A FAN’S NOTES

Baseball Statistics Integrate

Some days I’m prepared to coherently argue, unlike a crazed conspiracy theorist, that the game of baseball is entirely responsible for the creation and study of statistics, their recording and analysis, their application in the real world beyond sport; the advent of datamining, social media algorithms and ultimately educating AI. Then again, there was Herod’s census and the Domesday Book, but still …

The morning newspaper is a slog, a drag, like most of my past jobs. International and domestic hard news and political news is unfailingly grim. The business and finance pages are as confusing as one of my former boss’s jargon-juiced malapropped memos. Even the sports section, where you usually find the best writing because everybody already knows the score, is dreary now because you’ve finally figured out, to quote the elegant, elegiac poetry of Mick Jagger about something else, “It doesn’t fuckin’ matter!”

But that extraneous stuff, the halo around the reality of daily living and family and friends, can be awfully sticky: the red Montreal Canadiens sweater, Never a Dull Moment, Len Deighton novels and that utterly brilliant scene in The Wire when McNulty and Bunk work out a fatal bullet’s trajectory in an empty apartment, their extensive dialogue consisting solely of the word “fuck” or variations thereof.

For reasons I’ll briefly explain, baseball has stuck with me like, well, pine tar. The sporting press was a constant in our home during my Montreal childhood. My big brother was a voracious consumer of Sport, Sports Illustrated and The Sporting News. I ransacked his bedroom for back issues when he wasn’t home. When the Expos arrived in 1969, it was beyond a miracle that, my God, Bob Gibson, Roberto Clemente, Willie Mays and Henry Aaron would play the game in our town. Montreal had some significant history too. Jackie Robinson spent a season with the AAA Royals before busting through Major League Baseball’s (MLB) colour barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.

Baseball sounded great on a.m. radio, better than the Top 40 Countdown. It reads well, both in poetry and prose. It films well for highlights and Hollywood. I was decent enough to play one season of intercity ball; good field, no hit. My current go-to fashion accessory is a navy blue, twentieth century retro St. Louis Cardinals road cap, the intertwined StL emblem is fire engine-red. I bought a new glove about ten years ago, an Easton to replace my beloved Wilson Bobby (not Barry) Bonds model which somehow became a casualty in one of my divorces.

A few seasons ago MLB declared the Negro Leagues to be “major” leagues. Well, gee, they would’ve been given segregated baseball’s oil and water talent pools. The Negro Leagues existed between 1920 and 1948. There were about half a dozen of them, small loops on low budgets (Robinson played for the Kansas City Monarchs before joining the Royals). Late last month MLB announced that Negro Leagues stats would be incorporated into “the record book.” A change has come to the lists. New names long overdue. Satchel Paige isn’t just a black and white Life magazine portrait and aged sage of homilies any longer. Josh Gibson, whose career .372 batting average surpasses Ty Cobb’s .367, gets his overdue due. And what about Homestead (Pittsburgh essentially) Grays first baseman, Buck Leonard, who hit clean up behind Gibson? 

The record book used to be tactile, weighty: The Baseball Encyclopedia and, later, Total Baseball. Everything’s online now, digital stats tend not to bow bookcase shelves. Those books were as big and heavy as the brass-clasped volumes of family scripture; their content equally ripe for misinterpretation and argument too. But it’s only right that gospel be changed, expanded and updated. We learn as we live. You have to look back in order to see the better days ahead.

I’m a cynical man. But MLB’s decision to finally recognize rival segregated statistics didn’t strike me as patronizing or pandering. Pandering is orchestrated Pride and cancer nights. Patronizing is shilling Pride and cancer merchandise, rainbow or pink caps and jerseys. A wrong has been righted, finally. Granted, it’s not Pope Francis confessing to the Catholic Church really fucking things up these past two thousand years. And MLB is certainly guilty of lucrative surface atonement, teams playing games clad in throwback Negro Leagues uniforms.

I believe MLB missed an earlier chance for apology and atonement back in 2005. That’s when the Expos began National League play as the Washington Nationals. The District of Columbia (DC) had lost the American League Senators twice, emigres first to Minnesota and then to Texas. The Montreal Expos withering during their last couple of sad seasons were Philip Roth’s Port Rupert Mundys, homeless. The Expos had their last at-bats in San Juan, Puerto Rico as broke and busted wards of MLB. Very fucked. During the Second World War the Homestead Grays began to play increasingly larger portions of their home schedule in DC, dodging dwindling crowds, chasing money. You see where I’m going here. You see where MLB could’ve gone twenty years ago.                                         

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site www.megeoff.com is awake and alive. Watch and listen to some of the songs I co-wrote with The Muster Point Project or buy 5 KG, the complete EP. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book Of Course You Did in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer.