If you build it, they will come, Part Two
Mar. 18th, 2008 11:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
penfieldFrom both a personal and professional scouting perspective, the trip was an unqualified success. But my thirst for the new baseball season remained unquenched.
Upon returning from Florida on Monday afternoon, I fueled up on the few scraps of food that had survived the interim in our refrigerator and immediately left the apartment again, this time en route to Politics & Prose for a book signing and talk. The signers/talkers were Stephen Goldman, Jay Jaffe and Clay Davenport, editor and contributors to the 2008 Baseball Prospectus.
If I may put in a quick plug for the folks at Baseball Prospectus, let me say that they comprise the most thoughtful, intelligent, inquisitive and innovative minds thinking about baseball today, anywhere. Not only do they make professional sports seem like an intellectual pursuit -- no small challenge given the obsequious, testosterone-injected head-smashing ethos promulgated by traditional media -- they make math seem fun, which even my most charismatic high school teachers were pitifully unable to do. If you are at all inclined, and particularly if you have any interest in winning your fantasy baseball league, I strongly recommend the purchase of a Web site subscription or the 2008 annual.
At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, I admire these guys. And I was not alone: the event at P&P was well enough attended to require surplus seating. The free pizza and beer that the bookstore had arranged for the occasion was less an incentive for people to show up than it was a distraction for the more comestibly gluttonous patrons.
When Goldman, Jaffe and Davenport came up to the dais, my perspective was irrevocably alterned. I was under no illusion that these guys were in anyway rock stars, but I was surprised to find that they were such dorks. "Neo-maxi-zoom dweebies," as John Bender might say. They wore overstated, ill-fitting clothes from the early 1990s and sported socially awkward haircuts straight out of anime cartoons. I don't wish to belabor the point by insulting them, but it is relevant to my thought process: that I was there paying respect to three guys that I -- I, by no means a Big Man on Campus -- very likely would have ridiculed in high school.
Reflecting now, I am even more surprised that I was so surprised in the first place. Any person or group of people who coin terms like VORP, MORP and WARP-3 would be bound to score low on the Fonzie-meter.
And of course I quickly realized that G/F/D, like most neo-maxi-zoom-dweebies, come alive with enthusiasm and eloquence when talking about the stuff they know, especially since their chosen avocation is borne of a love for the American Pastime, and a uniquely American urge to understand it -- to live deep and suck out all the marrow of it, to coin another uniquely American thinker.
And within the hour my respect had been restored and my scorn was instead turned on the audience, of which I constituted a representative sample. If there were a hundred people in the crowd, 98 of them were male and at least two-thirds of them were old enough to have better ways of spending their 7 p.m. They/we were also dorks, but a different species of dork: not the kind bullies terrorized at bus stops or in the hallways, but the kind who were smart enough to stay invisible to all but a few close friends, such that they developed their own indigenous language and activites and lived so inconspicuously that no one remembers them at high school reunions.
The Baseball Prospectus talk at P&P was like a convention for those/us guys -- an opportunity to channel some irrational sports-related rage or anxiety, tell a few embarassingly inside jokes and get advice for our collective 1,428 fantasy leagues.
It was a little embarassing. But I think most good hobbies are a little embarassing and a little more fun for it.
Upon returning from Florida on Monday afternoon, I fueled up on the few scraps of food that had survived the interim in our refrigerator and immediately left the apartment again, this time en route to Politics & Prose for a book signing and talk. The signers/talkers were Stephen Goldman, Jay Jaffe and Clay Davenport, editor and contributors to the 2008 Baseball Prospectus.
If I may put in a quick plug for the folks at Baseball Prospectus, let me say that they comprise the most thoughtful, intelligent, inquisitive and innovative minds thinking about baseball today, anywhere. Not only do they make professional sports seem like an intellectual pursuit -- no small challenge given the obsequious, testosterone-injected head-smashing ethos promulgated by traditional media -- they make math seem fun, which even my most charismatic high school teachers were pitifully unable to do. If you are at all inclined, and particularly if you have any interest in winning your fantasy baseball league, I strongly recommend the purchase of a Web site subscription or the 2008 annual.
At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, I admire these guys. And I was not alone: the event at P&P was well enough attended to require surplus seating. The free pizza and beer that the bookstore had arranged for the occasion was less an incentive for people to show up than it was a distraction for the more comestibly gluttonous patrons.
When Goldman, Jaffe and Davenport came up to the dais, my perspective was irrevocably alterned. I was under no illusion that these guys were in anyway rock stars, but I was surprised to find that they were such dorks. "Neo-maxi-zoom dweebies," as John Bender might say. They wore overstated, ill-fitting clothes from the early 1990s and sported socially awkward haircuts straight out of anime cartoons. I don't wish to belabor the point by insulting them, but it is relevant to my thought process: that I was there paying respect to three guys that I -- I, by no means a Big Man on Campus -- very likely would have ridiculed in high school.
Reflecting now, I am even more surprised that I was so surprised in the first place. Any person or group of people who coin terms like VORP, MORP and WARP-3 would be bound to score low on the Fonzie-meter.
And of course I quickly realized that G/F/D, like most neo-maxi-zoom-dweebies, come alive with enthusiasm and eloquence when talking about the stuff they know, especially since their chosen avocation is borne of a love for the American Pastime, and a uniquely American urge to understand it -- to live deep and suck out all the marrow of it, to coin another uniquely American thinker.
And within the hour my respect had been restored and my scorn was instead turned on the audience, of which I constituted a representative sample. If there were a hundred people in the crowd, 98 of them were male and at least two-thirds of them were old enough to have better ways of spending their 7 p.m. They/we were also dorks, but a different species of dork: not the kind bullies terrorized at bus stops or in the hallways, but the kind who were smart enough to stay invisible to all but a few close friends, such that they developed their own indigenous language and activites and lived so inconspicuously that no one remembers them at high school reunions.
The Baseball Prospectus talk at P&P was like a convention for those/us guys -- an opportunity to channel some irrational sports-related rage or anxiety, tell a few embarassingly inside jokes and get advice for our collective 1,428 fantasy leagues.
It was a little embarassing. But I think most good hobbies are a little embarassing and a little more fun for it.
