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Posts Tagged ‘baseball’

Don’t get me wrong. I like baseball. I just don’t care about the MLB until post-season. The same is true for the NFL. It wasn’t always this way.

I was raised in a small New England village with a great baseball field about 100 yards downhill from our back porch. Between the ages of 5 and 13 , during the daylight hours when I wasn’t in school, doing homework or participating in organized sports at another venue, that’s where you’d probably find me with the other guys from our neighborhood playing baseball in Spring and Summer or touch football in the Fall.

Since I was a New Englander, I grew up a Red Sox fan. The Yankees represented the Evil Empire. New England didn’t have an NFL team in those days and the Jets didn’t exist, so the New York Giants was my default team of choice.

In later years, I lived in Pittsburgh where I became a Pirates and Steelers fan.

But now I’ve lived more than half of my life as a resident of New York State and, although during some of those years I’ve been a half-hearted Yankees fan, I’m not emotionally committed to any of the New York teams. I may, at times, like certain MLB and NFL teams more than others but I’m not passionate about any of them.

I’m a fair weather fan.

Which is why baseball season has just started for me. Now that “the wheat is separated from the chaff”, “the cream has risen to the top”, or whichever metaphor you choose to use to describe the process which has brought the Royals and the Giants to the World Series, I’m now getting interested.

I’m looking forward to another World Series of close games, late nights, emotional ups and downs, and watching some amazingly gifted athletes and managers perform under pressure.

I find watching them to be inspiring and educational….even if I’m just a lowly fair weather fan.

Postseason=The beginning of the Major League Baseball season for me.

Don’t get me wrong. I like baseball. I just don’t care about the MLB until post-season. The same is true for the NFL. It wasn’t always this way.

I was raised in a small New England village with a great baseball field about 100 yards downhill from our back porch. Between the ages of 5 and 13 , during the daylight hours when I wasn’t in school, doing homework or participating in organized sports at another venue, that’s where you’d probably find me with the other guys from our neighborhood playing baseball in Spring and Summer or touch football in the Fall.

Since I was a New Englander, I grew up a Red Sox fan. The Yankees represented the Evil Empire. New England didn’t have an NFL team in those days and the Jets didn’t exist, so the New York Giants was my default team of choice.

In later years, I lived in Pittsburgh where I became a Pirates and Steelers fan.

But now I’ve lived more than half of my life as a resident of New York state and, although during some of those years I’ve been a half-hearted Yankees fan, I’m not emotionally committed to any of the New York teams. I may, at times, like certain MLB and NFL teams more than others but I’m not passionate about any of them.

I’m a fair weather fan.

Which is why baseball season has just started for me. Now that “the wheat is separated from the chaff”, “the cream has risen to the top”, or whichever metaphor you choose to use to describe the process which has brought the Royals and the Giants to the World Series, I’m now getting interested.

I’m looking forward to a World Series of close games, late nights, emotional ups and downs, and watching some amazingly gifted athletes and managers perform under pressure.

I find watching them to be inspiring and educational….even if I’m just a lowly fair weather fan.

SanFrancisco.Giants.MLB.com/                                                        KansasCity.Royals.MLB.com/

Postseason=The beginning of the Major League Baseball season for me.

Don’t get me wrong. I like baseball. I just don’t care about the MLB until post-season. The same is true for the NFL.  It wasn’t always this way.

I was raised in a small New England village with a great baseball field about 100 yards downhill from our back porch.  Between the ages of 5 and 13 , during the daylight hours when I wasn’t in school, doing homework or participating in organized sports at another venue, that’s where you’d probably find me with the other guys from our neighborhood playing baseball in Spring and Summer or touch football in the Fall.

Since I was a New Englander, I grew up a Red Sox fan. The Yankees represented the Evil Empire.  New England didn’t have an NFL team in those days and the Jets didn’t exist, so the New York Giants was my default team of choice.

In later years, I lived in Pittsburgh where I became a Pirates and Steelers fan.

But now I’ve lived more than half of my life as a resident of New York state and, although during some of those years I’ve been a half-hearted Yankees fan, I’m not emotionally committed to any of the New York teams. I may, at times, like certain MLB and NFL teams more than others but I’m not passionate about any of them.

I’m a fair weather fan.

