Baseball Maudlin Sentimentality Check-In

Willson Contreras was not supposed to be here. It was a Friday day game at Wrigley Field in the late summer, late in the game with the shadows ominously creeping up to the batter’s box and the three o’clock seagulls divebombing the outfield, and the park was filled with tourists and children enjoying their last weeks before school and a lot of people who, like Willson Contreras, were supposed to be somewhere else. Contreras should have been gone, traded to a contender for one or two babyfaced nineteen-year-olds, and he had spent the season as a ghostly specter haunting Wrigley but here he was fully corporeal in the eighth inning blasting a pitch into the left field bleachers and pointing to the ecstatic fans and ground as if to say “this is where I am” as the last-place Cubs took a 2-1 lead over the last-place Marlins.

 

The trade deadline on the North Side of Chicago has become an emotional time in recent years, but Contreras elevated it into a sublime melodrama. The past couple weeks have seen Contreras hold tearful press conferences, grab teammates in interminable embraces, soak in multiple ovations, and generally act like he is on a train platform sending his wispily muttonchopped sons to fight in the Civil War. It has been over the top but also very endearing. Contreras represents one of the last remaining World Series Cubs besides Kyle Hendricks and Jason Heyward– while I was writing this post, Jed Hoyer announced that Heyward has played his last game as a Cub and will be released next year and exists on the current team as an apparition. Contreras has spent pretty much his entire adult life in the Cubs organization, hit a home run on the first pitch he saw in the big leagues, won a world series his rookie year, and has been a fan favorite; regardless of how he might feel about the Cubs and its management, he sure made it seem like he would rather stay here in Chicago slopping around the bottom of the National League Central in beautiful Wrigley afternoons than getting to play in the playoffs, which serves as a full embrace of the Cubs lifestyle.

What makes more sense as a fan here? To root for two more months of Willson Contreras in a career year soaking up the adoration of the crowd as the Cubs plummet into yet another pointless toilet season? To get angry at the Cubs for not maximizing his value by dealing him earlier? To hope that the Cubs use a bunch of transaction arcana to somehow turn him into an extra draft pick next year? And what will the Cubs do with Ian Happ, whom they also declined to trade this year and will presumably submit to another deadline of trades and dugout speculation, and seeing his hair growth billboards get swallowed up into more Urlacher ones to the point that there are so many Brian Urlacher hair billboards that there are now meta Urlacher billboards commenting on the number of Urlacher billboards on the Jane Addams tollway?

Rooting for the Cubs means a clash between sentimentality and the bloodless calculation of baseball’s heartless marketplace and it is crushing to see that, as of this year, the spreadsheets have won in an absolute rout. The Cubs let their World Series heroes go and so far it looks like they made a brilliant baseball decision. Kris Bryant has spent most of his first season in Denver in traction and various walking boots. Javy Baez’s Detroit career, save for that disputed opening day walk off against the White Sox, has looked exactly like the horrifying scenario of someone turning Javy’s baseball mojo sliders down one notch. Anthony Rizzo, meanwhile, seems to be having a great time in New York playing for a chance for another ring, dinking baseballs over Yankee Stadiums short right field porch, and being in the enviable position as a respected veteran leader who is not important enough to the team that the tabloids will ruthlessly attack him with “Anthony Shizzo” puns instead of fending off the Pirates and Reds for fourth place in the NL North. It is a bummer that the Cubs decided to sell off their stars like they are the Oakland A’s; it is also upsetting that it may have been a good move.

BASEBALL'S CORN GAME AND MLB'S MACABRE DEATH OBSESSION

After two years of turning the Cubs into the Iowa Cubs, Major League Baseball manifested this transformation literally by making the team play in Iowa in their nationally televised Corn Game.  This year, instead of an exciting and up and coming White Sox team clashing with the flagship Yankees they got two tanking teams from the bottom of the shittiest division in baseball in the middle of cynical rebuilds headlined by the Reds owner opening the season by telling his fans they are like ants to him and they should go fuck themselves while wearing a jaunty red blazer during a parade.

