SOLSC March 18: Baseball Season Looms

(if you are not a baseball geek, this may not be for you)

            ... and my Mets fever is rising. It has been tempered somewhat by the recent season-ending injury to Edwin Diaz, Mets closer extraordinaire — injury suffered while he was celebrating (!) his Puerto Rican team’s victory in a World Baseball Classic game last week. He may have been personally responsible for the Mets winning 20 to 25 of their 101 wins.

            I was thinking of all this today as I took the train to Norwalk, Connecticut, to meet a group of other Mets fans who have been gathering annually for at least 35 years, just before the season starts. Our organizer is Dave G., the head back in the late 1980s of a group of Mets fans who kept score according to a scoresheet designed by baseball historian and sabrmetrician Bill James. In the beginning, each fan committed to score 10 to 15 games a season, fax them to a central location where the marks on the scoresheet were converted to computer data, and got paid $10 per game.

            I got involved around 1990, mostly because I loved the scoresheet. (While the standard scoresheet made it easy to see who had scored a run, this new one made it easy to see who got the RBI. Moreover, this new sheet provided space to keep track of balls and strikes, something I had done in my own invented scoring system before I knew a standard one existed.) A year or so later, the central location and payment disappeared (this particular business model that intended to sell this data to teams or sports media didn’t work out), but Dave continued to convene us and a varying number of Mets fans every March. We usually met at microbreweries in New York or southern Connecticut, though for a few years we met at Bobby Valentine’s bar in Stamford, even inviting Valentine himself to regale us with tales of his career as a player and manager.

            Essential elements of every gathering were postmortems of the previous season, guesses for how many games the Mets would win in the upcoming season, and Dave’s devilish trivia in a Jeopardy format. Questions might include “what player hit more than 30 doubles every year between 1900 and 1907?” or “what pitcher had 175 strikeouts in 1931 at age 31?” Questions were not always this esoteric, but they did require more than a casual knowledge of baseball history. I have a more erratic knowledge and usually score at or near the bottom of this trivia contest.

            Today’s meeting was at an Irish bar, and as it happened, Ireland was playing England in a Six Nations Grand Slam competition in Dublin. That game was on three large screens suspended from the ceiling, and the bar was packed. At every good move or goal or point scored by Ireland, the place broke into cheers; when the game was over, music was piped in, very loud, and voices of patrons continued very loud. While the 14 of us ate platters of bar food and drank pints of beer, we were able to talk to the person next to us or across the table. But the trivia contest required Dave to repeat his question numerous times, and if one person didn’t get the right answer, the rest of us couldn’t hear the wrong answer and maybe repeated it. However, it was fun to see old friends and meet new ones. And baseball season, with a host of new rules, opens in less than two weeks.

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SOLSC 19: Baseball

I spent the afternoon with a bunch of baseball buddies. We are all New York Mets fans. This group has been together for almost 35 years—I joined maybe 32 years ago.

            It started as the fan group for Project Scoresheet, which was the brainchild of baseball historian Bill James. He had created a way to score games that could easily be input into the computer; with groups of 15-20 fans for each team scoring using his scoresheets (we were paid $10 a game) and faxing the completed sheet within 24 hours to a central location, he thought he could then sell the accumulated information to Major League Baseball. For whatever reason, his plan did not work out, but the Elias Sports Bureau refined the idea—and if you’re a baseball fan, you may have heard that name.

            Each fan group of James’s Project had a captain who gathered the group together each March, originally to parcel out which members were responsible for which games during the season. The Mets group’s captain was Dave G., a natural networker, who, after Project Scoresheet was shut down, continued to gather us every March to discuss the previous season, opine on the season to come—and play baseball trivia.

            Except for a couple of sessions, I’ve been the only woman in the group. The younger men seemed fine with that, but initially I felt some coolness from the men close to my age—did they think that I, a female, was intruding on their space? Some years in, I discovered accidentally that one of them belonged to my sister’s church and his wife was one of my sister’s friends. Plus, I hung in there and didn’t always suck at the trivia game. So now I have been accepted.

            Today we met at a sports bar in Stamford, Conn. (everyone but me lives in Connecticut). There were a total of 23 TV screens in the bar, some immense, some very large, some home size. Most screens were showing the NCAA basketball tournament, women’s game on the screen nearest our table, men’s game on the largest screen over the bar. When the UNC/Baylor game tied and went into overtime, the room roared when one side or the other went ahead. (UNC finally won.)

