Breslow hates the food, despises trades.
“Receive Thornton casket.”
Hub fans bid Lester a red fart in October,
Secret drink enhanced Nava.
Lackey is hurling grub for Boston bullpen,
And militant Beato going haiku.
Drew’s hot thong outhit the tubbier Lavarnway.
“Receive Thornton casket.”

“&0}}@{{|+!” Grant would emit,
When yielding a ¢0¢%$^¢%ing hit.
“You @$$#0£3! You suck!
You }^{§*^¢%ing *^¢%!
@&#*$(#@$)%&*(ing @&*#(%$&%(%*&@ing $#|+!”

I don’t remember the first time I ever saw a video game. I doubt it was as early as 1973. I know my next-door neighbor had an Atari 2600 in 1978, and I had a Mattel Electronics Football game around the same time. I know I went minigolfing for a couple birthdays in between there, and the minigolf place had an arcade. They probably had Pong, if not a few other video games in the arcade. Probably, then, I first laid eyes on a video game around 1976 or so.

So this Random Wikipedia article, 1973 in video gaming, comes a few years too early for me to have any personal memories. As a historical landmark, it’s one year too late. The big year in video gaming is 1972. In 1972, Atari was founded and they produced Pong. Additionally in 1972, Magnavox introduced the Odyssey, the first home video game console.

So 1973 was a period of infancy for video games–after they were invented, but before they became a major force in popular culture. Did the people working on video games back really believe it would later become a huge deal? Or did they assume they were just part of a temporary fad, just trying to figure something out, maybe eking out a living or something if they’re lucky, but not really suspecting they were incubating a baby entertainment industry that would eventually be as big as movies or TV?

And what’s the 2013 version of video gaming — the rough beast that’s just a baby now, barely even noticed, but one day will grow to be king of the world?

To be honest, I don’t give a crap about the 2013–14 Clemson Tigers men’s basketball team.

* * *

For a week now, I’ve been writing a blog entry each weekday about a random Wikipedia article. I’m not sure why. Something about it struck me as an interesting idea, so I went with it.

But when the Random Wikipedia Wheel of Fortune brought me to the 2013–14 Clemson Tigers men’s basketball team, I almost quit the idea. It annoyed the hell out of me. I mean, look at this, here’s the entire Wikipedia entry:

The 2013–14 Clemson Tigers men’s basketball team will represent the Clemson University during the 2013–14 NCAA Division I men’s basketball season.

It’s basically a tautology. It’s nonsense. It’s vaporware. It’s nothing.

Pffffft. The 2013–14 Clemson Tigers men’s basketball team doesn’t even exist yet. I didn’t go to Clemson University. Why the heck should I care about it? I don’t think I personally know anybody who went to Clemson. Heck, I barely know anyone who went to any of the schools in Clemson’s athletic conference, the ACC. Why should I bother writing about it?

* * *

The past few weeks, I’ve been taking an online course in Behavioral Economics. One of the issues they talk about is how much we overvalue the present and undervalue the future. We also overvalue things that are near to us, and undervalue things that are far away from us. For example:

Would you give $100 if it would pay for an operation that would, guaranteed to work or your money back, save the life of a 5-year-old child today? Probably, you would.

Would you give $100 if it would pay for an operation that would, guaranteed to work or your money back, save the lives of a hundred 5-year-old children in Belgium in 2043, kids who won’t even be born for another 25 years? Hmm…it’s a tougher question, isn’t it?

Why is it so hard to feel sympathy for people and events far away and in the future?

* * *

Taking that knowledge, I plowed ahead and did some googling about next year’s Clemson basketball team. I found an article on RealGM Basketball which uses some statistical analysis of college basketball players to predict that Clemson will go 6-12 in the ACC during 2013-14. Dan Hanner explains:

Given that they lose their two best players and have zero players who were elite high school recruits on their roster, I think a lot of preseason predictions will have them even lower than this. There really isn’t anyone on the roster who looks like a likely offensive star. (The only good news is that Clemson was young last year and the sophomore leap should help at least a couple of their freshmen become solid players.) But let’s face it, this is going to be an ugly team to watch. The only reason the model doesn’t have Clemson lower is because of Brad Brownell’s ability to teach defense.

Maybe that’s accurate. Or not. A year from now, we’ll know for sure.

But I’m from California, not Carolina. I follow the Pac-12, not the ACC. So again, I really don’t care. Because I am human. I concern myself mostly with the here and now. I am, as my behavioral economic class suggests, biased against the people and things that are separated from me by large gaps of space and time.

* * *

In my last Random Wikipedia entry about Błudowo, Poland, I examined a picture of a bible passage about the Lamb of God. I didn’t examine a matching companion text on the ceiling of that same church, partly because the image is interrupted by an ugly ceiling lamp, but partly because it seems to contradict the first image. The text is a quote from Revelations 1:8:

In English, the Błudowo text quotes God saying, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End.” The next part of that passage goes: “I am the one who is, who always was, and who is coming. I am the Almighty.”

It’s an interesting pairing. In the first image, God is presented as being meek and humble. Here in the second, God is powerful and eternal. What does it mean to put these passages together?

* * *

Will Leitch had a good article recently about what Christians mean when they thank God after a sporting event. Money quote:

When you live a Christian life, everything you do, from showing up to church on Sunday, to going to the grocery store, to pumping gas, to hitting a home run, to striking out, is done for the glory of Christ. Hamilton isn’t thanking Jesus for helping him hit a homer; he is thanking Jesus for everything.

I think that’s right, but incomplete. Living a Christian life doesn’t just mean understanding or believing Christianity, it means practicing it. And I don’t mean practicing as in “doing”, I mean practicing as in “training.”

We are naturally biased towards the here and near and now. We naturally discount the distant, both in time and space. You can’t just overcome that built-in bias with rational understanding. That bias is our default mode. You have to overcome that bias by actively training yourself to overcome it, otherwise you slip right back into your default mode.

In default mode, you think that three-point shot you just made to win the game is the most important thing in the world. You’re so awesome!

Expressing gratitude toward God, as a practice, removes you from that default mode. It strips away your bias, in two ways:

1. It affirms that second passage in the Błudowo church. It’s an acknowledgement that there is some thing more awesome than you, and some time more important than now. It is, as Leitch suggests, gratitude towards everything that was, is, and shall be.
2. It reminds us that our natural biases, a/k/a our sins, are not washed away by conquering the here and now like a tiger. On the contrary, our selfish, competitive biases toward satisfying the desires of ourselves and those nearest to us at the expense of others, is actually a cause of suffering in the world. The practice of thanking God is an act of humility and generosity, of caring about something beyond the immediate. Thanking God makes you more lamb-like than tiger-like.

* * *

Funny though, how in a large Christian nation like America, there aren’t any major sports teams nicknamed “the Lambs”.

* * *

So here I am, a sinner who doesn’t give a crap about the the 2013–14 Clemson Tigers men’s basketball team. If I were more God-like, more Christ-like, I would. I would overcome the bias that makes me care more about my local team and my local league and the current and most recent year than about some team far away and in the future. I’d be more generous, more caring, about everything.

* * *

And this is why I think I am writing these random Wikipedia articles. Like thanking God, it is a kind of practice, designed to train me away from my biases. Away from my compulsive desire to compete, to be great, to win in the here and now. A random Wikipedia article can send me anywhere–past, present, future–and it forces me to contemplate on it, to be generous towards it. Contemplation leads to empathy and compassion, and the world becomes a better place for it. And perhaps I become a better human being, too.

* * *

So Godspeed, 2013–14 Clemson Tigers men’s basketball team.

There are two tiers of professional tennis tournaments: the Grand Slam events, and all the others.

The Ericsson Open, a/k/a the Sony Open, a/k/a the Miami Masters, may be the Grandest of the Ungrand. Most Ungrand events are one week, single gender tournaments. The Miami tournament, like the Grand Slam events, plays over two weeks, hosts both genders, and has a large prize purse. It probably has visions of perhaps one day becoming Grand itself.

But so far, it remains the Biggest Fish in the Small Pond. Is that such a bad deal?

The Random Wikipedia Wheel of Fortune has sent us today back in time to the 2000 Ericsson Open Women’s Singles tournament. It is not a particularly remarkable tournament, other than serving as one affirmation, among many, of the greatness of Martina Hingis. Hingis marched through this tournament basically unchallenged. She never got close to losing a single set. She won 6-3, 6-1 in the quarterfinals against Amanda Coetzer. She destroyed Monica Seles in the semifinals, 6-0, 6-0. Hingis then trounced Lindsay Davenport in the finals, 6-3, 6-2.

In the past two days, the RWWoF sent us to examine the ordinary, unremarkable moments before and after greatness. Today, our eyes are opened to the existence of many other utterly ordinary moments, even in the middle of greatness. Perhaps we are meant to wonder: if greatness is so short and fleeting, what exactly is so great about greatness anyway?

Over at Beyond the Boxscore, Stephen Loftus has posted Pitcher Similarity Scores. The scores compare pitchers to each other based on:

• Pitch Velocity
• Pitch Break (Horizontally and Vertically)
• Pitch Locations
• Pitch Release Point

Curious about how the A’s scored, I extracted the A’s pitchers from the spreadsheet. A few pitchers didn’t seem to throw enough pitches last year to qualify (Brett Anderson, Sean Doolittle, Pat Neshek), while Fernando Rodriguez is on it, even though he hasn’t been seen in Oakland yet, because he got hurt in spring training.

A few notes:

• A.J. Griffin is only mildly Zitoesque, and is actually more similar to Jerry Blevins, of all people.
• Griffin is the only player on the A’s who does not have R.A. Dickey among his 10 least-similar players.
• Bartolo Colon has the most-similar least-similar player in baseball, if that makes sense. His similarity to John Axford, his least similar player, scores higher in similarity than any other player’s least-similar player. I assume that’s because Colon throws mostly fastballs.
• Tommy Milone seems to be the most unique pitcher on the A’s. His #1 comp score (Jason Vargas, 0.739) would be the 24th-highest score on Bartolo Colon’s list.

Enjoy:

Back on the old Baseball Toaster, I wrote 8,320 entries of various sorts.

I recently surpassed that number of posts on Twitter, and I have now reached my 10,000th tweet.

I wanted to do something special to commemorate the milestone, so I dug something up out of my old bag of tricks, and made a slideshow of my Top 30 2012 Vacation Photos and Baseball Player names.

Check it out.

* * *

If you enjoyed those, here are some older, similar slideshows built on outdated technology:

• 2003
• 2006
• 2007

Yoenis Cespedes fascinates me. He came to the USA from Cuba last year with no professional baseball experience, and went straight to the majors. He had to adjust to the new level of play, of course. All players do. But usually the kind of learning a player does in the majors is subtle, since the difference between AAA and the majors is subtle. It’s hard for a layman like me to catch on to those subtleties.

But with Cespedes, the learning wasn’t subtle, it was obvious. He’s amazingly talented, and you could see, often from pitch to pitch, the adjustments he was making. The first time he faced a pitcher last year, he had a tendency to swing at breaking pitches out of the strike zone. Once. Maybe twice. But the next time, he’d take the pitch. Then the pitcher would have to throw some new wrinkle at him. Which he’d fail at initially, and then figure that out the next time, too. Then the pitchers have to come in and throw him a strike, and he’d hit it, hard.

Which makes me especially intrigued about this year, his second time through the league. How will the league try to get Yoenis Cespedes out now that he’s seen most of the pitchers before?

So I’d thought I’d look at what Seattle has done in the first two games against him, courtesy of some Pitch F/X graphs from Brooks Baseball.

Game 1

Facing Felix Hernandez. Last year, Cespedes was 4-for-12 against him, with a double and four strikeouts.

Plate appearance #1: Hernandez throws a get-me-over fastball on the first pitch. Cespedes takes. Then Hernandez throws a curve down and away, which Cespedes chases out of the zone, and grounds to third. I’m sure the Mariners wouldn’t mind seeing Cespedes swing at curveballs out of the zone all the time. If this were one year ago, they’d keep throwing it over and over again hoping he’ll still chase it, but as we’ll see, the Mariners don’t just do one thing against him anymore.

Pitcher F. Hernandez Batter Y. Cespedes
Speed   Pitch   Result
1       91      Fastball (Four-seam)    Called Strike
2       80      Curveball               In play, out(s)
Yoenis Cespedes grounds out, third baseman Kyle Seager to first baseman Justin Smoak.

Plate appearance #2: Hernandez throws a slider up and over the middle of the plate on the first pitch. That’s a dangerous pitch to throw Cespedes, and he whacks it, but Brendan Ryan manages to make a good play on it and throw him out. The Mariners win this battle, but you wouldn’t want to use that pitch as an example of how you want to get Cespedes out. We’ll find that out in game 2.

Pitcher F. Hernandez Batter Y. Cespedes
Speed   Pitch   Result
1       84      Slider                 In play, out(s)
Yoenis Cespedes grounds out, shortstop Brendan Ryan to first baseman Justin Smoak.

Plate appearance #3: Cespedes hasn’t seen a changeup yet, but Hernandez throws him four of them in this at-bat. Also interesting is how Hernandez moves around the strike zone. Up and in, down and away, up and in, down and in, up and away, up and…oops over the plate. The last pitch is a changeup that’s up and over the plate, slightly in. Again Cespedes jumps on it, and again hits it hard right at a fielder, this time, the third baseman. Cespedes works the at-bat and gets a good pitch to hit, again it finds a glove, but again, this isn’t a recipe you probably want to rely on to get Cespedes out.

Pitcher F. Hernandez Batter Y. Cespedes
Speed   Pitch   Result
1       89      Changeup                Called Strike
2       87      Changeup                Swinging Strike
3       91      Fastball (Four-seam)    Foul
4       87      Changeup                Foul
5       91      Sinker                  Ball
6       87      Changeup                In play, out(s)
Yoenis Cespedes grounds out, third baseman Kyle Seager to first baseman Justin Smoak.

Plate appearance #4: This was in the bottom of the ninth, and Felix Hernandez had been replaced by Tom Wilhelmsen. Cespedes had struggled against Wilhelmsen last year, going 0-for-5 with 4 strikeouts. Cespedes gets ahead in the count by laying off a first-pitch curveball off the plate. Wilhelmsen then comes in with a fastball which turns out to be the best pitch of the at-bat for Cespedes to hit, but he fouled it off. Cespedes then lays off another curveball out of the zone. Cespedes is probably looking for another fastball like the 2nd pitch and does get it. But Wilhelmsen throws it inside off the plate, not a good pitch to hit, and Cespedes jams himself and grounds out to third. Another lesson for Cespedes to learn from–it will be fascinating to see what Cespedes and Wilhelmsen do the next time Cespedes faces him ahead in the count 2-1, 3-1, or 3-2.

Pitcher T. Wilhelmsen Batter Y. Cespedes
Speed   Pitch   Result
1       77      Curveball               Ball
2       95      Fastball (Four-seam)    Foul
3       79      Curveball               Ball
4       97      Fastball (Two-seam)     In play, out(s)
Yoenis Cespedes grounds out, third baseman Kyle Seager to first baseman Justin Smoak.

Game 2

Facing Hisashi Iwakuma. Last year, Cespedes was 2-for-4 against him, with a homer.

Plate appearance #1: The pitchers Cespedes faces in this game don’t have the kind of stuff that Hernandez and Wilhelmsen had yesterday. Cespedes hardly sees any inside pitches in this game. We can see what Iwakuma wants to do in this game: instead of working inside and outside like the fireballers yesterday, he lives on the outside corner against him, either slightly over the plate away, or slightly off the plate away. Iwakuma misses away on the first two pitches, and Cespedes takes the third to make him throw a strike. Then Iwakuma makes the same mistake Hernandez did yesterday, leaving a slider up and over the plate. This time, Cespedes doesn’t hit it at any fielders, as he deposits it over the center field fence for a home run.

Pitcher H. Iwakuma Batter Y. Cespedes
Speed   Pitch   Result
1       89      Fastball (Four-seam)    Ball
2       81      Slider                  Ball
3       89      Fastball (Four-seam)    Called Strike
4       81      Slider                  In play, run(s)
Yoenis Cespedes homers (1) on a line drive to center field.

Plate appearance #2: Iwakuma avoids throwing Cespedes any sliders after that. He throws a fastball inside for show on the first pitch, and then goes back to the outside corner. He leads off with a good curveball down and away, and then goes up the ladder with two excellently located fastballs, both of which Cespedes swings through. I’m guessing the second fastball in a row surprised Cespedes a bit.

Pitcher H. Iwakuma Batter Y. Cespedes
Speed   Pitch   Result
1       89      Sinker                  Ball
2       73      Curveball               Swinging Strike
3       92      Fastball (Four-seam)    Swinging Strike
4       91      Fastball (Four-seam)    Swinging Strike
Yoenis Cespedes strikes out swinging.

Plate appearance #3: Iwakuma is gone, and Cespedes is now facing Carter Capps, whom he faced once last year. He takes a first pitch curveball over the inside of the plate. Then Capps gets him to chase a couple of curveballs just off the plate, and strikes him out. Next time they face each other, I’ll be watching to see if Cespedes chases those curveballs again, or if he lays off the next time, and makes him throw something in the zone he can hit.

Pitcher C. Capps Batter Y. Cespedes
Speed   Pitch   Result
1       83      Curveball               Called Strike
2       85      Curveball               Swinging Strike
3       96      Fastball (Four-seam)    Ball
4       82      Curveball               Swinging Strike
Yoenis Cespedes strikes out swinging.

Plate appearance #4: Oliver Perez, this time, who like Capps had faced Cespedes only once before. He takes the first pitch for a strike, as he often does. Then on the second pitch, he gets a slider it a hittable location over the middle of the plate, but fouls it off. Then he swings through a well-located fastball low and away in the zone.

Pitcher O. Perez Batter Y. Cespedes
Speed   Pitch   Result
1       88      Sinker                  Called Strike
2       80      Slider                  Foul
3       92      Sinker                  Swinging Strike
Yoenis Cespedes strikes out swinging.

Eight at-bats isn’t enough to draw any definite conclusions from, but it’s enough to speculate a bit. Here’s a rough-draft preliminary formula I’d draw from this:

• If you have a pitcher that Cespedes hasn’t seen much, try to throw him breaking pitches off the plate and get him to chase. That won’t work forever, though.
• He can hit fastballs and crushes badly located off-speed stuff. So if he has faced a pitcher multiple times, mix up your pitches and avoid predictability.
• If your pitcher has good velocity, you can try to jam him inside. Don’t try this with soft-tossers, though.
• Location, location, location.

I don’t know that there’s anything there that isn’t true of most hitters in general, except that Cespedes doesn’t seem to have any one particular hole in his swing or vulnerability in his approach except against unfamiliar pitchers. So you have to try to fool him like Iwakuma did when he went up the ladder on him, or just hope that when you miss your spot that it finds a fielder.

Now go turn on the A’s game and watch Joe Saunders blow my whole rough theory apart tonight by pounding Cespedes inside with loopy sliders or something. That would be cool, because baseball is awesome like that, and there are always new lessons to be learned.

“Oh, Oakland Aaaaaaaaaaaa’s faaaaaaaaaannnnnn!” said Felix “Lucy” Hernandez.

“What do you want, Lucy?” said Oakland “Charlie Brown” A’s Fan.

“It’s been a long winter without any baseball. Wouldn’t it feel great to have an Opening Day?”

“Oh, yes, Lucy, it sure would! Opening Day is great! The warm sun, the green grass, the rhythms of baseball, I love it!”

“I agree, Charlie Brown! So I’ll just hold this ball right here for you, and you come running up, and we can kick off the season.”

“But wait, don’t we try this together every year and you win every time?”

“Well, yes, but this time it could be different! You’re bound to succeed on Opening Day eventually, right? Maybe this is the day!”

“You know what, you’re right! This time, it could be different! Oh, boy! Opening Day! Wow, this is going to be great! OK! I’m ready! Here we go!”

Mosaic at Charles Schulz Museum, by Mike Linksvayer on Flickr, via Creative Commons License

AAUGH!

WHUMP!

Jason Wojciechowski has a look at why A’s fans may be overoptimistic about the A’s this year. His analysis is reasonable. But I, too, find myself slightly more optimistic than the projections. I want to explore why I feel this way.

The A’s ended the season with five rookies in their starting rotation. Except for Travis Blackley, those rookies all return, joined by Brett Anderson and Bartolo Colon. The bullpen will basically be the same. I have some concerns about the starting pitcher depth — the 7th-9th pitchers in Sacramento are all big question marks — but that’s true for a lot of teams.

I expect the pitching to be roughly the same as last year. The big changes are on offense.

Despite winning their division, the A’s got below-average OBP in 2012 from six of the nine positions on the team, and were the worst in the league in three of them:

C: .262 (30th of 30)
1B: .340 (12th)
2B: .303 (24th)
SS: .272 (30th)
3B: .280 (30th)
LF: .370 (4th)
CF: .324 (20th)
RF: .298 (27th)
DH: .345 (4th of 15)

With slugging percentage, it was a similar story:
C: .325 (28th of 30)
1B: .461 (10th)
2B: .316 (28th)
SS: .313 (26th)
3B: .391 (23rd)
LF: .502 (3rd)
CF: .453 (8th)
RF: .437 (16th)
DH: .437 (7th of 15)

The A’s offense last year depended heavily on Yoenis Cespedes, Brandon Moss and the Smith/Gomes platoon at DH. You look at that list and think, well maybe they’ll regress at three spots in the lineup, but there’s lots of room for improvement at six!

And the A’s did make moves to improve the worst of these positions. Jemile Weeks held down second base for most of the year, and was awful, both offensively and defensively. A platoon of Sizemore and Sogard should be able to best Weeks’ numbers. John Jaso at catchers should easily surpass the pitiful numbers Kurt Suzuki put up before he was traded. And Jed Lowrie will surely outhit Cliff Pennington, although he may not be quite as good defensively.

