Chin Music
Sep. 10th, 2010 11:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
penfield"I always turn to the sports section first. The sports page records people's accomplishments; the front page has nothing but man's failures."
- Earl Warren
It is both curious and totally appropriate that professional sports leagues use the word "season" to refer to the period between beginning and end.
Curious because these leagues invariably span numerous seasons: professional football debuted last night, just as summer started to give way to crisp autumn, and will not finish until we are up to our asses in winter. Baseball begins each year with Spring Training, cruises through The Dog Days of Summer and ends with the Fall Classic. The NBA starts every year in November and, including the playoffs, concludes a full year and a half later.
And it is totally appropriate because we look forward to each opening day with agitated anticipation, only to find that the end sneaks up on us. Likewise, we breathlessly await the first cool breezes of fall, or the cozy hearth of winter, or spring flowers, or summer sunshine, until they abruptly stop, usually right in the middle of our evening commute.
And at the end of each season, we feel ourselves die a little inside, because we know that we only have so many seasons in us, and another one is gone.
* * *
The 2010 season will come to a close this weekend for the Harry's Full Disclosure softball team (HFD), when the U.S. House Softball League sponsors its annual championship tournament. For every team but one, the final out will be disappointing.
It will be particularly disappointing for HFD after the team's most successful regular season in almost a decade, as measured not only in terms of on-field results but in more nebulous and hard-to-quantify ways as well. After several years in which team leadership occasionally struggled to field a minimum of nine healthy bodies, the 2010 team was legion, often more than a dozen strong and unanimously wearing the official uniform. Postgame carousing -- the bellwether of team chemistry -- was strongly encouraged and routinely practiced.
For these reasons the 2010 season will be considered an indisputable success no matter how disappointing is the finish. We the players harbor no illusions of grandeur; one teammate recently mused that we are "the least-confident No. 16 seed ever" in the tournament. We are, in the largest sense, just happy to be there. Last year we didn't even get a tournament bid.
But there is also the sense that this might be the best chance we ever have to do something exciting and memorable on this stage. And a championship would be even sweeter if we could achieve it with this particular HFD team that has become so close. Nobody knows if 2011 will be the same. We don't want this season to end.
But everything ends.
* * *
There are a lot of great and positive things about sports, especially (and almost exclusively) recreational sports: camaraderie, teamwork, exercise, leadership by acclamation, friendly competition, the joy of play, the attention to detail, the appreciation of the gestalt, the bright euphoria in victory, the warm sympathy in defeat, the satisfaction of full effort and the ungoverned exuberance of battle for battle's sake.
The trouble with sports, especially (and almost exclusively) recreational sports, is that the individual players seldom agree on which is the most important of those things. Each teammate's individual motivations may add up to a common goal, but problems inevitably crop up when a person who is in it solely "for the bright euphoria in victory" crosses paths with a person who is in it simply "for the joy of play".
By contrast, the great thing about professional and pro/amateur (i.e. NCAA) sports is that everyone -- owners, players, popcorn vendors -- tacitly agrees on what is really happening. Pro and pro-am sports is a business, a commodification of athletics via an upfront transaction of cash-for-entertainment, contingent on the leagues' ability to provide certainty in the form of Winners and Losers. Which is to say, in the modern parlance of contract negotiation, "It's a business."
In fact, it's all very postmodern in the way it openly acknowledges (and often celebrates) the conversion of something simple and beautiful into commerce. Whereas the math required of the typical reader of the Sports section used to be as simple as counting home runs or dividing the number of hits by the number of at-bats, authors now seek to calculate the deferred accounting against the salary cap or estimate the value of a franchise's "brand."
There is very often a pull between the philosophies of the recreational and those of the professional. Some people want professional athletes and team owners to embrace the game at the core of The Game, to place sportsmanship and loyalty and enthusiasm and other romantic notions above typical buyer/seller relationships. And there are others who are either so consumed by the spirit of recreational athletics or so thirsty for power that they will seek to formalize and professionalize the recreation, like the rich guy who buys his childhood team, only to end up rooting for himself.
* * *
For the record: Harry's Full Disclosure went 10-2 in the regular season, including wins in each of the first seven games of the year. That comes to a .833 winning percentage, tied for seventh in the 117-team league. When you factor in the strength of schedule and the quality of the competition and the quality of the competition's competition and all kinds of hypotenuses or whatever, we finished with a Ratings Power Index (RPI) of .605. In the U.S. House Softball League's Selection Show, we were awarded the 16th seed (and a first-round bye) in a field of 48.