            But our table stuck to baseball, at my end discussing why we hated the designated hitter that has now been imposed on the National League. (Well, accepted by the players in their new labor contract.) But as the noise level increased, it made playing trivia nearly impossible. When our game host read a question, he often had to repeat it as the turn passed from one person to the next—there were ten of us at a long table. I used to keep track of the questions and answers so I could try to remember for the next time, but today I couldn’t remember anything because I could barely hear. I didn’t get a single answer right, though I would have gotten two if I’d trusted my instincts—maybe the noise weakened my confidence.

            Before we left for the day, we each predicted how many games we thought the Mets would win this season, ranging from 83 to 93. I hope we can get together at an actual Mets game this summer to see one of those wins.

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SOL March 27: Baseball!

I am a huge baseball fan. It started with Don Larsen’s perfect game in the World Series of 1956. Could someone actually do something that was perfect? Then it wasn’t impossible for me to be perfect in my life.

            At the time, I was living in a Philadelphia suburb, so of course I became a Phillies fan. Being a Phillies fan in the mid-’50s was good practice for later becoming a Mets fan. But first I had to go through a Yankees phase: when my husband and I were first in New York and lived on the Upper West Side, I thought we must live closer to Yankee Stadium than to the Mets’ Shea Stadium. Then my daughter’s high school offered tickets to a Mets game late in the 1986 season, which turned out to be their World Series year. For the first time, I read the sports pages in the off-season so the new players and the gone players were not a huge surprise come April.

            A few years later I joined a group of Mets fans who had turned their fandom into a bit of money. They were the Mets scorers for Project Scoresheet, started by the baseball historian and statistician Bill James, who had invented a new way to score games that could be computer coded. The scorers only had to watch games, score using the Project Scoresheet system, then fax our completed scoresheets to the computer coders—and get paid $10 per game. Each year, in March, this Mets group of scorers met at a brewpub in New York or southern Connecticut (many of the men, and they were all men, lived in Connecticut), signed up for the games we’d score, talk baseball and play baseball trivia.

            Project Scoresheet failed as a business, replaced by the Elias Sports Bureau, but the Mets group has continued on. Last year our in-person meeting was canceled, but five of us had a watch-party for the Mets’ opening day. That may have been my first zoom ever.

            This year, we zoomed for our preseason gathering. A couple of the men were on grandfather duty, so baby sounds were background. We talked about the Mets’ prospects with their new, super-rich owner; we remembered all the superstars of the past who came to the Mets and didn’t perform; we wondered what had happened to former members of our group; we watched the Mets rather handily beat the Astros. Perhaps we will all go to a game this year—perhaps. It’s an hour subway ride from my home. I hope the positivity rate will have declined by later this summer.

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SOL30: Life Begins on Opening Day...

            ...which was last Thursday this year, or was it a week ago Wednesday, when Seattle beat Oakland in two official games—in Japan.

            The baseball season used to start on Monday, the first day of the week. Then ESPN came along, with its Sunday Night Baseball, and two teams would start their season the night before traditional Opening Day. And this day would be in April, unless it was in late March, when it was more likely to snow.

            (Doing a bit of Google research, I learn that Opening Day was in Japan, on a Wednesday, seven years ago. In 2014 Opening Day was in Australia, but I don’t think we were paying too much attention that day as Jack was still in rehab at the nursing home. And in 1968, Opening Day was on a Wednesday because Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated the week before, and all sporting events were, along with others, postponed until after the funeral, on April 9. In fact, April 10 was the first time all Major League Teams started their season on the same day.)

            I like to score games when I watch, but I couldn’t watch the Mets’ Opening Day on Thursday because I had work to do. Today, however, I sat in front of the TV for the whole game, keeping score by a system devised by Bill James that is too complicated to describe here, but allows for keeping track of balls and strikes and makes it much easier to see who gets the RBIs. Here’s what it looks like. And hurrah, the Mets won, although they made it look harder than it should have. 

 

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SOL9: Baseball Celebrity Sighting

               Every March I meet with a group of Mets fans to talk over the previous season, guess how many (or few) games the Mets will win this season, and play a sometimes easy, sometimes fiendish game of baseball trivia.  We often meet at a microbrewery as two of our members are beer aficionados or at a sports bar.

               Today, it was at BV’s, in Stamford, owned by Bobby Valentine, a former player and a manager of the Mets for seven years, including their 2000 subway World Series with the Yankees. The eight of us were in the middle of our trivia game, in a Jeopardy-format with an overall theme of Horseshoes and Hand Grenades (I think the only answer I got right was a manager who managed two New York teams, one with World Series in the ‘50s and one with losing seasons in the ‘60s—Casey Stengel) when who should appear at the end of our table but the owner himself. 

               It took me maybe five seconds to realize this was Bobby V himself. He regaled us with stories for more than an hour—he might still be there, but I had to leave to come back to the city to meet friends.

              Here’s one of his stories.  When he heard we were playing trivia, he reported having been at a recent event with Joe Torre, who was managing the Yankees when Bobby V was managing the Mets in 2000. Some “civilian” came up to them and said, “I’ll give you $5,000 if you can tell me who was in the starting Mets lineup in right field in the fifth game of the 2000 World Series.” Even Bobby V couldn’t remember in that moment what player that was. As he told the story, we all began guessing: Benny Agbayani (from Hawaii, and one of 10 known MLB players of Filipino background)? No, he played left field. Timo Perez? No, he was hurt. Mike Kinkade? No, he was hurt, too. The answer: Bubba Trammell, who no one could remember because he was only with the Mets for four months.

               There were many more stories, and it was clear that Bobby V hung out at his own bar so he could find new audiences for the stories of his baseball career.

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SOLSC: Baseball!

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            The baseball season opened today—oddly, in the middle of the week, and in late March, not Monday or Sunday night in the first week of April.

            I watched the New York Mets single and double against the St. Louis Cardinals, beating them 9-4. Not one home run, and that’s a good thing. Noah Syndergaard did give up two home runs, but he also struck out 10, including striking out the side in the third inning, which was part of a five-strikeout string.

            It’s not unheard of for the Mets to win on opening day. The team lost its opener its first eight years; in fact, the Mets won the World Series, in 1969, before it won an opening day game. But since 1969, the team has won 35 and lost only 12 of its openers.

            I loved watching all the old familiar players (Yoenis Cespedes, Jay Bruce, Asdrubel Cabrera), young guys (Brendon Nimmo, Amed Rosario), and new ones (Adrian Gonzalez, Todd Frazier) play well together and produce. I do wish they hadn’t left so many runners on base, but they certainly scored enough runs. I’m looking forward to spring, summer, and fall—the long season.

            Are you a baseball fan? Do you go to games?

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SOLSC: Baseball Season Starts Soon

            Today is St. Patrick’s Day, but no St. Pat’s activities for me. Instead, it’s my annual Mets fan gathering at Cask Republic, a craft brew bar in South Norwalk, Connecticut. I’m not a beer fan, so this year I got a glass of malbec to go with my burger and fries. Interestingly, most everyone else—all men—had salads.

            We generally talk baseball, with not much personal chit-chat. There was the continuing argument over who’s eligible for the Baseball Hall of Fame: does taking steroids disqualify a player, or not? There were logical claims pro and con the steroid-takers. On one side, it’s an artificial substance, so a form of cheating, and since players are paid so much, of some do it, it puts at a disadvantage those who would prefer not to damage their bodies in this way. On the other side, aat the time some players used steroids, they were not a banned substance in the major leagues, and players will, and have, always used substances to improve their performance—who knows what players used in the past?

            This argument bores me. The games has changed so much over the decades that it seems to me players of one era aren’t comparable: there are new criteria and sabermetrics has created new stats. One person even argued that some of those voted into the Hall in the early years wouldn’t have been eligible today; maybe some could be voted out, or put into a separate category. Maybe it’s time to say, “You’ve been in the Hall for 75 years. Now it’s time to move you out.”

            The high point of the gathering is the trivia contest. Our group’s convenor makes up the contest, which several years he’s offered in a Jeopardy format, with several categories varying in value from 100 to 500 points. Today’s categories:

            Players who’ve been on 3 of the 4 New York teams (Mets, Yankees, Dodgers, Giants)

            Between the wars (I and II) Hall of Famers

            ERAs under 2

            Mets managers

            3,000+ hits and 500+ stolen bases

            Expansion teams’ first year

            Players of the 2000s

There was also a "batting practice" category, which the quiz creator admits is frankly sexist—it’s super easy, and only available to me. It’s a point of honor for me not to choose any of these questions.