For the players who were not replaced, I expect improvement from several of them. Yoenis Cespedes and Josh Donaldson were both a bit overwhelmed early in the year, but improved dramatically as the year went on. I’ve never seen a player learn to adjust so visibly and impressively as Cespedes. He tends to get fooled with off-speed pitches the first time he sees a pitcher, but the next time, he either lays off the pitch that fooled him, or he crushes it. I can’t wait to see what he does his second time through the league. Donaldson was learning to play third base at the beginning of the year, and seemed to take his defensive struggles to the plate with him. But his defense went from being awful in April to fantastic in September, and as his defense came around, he began to hit about what you’d expect from his minor league numbers in the past.

So that leaves basically Moss, Reddick and the DH platoon as sources for regression. Gomes has basically been replaced by Chris Young. Young, like Gomes, has strong platoon splits, and if Melvin can use Young like he used Gomes, I think the DH platoon can hold up. Young’s strong defense may tempt Melvin to play him more against right-handed pitchers than he played Gomes, with someone like Cespedes moving to DH. That would improve the defense, but hurt the offense. A wash? Maybe.

We might not expect Reddick to hit 32 homers next year, but he was awful for long stretches last year, particularly with men on base. He hit .283/.332/.540 with bases empty, but only .191/.273/.368 with men on base. If both of those splits regress revert to his personal mean, he’ll have more impact in 2013, because so much of his 2012 output was empty.

That leaves Brandon Moss, who to me is the key to the A’s season. If he produces anything like he did last year, the A’s make the playoffs. He out-OPSed (1.123) both Mike Trout (.900) and Miguel Cabrera (1.071) in September/October last year. But he’s a career .251/.317/.442 hitter. If he hits like his career numbers in 2013, the A’s may disappoint. The projection systems mostly regard his 2012 as a mirage, and expect numbers closer to his mediocre past.

Moss also has a big platoon split. Part of his 2012 success was being platooned with Chris Carter, who hit .241/.404/.494 in his half of the platoon. Carter was traded away to get Lowrie. Replacing Carter as a right-handed first baseman is Nate Freiman, a rule-5 player who has to stay on the roster all year, or be returned to the Padres. Freiman has power, but he can hardly be expected to put up an OBP over .400, even if strictly platooned against LHPs.

Billy Beane built a roster with a lot of depth and versatility, and if any hitters get hurt or underproduce, there are other players at the same positions who can step in and produce — except at first base. There really isn’t a good replacement for Moss if he gets hurt or reverts to pre-2012 form. But what I’ve seen in the five spring training games I watched, his swing looks good. I feel optimistic about Moss, which makes me optimistic about the A’s as a whole.

A completely predictable future is already the past.

—Alan Watts

Major League Baseball’s Opening Day fell this year on Easter Sunday. It is probably no coincidence that both Easter and Opening Day arrive in spring, as both are meant to signal as spring does a rebirth, a new beginning, a fresh start.

Starting fresh is not as easy as it sounds. We humans are very good at pattern recognition. We see a new thing, and recognize in its shape some other shape we’ve seen in the past. The older we get, the more we do this; the more patterns we can bring to mind, the less we see some new thing as it is today, and the more we see that thing as something that came before.

Look, here comes young Oakland A’s baseball pitcher A.J. Griffin, throwing a curveball. It looks familiar, that curveball. Does he throw that curveball Zitoesquely? Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that he throws it Duchschereresquely?

Today is Opening Day for Griffin’s A’s 2013 team. Will it be as magical as 2012 was? Or as disappointing as 2007? Or perhaps glorious, like 1972, 1973 and 1974?

We can take all the statistics from all the players from all the history of Major League Baseball, sum them all up in clever and scientifically sound ways, and make predictions. 82.2 wins! 86 wins! 93 wins!

Those predictions, they aren’t the future, or even the present. They are merely shadows of the past. To truly start fresh, we must try to look on things as a child does, like someone who has no past, who has no library of previous patterns in our heads.

This is, of course, impossible. These thoughts come to our minds automatically, whether we want them to or not.

And so today will happen, and tomorrow, and the days will add up through October to a number that is greater than or equal to or less than some number we expect in our heads, and we will be delighted or bored or disappointed accordingly. And only then, when it is too late to enjoy the year in and of and by itself, can the 2013 season drop the baggage of its past, and be free to be itself.

For what is truly born on Opening Day is not the current year, but the previous year. Congratulations on your newfound freedom, 2012. You were amazing.

Nobody was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame today, and Rob Neyer has an interesting post exploring why some writers seem to consider steroid cheating in baseball as being worse than other forms of cheating. I want to address his article, because at one point he says something that is flat out wrong:

Why does the impact matter? I’m trying to imagine a player’s thoughts here … “Gosh, those amphetamines seemed to help a little, so even though it’s cheating I think they’re okay to use. But golly, these steroids everybody’s talking about … I’d better not mess with those, because they seem to help a LOT.”

That just defies everything we know about human nature and, specifically, the nature of world-class athletes. If there’s a small advantage to be taken, big-time athletes will take it. If there’s a larger advantage to be taken, they’ll take that.

Neyer is wrong about that defying what we know about human nature. Just the opposite, it actually conforms to it perfectly. Dan Ariely, Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke, has made a science out of studying cheating, and he has found that nearly everyone does make a distinction between cheating a little versus cheating a lot. Watch this animated video of an Areily speech, and keep the steroid issue in mind as you listen to it:

Most people cheat, as Ariely says, “just a little bit”. Only a very very few cheat a lot. You see it every day: if you’re on the freeway, and the speed limit is 55mph, do you stay under 55mph? No, most people drive about 58-63mph–cheating just a little bit. A few will drive 70, 80, 90mph — but they’re a small minority.

If you cheat just a little bit, it’s easy to rationalize it, and still feel good about yourself. It is much harder to rationalize cheating a lot: in that case, you have crossed over into Ariely’s “What the Hell” effect.

I doubt that athlete’s psychology is very different from other humans in this manner. People don’t seem to mind people who cheat just a little bit — scuffing a baseball here, or stealing a sign there, or drinking some extra caffeine to stay alert. But there is a point where you flip over into the “What the Hell” effect — where you’re cheating so much that it has a noticeable effect, and you keep doing it, because what the hell, why not?

Where is the line in baseball between cheating a little and cheating a lot? I don’t know, and neither it seems, do the baseball writers. But this is not an black-and-white issue, where in order to be consistent, you either you have to let all cheaters in, or you have to kick all cheaters out, as I’ve seen some people (including, I think, Neyer) arguing. The science says there are levels of cheating wired into human nature. To Neyer’s credit, however much he may not want to draw a line between cheating a little and cheating a lot, he recognizes that writers are doing it, and he hypothesizes that they’re drawing the line at the statistical records being broken:

I continue to believe that a lot of the hand-wringing over steroids — which, by the way, I really wish hadn’t happened — is due to just two players: Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds. I believe that if McGwire and Bonds hadn’t so utterly destroyed the home-run records, leaving first Roger Maris and then Hank Aaron in the dust, we might not be having this discussion at all.

On this point, I think Neyer is right. Many people are outraged by steroids because breaking those cherished records makes it clear that Bonds and McGwire were cheating more than “just a little”. And because that line that is built into human psychology, people react emotionally to want to punish that behavior. The fact that baseball writers are taking some time to figure out what and where that line is, to me seems quite a reasonable thing to do.

Try taking the long view. What will we think about Brian Wilson’s lycra tux in 2037?

–Ian Miller

Ian Miller’s essay on Brian Wilson’s antics and how we react to them (subscription required) got me thinking about this speech by Malcolm Gladwell:

I’ll summarize, for those who don’t want to watch the whole thing. Gladwell contends that this past century, we’ve gone through three large generational shifts in how people approach human social organization.

In the WWII-generation, the prevailing paradigm was a hierarchical organization. People just assumed that social organizations should be hierarchical, that’s how things work. When Martin Luther King led the civil rights movement, he did it with a hierarchical organization. There’s a boss at the top, and everyone below the boss follows orders.

But when the Baby Boomers came of age, they broke that paradigm. Somewhere around 1975, people started insisting on being treated as individuals. They didn’t just accept the orders coming from above. In Silicon Valley and other places, a new more egalitarian model of corporate governance began — driven as much by engineers as executives. Consumers started to demand choices. “Boomers want to surround themselves with the totems of their individuality,” said Gladwell. They didn’t want chocolate or vanilla ice cream. They wanted a choice of 31 flavors.

In baseball, this era is where free agency started–players no longer accepted that the owners were the bosses, and they had to follow their orders. Players began to assert their individuality, and suddenly there was a wealth of unique characters like Bill Lee, Al Hrabosky, Doc Ellis, and Mark Fidrych.

This paradigm prevailed until the last half decade or so. When Steve Jobs came back to Apple in the 1990s, he was still selling to Baby Boomers. The first thing he did was create a series of products in many bright colors, to appeal to that generation that wanted products as an expression of their individuality. He told them that Apple would “think different”.

Now, however, times have changed. The Baby Boomers have now begun to yield to the next generation, which has its own paradigm. This Millenial generation is networked.

As Gladwell says, “That notion of being treated and seen as an individual is not a preoccupation of the current generation.” Millenials don’t care about tokens of individuality. They want to be surrounded by things that signal that they are connected, that they are participating in a community. You’ll notice that Apple doesn’t bother giving people these colorful choices anymore. They don’t say “think different” anymore. People in the Millenial generation go around with identical Apple laptops and iPhones, and are fine with that.

When Millenials start a movement, such as the Occupy movement, there are no leaders. Their work spreads virally across their global networks, effortlessly, but without conscious design or planning or goals. A meme can be born and become a global phenomenon in an instant. But it is difficult, if not impossible, to plan and control these phenomena.

As an aside, this is partly what makes the current NHL lockout so insanely stupid: the owners are waging a battle based on a paradigm that’s two generations out of date. Wake up, knuckleheads! You’re living in the 21st century.

So in 2037, when Millenials look back at which characters of the current generation they admire most, it probably won’t be the ones like Brian Wilson who flaunt their individuality by going to an award banquet in a lycra tux. That was the modus operandi of the previous generation. Instead, they’ll probably most fondly remember the ones who best participated in social networks: Brandon Phillips, Logan Morrison, and Brandon McCarthy. The ones who were most in tune with their generation.

Actually, this isn’t really a hypothesis about women’s sports per se. It just manifests itself more obviously in women’s sports. It can apply equally to something like, say, men’s lacrosse. But it came up in discussion about women’s sports, so here goes.

If you look at a sport like women’s soccer in the US, you’ll see a gap:

Youth league soccer: very stable
High school soccer: very stable
College soccer: very stable
Pro league soccer: one miserable failure after another
International soccer: very stable

Women’s World Cup and Olympic soccer get very good ratings. College, high school, and youth league soccer are all quite stable entities. But multiple attempts to create a women’s pro league in the US that sits in-between college and international soccer have been unsuccessful.

Meanwhile, over in Europe, you don’t really see that gap. Each level is just about as stable as any other. So what we see when these pro leagues fail in the US is that American players who have reached that level go over to Europe to play.

How do we explain this? Here’s my hypothesis:

A sports league must reach a certain tipping point of popularity to survive independently in the long term. Below this level, a league requires deep local community support for stability.

In America, youth leagues are primarily supported by a large network of parents. Then at the high-school and college levels, the school community (alumni, teachers, students, parents, school district) provides the support structure. But the pro teams don’t typically have a very deep or tight network of local community support. If they need something done, independent pro teams can’t easily reach out into their community and find people willing and able to chip in — they are expected to pay people to do things. And in the long run, it’s hard to make that math work, and that’s where things fall apart. It’s was hard even to make this work for men’s soccer — America saw several different league iterations before soccer finally became popular enough for MLS to get the kind of attendance and TV ratings for the league to stabilize and succeed.

In Europe, it’s quite different. You don’t have different kinds of league structures at different ages. In each community, a single organization typically manages everything from youth teams up to the pro level. The pro level functions under a national organization, where clubs move up and down with a relegation system.

I played basketball in Sweden for two years in one such organization. Our top men’s basketball team played in Division One, and the year after I left, they managed to advance into the top Swedish league for a year. The organizations made some money from ticket sales, some from sponsorships from local businesses, some from player fees, and some from fundraisers. The top players got some money, but typically it wasn’t enough to live off of, so local businesses and organizations often gave them day jobs and hired them as employees. (Sorta like alumni hiring college athletes, only it’s not against the rules.) In return, the players were also expected to act as coaches in the organization, and indeed, I had several of these players as coaches. As a younger player in the organization, I would also volunteer support, by selling lottery tickets, or helping set up the arena before the men’s games, which were typically attended by 500-1000 people. A lot of that attendance came from younger players and their families.

Now, I was involved in a men’s structure, but the women’s structure was nearly identical. Of course, in Sweden as in America, the men’s teams were more popular than the women’s teams, so there was more money available to them. But European women’s teams can still function in this same kind of structure, because the structure embeds the pro-level team into a larger soccer community which can help support it. The nature of these communities makes it less likely for such a structure to fall apart. There are always plenty of people to figure out a way to pick up the slack if any part of the structure runs into trouble.

So if I were to design a women’s pro soccer league, I’d experiment by trying to model it after the European system. Pick a few large cities in one narrow region of the country, and partner/merge with the local youth soccer organizations. Grow the players within those organizations from age 5 up to the pro-level teams. Build a support structure in the community that can ensure the team survives, even if the league doesn’t get a national TV contract. Create a relegation system to encourage/reward those organizations that do the best job of this. If it works, expand to other regions, and then nationally.

Just before the beginning of this sentence, this essay could go in an infinite number of directions. But now that the first sentence has been written, the number the infinite directions it could possibly go has been reduced into a much smaller infinity. Who knows what I’ll write next?

It could be anything! Gratitude to their emotions in the water! Or maybe with Zito is blind to park your dastardly actions.

I recently watched a TED Talk by Emily Levine which is like that. It rambles off in a gazillion directions, with little coherency. You could go off now in the direction of watching it. I’m not sure I’d recommend that for you, but I’m glad I did it myself, because it contained one nugget near the end which sent me off in another, more interesting direction.

She rambles this way and that on purpose, not completely polished and slightly unprepared, because she says she likes her talks to remain in a “probability wave” as long as possible. If you’re polished and prepared, you’ve already collapsed your probability wave into single point, and you’ve closed yourself off to new possibilities. She wants to keep open the possibility of “getting on the same wavelength” as her audience.

