“There are two theories on hitting the knuckleball. Unfortunately, neither of them works.”
– Charley Lau
More proof magic exists.
Posnanski, Joe. Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments. United States, Penguin Publishing Group, 2023. pg 17
Category: baseball
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Ah, the knuckleball. Nothing in the whole world like it. Willie Stargell called the knuckleball a butterfly with hiccups. Bobby Mercer said hitting one is like eating Jell-O with chopsticks. Tim McCarver said catching one is like trying to seize a moth with tweezers.
– Joe Posnanski
The knuckleball is proof magic exists.
Posnanski, Joe. Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments. United States, Penguin Publishing Group, 2023. pg 17
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I recall as a young boy owning some Willie Mays baseball cards. He simply seemed classier and more special than the other players, as if he had some magic, secret power that others did not.
– Tyler Cowen
GOAT.
Cowen, Tyler. “Thursday Assorted Links.” Marginal Revolution (blog). June 20, 2024. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/06/thursday-assorted-links-457.html.
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But there’s also no way to know how the modern major leagues would have adapted to him. We don’t know how good Mays would have been had he gotten to face the best players in the country his age, growing up competing at showcase events. We don’t know how much better he might have been had he not grown up in the Jim Crow South, had he not had to deal with the specter of racism his entire career, had he not had to fight against redlining even as a superstar living in San Francisco. We will never know how Willie Mays would have fared had he been born in our time because he was born in his time. And the impact he made during his time will live on forever.
What we do know is that no one who played against the best baseball players in the world ever dominated them as much as Mays did, for as long as Mays did, with as much style as Mays did. He was a giant of the game. He was the GOAT before we called them GOATs. He was the Greatest Ballplayer Who Ever Lived.
– Rany Jazayerli
RIP Willie Mays.
Rany Jazaerli poses the deeper question. It’s not how Willie Mays would have adapted to the modern major leagues, it’s how would the modern major leagues adapted to him?
Jazayerli, Rany. “Willie Mays Obituary: Life, Legacy, and Statistics.” The Ringer, June 19, 2024. https://www.theringer.com/mlb/2024/6/19/24181679/willie-mays-obituary-life-legacy-statistics.
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Michael Chabon’s Summerland is a wrap. 500 pages of weird, muddle, and baseball. Zero boredom though.
The final few chapters had some wonderful bits. The following is one of the most insightful thoughts on parenting and promises I’ve read:
It was the kind of promise a father makes easily and sincerely, knowing at the same time that it will be impossible to keep. The truth of some promises is not as important as whether or not you can believe in them, with all your heart. A game of baseball can’t really make a summer day last forever. A home run can’t really heal all the broken places in our world, or in a single human heart. And there was no way Mr. Feld could keep his promise never to leave Ethan again. All parents leave their children one day, Ethan knew that better now than he had ever known before. But he was glad to have the promise nevertheless.
pp 480Last year’s Mets should’ve had this hung in the clubhouse…
One lover of baseball cannot get a team out of the cellar, but two can turn a season around.
pp 496And a concise compilation of all the beauties of playing small ball:
They noticed that there was more to baseball than hitting the ball as hard as you could, than waving your glove in the general direction of the ball and hoping for the best. They took pitches, turned double plays, and hit the cutoff man, and instead of trying to cream it every time they got up, they just did their best to advance the runner. They played like ferishers, with careful abandon.
pp 497A few ideas to ponder if you’re deciding to read Summerland.
One – have a basic grounding of folklore and myth. In particular the meanings of the coyote, faeries, and Sasquatches. Quick Perplexity.ai refresh is all you need. Dive into deeper texts if compelled.
Two – Begin reading it during late summer and carry on through early fall. You may also finish all 500 pgs in a weekend, but bringing the fall classic vibes heightens the reading experience.
Three – Embrace the weird. Characters fly in and fly out of the story. Creatures appear, vanish, and reappear. The story jabs and cracks unexpectedly. Embrace it.
Four – Love baseball. Not a requirement. Ok, it’s a requirement.
Chabon, Michael. Summerland. United States, Thorndike Press, 2003. pp480
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It was Rodrigo Buendía. He had been quiet all morning, puffing away at a succession of cigars, walking back and forth across Diamond Green as if taking the measure of it. The confinement he and the others had undergone, in a lightless cell in the wagon sledge, had been hardest on him; Cinquefoil had told Ethan that the slugger even wept in his sleep. “Waste of time, dude. We should be out there warming up. Sprints. Bunt work–fielding and laying them down. And then a couple of hours of BP. You, little fox dude, you going to be in center today. When the last time you played ball?”
“Fifteen sixy-nine,” Cutbelly said at once. “I hit into three double plays.”
“That’s what I’m saying,” Buendía said.
Chabon, Michael. Summerland. United States, Thorndike Press, 2003. pp460
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He had played almost all of his career since his defection to the United States in the National League, first for the Phillies, and then for the Mets. He had played centerfield, and then as his legs gave out and the surgeries mounted he switched to right; but since coming to the American League he had played nothing but designated hitter, never taking the field, spending the whole game on the bench until his turn to bat came around. Sometimes an aging player can flourish as the DH, smacking home runs at a decent clip and stretching his career by a couple of years. But hitting, though he did it magnificently, had always been only one part of Rodrigo Buendía’s game. As a younger player he had been one of the top outfielders in the game, covering vast distances, making legendary catches, throwing out runners at home plate from deep in the outfield grass. He had not been moved to the DH position, so much as reduced to it.
Passages like this is why I’ve kept my ticket aboard the Summerland locomotive. There’s whole pages where I give it a blank stare, hoping it will all make sense at the end. But the baseball bits, here Rodrigo Buendía’s back story, where Ethan, Jennifer T., Thor and co have all “jumped” (a form of sort-of time traveling and teleporting?) to Buendía’s compound in some mini-verse Cuba?
Weird.
Chabon, Michael. Summerland. United States, Thorndike Press, 2003.
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The ferisher baseball lay warm and almost animate, a living thing, in his fingers, he recalled Peavine’s words: “A baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day.”
Or a November evening.
For the Rangers, World Series Champions.
Chabon, Michael. Summerland: A Novel. New York: Hyperion Books for Children, 2002. (pp332)
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With the pennant races rumbling on…
Ohtani as proof mythical men did exist:
Ohtani makes me believe that many of the stories of the heroes of old, of Greek myth, or Mesopotamian myth, Arab or African myth, or whatever myth, that such men did walk the earth
– David Bentley HartDamn. Some men have it all. Ohtani is baseball’s George Clooney.
And lets admit it. It’s annoying. He’s tall. And handsome. And suave. And you know, its just, he makes the rest of us feel just slightly less human.
– David Bentley HartAnd Ohtani’s underrated, but awe inspiring skill:
The thing that amazes me most when I’m watching him is not necessarily the massively soaring home runs, or the one hundred and one mile per hour fastball on the corner. It’s actually watching him run the bases, because he does it like a gazelle. He’s moving as fast as some of the fastest runners in the game, but he looks like he’s just taking long, easy, loping strides when he does it. He’ll steal without a slide half the time, because he doesn’t have to slide. He’s an amazing specimen. And happily plays the only game in the world worthy of his skills.
– David Bentley HartI echo that last statement. Once, I watched Ohtani stretch out a double and his helmet flew off while he was running. I couldn’t help but smile. I thought “man this guy is having fun”.
This excerpt begins at 12:40. Watch the interview in full from the C.S. Lewis foundation below.
Floodlights and Goalposts 