As a spectacle, the Corn Game looks fantastic on television.  The players emerge from the stalks in perfect golden hour sunlight, the tiny stadium has been expertly art-directed to exude quaintness, the Cubs' uniforms featuring a crudely-drawn bear that appears to be confused how it obtained a bat were nice, and it is extremely cool when someone blasts a home run into an ocean of corn.  I'm not an enormous fan of what the game is trying to evoke with the sepia-toned paeans to some imagined bucolic purity; my preferred old-time baseball aesthetic would instead focus on the players' ridiculous nicknames and dirtbag ballplayer bullshit and the various elaborate ways that they would cheat and get rioted upon by fans, but I understand why MLB would not want to put on a Mustache Guy Chased From Brothels Game.

But the thing that is strange about the Corn Game aesthetic is that it is a grim and macabre evocation of death.  Field of Dreams is a movie about processing grief through the mechanism of baseball.  To MLB, the movie's ghosts represent baseball history and Kevin Costner's desire to play catch with his dead dad is a maudlin marketing gimmick about baseball linking generations, but if you look at it another way it is a Very Special Baseball Event about how you and everyone you love even if that also includes baseball players from the 1910s will die. This is a phenomenon unique to baseball, the oldest of the American major sports leagues, the one that makes a connection to history one of its greatest selling points, and the one where the limitless supply of documentary talking heads feeding baseball's nostalgia industrial complex are always ready to spring up in book-lined study to talk about how the sun was shining in Yankee Stadium when they went there to see the fictitious baseball player "Mickey Mantle" that they only remember because of a pervasive disinformation campaign targeting baby boomers by Ken Burns and Billy Crystal.  Major League Baseball is not the only sports league that appeals to history and nostalgia, but it is the only one where the theme of all of its newsreel grandeur is not look where we came from but look what he we have lost.  The Field of Dreams is a mausoleum.  I suppose that is why the most noteworthy feature of the game was holographic necromancy.

In 2020, when baseball chaotically returned in the middle of the pandemic and some Fox broadcasts used bizarre, poorly rendered computer graphic versions of fans to up the empty stadiums, I wrote that we had officially become a cyberpunk society.  It was not only the computerized fans on MLB telecasts, but also a feeling that the pervasive low quality zoom images everywhere suddenly gave all television the aesthetic quality of 80s and 90s movies about cyberpunk dystopias.  The Harry Caray hologram fit into that style.  It looked like a playstation cutscene.  It lurched unnaturally.  It glowed eerily.  The mouth movements were off so it seemed like Take Me Out to the Ballgame was being being dubbed over a demonic incantation in some dead, unholy language. In a setting where everything was supposed to evoke an old-timey feel to the point that the broadcasters all dressed like members of the rival "Hey Mister" and "Whaddaya Say Fella" gangs who were about to brawl on a streetcar, Fox decided to unleash a hologram of a famous 1980s drunk who has been dead for more than 20 years for what appears to be no reason whatsoever.  

This was such a strange and insane thing to do that I am glad they did it.  The hologram itself was an unsettling invasion from the Uncanny Valley, but I can't stop laughing about how many people had to approve it before it came lurching onto our screens like the woman from The Ring.  I can't wait to see other holograms they come up with: hologram Babe Ruth calling his shot, hologram Lou Gehrig saying goodbye to Yankee Stadium, hologram George Brett explaining how he shit himself on the Las Vegas strip to a bunch of hologram Royals rookies.  The possibilities are endless.    

MANEATING TIGERS

One thing that sometimes occurs to me when I walk by a fence and am briefly startled by the unexpected bark from a dog that is always at least thirty percent smaller than it sounds is the relative freedom I enjoy from being hunted and messily eaten by a predator. I have been thinking about this because I have been reading about the Champawat Tiger, which killed an estimated 436 people in India and Nepal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century before it was finally killed in 1910 by the famed tiger hunter Jim Corbett.

I got interested in this while rereading the tiger essay in Brian Philipps’s Impossible Owls, where he goes on a tiger watching expedition in India, and figured I should probably read Corbett’s Man-Eaters of Kuamon. When I put that into the library search engine, though, it spit out a book with the arresting name No Beast So Fierce: The Terrifying True Story of the Chamapawat Tiger, the Deadliest Animal In History and immediately mashed that request button. The writer of the book is a newspaper and magazine journalist named Dane Huckelbridge who has also published a book on the history of bourbon, so I had no idea whether I was getting a decent book or a fevered J. Peterman catalog, and here’s what greeted me in Chapter 1:

Where does one begin? With a story whose true telling demands centuries, if not millennia, and whose roots and tendrils snake into such far-flung realms as colonial British policies, Indian cosmologies, and the rise and fall of Nepalese dynasties, where is the starting point? Yes, one could commence with the royal decrees that compelled Vasco da Gama to sail for the East Indies, or the palace intrigues that put Jung Bahadur in the highest echelons of Himalayan power. But the matter at hand is something much more primal– elemental, even. Something that’s shaped our psyches and permeated our mythologies since time immemorial, and that speaks directly to the most profound of our fears. To be eaten by a monster. To be hunted, to be consumed, by a creature whose innate predatory gifts are infinitely superior to our own. To be ripped apart and summarily devoured. And, with this truth in mind, the answer becomes even simpler. In fact, its golden eyes are staring us right in the face: the tiger. That is where the story begins.

And yet, despite Huckelbridge’s various forays into Magazine Mode, I enjoyed this book. Huckleridge carefully and viscerally paints a picture of the various horrible ways that a tiger will fuck you up, and he puts it in ways that can be appreciated by readers of a sports blog. “...[the bengal tiger] is the middle linebacker of the animal world, the perfect melding of power and speed,” he notes Facendaishly. “To put that number into grisly perspective, the entire roster of the National Basketball Association evens out at around 450 players. So essentially– according to most published accounts– the Champawat very nearly consumed the entire NBA.”

Huckleridge does two things effectively in his account of the Champawat tiger’s decades-long rampage spanning two countries. First, he provides a compelling case linking manmade ecological changes and maneating in tigers. In order to do this, he unspools a compact history of the terai in western Nepal, a marshy area that serves as the bengal tiger’s primary habitat, and the Rana dynasty that emerged in the nineteenth century. The new government, according Hucklebridge, began to more effectively exploit the terai with farming methods that disrupted the tigers’ relatively harmonious relationship with the native Tharu. Simultaneously, tigers just over the border in India saw an even more dramatic attack on their habitat under British policies in the late nineteenth century as the colonial government gobbled up hundreds of thousands of acres of timber. The British also greatly increased the pace of tiger hunting as visitors with money demanded to hunt tigers as a tourist experience.

These ecological changes turned out to function as ideal conditions for churning out maneating tigers. Tigers, as Hucklebridge explains, tend to leave humans alone for whatever reason unless they become injured, displaced, or otherwise desperate and figure out people have virtually no defenses against them. The British program of destroying tiger habitats and leading endless tiger hunts that maimed tigers could not have been a more effective plan for unleashing a scourge of deadly tigers. According to Hucklebridge, the instances of serial maneaters like the Champawat along with equally dangerous leopards significantly increased during the twentieth century. Tigers are territorial, and one adult tiger can claim territory of 25 square miles to even 50, and tigers that lose that territory to a rival get pushed further and further out where they are more likely to encounter rapidly encroaching human settlements. These tigers are further from the environment they know and become desperate for new food sources; at best they can become a plague on livestock and at worst they become monsters that can besiege entire villages.

The second thing that Hucklebridge does well is to sell the tense terror when reconstructing Corbett’s hunt. Corbett’s own account from his Man-eaters of Kuamon (I ended up finding it on the internet) is only about 25 pages of plain-speaking bluffness, but Huckleridge provides a far longer and more dramatic account, using plenty of license and what I would affectionately describe as writerly bullshit to spice things up. There are a lot of probablys and would likely haves throughout this part of the book but Huckleridge is not just making things up to make them up but trying to convey two important elements of the story: one is the fraught politics of the situation that Corbett, who was born in India and speaks fluent Kuamoni and is coming to hunt a tiger on behalf of his own countryman, was still showing up as a representative of the British government who the people in Champawat had good reason to mistrust and hate; the other, which Corbett makes very clear and Hucklebridge reiterates, is that hunting a maneating tiger is in fact extremely scary.

Do you know a tiger is hunted? It is not some pith helmet guy out there crawling around like the predator except with embarrassing knee socks instead of dripping mandibles. As Phillipps writes about the experience of just trying to photograph them, tigers can be virtually invisible to human beings. Instead, what you do is organize an enormous party of dozens if not hundreds of people into what is called a “beat,” a large battle line of people and elephants making an enormous racket to rouse the tiger and scare the absolute shit out of it until it gets cornered or exhausted and the hunter is able to take a shot from the safe pachyderm perch.  Corbett did not have the luxury of an elephant and his beat was designed to lure the tiger into a ravine where he only had a few shots.  In Hucklebridge's telling, Corbett dropped the tiger only seconds from getting mauled.  And then there it is, the photograph of Corbett and the deadly maneater that looks identical to any number of photographs of British hunters from the era.

