I Can Care About Something Without Telling You I Care
I hope you’re doing well. At least you didn’t utterly humiliate yourself and your nation in an international meeting on your home soil. Or leave sensitive government documents on a hotel’s public printer. Whatever, baseball is still good as hell, so I’ve written a lot about baseball, why a certain line of argument about trans kids in sports annoys the hell out of me, and the movie “Weapons”. LFG.
GO DIRECTLY TO:
- Mike Yastrzemski Is Good at Baseball
- The Designated Hitter Is Now Fully Dead
- I Can Care About Something Without Telling You I Care
- A Good Baseball Podcast
- I Don’t Want the Whole Video Game — Just the One Part
- A Stray Thought About MLB Players on the Golf Course
- Imagine an NBA Team Allowing This Today
- About Trans Kids Playing Sports…
- If You Have Seen “Weapons”, This Item Is for You
Mike Yastrzemski Is Good at Baseball
Since being traded to the Kansas City Royals at the deadline, through Saturday, Mike Yastrzemski hit .179/.292/.487, which is perfectly cromulent but also a wild improvement on the production Kansas City was getting from its corner outfield spots. Yaz put up 1.9 bWAR for the San Francisco Giants before the trade, and it looks likely he’ll end up close to 3.0 bWAR range for the whole season, which might be his career high after finishing with 2.0-2.7 bWAR with metronomic consistency every year since breaking into the majors in 2019.
His best season was 2020, when he hit .297/.400/.568 (164 OPS+) with always-solid defense split between right and center fields, good for 2.7 bWAR and an eighth-place finish in the MVP voting for the shortened campaign. It turns out it’s pretty hard to find guys who hit slightly better than league average, play defense slightly better than league average, are by all accounts a decent dude, and do it for years on end, so the Giants kept running him out there, and he kept producing.
And it’s not like he was boring. I was there when Yaz hit this home run when the Giants were down to their final out in St. Louis, and he also did lots of cool stuff in the field, like this throw, this catch, this catch, and his annual ‘stache.
It’s unlikely this is the end of the line for Yaz, but, as a Giants fan who enjoyed watching him do his thing, it’s worth pulling over and appreciating how he is that nearly-mythical ballplayer who truly does everything pretty well — the worst you could say is has a tough time against same-side pitching, just like most other hitters — but not so well that it ever turned him into a star.
As long as he has been in the major leagues, he has played winning baseball, and I hope he does it for many more years.
The Designated Hitter Is Now Fully Dead
The Japanese Central League will have a designated hitter rule in 2027, ending its era as the last high-level pro baseball league without one. Long ago, I resigned myself to the inevitability that the DH would come to the National League, and I understand that lots of people prefer things this way because it removes supposed non-hitters from lineups. However, the DH will probably always offend my sense of symmetry and order that holds if someone plays in the field they should also hit. If you just want the best hitters and fielders at all times, why not let MLB teams go full NFL and have as many DHs as they like?
I Can Care About Something Without Telling You I Care
On a recent episode of The Right Time With Bomani Jones podcast (transcript here), Jones and Howard Bryant had a little segment where they talked about how baseball fans in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia care about their teams more passionately than fans in other cities do (about 46:00 in). They’re not the first ones to state this as self-evident, and the broader conversation is fine as these things go, but it’s a classic example of east coast chauvinism that I feel like I should address whenever it comes up.
The main thing Jones and Bryant miss is that the reason Boston, New York, and Philadelphia sports fans have a reputation for caring more than fans in other places is twofold: the fans say it’s so repeatedly and because there are a lot of them it becomes a self-reinforcing shibboleth. And there is a strain of behavior especially prevalent in northeast metros highlighted by a value that if their feelings are not expressed externally then those feelings do not exist. It’s also present in the “loud families” thing, the “we just wear our hearts on our sleeves” thing, the “we booed Santa Claus, but not because we’re assholes — it was because we could tell he was drunk” thing, the “I swear we’re just reacting organically to the Jets’ first-round pick at the NFL draft and not performing what we think everyone we know expects from us” thing, the “Bing Bong” thing, et cetera.
People in those areas who hold the value that “if one does not express his feelings externally then those feelings must not exist” look at how people in other parts of the country live their lives, they see those people not expressing all their feelings about their sports teams externally as much or as performatively as they do, and conclude those people must not care about their sports teams as much.