            I no longer remember the question, but at my first chance, my answer was Casey Stengel, and I got admiring glances from the others. Another one I got right that stumped the others: which Mets manager won the World Series with another team not in New York? (Answer: Dallas Green) And another question I got right: what National League East pitcher in 1985 had an ERA of 1.54? (Answer: Doc Gooden) On the other hand, a question I should have gotten right—what player was with the Mets 1983-1990, the Dodgers 1991-1993, and the Yankees 1995-1999?—I just couldn’t dredge from memory. Mets fans out there, do you know?

            I used to write down as many questions as I could so I could tell Jack when I got home. He enjoyed testing himself, though he often thought the questions were too obscure to be fun.

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#AtoZChallenge: B Is for Baseball, Beisbol, Base-Ball, Puro Yakyu, Yagu, Bangqiu...

            (I don’t know what other languages have a word for baseball, but if you know, please post a comment.)

            Yes, Sunday was opening day for a few teams, but as far as I’m concerned, today is the official Opening Day, and the first game for the New York Mets. The Mets have been my team for the past 30 years. Yes, I became a fan in 1986, the second time they won the World Series.

           The only reason I hadn’t been a Mets fan before is that I thought they were too far away from where I live. We’d been going to Yankee games for about eight years, and though we had to go downtown to get to the Bronx, which is uptown, Queens seemed so far away. Until my daughter started high school in 1986, and her school had a block of seats at Shea Stadium in mid-September. Of course we went, that is, my husband and I went. Our daughter wasn’t all that interested. And it didn’t take much longer to get to Shea than it did to get to Yankee Stadium. And no only were the Mets contending, but they were playing real baseball – that is, baseball without the designated hitter.

            I’ve been an off-and-on baseball fan since childhood. Well, sort of. In 1949, I lived in Brooklyn and was in the second grade. A classmate asked me whether I was for the Dodgers or the Yankees. I had never heard of the Dodgers (surprising, because my lefty parents surely knew about Jackie Robinson), but our downstairs babysitter had mentioned the Yankees, so I said I was for the Yankees. “You live in Brooklyn, so you gotta be for da Dodgers,” my classmate said, in strong Brooklynese. You can’t tell me who to be for, I thought, and instantly conceived a (somewhat) lifelong hatred of the Dodgers: it waned somewhat when they moved to L.A., then returned when they beat the Mets in playoffs in 1988.

            As a teen, I lived in Philadelphia suburbs, so became a fan of the Phillies, the lowly Phillies, last in the National League when there only 16 teams in the two leagues combined, so the Phillies were last of eight. Sometimes they’d end in seventh place. I kept a residual allegiance to the Yankees, since they could be sure to win and balance out my fandom for the underdog.

            I think this is enough about baseball for today. Except to add that the Mets won today, their 36 opening day win against only 12 losses since 1970 (they lost their first eight opening day games). And it was a pretty interesting game, a pitcher’s duel through six, then the Braves’ bullpen fell apart.

SOLSC 25: Baseball Season Coming Up

            Opening day is just over a week away. So today I took the train to Connecticut to meet a group of New York Mets fans that has been meeting just before the season starts for almost 35 years. The group started as part of a Bill James initiative called Project Scoresheet.* The Project organized groups of fans for each major league team to score games with its computer database, and those groups met just before the season started to divvy up who would score which games. I joined the group in 1990, shortly before Project Scoresheet disbanded. But our group captain was a sociable organizer, and the group continued to meet every March, to discuss baseball and the fate of the Mets, and play baseball trivia.

            I’m not great at baseball trivia. I don’t remember who pitched, or even won, the first game I ever saw. I can’t tell you the lineups, positions, or numbers of every player on the New York Mets since their creation. But I know enough to guess that it was Tom Seaver who made 11 opening day starts for the Mets. I know that Terry Pendleton of the Cardinals hit a home run that dashed the Mets hopes for winning the NL East for a second year in a row (I was there). I know just enough not to make a fool of myself in a friendly baseball trivia game.

            Today we met at the Cask Republic, a bar/restaurant serving a multitude of craft beers. Everyone but me lives in Connecticut, so South Norwalk is a central location. These occasions are the only time I drink beer, but today I went for a very exotic sangria mix (it included coconut rum). In between eating, entering the Mets 2017 wins pool, and playing trivia (I came in last), we watched the UConn women beat UCLA.