Which is why baseball season starts for me this week. Now that “the wheat is separated from the chaff”, “the cream has risen to the top”, or whichever metaphor you choose to use to describe the process which has brought these contending teams to the playoffs, I’m about to get interested.

I was particularly looking forward to watching Terry Francona and his Indians battle the Red Sox. But, alas, it’s not to be.

Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to an October and early November of close games, late nights, emotional ups & downs, and watching some amazingly gifted athletes and managers perform under pressure.

I find watching them to be inspiring and educational….even if I’m just a lowly fair weather fan.  

                                                             Batter up !

“When you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply because of their appearance, you’re less likely to find the person best suited for the job.”-Michael Lewis in MONEYBALL.

Michael Lewis is a journalist who writes like a novelist. The first time I encountered Lewis’ work was in his book, THE NEW NEW THING. Understand that I’m a very slow book reader. My reading tends to be in the snack-o-tainment style of magazine articles and , now, blog pieces. It can easily take me a month to 6 months to read a book which is why I tend to prefer audiobooks which I can “read” during commutes.

THE NEW NEW THING was an exception. While accompanying my wife on a weekend business trip to Phoenix, I couldn’t stop reading it and completed the whole book in a couple of days. That’s when Michael Lewis became one of my favorite writers.

I don’t buy audiobooks. I get them free from the library. But I did buy the audiobook of MONEYBALL because I was fascinated with the concept of using sabermetrics to assess performance. To me, it was more like a textbook than a mere reading experience. But I was a little surprised when I learned that the book had been made into a movie. Guess I shouldn’t have been given that movie adaptation of “The Blind Side” was such a big hit.

During an interview about the movie version of THE BLIND SIDE, I’d heard Michael Lewis talk about how once he sells the film writes to a book he relinquishes control and is usually eliminated from the project. In his recent interview with Jon Stewart, Lewis indicated that he’d expected the movie adaptation of MONEYBALL to be a disaster but that he’d been pleasantly surprised.

We saw the MONEYBALL movie last night.

Apparently, Paul DePodesta, who is a central character in the book, did not want to be represented in the movie. So the character of Peter Brand as played by Jonah Hill was created as an amalgamation of DePodesta and other members of the Oakland A’s staff. Hill’s movie career has primarily been playing obnoxious geeky characters in Judd Apatow movies. He’s geeky but vulnerably likable in this role.

The book chronicles the pre-Oakland A’s experiences of several key characters: Billy Beane, Paul DePodesta, Chad Bradford, and Scott Haddeberg. We hear anecdotal observations about Beane and his mercurial nature but we don’t really get to know much about him. The movie is more centered around Billy as the main character and, with Brad Pitt in the starring role, we get to learn more of his experiences as a person. It could be titled “Moneyball:The Billy Beane Story”. I’m unclear about how much of the personal interactions between Billy Beane, his wife and her new partner or Billy and his daughter are fictionalized but they play well in the context of a movie. Pitt’s performance is relatively low-key with occasional outbursts and you find yourself rooting for both Beane and his team of outcasts as the underdogs. My emotional reaction reminded me a lot of those I experienced while watching the movie version of “Seabiscuit”

The book ends with the story about how Scott Haddeberg inadvertently broke his Louisville Slugger contract by grabbing the wrong bat when he was unexpectedly called in to pinch hit for what turned out to be a record-breaking game. The movie doesn’t include that story and instead ends with Billy Beane in a “dad” moment.

It works.

Postscript: I’m an advocate for Billy Beane’s sabermetrics approach but there is a certain irony that Tony LaRussa, who Billy forced out, has been the manager of two World Series contending teams since leaving the A’s organization while A’s have yet to make it into the Series. Tony likes to employ all those old baseball tricks like sacrifice bunts, etc that sabermetrics indicate are ineffective.

The 2011 World Series was supposed to feature the National League’s Philadelphia Phillies versus either New York’s Yankees or Boston’s Red Sox representing the American League. Oops! Those of us who are underdogs in business, life, or both should take heart that this year’s World Series champs might turn out to be Tigers or Brewers.

Postscript: Given the way things have been going in the playoffs so far, it’s doubtful that we’ll be seeing the Tigers or the Brewers in this year’s World Series.