Jones and Bryant are probably right that this affects athletes’ choices about where to play in that a star who strongly dislikes getting hassled whenever they go out and about might be less inclined to play for the Red Sox or Phillies while athletes who feed off of more attention might want that kind of fan relationship. But again, that’s not indicative of whether fans actually care about their team.
A Good Baseball Podcast
I have a tight podcast rotation. I subscribe to one where I’ll listen to every episode, another two where I’ll listen to almost every episode, and another two where I check the description and make a quick call on whether to listen or skip. All that’s to say I have a very high bar for adding a podcast to my list, so with that context, I wholeheartedly recommend the Batting Around podcast, and I’m disappointed it’s taken me this long to discover it.
It’s possible I’ve come across an exceptional string of episodes since I first started listening, but I’ve been delighted with every one. All the discussions seem to hit a sweet spot (baseball term!) where the hosts are passionate without being overbearing and irreverent without being dismissive, and the baseball talk is intelligent while still being accessible. For example, a recent episode included conversation about Matt Strahm’s collectible card-investing strategy, gambling on the Little League World Series, an impassioned soliloquy about how the Pohlad family is functionally following the John Fisher playbook in Minneapolis, and trying to explain what the Red Green Show was.
It’s good stuff!
I Don’t Want the Whole Video Game — Just the One Part
When I visited North Carolina the other month, we stayed with a family where the kids were really into playing MLB: The Show. I know myself well enough to not hop on the sticks to try actually playing, lest I get sucked in and lose hours upon hours, but I did allow myself about 45 minutes to mess around with the game’s ballpark creator.
If you’re unaware, MLB: The Show has a robust stadium creator where people can build playable ballparks and perhaps upload them for other people to use. As someone who spent a ton of time tweaking custom ballparks in Earl Weaver Baseball and who still has a predilection for building out fictional sports worlds, this should’ve been my jam. However, I only spent the 45 minutes because building ballparks with a PS5 controller is wildly unwieldy and frustrating. Sure, if I spent enough time on it, there are probably tricks to improve the work flow, but I doubt there’s anything to be done about the sheer difficulty of using a console controller to make minute and precise adjustments.
That said, I might pay real money for just the ballpark creator on desktop. If I could build ballparks with a mouse and keyboard, that’d be worth something to me, and if I could upload them for others to actually play games in them — or buy from me with the publisher getting a cut? — that wouldn’t be necessary, but it’d be interesting.
A Stray Thought About MLB Players on the Golf Course
Plenty of MLB players are natural right-handers, yet bat left-handed. One might argue about whether hitting from the left side is actually left-hand dominant — Is the top hand the power hand, or is the bottom hand? Is it different for different hitters? — but most people default to the top-hand dominant when choosing a side.
I get that a golf swing has fundamental differences from a baseball swing, and I never got into golf deep enough to consider swinging lefty (I’m a natural righty) even though I switch-hit in baseball, but the other day I wondered if there are any baseball players who hit lefty in baseball but swing righty in golf. Handedness isn’t necessarily a straightforward thing (see: LeBron James, a natural lefty who writes lefty, plays basketball righty, and, for what it’s worth, golfs righty), but I surmised most baseball players would golf from the same side they prefer to swing a bat.
My cursory YouTube searches suggest this is probably true, but I found exceptions easily enough.
- Bryce Harper - throws right, bats left, golfs left
- Kyle Schwarber - throws right, bats left, golfs left
- Freddy Freeman - throws right, bats left, golfs left
- Lars Nootbaar - throws right, bats left, golfs left (plus Mookie Betts, all righty)
- Matt Olson - throws right, bats left, golfs right (plus Sean Murphy and Austin Riley, all righty)
- Shohei Ohtani - throws right, bats left, golfs right (poorly)
- Cal Raleigh - throws right, bats both, golfs right (but mentions possibly wanting to putt left)
- Nick Swisher - throws left, bats both, golfs right
- Mark Mulder - throws left, bats left, golfs right
Now, is there a guy out there who throws right, bats right, and golfs left?
Imagine an NBA Team Allowing This Today
In 1991, the Gastonia Rangers minor league baseball team held a stunt promotion involving two local athletic celebrities. Dell Curry and Muggsy Bogues, both then-current players for the Charlotte Hornets, signed on to play an actual league game. Curry pitched well!