Hucklebridge taps into the primeval horror invoked by tiger attacks, but the real strength of the book is to contextualize it as a modern phenomenon.  His account of the Champawat tiger, presented as the forces of colonialism and environmental despoliation literally creating a monster, is an allegory almost too on the nose to be published if it was fiction.  But tiger attacks unfortunately persist, even as they have been driven into dangerously low populations and confined to nature preserves; unfortunately the tigers don't know where they're not supposed to go.

It's Over, We're Cyberpunk Now: A Review of Baseball's Opening Weekend

Heading into Spring Training, baseball had been afflicted by the low-grade malaise that has been seeping into the sport for the past few years: there was the lingering Houston Astros sign-stealing scandal, questions about the juiced ball that baseball handled with a series of increasingly half-hearted denials and obfuscations, and an increasingly bold stance by owners that they didn’t get into the baseball business to pay baseball players that signals impending labor strife. But it is also clear that in a year that saw baseball heading into a season that was going to be defined by reporters repeatedly asking Astros players "did you bang the cans," that all of these concerns are muted by the possibility that Major League Baseball will literally kill someone.

Baseball careened into its pandemic restart plan with the panicked disorganization of a retreating army. As labor negotiations roiled into bitterness between players and owners, plans to play in Arizona and Florida fell by the wayside as Covid cases spiked in those states, and the testing regime immediately fell into delays that made it impossible to tell quickly and decisively if anyone was infected before they had the opportunity to spread disease around the stadium, I became increasingly convinced that this was all a giant ass-covering exercise; this way, MLB could claim that they tried before folding the season as the incompetent reset plans continued to lurch forward so haphazardly that it would be impossible to play without marinating the entire league in a virus stew.

But here we are. Baseball has returned, barreling through the clusterfucks and logistical nightmares with the confidence of a person drunk enough to try some amateur bear wrestling in the wild. In this week alone, the Canadian government denied permission for the Blue Jays to play in Toronto leaving them scrambling to secure a home field days before opening day, Nationals superstar Juan Soto tested positive just hours before a game but allowing teammates near him to still play; MLB is still ramming bizarre rule changes into a season that has already seen a universal DH and a mind-meltingly stupid rule to start extra innings with a runner on second-- minutes before the opening pitch, MLB announced an expanded playoff format as part of the sport and America's dominant fuck it we'll do it live ethos.

It is clear that attempting to play organized baseball, with the travel, infrastructure and close contact required by a modern baseball operation is reckless and stupid, and in a functioning country the entire thing would be completely shut down.  Instead, they brought baseball back, crammed the telecasts with triumphant commercials about persevering over a disease that is in fact bat-flipping in triumph at the American medical establishment, and lauded by announcers as something America needs.  It is insane to witness; I do not know why-- possibly because it is bracing to watch professional sports leagues stage grandiose plans for safety theater and execute them as if you or I or your neighbor who has strong opinions about brands of weedwhacking equipment were put in charge of the D-Day invasion-- but watching professional sports leagues attempt to play under these circumstances with increasingly ludicrous fake safety measures makes me feel completely unmoored from reality.  We absolutely do not need any of this.  We don't need Bubbles.  We don't need Alternate Sites.  We do not need to drive a steamroller over people so I can watch Jason Heyward roll over a slow grounder to the second baseman.

I watched like fifteen hours of baseball this weekend.

AN AESTHETIC REVIEW OF PLAGUE ERA BASEBALL

The biggest and most notable thing is the lack of fans, of baseball played in empty stadiums.  The broadcasts tried several ways to get around this.  Teams are blaring low-level crowd noise over the sound system.  Some set up cardboard cutouts of fans as a sort of comforting simulacrum of the televised baseball experience instead of looking at row after row of cold, empty seats and thinking oh shit there's a plague what the hell are we doing.  I like the cardboard fans.  They're goofy and charming.  The Dodgers had them set up for the game I watched late Thursday night, and I was disappointed they did not set up a cardboard Larry King to emulate what I think is one of the greatest camera shots in the history of televised baseball:


On Saturday's Fox telecasts, the production crew decided to go in another direction and remind us that we are all living in a cyberpunk dystopia.  Fox digitally inserted fans into the stadium using computer graphics from an early generation of console video games and taunted viewers with disturbing pixelated blobs waving disconnected limbs around and appearing and disappearing like ghoulish specters.  There were no fans behind the plate in the Cubs game I watched, but a player would hit a foul ball and the camera would pan into a crowd of weightless cub-shirted dolls, their limbs undulating like horror movie versions of inflatable car lot dancers.  It is an abomination.