It’s that idea of “probability waves” that got me intrigued. She’s using ideas from quantum physics to help her understand her art. Using quantum physics as a metaphor sounded interesting, so it sent me scrambling to update myself on quantum physics and probability waves again. And now there’s a very high probability that this essay will devolve into a physics lesson.

* * *

To understand Levine’s metaphor, you need to know about the double slit experiment. This cartoon is the best introduction to it I’ve seen:

That’s kind of freaky. If you’re like me, you still don’t quite get it. I’ll add Professor Brian Greene’s explanation of the double slit experiment on Nova:

* * *

In short:

• Before observation, a subatomic particle is anywhere in the whole universe.
• Upon observation, a subatomic particle can no longer be anywhere. It must “collapse” to somewhere specific.
• Where an “anywhere” ends up collapsing into a “somewhere” is based on probabilities. Some places it can end up turn out to be more likely than others. And these probabilities can interfere with each other, or amplify each other, in the way that one wave can either interfere with another wave, or amplify it.

Ok, if you’re like me, you’re still having trouble understanding the concept of “probability waves.” And when I’m confused, I turn to baseball metaphors.

* * *

Imagine that a baseball player is a subatomic particle. We’re going to pass the player through two slits, and we’ll call these slits “On-base Plus Slugging” and “Plate Appearances”.

Suppose we have a player/subatomic particle named “Kila Ka’aihue”. Let’s say Ka’aihue is projected to hit something like this in 2012:

4% chance his OPS is around .913
8% chance his OPS is around .869
12% chance his OPS is around .837
16% chance his OPS is around .811.
20% chance his OPS is around .786.
16% chance his OPS is around .762
12% chance his OPS is around .738
8% chance his OPS is around .705
4% chance his OPS is around .663

and let’s say he’s projected to get playing time like this:

4% chance he gets around 500 Plate Appearances
8% chance he gets around 450 PA
12% chance he gets around 400 PA
16% chance he gets around 350 PA
20% chance he gets around 300 PA
16% chance he gets around 250 PA
12% chance he gets around 200 PA
8% chance he gets around 150 PA
4% chance he gets around 100 PA

Before the season starts, any combination of these stats are possible. He could hit a .913 OPS and get around 200 PA. Or he could hit .738 and get around 400 PAs. Or any other combination — some are more likely than others, but they can all happen.

Some of these probabilities, however, interfere with each other. If Ka’aihue hits .663, it reduces his odds getting 500 PA, because the A’s will likely give his PAs to somebody else instead. If he hits .913, it reduces his odds of taking a path with only 100 PA, because if he’s playing that well, the A’s will want to give him a lot more than 100 PAs.

Other probabilities amplify each other. If Ka’aihue ends up with a .663 OPS, it increases his odds of ending up with only around 100 PA. If he ends up with a .913 OPS, it increases his odds of ending up with over 500 PA.

* * *

So now, let’s play the 2012 season a million times.

Each time we play, we shoot the Ka’aihue subatomic particle through these two slits, and some particular combination of OPS and PAs ends up on the back wall.

Now, if we chart the one million Ka’aihue outcomes, all the OPSes and PAs, we’ll see something similar to the double slit experiment. We’ll see some areas of high density, and other areas of low density. We’ll get lots of marks where the OPS and PAs are both high, or both low, because that’s where the odds get amplified. We’ll get gaps where one is high and the other is low, because that’s where the odds cancel each other out.

* * *

Now of course, we didn’t play the 2012 season a million times. We only played it once. And in that one, single time, Ka’aihue ended up with .693 OPS in 139 plate appearances — both low. And because of that low outcome, the A’s tried Brandon Moss and Chris Carter at first base, instead.

* * *

You can think of the whole 2012 Oakland A’s season in this way. If Ka’aihue has a low OPS, it amplifies the odds that he’ll also have fewer PAs. If Ka’aihue has fewer PAs, it amplifies the odds of Chris Carter or Brandon Moss or Daric Barton getting more PAs, until one of them starts hitting well. Which is what happened: Moss and Carter ended up in a platoon and hit well.

But if Ka’aihue has a high OPS instead, it amplifies the odds that he’ll get more PAs, and cancels out the odds of Carter and Moss getting a lot of PAs. The whole season takes a completely different path, and probably ends up “collapsing” into a completely different place.

* * *

Baseball is more complicated than just OPS and plate appearances, of course. And in the end, the stat we baseball fans are really interested in measuring on that back wall is team wins.

As the season starts out, there are an infinite number of possible ways the season can play out. Some things are more likely than others, but once we observe the season, all those possibilities collapse into one, single outcome. The 2012 A’s could have ended up with 0 wins or 162, but those are extremely unlikely paths. That would be like a diamond spontaneously jumping out of a locked safety deposit box and into a thief’s pocket. Most likely, the diamond stays in the box. Most likely, the team stays within a “box” between 40 and 120 wins.

Atomic-era general managers will understand all these possible amplifications and cancellations, and construct their teams to maximize the odds that the path their team takes collapses into a championship. The most likely outcome for the A’s was figured by pundits to be around 75 wins. And maybe if you replayed 2012 a million times, it will average to 75 wins. Or maybe, Billy Beane understood how all those waves of statistics amplified and canceled each other out better than anyone else. Maybe, the A’s season collapsing into a single, specific result of 93 wins and an AL West Division title was not quite the miracle we thought it was.

And with that, this essay shall hereby collapse into itself.

* * *

Disclaimer: this metaphor was presented for informational and entertainment purposes only. Baseball players are not actually subatomic particles. Quantum physics are not the most accurate way to describe the behavior of baseball players. Nor are the behavior of baseball players the most accurate way to describe quantum physics. The reader assumes all risk for all unintended uses of this metaphor, including–but not limited to–using Feynman path integral formulations to project future baseball outcomes.

I used to write some really weird stuff, man.

Kira, at Bashi.

* * *

So when R. Kelly tells me there’s someone hiding under my kitchen sink, and insists on exposing who he is, I will tell him it is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
…

I have faith in both faith and science, and I believe, that in the end, the truth and the truthiness will join together at last.

—Ken Arneson, April 10, 2006

Where did that Ken Arneson go? It’s been over a month now since I returned to blogging, but I still can’t find him. I’m lost, alone, adrift.

Darmok, on the ocean.

* * *

I was discussing with Stacey Gotsulias on Twitter the other day this feeling of having lost your writing chops. Stacey said one thing in particular that stuck with me:

@kenarneson A lot of it is fear for me. Fear of being horrible. It’s so strange. I’ve battling this feeling of dread for close to a month.

— Stacey R. Gotsulias (@StaceyGotsulias) October 14, 2012

Hmm. Fear? Maybe. Something is holding me back, inhibiting my creativity right now. When I’m in my zone, the right words, the right crazy metaphor, the right structure — it all pours out of me as easily a river flows from a mountain to the sea. But right now, it doesn’t flow. I know it’s inside me, but it won’t come out. It’s a grind.

What is blocking that flow? Is it fear? For me, I’m not sure. If it’s fear, fear of what? Failure? Criticism? Being horrible? Being unextraordinary?

The beast, at Tanagra.

* * *

Have you ever seen the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Darmok“? In this episode, Captain Picard is stranded on a planet with an alien named Dathon. Dathon speaks a language that consists almost entirely of metaphor. Dathon says things like, “Temba, his arms wide” “Chenza at court, the court of silence” and “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra“. The words sound like English to Picard, but the statements are utterly meaningless to him because he doesn’t have any understanding at all of what those words symbolize. Here’s a key scene:

I have begun to feel that so many modern human conflicts, ranging from science to religion to sports, are like this. At their core, they are talking about the exact same thing, because there is only one human nature. But they have such completely different ways of expressing these things that the other side just discounts it as unintelligible jibberish.

