Guest Post At Baseball Analysts
Jeff · September 28, 2005 at 11:35 pm · Filed Under Mariners
I’ve got a guest post today at Rich Lederer and Bryan Smith’s fine Baseball Analysts site. It’s about why I love baseball, and why I keep doing this.
It kind of follows in the footsteps of Dave’s post from a few weeks back where he took a trip down nostalgia lane and wrote: “‘Why do you love baseball?’ is a pretty common question for me. I’m never really sure what to say. I just do.” My post tries to figure out what I should say when asked that question.
Comments
16 Responses to “Guest Post At Baseball Analysts”
Oh, Jeff, that is a wonderful article.
One of my favorite experiences in Japan was once taking the hour-long train ride back to Tokyo after going out to Chiba Bay to see the Marines play the Fighters. A guy who had seen me in the stands singing and yelling with the Fighters cheering section started talking to me on the train. He spoke no English, I speak… well, you’ve heard my Japanese. Still, we chatted for 30-45 minutes or so about baseball on the train. He told me about being a Fighters fan for 20 years; I told him about being a Phillies fan all my life. It was awesome.
Last night was my last season ticket game for the year. I’ve spent the last two years sitting next to the same people, but next year we all plan to get different plans. Funny how that works; it’s almost like saying goodbye to a college roomate or something. Heck, my mom still sends Christmas cards to the lady who had the season tickets next to hers at the Vet from 1974-1985 or so. It’s not crazy. It’s community.
Thankyou Jeff. Wonderful read to bring a positive perspective to my day.
Are you going to bring back one of those bottles of Saki with the snake in it that you referred to a few months ago?
DMZ would roundly berate me if I didn’t. Actually, he’d probably just boo. So yes, yes I will.
Back in the “turbulent ’70’s”, I knew of several families in which the only civil conversation that could be conducted was about baseball.
Baseball – the bridge to get familes across otherwise impassable rifts. There’s not much else in the world that accomplishes that task so well.
One of my wife’s Okinawan uncles is fanatic about the game, and not just Japan’s yakyuu. He checks out American box scores daily, watches all the televised Mariner and Yankee games, and tries to convince me that the Mariners’ demise is directly related to the absence of Dan Wilson.
what? he’s a Dan Fan without being told to be one by Rizzy? 🙂
His son’s a catcher, so …
Baseball – the bridge to get familes across otherwise impassable rifts. There’s not much else in the world that accomplishes that task so well.
The family of a friend of a friend went the other way: they live in Connecticut, right on the Red Sox / Yankees fault line; all the brothers bled red, but the sisters switched to New York in the 90s “because Jeter is so cute.” Apparently there is now a house rule that no baseball can be discussed during dinner.
if we are pointing to articles elsewhere (though none as nice as Jeff’s piece) Morosi outdoes himself with an …. analysis on Bavasi’s tenure thus far (done without any input from Bavasi) and Finny continues his series on the M’s needs with an incoherent piece on catchers but Larry Stone’s entertaining piece on the mashers of ’97 makes up for the others.
Well done Jeff.
I don’t like Morosi’s analysis of the Freddy trade. I think it’s clear that we owned the ChiSox on that one.
Nice piece Jeff.
#7, Whoah. I honestly can’t imagine how I would handle that, but I think it’s fair to say I would completely flip out. There was a girl I knew in DC whose boyfriend was Yankee fan who would say similar things (even about Posada of all people), but at least she was just copying the guy who had taught her about baseball. That’s hard to compete with. But in my own house? I shudder to think.
Jeff if you fly United to Osaka there is a chance can get you seated in what ever is open as know and live with flight attendents on that route.
My girlfriend is a Red Sox fan, and she recently got in an argument with a guy at a sporting goods store (she was buying rugby boots) about how attractive Jeter is. She insists he’s bland and homely, while the guy selling rugby gear was arguing Jeter was cute.
It took someone else pointing out what he was actually saying to shut him up.
I’d like to think that I helped inspire Jeff to do this (even though he told me he planned to do it)… about 3 or 4 months ago. Regardless, it’s good to see it finally in print and it was better than I imagined. Right up there with that disc golf story! That’s the thing I miss the most about going to Jeff’s old blog, links to his stories in random papers. You guys should open a site for side projects, call it USS No Mariner. I know all the clogging fans on the board would be happy to have an outlet for Jason’s work.
Anyways, good work Jeff.
Evan, I am so sick of hearing intelligent journalists talk about the Garcia trade (or the Randy Johnson trade) and ignoring the fact that he was a free agent at the end of the year and was going to leave, WHICH IS THE WHOLE POINT OF THE TRADE. I complained to Steve Kelley and his editor a few weeks ago when he pulled that BS in the Times.
Already we’re ahead on the Garcia trade and we still have two more years of Reed for cheap plus whatever we might get in trade for Morse.
Back to the topic, nice piece Jeff. I must wonder how you communicate when you don’t speak the same language, even if in a sense you do. I understand a bit of French and Spanish, but couldn’t talk about baseball in either language.
Jeff,
I agree.