But if you want to look for blemishes on that record, they're easy to find: We didn't play any team in the top 25, and only faced two teams in the top 55 (and lost to one of them). Half of our wins were by four runs or fewer. We lost our last game of the season in a listless, powerless effort against a team that didn't even make the tournament.
The softball cognoscenti has taken notice of these flaws, if the chatter on the "smack talk" section of the league's message boards is any indication. For example:
Someone named The Softball Guy predicts on his "Unofficial House Softball League Blog" that "Harry's Full Disclosure gets knocked off by the Hired Guns" (the No. 17 seed and our likely opponent in the second round).[*]
Someone named "Sonny" agrees: "Harry's Full Disclosure: Having not played a single team in the top 25, the Hired Guns will be too much to handle." Sonny and The Softball Guy may have a point; The Hired Guns went 12-4 with a substantially larger run differential and played two powerhouse teams pretty close. It's also possible that Sonny and the Softball Guy are the same person.
Someone named "The Dude" proclaims that "Owego in sweet 16 is on par with Harrys Full Disclosure? No chance sir, not all sweet 16 matchups are created equally." I confess that I have no idea what this means. It could even be a compliment. The Dude certainly seems to know what he is talking about.
They all must know what they are talking about because some members of this loquatious subculture post messages to these boards every five minutes. They think about this stuff a lot. It should not surprise readers inside or outside of D.C. that many of these individuals are employed by the federal government.
* * *
In Major League Baseball, just in time for the final stretch of the pennant races, teams are permitted to expand their rosters from 25 to 40 players beginning in early September. There isn't an overriding, perfect reason for this, though there are several smaller rationalizations: the minor league season ends in August and they want to bring the kids up for a cup of coffee, it allows teams that are mathematically eliminated to give their fans something new and exciting to watch, and for playoff teams it helps give the weary regulars an occasional rest before the televised games begin.
But there is a basic flaw in this tradition: during the most critical phase of the season, teams are forced to play under fundamentally different rules than are in place the rest of the year. Baseball begins in April as one game and ends in October as something else.
Endings are like that.
* * *
In the U.S. House Softball League, tournament softball is so different than regular-season softball that it is only nominally the same sport. It's like suddenly graduating from ping-pong to tennis.
Regular-season games are usually played on patchy, lumpy, unbounded plots of land dotted with tourists and sewer grates; tournament games are played on well-manicured fields with fine dirt infields and deep fences.
Regular season games are played with whomever can show up on that given weeknight, often including mercenary ringers, friends-of-friends and strangers off the street, and managers usually try to let everyone play at least an inning or two; tournament games are strictly limited to pre-established 25-man rosters and played on weekend mornings when there's no competition with night classes or overtime, and the drive to win naturally compels managers to play their best eleven swingers.
Perhaps most importantly, regular-season play operates with no strike zone and a relaxed pitch-until-they-hit-it philosophy; tournament play operates with umpires and each at-bat starts with a 1-1 count. (Not only can you walk and strike out in the tournament, but there is a walk rule that rivals the Hawley-Smoot Tariff in terms of legal complexity.)
This presents a specific challenge for me, as the team's pitcher. My role has suddenly changed from facilitator to competitor. And I, more than any other player, hold the team's fortune in my hand. I am not the best player on our roster. But I have the unmatched power to end our season.
Everything ends, somehow.
* * *
I told my father the other day how nervous I was about playing in the tournament. About the whole new ballgame. About the pressure to preserve the great season. He already knew what I was feeling.
My dad was a real athlete in his younger days -- until his skills topped out in college, anyway -- and I suspect that he viewed his first-born son as the successor to that talent.
He was cured of that notion early on in my Little League career, which could arguably be referred to as a criminal enterprise against sport itself. I was at once flabby and uncoordinated, alternately frustrated and disinterested. Under pressure, I collapsed on myself spectacularly, like a bad equation. But the only time I ever felt my father's disappointment was when he didn't think I was trying hard or having fun.
And so that's what he told me the other day. "Just do your best and have fun." And that means I'll just have to forget about the umpire and the commissioners and the pressure and the doubters and all that stuff, and remember the thing that I'm trying to hold on to in the first place. So:
Here's to the "play" in playing softball. Here's to my teammates. And here's to end of this season, and the beginning of the next.