The aesthetic of pandemic-era television is the grainy, pixelated Zoom quality of video images, and it is precisely the degradation of television from high-definition to blurry glitches that gives everything a feeling of cyberpunk dystopia.  I believe this is because this is how television and communications looked in every 1980s and 1990s cyberpunk dystopia movie.  Every day on our screens we see an entertainment apparatus that will not stop for anything including a pile of bodies continue to go through the motions with the same form and content but now these programs look exactly like how grainy video calls looked in Total Recall.  There is a television on at all times outside of my office, and every morning I see the same chipper morning news people grinning through elaborate haircuts and doing their inane post-human banter no longer in a studio but in their homes, in networks of flickering rumpus rooms, and the idea of someone sitting at home staring into a computer and vacuously chuckle-talking to Keith about his Summer Movie Faves has been consistently making my blood run cold.

Sports television has hewed to this aesthetic.  Networks have added teleconferenced announcers superimposed over game action nervously tripping over each other and disembodied crowd sounds echoing through eerie shots of abandoned stadiums but they have tried to maintain the familiar grammar of a sports broadcast.  It is the psychosis of the NFL draft but now Mel Kiper looks like a 1990s CD Rom Video Game Guy who sells weapon upgrades.  In my head, I hear Joe Buck narrating the fall of the American government from various regional warlord factions in his same lilting down low it's three and two cadence while John Smoltz interrupts to add in that it's also a rough night for Giants hitters as Kershaw's looking sharp. 

The aesthetics of American Cyberpunk as depicted on sports television

And yet, despite all of the harrowing dread, baseball is still baseball.  The pitch still thumps into the catcher's glove.  The ball still cracks off of bats.  Every few minutes, a large person you have never heard of named Tanner Traegarten or Chance Hacklebourg comes in to throw 98.  The umpires still communicate in their indecipherable grunt-argots.  For some reason, everyone is still spitting and grabbing at their extremities at all times, which is comforting in baseball and would give me an anxiety attack if I saw someone do it on a sidewalk. It took about 15 minutes of me settling in to watch my first Cubs game to go from marveling at the ludicrousness and recklessness of the entire enterprise to start worrying about their ramshackle bullpen consisting entirely of fictional guys from the famous Japanese Nintendo game graphic.



In the midst of all of this, the Cubs decided to launch their own television network.  And because the Cubs are owned by the eternally grasping Ricketts family, it naturally involved an important Business Deal that threatened to leave Comcast customers, the main carrier of all Chicago area cable subscribers, unable to watch the game until they came to a last minute agreement on opening day.  The Marquee Network exists to show nothing but Cubs content, and I have occasionally been thinking about what they have been airing for the past several months as the entire reason for its existence has been swallowed up by the pandemic.  For the past few days, since the Marquee Network has loomed large in my brain, I have been unable to stop thinking about them airing a Ryan Dempster talk show that is just a 1990s talk show where Dempster wears an enormous boxy suit and painted tie, talks to Sissy Spacek and Antonio Alfonseca, and everyone involved is constantly housing and spitting sunflower seeds everywhere.  

Baseball has returned with a sense of anxious joy and horror, something that should not be happening at all but is, and since I am powerless to stop it I might as well see if Javy Baez can knock some dingers.  It exists, like the return of all entertainment and amusement parks and throngs of people hosing each other down with particles in bars, an abomination, an indictment of a government and society unwilling to protect itself from annihilation, and it is also the comfort of knowing that on a summer day you can turn on the radio and hear Ron Coomer talking about how Kris Bryant is really looking for something he drive here the same way you always can.  And if this contradictory state of affairs seems untenable, an impossible way to reconcile enjoying something that should not really exist, there is nothing I can tell you that you can't already know from watching college football in normal times.