            I donated Jack’s two Mets hooded sweatshirts – too big to fit me – as prizes, and showed around the rookie baseball card for Darryl Strawberry that I was given while in California, by a friend of a friend’s husband who happened to have been Strawberry’s high school Government teacher. When he learned I was a big Mets fan, he gave me the laminated card.

            There was still hulking piles of dirty snow here and there in Norwalk.

But the train station had some very interesting historic artwork, characteristic figures of many eras, from a Civil War soldier (right) to civil rights marchers (left).

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*Bill James is a baseball historian and statistician, and Project Scoresheet was a method of scoring games for computer input and collecting the information to sell to fans and teams. It was supplanted by Stats Inc. and the Elias Sports Bureau. I love this scoring method because it counts balls and strikes.)

SOLSC Day 19: Baseball’s Coming

Today I took the train up to Connecticut to meet with a group of New York Mets for our annual preseason lunch, craft beer, and trivia.

            The warmup to trivia was a heated discussion about who on the 2016 Baseball Hall of Fame ballot should be in voted in. Personally, I cannot get excited about these arguments, but at a table full of those who are, I will have opinions. Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire all raise the question of whether players who took steroids should be in the Hall, and opinions were mixed. I suggested the Hall of Fame have a separate Steroid Wing. And no Hall for players who were designated hitters most of their careers; they were playing only half of the game.

            The trivia contest has always been created by D.G., our group’s convenor for the past 33 years — I’ve only been a member since 1991. Today’s was fiendish. Set up like a Jeopardy game, the categories were minor league teams from 1949, 1955, 1965, 1975, and 1985, with a softball category called Batting Practice for those 90 years old (one of us), and women (that would be me). We were assured that every answer was a Major Leaguer we would all know, but no one liked this game. The clues were too obscure, and starting with the name of the player’s minor league appearances was disorienting.

            If you’re not a baseball fan, this probably sounds pretty silly, but we had a great time — and hope to see a Mets game together sometime in the summer.

Slice of Life, #21

Part I. The Afternoon

            I met with a group of New York Mets fans who have been gathering before the season starts for 30 years -- I joined five years in. Three of the original members are still in it, all trivia mavens and sabrmetricians (people fascinated by baseball stats, from the Society for American Baseball Research), and they have real lives as well. We meet to talk about the team, its recent past, and, hopefully, better season this year, and then play a round of baseball Jeopardy. This year's categories were "Rogers" (players whose first or last name was Roger or Rogers); Mickey, Willie, and the Duke; Mets Hall of Famers; the Roaring '20s; and Cy Old (pitchers who won the Cy Young award when they were old -- by baseball standards). I won last year's pool for how many games the Mets would win: 79.

            We met at a beer connoisseur's bar/restaurant called the Ginger Man in Connecticut, where we commandeered a section of couches and banquettes, making a cozy spot for conversation. Being the only woman in the group made me a little nervous the first few years, but the organizer of this group is very welcoming and all I had to do was show knowledge of the game and the previous seasons. (How I came by my baseball knowledge and fandom is a long story, possibly for posts starting in April, when baseball starts up again; Thomas Boswell once wrote a book titled Why Time Begins on Opening Day).

Part II. The Evening

            A friend valiantly stood in line for standby tickets for Hamilton, the hip-hop musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda at the Public Theater. She was successful, so we got to see the best play of the season. It’s a history lesson, and a hip-hop concert. It’s a love story, and a civics lesson. In hip-hop vernacular and rhythms, we see the American Revolution in action and the rivalries, political as well as personal, among Hamilton, Burr, Jefferson, and Madison. A Cabinet meeting in Washington's administration is introduced to the audience as though Washington is an MC, inviting us to a performance. It is long, but it  packs in a tremendous amount of history in an immensely entertaining and informative way. I'm told that Dick and Lynne Cheney saw it recently, and I can hardly wait to see their reaction. The play is both patriotic and subversive, with almost all of the characters played by people of color.

            The shows at the Public are sold out through May 3 (but there are those standby seats if you are willing to stand in line). it moves to Broadway in July, and preview tickets are already on sale. They ought to offer discounts to high school classes; tickets are over $151 and $131. I think students would love it.