Kadir, beneath Mo Moteh.

* * *

I was baptized and confirmed in the Swedish Lutheran Church when I was 14. In my confirmation proceedings, I acted as best I could to convey that I really understood what Christianity was about. But to be honest, there was one very key aspect of it that I didn’t get, that I’ve felt had a kind of “underpants gnome” quality to it.

Underpants gnomes are cartoon characters from an episode of South Park. These gnomes go around stealing underpants, because they have some sort of assumption that doing so leads to profits. But there’s a missing step in their business plan:

1. Steal underpants
2. ???
3. Profit!

Here’s the thing about Christianity that I kinda felt worked like the underpants gnome business model:

1. Jesus dies on the cross.
2. ???
3. Believers get eternal life.

For years, I just happily accepted this conclusion, like the underpants gnomes happily accepted their business model. I enjoyed the idea of eternal life, just like the gnomes enjoyed the idea of profits. So why question a good thing?

Of course, as I grew older I did come to question it. Why should Jesus need to die on the cross for believers to get eternal life? God is all-powerful. Why couldn’t He just give believers eternal life without Jesus having to die on the cross? It made no sense to me. I didn’t understand the metaphor. To me, it was jibberish.

Chenza at court, the court of silence.

* * *

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

…

Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

—David Foster Wallace

It’s interesting to juxtapose that David Foster Wallace speech with Clayton Christensen’s concept of the Job To Be Done. The Job-To-Be-Done model says that we don’t necessarily rationally think through what is the best product, and buy that. What happens is, we go along in our lives, and at certain times we come across a job that we need to get done. We tend to hire the product or service which (a) does the job, and (b) most easily comes to mind or is most readily at hand.

To borrow Christensen’s milkshake example, we may want to hire a milkshake to keep us busy on a long, boring morning commute. But we probably won’t hire that milkshake if it only comes packaged together with a hamburger. We’ll hire a banana or a bagel instead. We don’t want a hamburger in the morning.

By Wallace’s account, we humans have a psychological need to worship something. But when exisiting religions take sides in politics, or reject science, conflict with other values like equality for gays or women, they make it more complicated for us to pull them in to solve our Job-To-Be-Done. We want to hire something to worship, but we don’t necessarily want it packaged together with a rejection of science or equality.

And so what do we do? We may not outright reject religion, but we don’t explicitly buy it, either. We put the decision off. And then we find ourselves as Wallace describes, drifting unconsciously towards other things that can fill that Worship-Job-To-Be-Done. Money. Sex. Intellect. Art. Power. Reason. Fame.

Or sports.

Zinda, his face black, his eyes red.

* * *

Many religious institutions tend to think of science as their biggest competition. But if you ask me, sports is by far a bigger competitor. It’s global. It’s ubiquitous. There’s no religion that has 3.2 billion adherents. There’s no science book that has 3.2 billion readers. But the 2010 World Cup had 3.2 billion people watching it.

3.2 billion people hired the World Cup to do a job for them. But what job, exactly, is it filling?

Uzani, his army with fists open.

* * *

The other day I was watching a 2010 Ted Talk by Brené Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston. Brown spent the first six years of her career studying a single human emotion: shame.

The data she collected led her to expand into exploring other aspects of human nature: courage, worthiness, and vulnerability. And she concluded that the fulcrum around which all of the other aspects pivoted was vulnerability. I recommend watching this talk, it’s both interesting and entertaining:

Rai and Jiri, at Lungha..

* * *

If you don’t have the time to watch the whole of Brown’s talk, here’s a money quote:

One of the ways we deal with it is we numb vulnerability… We are the most in-debt, obese, addicted, and medicated adult cohort in US history. The problem is — and I learned this from the research — you cannot selectively numb emotion. You can’t say “Here’s the bad stuff. Here’s vulnerability, here’s grief, here’s shame, here’s fear, here’s disappointment. I don’t want to want to feel these. I’m gonna have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin.”

You can’t numb those hard feelings without numbing the other affects, or emotions. You cannot selectively numb. So when we numb those, we numb joy. We numb gratitude. We numb happiness.

And then we are miserable, and we are looking for purpose and meaning. And then we feel vulnerable, and then we have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin. And it becomes this dangerous cycle.

Kiazi’s children, their faces wet.

* * *

This resonated with me regarding my writer’s block. One cannot create something for public consumption without passing through vulnerability. Writing is a risky act. When we write, we risk being wrong, we risk being ridiculed, we risk being rejected, we risk being dismissed, we risk being ignored, we risk being horrible, we risk being mediocre, we risk being unspectacular.

It’s natural to feel the desire to numb ourselves to those consequences. There are many ways to do so. We can use external sources to numb our feelings, with drugs or comfort foods. But can also do it with internal, psychological sources. Denial. Delusion. Cognitive dissonance. Confirmation bias. Self-censorship.

The latter, I think, is the source of my inhibitions. I am subconsciously self-censoring myself, to avoid that vulnerability, to prevent myself from saying something wrong. But in numbing myself from those negative consequences, I am also numbing my creativity.

I need to let go of that fear of failure. I need to embrace my vulnerability, to risk being wrong to let the creativity flow out of me again. I need to do what Brown says healthy people do: practice gratitude, seek out joy, accept my limitations.

Kailash, when it rises.

* * *

It also seems plausible to me that this vulnerability is why we hire sports into our lives. When you commit to a team, when you say “I am a diehard Oakland A’s fan”, you are exposing yourself to vulnerability. You are vulnerable to the pain of Kirk Gibson homering off Dennis Eckersley, of Jeremy Giambi failing to slide, of Eric Byrnes forgetting to step on home plate, or of Coco Crisp dropping a fly ball in center field. But unless you expose yourself to that vulnerability, you also won’t experience the joy of Scott Hatteberg’s home run, of Ramon Hernandez’ walkoff bunt, of Marco Scutaro’s foul pole doink against Mariano Rivera, or of that crazy comeback in Game 4 of the 2012 ALDS. Vulnerability is the intersection where all the pain and the joy meet. If we humans crave that intersection, sports is a product that provides it.

Uzani, his army with fists closed.

* * *

Brown believes that our modern culture has an unhealthy attitude towards vulnerability. We perceive it as synonymous with weakness. We treat it like a disease to be avoided instead of as the source of everything beneficial in our lives. This has consequences for us not just individually, but as a society as a whole:

The other thing we do is make everything that is uncertain certain. Religion has gone from a belief in faith and mystery to certainty. I’m right, you’re wrong, shut up. … That’s what politics looks like today. There’s no discourse anymore. There’s no conversation. There’s just blame.

This unhealthy attitude towards vulnerability also applies to sports. When Derek Jeter broke his ankle the other day, Nick Swisher was blamed for it, even though he wasn’t involved at all in the play where Jeter got injured. He misplayed a ball on the previous play, extending the inning where Jeter got hurt. When your attitude towards vulnerability in sports is unhealthy, you treat victory as required, and failure as unacceptable. Talk radio and internet discussions are full of this sort of attitude: our team must win, or else scapegoats must be found and heads must roll.

Kiteo, his eyes closed.

