because that’s what was in the pantry, but it’d work with Imagine Foods’ No-Chicken Broth). The Cashew Cream worked beautifully and even looked like cream when I mixed it in.
So now I’ll have to look for other ways to use this magical ingredient.
Kind of a long post today. But I haven’t posted on Monday in a long time.
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And the long post continues. Mental Floss’s Morning Cup of Links had one I had to pass along, and through the magic of embedding, you can just stay right here and appreciate it. It’s a short film titled “Validation,” and I found it surprisingly touching. I guess I’m just a softie.
Olympics
As The Fair Elaine mentioned today, the Olympics have seriously impacted our normal evening schedule. So I thought I’d chime in briefly with my thoughts.
Bottom line: I like events with objective results. Give me, any day, Snowboard Cross or Super G or the Downhill or Speed Skating. I’ve enjoyed, in the past, some of the Ice Skating, but I just prefer it all coming down to the clock.
BTW, Snowboard Cross is my new favorite event. All the downhill skiing events are also awesome, though.
I also think Curling is pretty cool.
That’s about it, I guess. What are your favorite events?
Ninja Warrior and Competition
Quick comment on the Super Bowl here. Trivial Pursuit is better.
(We managed to miss the onside-kick that sparked the Saints’ getting back in the game. DVR good. And WTG, Saints.)
So it’s getting toward baseball season here, and I’m not just going to wax poetic about how much better baseball is than football, because there’s really little left to be said, and it’s so manifestly true.
No, instead I’d like to opine a bit about competition. I often hear from other parents that they want their boy (I’m being boy-centric here, because I am one, and I have one) to be in a non-competitive league. I. Just. Don’t. Understand. This.
Okay, so I do understand wanting to give kids a low-pressure way to experience sports. And maybe it’s a good entry point, or a toes-in-the-water point for kids who probably aren’t wired for sports competition.
But I think there’s something we miss when we remove competition, and when all the kids get trophies. As Dash put it in The Incredibles, after his mom (Elastigirl) commented that “everyone is special”:
“Which is the same as saying nobody’s special.”
Now, I’m all for rewarding effort and not just performance, and I can see the argument for a trophy being a good carrot to dangle, even if it’s not earned by performance so much as participation.
But shouldn’t our kids be learning to lose well? Learning that, hard as you try, you just might be on a pretty lousy team? That it’s okay to lose if you tried your best?
The thing is, in teaching our kids about losing well, we also get to teach them how to win well. And they learn how great it feels to win.
(Incidentally, this is why I generally don’t let the Boy win. I want him to feel good when he beats me. Though I do sometimes handicap myself to level the playing field. But within those strictures, I still try to win.)
As I’ve written before, we’re big fans of Sasuke, known in America as Ninja Warrior. It’s a lot like ABC’s Wipeout, only a hundred times cooler.
It’s basically the world’s toughest obstacle course, but it’s not just the obstacles that make it cool. It’s the fact that they might go SEVEN YEARS WITHOUT A WINNER!!!!!
On Wipeout, there’s always a winner of the $50k prize. Twenty-four start the competition, and one of them wins it.
On Ninja Warrior, one hundred people start the competition, and most of the time, one hundred are eliminated. Sometimes only two or three even make it past Stage One (of Four). Oh, and the prize is less than $20k.
And they keep making the course harder. If you look back at the first winner (there have been two winners out of more than twenty competitions), his course was much easier than the second winner’s.
But of course, sometimes somebody does win. For instance, The Pancake Eating Boy’s current hero, Makoto Nagano. Here’s a video of him completing all four stages back on Sasuke 17 (the video lacks G4’s English translation, or you’d get the impression that the announcer has just as big a Man Crush on Nagano as The Boy does):
The Boy gets seriously emotionally invested in watching his Main Dude on Sasuke. When Nagano fails, the Boy is very put out.
I think it says something about the Japanese that they’re willing to watch a competition that may not even have a winner and most of the time doesn’t. (Strictly speaking, I think you could call the course itself the winner most of the time.)
But there’s another good lesson on Ninja Warrior, and that’s respect for your opponent. It’s really cool to see the way all the contestants pull for each other. Granted, they’re not really competing against each other, but it’s still awesome to watch how disappointed the All-Stars are when one of their ilk fails early. Even cooler was when all the All-Stars were eliminated (Nagano fell on the first obstacle of Stage Two) and only American free-runner Levi Meeuwenberg was left standing. They did their best to coach him through Stage Three (this time with English subtitles):
Am I off base (Shocking, eh? Baseball term!) about competition? I love the fact that the Boy’s Fall Ball team didn’t win any games last year. It’ll make a winning experience all the more awesome. Plus, it pulls a layer back so the experiences of individual games are the best parts. Okay, so we didn’t win a game, but I made a great play at first base. Or I scored two goals in a losing hockey game.
I could see how a kid could get spoiled by always being on a winning team, but how often does that really happen? When I think back to my Little League days, I only remember being on one pretty good team (hmm…and I was the common element on all those lousy teams). But that one winning year stands out as a highlight for me.
Thoughts? I know this wasn’t a normal Monday post, but I haven’t written a lengthy non-theology post in some time.