A tweet went around yesterday asking a pretty simple question, hoping for answers, because everyone loves that dopamine hit of attention. The tweet was this:
I answered it, nailing down all my possible answers to just the one cool thing that happened to strike my fancy at the moment:
I stand by that extremely hard, by the way.
But that’s not the only thing I miss. How could it be? I like baseball quite a lot, it turns out, and that means that I certainly like more than one aspect of it.
Anyway, here are a few other things I miss, because they’re cool and fun, and baseball is also cool and fun:
-In the scenario I tweeted, where the batter strikes out looking, it’s about twelve times as cool if the batter stands in the box with that exasperated God dammit posture before the ump makes the call. He knows he should have swung. He knows he messed up. He takes a moment, as everyone on the field jogs to the dugout, to just stand there, basking in his failure. Then he sighs, turns around, and starts his own slow walk back. Sometimes he peeks back at the pitcher involuntarily, wondering how that guy got the better of him. Occasionally, he’ll mutter to himself.
-But you know what else is great? How that batter gets another chance later in the game. That old failure is over. It’s done. It’s in the past. You don’t get to rest on your laurels; you have to beat that guy again. You have to earn it. I like that. You can’t avoid the problem when you’re a pitcher. You can walk a guy, of course, but that’s basically just losing a little. You don’t get to run out the clock and win by default. You have to actually win.
-I like Johnny Cueto’s windup, no matter which of his 800 windups he’s using that day. He takes a step back, maybe he holds it and maybe he doesn’t, and then he lifts his leg in the air, and maybe he throws immediately or maybe he rocks a little bit or maybe he rocks a lot or maybe he just stands there, holding it for an eon, and then he throws from one of 19 different arm slots.
Or maybe he quick pitches the batter, who gets all mad about it. It changes every pitch!
-He wouldn’t have been playing yet anyway because of his shoulder injury, but there’s something extremely satisfying about watching Reyes Moronta take the mound, walk his first two batters, and then strike out the side. It’s like he’s too good so he needs to make things a little hard on himself. It is certainly frustrating in the moment, but once he gets out of it — and he almost always does, which is against the laws of baseball — it is delightfully befuddling how he does things.
-Tyler Rogers. He’s a submariner. Submariners are cool. I don’t think I need to explain this more.
-I mean, I can explain it more. Like, he has a brother on the Twins who’s also a pitcher. A left-handed pitcher, where Tyler is a righty. And his brother throws totally normally!
-I talked about Brandon Belt’s eye for a moment on Tuesday, so I’m not going to repeat myself, but when he gets AT&Ted and he walks away normally and his shoulders don’t slump, I dunno, I feel kinda proud?
-Also, Tyler Rogers was great for years in Sacramento, and the team never gave him a chance, which was weird, because it’s not like those bullpens were lighting the world on fire, and you have this fun, unconventional guy who’s shredding a hitter’s paradise, and, like, what’s the point of having Tyler Rogers if you’re not going to call him up in a lost year when he fills a position of need, and … anyway, you get the point.
-”When it’s time for a change, think Speedee Oil Change and Tune Up. Your oil change, tune up, and smog experts.”
They’ve changed the ad read a little bit — it’s now Speedee Oil Change and Auto Service, for one thing — but this is the version that will always live in my heart.
-When the game is absolute crap — like, the Giants are down 9-2 in the seventh and definitely won’t be coming back — and the broadcasters just start doing whatever they can to fill up the time. Kruk and Kuip start finding children in the crowd to talk about, and Jon and Dave start talking about boats or FDR or boats named after FDR. Jon in particular is just wildly entertaining when there’s no reason to rein it in.
-Bruce Bochy’s acting in Amici’s commercials. I will forever remember his delivery of the line, “Well, I manage.”
-The shots of the seagulls circling the park. It’s about to be Seagull Time in San Francisco and as long as I’m not literally there for it, I am there for it.
-The ads. The ads are always hit and miss, but the misses aren’t that bad and the hits are fun, and can reveal new sides to a player. I think of Ray Durham’s raised eyebrows when asked what the G in G-string stands for, or Evan Longoria’s perfect rapid fire comic timing last year, or well, Buster Posey just outclassing everyone:
-Oh, speaking of Buster Posey: when Buster Posey lines a double the opposite way. Down the line or in the gap. Doesn’t matter. It’s aesthetically perfect.
-Watching really fast players. I remember I had great seats on Memorial Day in 2012, and at some point, Gregor Blanco tripled. Seeing him sprint around the bases was breathtaking. People aren’t supposed to run that fast, I thought, and yet here he was, running that fast.
We’d have gotten Billy Hamilton this year, who is faster than Blanco ever was (he’s faster than just about anyone ever was), though he’s also less good at baseball. But the times that he got on base would have been spectacular, and seeing him running the bases would have made up for all the ways in which he wasn’t all that good.
-I miss deluding myself about how annoyed I would be watch a guy hit when he has an OBP that tops out around .300 and no power. I would be very annoyed.
-Finally, I miss the rhythm of having baseball to watch. It’s not just the lack of the game, it’s the lack of the routine. Last year, I would get home at 7:15, eat dinner, and watch the game until it was over. It’s comforting to have it there, and familiar. It’s this habit that binds you to people all over Northern California, and some scattered even farther away than that. It’s part of the fabric of your day in the spring and summer, and now that fabric is…skimpier?
Maybe I should have thought that metaphor through a little better.
In a time when everyone is stuck at home, it’s a twist of the knife that we can’t even have baseball so that, for three hours, everything feels normal again. Obviously, I don’t want baseball while there’s the slightest risk to anyone involved, and there is currently much more than the slightest risk, so I’m not asking Rob Manfred to drop everything and bring the league back. But I miss it.
When your routines get taken from you and you can’t replace them, all they leave behind are holes. Baseball’s supposed to be something that helps fill those holes, and instead it’s just one more.