Aloha from Hawaii!
Get ready for a few sleep-deprived thoughts from our magic retreat in Kauai!
This week, Molly Knight and I have the great Ken Burns on The Joy of Baseball podcast, and it’s every bit as much fun as you would imagine. Ken is just wonderful. We talk about Buck O’Neil, about fandom, about sharing the game with the people you love, and Ken shares his opinion that the greatest of all Boston Red Sox players is … well, I’ll let Ken tell you.
The FIFTY SEASONS preorder campaign is on … if you preorder the book from Rainy Day Books, I will inscribe the book however you like. And if you preorder from Amazon, B&N, Target, your local bookstore, or anywhere else, be sure to save the receipt because in two or three weeks we’re going to give you a special bonus: You will get the complete table of contents, so you can see exactly which seasons I included, plus a bonus chapter that was cut from the book.
The gorgeous photo above was taken by our pal George Luck on the boat ride that our magic retreat group took on Tuesday. It looks stunning. As I mentioned yesterday, I didn’t go — and I’m glad I didn’t go because apparently numerous people (including George) did get a bit seasick on the trip, and without disrespecting the queasiness quotient for any of the fine people in our group, I’m the Pedro Martinez of seasickness, and they’re all Class AA pitchers by comparison.
But I’m very much enjoying the photographs.*
*George has let me know that, actually, he did not take the awesome photo — that was taken by Robb Fischer. So full credit to Robb. George did get sick, though.
We haven’t talked about them much, but I guess it’s time to ask the question: Are the Seattle Mariners the most disappointing team in baseball this year? They tried to blow a 9-1 lead against the Red Sox on Tuesday, and even though they held on to win, they are still 65-74 and five games back in a division that nobody else seems to want.
There’s something specific about the Mariners that strikes me: They are, by Statcast Outs Above Average, the worst defensive team in baseball, and it isn’t particularly close. They are negative-50 Outs Above Average (Outs Below Average, I guess), and, incredibly, EVERY SINGLE PLAYER except first baseman Josh Naylor is below average.
Naylor is 1 run above average.
1B: Josh Naylor, +1
2B: Cole Young, -5
SS: J.P. Crawford, -10; Colt Emerson, -4
3B: Leo Rivas, -1
LF: Randy Arozarena, -5
CF: Julio Rodríguez, -2
RF: Luke Raley, -6
They don’t list catchers in OAA, but you already know that Cal Raleigh is having a nightmarish, year-after-you-sell-your-soul-to-the-devil offensive season, and his defense seems to have fallen off too. Much of Raleigh’s defensive value was tied up in his ability to frame strikes, and with the ABS challenge system in place, that skill doesn’t play as big a role.
Anyway, the defense has been a catastrophe. The Mariners are dead last in the league in runs scored. The pitching is mostly meh. Their record, mediocre as it is, is actually an overperformance — based on runs scored, they have a 62-77 Pythagorean record.
There’s absolutely no mojo going on, and this team was among the league leaders in mojo last year.
It’s going to happen for Mariners someday — I feel it in my bones. But seasons like this one do break the spirit, don’t they?
We are lucky enough on this trip to be joined by, perhaps, the greatest sleight-of-hand magician in the world, Shoot Ogawa. Here he is doing the incredible linking rings routine, which was named one of the 100 greatest tricks in the world. And here he is doing the invisible coin purse a foot away from Teller; this is as pure sleight of hand as you will ever see.
Anyway, he’s with us, doing magic, talking magic; he’s a wonderful guy, and I’ve been watching him closely and trying to pick up something from him that is larger than magic: I’m trying to understand what it takes to become truly great at something. Take the invisible coin purse. It’s a short routine, maybe two minutes long, and in the end, no elephants disappear, no assistants are sawed in half, no bullets are caught in the teeth.
How do you make such a small thing larger than a good trick? How do you make it art? How do you make it inspire wonder?
I’ll have more to say about this next week, when I’m not in some time-zoneless netherworld (I have no idea what time it is anywhere), but watching Shoot, I think the one-word answer is: Care. He puts so much care into every single thing he does. He thinks through every tiny detail, including a thousand details that you or I would never consider. I suppose this is also what makes a great pitcher, or a great actor, or a great poet. Shoots spends hours and hours considering the angle of his hand in every single second of this routine.
OK, today Joshua Jay is going to teach me the one impossible card trick that I came here to learn. I don’t know what it is yet, but he’s excited. He says it’s a killer.
I mentioned yesterday that Josh has come up with a whole bunch of wild baseball rule changes that he (A) knows will never be implemented but (B) truly believes would make the game better. I’m going to tell you one now because I just got a jolting piece of baseball information from our pal Tango that I honestly didn’t know. Maybe you did.
There are as many foul balls hit in a season as balls hit in play.
That’s 120,000 or so foul balls hit out of play every year — or to give you an even better idea, that’s FORTY-NINE FOUL BALLS EVERY GAME. Josh has taken numerous people from England to games, and he says this is what stops them cold. Josh believes foul balls are so inelegant. They don’t accomplish anything. They add nothing to the narrative of baseball. They take you out of the magic of the game.
There are people — Tom Tango and Bill James among them — who believe that the game would be better if, at some point, a foul ball counted as the third strike. Maybe after two foul balls. Maybe after 5. The number doesn’t matter; their feeling is that it isn’t great for the game for the batter to have unlimited foul balls, especially now that batters are seeing more pitches per at-bat than ever before.
Josh’s solution is something different: He wants to add a third category to an at-bat. Right now, a batter makes an out or doesn’t. Josh’s idea is to add a “stalemate” — which would work like so: After a certain number of foul balls, the at-bat would be considered a draw, and the batter would go back to the dugout, and the next batter would come up. It wouldn’t be an out. It also wouldn’t be a hit or walk. It would be declared a stalemate, and the lineup would just move up one.
I think there are any number of consequences to Josh’s rule that he hasn’t fully considered — for instance, I imagine that this might actually encourage some of the lighter hitters to hit MORE foul balls since it would be a win for them to just keep the lineup moving. And while Josh hopes this will reduce pitch counts, I imagine it would actually ADD to pitch counts because you will have all these at-bats with no result.
What I love about it, though, is that it’s a loving way to look at baseball and think about how it can be better.
Isn't the surprising thing that there are ONLY as many foul balls as balls in play? A plate appearance can have, at most, one ball put in play, but there's no limit to the number of foul balls it can have. I would've guessed there are more foul balls than balls in play.
Back in the day, when Family Guy was at its best, some of the best jokes on the show were the ones that managed to go from funny to annoying to memorable by going on so much longer than you expected (Think, Peter tripping and hitting his shin or the early Chicken fights). I view foul balls the same way: one or two is part of the game, three or four start getting annoying, and then when you have one of those at-bats where the batter fouls off like 10 pitches, that becomes amazing again