#57 How many games do you go to a year?
Plus: work for the Savannah Bananas and when it makes sense to pinch-hit for an MVP candidate
The Opener
The Yankees have been bad lately — except not just “lately,” for over a month. At least New Yorkers have options? Oop, nope, wait: the Mets have been worse.
The most recent Mets’ worse has come at the hands of the Milwaukee Brewers, who are on pace for what would be a franchise-best 101 wins after sweeping the Mets.
The Padres tried a hidden-ball trick and ended up balking in a run. That video doesn’t do a great job of explaining what happened, but the pitcher can’t be on the rubber as part of the farce. This feels like it should be in the Bullpen section, except I’m not sure what more there is to say. What do we think, does this count as shoddy fundamentals?
I have stayed till the end of exactly one baseball game this whole season. Wait! Please don’t cancel your subscription. I go to pregame media availability somewhat regularly, and then hurry home to make it back for bedtime (the baby’s) and spend the rest of the evening flitting around the baseball broadcasts to catch whatever seems the most compelling or important. Never a quadbox (the four-screen situation beloved by baseball sickos) fan, I’ve tried to train myself to consume multiple games at once. I partake of MLB Network’s various rundown or recap shows. I have opinions on the host of MLB’s answer to Red Zone, Strike Zone.
To be more honest, often my laptop is open and I’m scrolling job boards and sending emails and searching for links to populate this newsletter. That means opening news sites and social media and asking friends to send me anything interesting they come across. I wonder if we should do live video more, or start a podcast, or engage with the chat function on Substack more intentionally and frequently. I look at the Substack sports newsletter leaderboard and command+click, command+click, command+click — a new row of increasingly narrow tabs blooms at the top of my screen, creating a to-do list of market research.
In so many ways, I’m trying not to miss anything.
The result, ironically and yet perhaps predictably, is that I feel fairly numb on the baseball season as a whole and like I’m lacking truly distinct entry points of curiosity.
I’m trying not to make this too treacly or trite but the truth is, I think there’s a growing cost to not consuming baseball as something that is worth wasting time on. I’m treating the games as a means to an end — content — that can be made more efficient and not an experience I’m actively seeking to soak up.
Last night, before we fell asleep, Jake and I were talking about how the culture kind of sucks now. Not just the political climate, or the job market, or the digital discourse but even the creative culture. It feels frenetic and fractured and fake. We got there, as we so often do, by worrying about the future our son will inherit (and taking a break from doing so in a totally doomsday, climate crisis kind of way). Everything is shortform, digital content produced by self-taught solo operators who understand they have to produce a certain amount of slop to feed the algorithm just to have a chance that their more considered output will get seen.
I need to read a fucking book, I said, realizing my role in this all as someone who has inadvertently swapped reading for scrolling in recent months. I need to push back against the convenience of crap culture.
And, although I didn’t make this connection at the time, I need to stay for an entire, inefficient, unpredictable, and multi-sensory baseball game. Sometimes at least. Soon, before it’s too late or too cold. Ideally before they even super matter and I’m staying because the stakes demand it. Baseball, just for baseball’s sake.
–Hannah Keyser
The Bullpen
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A woman umpire called balls and strikes on Sunday for the first time in Major League Baseball history. How did Jen Pawol do? Well, she missed the first call of the game (wince), before going on to be correct 91% of the time, according to umpire scorecard. That’s not amazing, by any means, but credit to the first reply in this Reddit thread for providing a ton of rookie ump context. In conclusion? Pretty standard performance for a first game.
I feel ambivalent about the fanfare around these barrier-breaking firsts. Should we treat Pawol like any other first-time ump or should we hold a press conference to commemorate the occasion? In celebrating her individual achievement, do we inevitably end up lauding a league that is literally decades behind other major American men’s sports in having female officiants? One thing that’s easy to feel good about: Violet Palmer, the first woman NBA referee, sending a message of congratulations to Pawol. –HK
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If all the Savannah Bananas chatter of late has made you think it sounds like a fun place to work, now is your chance. The company, technically called Fan First Entertainment, is hiring a social media marketing coordinator to fulfill the brand’s vision of “Creating the Greatest Show on social media.”
If the sentence “Attention beats marketing 1000%” makes sense to you, go forth and live your Banana Ball dreams. But I gotta say, I find the application truly offensive in how much free work it demands. All applicants have to submit a “test drive” with four multi-part assignments that includes building out full graphics and content calendars for different teams.
This is not just a Savannah Bananas problem — as anyone who has applied for a job recently will tell you — but it does sorta sour me on the whole operation. That amount of work should come with compensation. Speaking of, no mention of salary. –HK
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