Seeing the end coming doesn't make it any easier.
- Earl Warren
It is both curious and totally appropriate that professional sports leagues use the word "season" to refer to the period between beginning and end.
Curious because these leagues invariably span numerous seasons: professional football debuted last night, just as summer started to give way to crisp autumn, and will not finish until we are up to our asses in winter. Baseball begins each year with Spring Training, cruises through The Dog Days of Summer and ends with the Fall Classic. The NBA starts every year in November and, including the playoffs, concludes a full year and a half later.
And it is totally appropriate because we look forward to each opening day with agitated anticipation, only to find that the end sneaks up on us. Likewise, we breathlessly await the first cool breezes of fall, or the cozy hearth of winter, or spring flowers, or summer sunshine, until they abruptly stop, usually right in the middle of our evening commute.
And at the end of each season, we feel ourselves die a little inside, because we know that we only have so many seasons in us, and another one is gone.
* * *
The 2010 season will come to a close this weekend for the Harry's Full Disclosure softball team (HFD), when the U.S. House Softball League sponsors its annual championship tournament. For every team but one, the final out will be disappointing.
It will be particularly disappointing for HFD after the team's most successful regular season in almost a decade, as measured not only in terms of on-field results but in more nebulous and hard-to-quantify ways as well. After several years in which team leadership occasionally struggled to field a minimum of nine healthy bodies, the 2010 team was legion, often more than a dozen strong and unanimously wearing the official uniform. Postgame carousing -- the bellwether of team chemistry -- was strongly encouraged and routinely practiced.
For these reasons the 2010 season will be considered an indisputable success no matter how disappointing is the finish. We the players harbor no illusions of grandeur; one teammate recently mused that we are "the least-confident No. 16 seed ever" in the tournament. We are, in the largest sense, just happy to be there. Last year we didn't even get a tournament bid.
But there is also the sense that this might be the best chance we ever have to do something exciting and memorable on this stage. And a championship would be even sweeter if we could achieve it with this particular HFD team that has become so close. Nobody knows if 2011 will be the same. We don't want this season to end.
But everything ends.
* * *
There are a lot of great and positive things about sports, especially (and almost exclusively) recreational sports: camaraderie, teamwork, exercise, leadership by acclamation, friendly competition, the joy of play, the attention to detail, the appreciation of the gestalt, the bright euphoria in victory, the warm sympathy in defeat, the satisfaction of full effort and the ungoverned exuberance of battle for battle's sake.
The trouble with sports, especially (and almost exclusively) recreational sports, is that the individual players seldom agree on which is the most important of those things. Each teammate's individual motivations may add up to a common goal, but problems inevitably crop up when a person who is in it solely "for the bright euphoria in victory" crosses paths with a person who is in it simply "for the joy of play".
By contrast, the great thing about professional and pro/amateur (i.e. NCAA) sports is that everyone -- owners, players, popcorn vendors -- tacitly agrees on what is really happening. Pro and pro-am sports is a business, a commodification of athletics via an upfront transaction of cash-for-entertainment, contingent on the leagues' ability to provide certainty in the form of Winners and Losers. Which is to say, in the modern parlance of contract negotiation, "It's a business."
In fact, it's all very postmodern in the way it openly acknowledges (and often celebrates) the conversion of something simple and beautiful into commerce. Whereas the math required of the typical reader of the Sports section used to be as simple as counting home runs or dividing the number of hits by the number of at-bats, authors now seek to calculate the deferred accounting against the salary cap or estimate the value of a franchise's "brand."
There is very often a pull between the philosophies of the recreational and those of the professional. Some people want professional athletes and team owners to embrace the game at the core of The Game, to place sportsmanship and loyalty and enthusiasm and other romantic notions above typical buyer/seller relationships. And there are others who are either so consumed by the spirit of recreational athletics or so thirsty for power that they will seek to formalize and professionalize the recreation, like the rich guy who buys his childhood team, only to end up rooting for himself.
* * *
For the record: Harry's Full Disclosure went 10-2 in the regular season, including wins in each of the first seven games of the year. That comes to a .833 winning percentage, tied for seventh in the 117-team league. When you factor in the strength of schedule and the quality of the competition and the quality of the competition's competition and all kinds of hypotenuses or whatever, we finished with a Ratings Power Index (RPI) of .605. In the U.S. House Softball League's Selection Show, we were awarded the 16th seed (and a first-round bye) in a field of 48.
