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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I’m participating in the 16th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 18 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

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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I’m participating in the 11th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 17 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

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, #8.5*

J. and I were watching a spring training game on TV between the Mets and the Red Sox. Gary Cohen, was one announcer, a longtime sportscaster for the Mets. The other voice was new, yet sounded vaguely familiar.

Around the fifth inning, two outfielders came too close to each other, leading Cohen and his associate to reminisce about a time 10 years ago when Mike Cameron and Carlos Beltran did collide while each dived for a ball neither caught. Beltran had a concussion, and Cameron had numerous facial injuries and was never the same player again. The unknown announcer remembered seeing the collision from left field -- and immediately, I knew he was Cliff Floyd, one of the Mets' better left fielders. When I said it, J. remembered that he'd read that Cliff Floyd was going to do some sportscasting for the Mets this year.

I'm a big baseball fan, but not one of those obsessives who can name every lineup for my team back to its beginnings. Every now and then, though, a trivia fact will surface, and I will know something I didn't know I knew. It was fun.

*I've already posted to the Slice of Life Writing Challenge, but this was something I wanted to write about today, as well.