About Trans Kids Playing Sports…
Recently, I’ve noticed an uptick in a certain line of argument about trans rights. Here’s a representative example, from a person with more than 1,000 followers on Bluesky, that’s worth quoting in full:
Hi. 64 year old Iowan here. This is bullshit. There are so few trans athletes in HS sports nationwide that the entire conversation is stupid & the only way to "message" this is to point that out. It's HS sports, ffs. It's supposed to be kids having fun. Fuck off with the "fairness" shit.
This person has struck a tone of outraged righteousness, but they have made an incredibly shitty argument, conceding that trans rights are conditional upon some threshold of influence that has yet to be surpassed because there are relatively few openly trans children playing competitive interscholastic sports. Maybe I’m particularly militant about this — though I certainly don’t feel that way — but arguing that human inclusivity and belonging are conditional upon there being enough people in a certain class that I can’t ignore them strikes me as short-sighted at best and monstrous at worst.
The fight over allowing trans kids to play sports in the gender classification with which they identify has nothing to do with “competitive fairness” because for students, playing high school sports is largely not about competitive accomplishment, but about belonging on a team and in a community. Reducing athletics programs to “we’re trying to beat everyone and prove who’s best” is both a poor model for all young people seeking athletic excellence as just one aspect of their lives, and is not reflective of why most students join a team. Barring trans kids from competing as the gender with which they identify is an attempt to shame them into not competing at all, a strategy clearly meant to hound trans kids from public life.
Don’t concede that trans rights are conditional upon more trans people becoming visible. Trans rights are human rights. Trans kids are kids who deserve the full rights and privileges of every other kid.
If You Have Seen “Weapons”, This Item Is for You
I saw the new Zach Cregger film, “Weapons,” in an empty theater at 9 a.m. (As in: I was the only person in the theater. Haven’t had that experience since seeing “Superbad” in a second-run morning show many years ago.) That was sub-optimal, because it, like most movies, is best experienced in a full theater, but even so, I was enthralled. I wouldn’t call it a perfect movie, but I’m still thinking about it many days later, and the sheer “we’re going for it” of it all.
Lots of spoiler-y discussion to follow, so feel free to skip if you don’t want to discuss themes and specifics of “Weapons”...
Reading posts about the movie since, I’ve been struck by people’s need for a pat explanation “what the movie is about”. For some reason, a good number of critics seem to have settled on “it’s not really about anything”, which baffles me, because, if anything, it’s a big swing at being about many societal ills while maintaining a throughline that the biggest societal ill facing Americans today is our unwillingness to care about each other on a fundamental personal level.
The parents’ anger at the teacher and school after their children disappear has echoes of the aftermath of school shootings; the story of Alex is pretty clearly one of how a family member has groomed a child for abuse while rendering his parents literally zombies unable to see what she’s doing to the boy; the story of James is about how he’s seen as a nuisance and a threat when what he really needs is help; the story of Paul is about how he’s a complete mess but his fiancée and co-workers simply don’t see it and so he takes it out on James before getting zombie-fied, himself; the story of Archer is about how he’s so caught up in his own grief and single-minded desire to find his son that he completely neglects his work and his wife, steamrolls other parents in his search for evidence that will help him find his son, and then when he finally does come across all the children, he doesn’t lift a finger to help any of them because he only wants to find his own child; and, finally, the story of Justine Gandy is that she authentically cares about her students as developing young people, to the point that she does go too far and puts herself at risk in order to do what she thinks is the right thing to help them (driving a child home, et cetera), and she is punished for it because society’s structures — represented by Marcus, the principal who enforces rules and order because they are rules and order — require that she be ridiculed for caring too much, and then considered a suspect once the kids go missing.
That’s the heart of the film. Why was there a giant rifle in the sky during Archer’s vision? I don’t know, man! If you want me to intellectualize it, English major style, I’d say it was there for the same reason the Overlook Hotel’s layout doesn’t actually make any sense and there are a bunch of continuity “errors” in “The Shining”: because it’s creepy as hell and adds to the unsettling vibe.
As for the ending — that thrilling, hilarious, jaw-dropping, bravura chase and mauling — I see it as a warning that all the shit older generations are heaping upon young people could make them snap and take it out on them, while leaving those young people irreparably damaged, too.
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Thanks for reading, you crazy kids. Let’s do this again, sometime.
(Photo: "Boston Sucks" by Eli Christman. Used under CC BY 2.0 license.)