But if you want to look for blemishes on that record, they're easy to find: We didn't play any team in the top 25, and only faced two teams in the top 55 (and lost to one of them). Half of our wins were by four runs or fewer. We lost our last game of the season in a listless, powerless effort against a team that didn't even make the tournament.
The softball cognoscenti has taken notice of these flaws, if the chatter on the "smack talk" section of the league's message boards is any indication. For example:
Someone named The Softball Guy predicts on his "Unofficial House Softball League Blog" that "Harry's Full Disclosure gets knocked off by the Hired Guns" (the No. 17 seed and our likely opponent in the second round).[*]
Someone named "Sonny" agrees: "Harry's Full Disclosure: Having not played a single team in the top 25, the Hired Guns will be too much to handle." Sonny and The Softball Guy may have a point; The Hired Guns went 12-4 with a substantially larger run differential and played two powerhouse teams pretty close. It's also possible that Sonny and the Softball Guy are the same person.
Someone named "The Dude" proclaims that "Owego in sweet 16 is on par with Harrys Full Disclosure? No chance sir, not all sweet 16 matchups are created equally." I confess that I have no idea what this means. It could even be a compliment. The Dude certainly seems to know what he is talking about.
They all must know what they are talking about because some members of this loquatious subculture post messages to these boards every five minutes. They think about this stuff a lot. It should not surprise readers inside or outside of D.C. that many of these individuals are employed by the federal government.
* * *
In Major League Baseball, just in time for the final stretch of the pennant races, teams are permitted to expand their rosters from 25 to 40 players beginning in early September. There isn't an overriding, perfect reason for this, though there are several smaller rationalizations: the minor league season ends in August and they want to bring the kids up for a cup of coffee, it allows teams that are mathematically eliminated to give their fans something new and exciting to watch, and for playoff teams it helps give the weary regulars an occasional rest before the televised games begin.
But there is a basic flaw in this tradition: during the most critical phase of the season, teams are forced to play under fundamentally different rules than are in place the rest of the year. Baseball begins in April as one game and ends in October as something else.
Endings are like that.
* * *
In the U.S. House Softball League, tournament softball is so different than regular-season softball that it is only nominally the same sport. It's like suddenly graduating from ping-pong to tennis.
Regular-season games are usually played on patchy, lumpy, unbounded plots of land dotted with tourists and sewer grates; tournament games are played on well-manicured fields with fine dirt infields and deep fences.
Regular season games are played with whomever can show up on that given weeknight, often including mercenary ringers, friends-of-friends and strangers off the street, and managers usually try to let everyone play at least an inning or two; tournament games are strictly limited to pre-established 25-man rosters and played on weekend mornings when there's no competition with night classes or overtime, and the drive to win naturally compels managers to play their best eleven swingers.
Perhaps most importantly, regular-season play operates with no strike zone and a relaxed pitch-until-they-hit-it philosophy; tournament play operates with umpires and each at-bat starts with a 1-1 count. (Not only can you walk and strike out in the tournament, but there is a walk rule that rivals the Hawley-Smoot Tariff in terms of legal complexity.)
This presents a specific challenge for me, as the team's pitcher. My role has suddenly changed from facilitator to competitor. And I, more than any other player, hold the team's fortune in my hand. I am not the best player on our roster. But I have the unmatched power to end our season.
Everything ends, somehow.
* * *
I told my father the other day how nervous I was about playing in the tournament. About the whole new ballgame. About the pressure to preserve the great season. He already knew what I was feeling.
My dad was a real athlete in his younger days -- until his skills topped out in college, anyway -- and I suspect that he viewed his first-born son as the successor to that talent.
He was cured of that notion early on in my Little League career, which could arguably be referred to as a criminal enterprise against sport itself. I was at once flabby and uncoordinated, alternately frustrated and disinterested. Under pressure, I collapsed on myself spectacularly, like a bad equation. But the only time I ever felt my father's disappointment was when he didn't think I was trying hard or having fun.
And so that's what he told me the other day. "Just do your best and have fun." And that means I'll just have to forget about the umpire and the commissioners and the pressure and the doubters and all that stuff, and remember the thing that I'm trying to hold on to in the first place. So:
Here's to the "play" in playing softball. Here's to my teammates. And here's to end of this season, and the beginning of the next.
Seeing the end coming doesn't make it any easier.
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POSTSCRIPT:
Date: 2014-09-02 09:19 pm (UTC)