* * *

If I have drifted away from religion in my life, it is because of this: the versions of Christianity that I was exposed to in my formative years, with all its certainties of how everything worked, became at odds with how I came to understand the world. I wasn’t certain God exists, at least not as a man with a white beard in the sky looking down on us. I wasn’t certain evolution is wrong, or that homosexuality was evil, or that if you’re a socialist, you’ll go to Hell. How could I be certain of any of those things if I didn’t even understand how the crucifixion worked?

The job I personally needed my Christianity to do was to be comfortable with uncertainty. To embrace my doubts instead of rejecting them. To be able to say, “I don’t know or I don’t understand–and that’s OK.” But that version of Christianity was not a product visible to any shelf I could see or reach. And so off I drifted, unconsciously and unintentionally, into the open fists of sports.

Shaka, when the walls fell.

* * *

After watching Brown’s Ted Talk, I went back and read the accounts of the Crucifixion. I found it interesting that Jesus only says two things while on the cross: the first line of Psalm 22, and part of the last.

The Old Testament’s Psalm 22 is subtitled “A Cry of Anguish and Song of Praise”. It could just as easily be subtitled “A Cry of Vulnerability, and a Song of Gratitude.” It is a poem that begins as an expression of our vulnerability. Sometimes we suffer, and in those moments, it feels as if God is not there.

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
Why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?
O my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not;
and in the night season, and am not silent.

But this poem does not reject that suffering, nor does it reject God for allowing it. Instead, it praises God, and thanks him.

A seed shall serve him;
it shall be accounted to the Lord for a generation.
They shall come, and shall declare his righteousness
unto a people that shall be born, that he hath done this.

This is why Jesus needs to die on the cross to deliver eternal life. This is the missing stage 2. Because the path to everything that is divine (a/k/a eternal a/k/a good) in life passes through vulnerability. If Jesus is to be the example for the whole world to follow, to show us mere mortals the way to experience divinity, He must lead us to and through vulnerability. He must experience the ultimate vulnerability — death itself. So Jesus suffers. He suffers not just physically by being nailed to that cross, but also suffers spiritually.

Jesus saying, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” confuses a lot of people. If Jesus is the son of God, why would God forsake him? But of course, God isn’t forsaking Jesus. But if Jesus is to be truly, genuinely vulnerable in this moment, He must feel vulnerable to being rejected by the one thing He loves the most, God the Father. That one moment, of God Himself feeling vulnerable, is the greatest gift God ever gave mankind. It creates the perfect example for mankind to follow, that single seed that shall serve him.

And that is how, if we believe in the story of Jesus–or, in the language of science, if we embrace our vulnerability instead of numbing it away–we can have access to all the blessings and joys that life offers.

Sokath, his eyes uncovered!

* * *

Does this mean I am now rejecting sports in favor of Christianity? Not at all. I don’t need to reject anything. There is only one human nature. We can express that single human nature through the language of Christianity, the language of science, the language of science fiction, the language of art, or the language of sports. We can make the mistake of numbing our vulnerability through each kind of language and suffer the consequences (hello, sports talk radio!). But we can also be uplifted in each of these languages by the beauty of human nature when it is done right.

Ubaya of crossroads, at Lungha.

* * *

“All that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity.”
– William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.2

On October 3, 2012, after beginning the season being expected to finish in last place, after trailing in the standings by five games just nine days earlier, an improbable Oakland A’s team completed an amazing comeback to win the American League West. The team and their fans went wild, celebrating the culmination of a miracle season.

A’s reliever Pat Neshek wasn’t there. He had flown to Florida two days earlier to witness the birth of his first child. He went to his hotel room to watch the last game. In the fifth inning of the game, he got a phone call. His wife told him, “The baby stopped breathing.”

If Pat Neshek had an unhealthy attitude towards life, he’d be angry. Angry at his team for distracting him away from being with his child. Angry at God for taking his baby away from him just as the promise of a new life together began to feel real. He’d be looking for someone to blame, wanting to sue the hospital for its negligence.

Instead, Neshek returned to the team two days later. And this is what he said:

It was probably the best day I ever had, the one day. I’d go through it all again just for that one day. It was pretty awesome.

Neshek went out the next day and threw a perfect inning in the first game of the playoffs.

Darmok and Jalad, on the ocean.

* * *

The A’s lost those playoffs, in a fifth and deciding game to the Detroit Tigers. But the fans were so overjoyed by this unlikely story, by this unlikely team, that even though they lost and their season was now over, they gave their team a five-minute standing ovation after the final out was recorded. Watch this, all of it:

This is Psalm 22, translated into sports. This Brené Brown’s scientific research, translated into sports. It starts out with an expression of vulnerability, of suffering. When the Tigers start rushing out onto the field to celebrate, the A’s fans boo. But very quickly, that cry of anguish transforms into a song of praise from 36,000 people for what their team had accomplished. There is no demand for certain victory, no bitterness at an entitlement taken from them, no blame for whoever caused the loss, no numbing or turning away from the vulnerability sports fans expose themselves to by choosing to root for a team. It’s just five minutes of pure gratefulness and joy.

Mirab, with sails unfurled, sing thee to thy rest. It is done. The rest is the river Temarc, in winter.

The Oakland A’s lost ALDS Game 5 last night to the Detroit Tigers, and their 2012 season is now over. That’s kinda sad, so let’s step back a day and remember Game 4, where the A’s made a miraculous comeback in the bottom of the ninth to extend their season one more day.

Here’s some video I took at the game. Unfortunately, my camera failed me (or I failed my camera) at the climactic moment, so I had to get a little creative to make the piece hold together.

A’s broadcaster Ray Fosse’s reaction to the win was priceless. And it’s especially noteworthy to me because I had a brief conversation with him before the game, after which I videobombed him on the pregame show.

It was a great day, the climax of an amazing year for the Oakland A’s. The year was so unexpected and remarkable that I wasn’t even depressed in the slightest when they lost Game 5. And neither were my fellow A’s fans, who stayed and cheered their team after Game 5 ended, even as the Tigers celebrated on the field. There was no anger from the crowd, no bitterness, just joy and appreciation for a remarkable run. It’s how sports ought to be, human nature at its best.

I wanted to say something about yesterday…about how the Oakland A’s joyously won the AL West, only to find out a few hours later that the newborn son of A’s reliever Pat Neshek had suddenly died:

Please pray for my family.Tonight my wife & I lost our first & only son 23 hours after he was born with no explanation.

— Pat Neshek (@PatNeshek) October 4, 2012

I wanted to say something about how cruel this world we live in is, when joy can be transformed into horror in just a matter of hours. About the pain of a present destroyed, and the emptiness of a future that will never come to be. About how I want to cry at the injustice of it, like Job did after God let Satan test his faith by destroying his wealth, killing his children, and taking his health.

“I cry to you, O God, but you don’t answer.
I stand before you, but you don’t even look.
You have become cruel toward me.
You use your power to persecute me.
You throw me into the whirlwind
and destroy me in the storm.
And I know you are sending me to my death—
the destination of all who live.”

I wanted to say something like what Ray Ratto said about the news. About how awful it is, and how any good news about the A’s going forward will now be tempered by this unbearable sadness the Neshek family must face.

But I also wanted to say how we … and baseball … together … and life … but, no.

My natural reaction, the desire to try to find something redemptive in this, to find something that can explain why and how such suffering can exist–that reaction doesn’t seem quite right. The loss of a child is not something the human mind is designed to comprehend. There is no lesson to be learned here, no perspective to be gained.

Then the LORD said to Job,

“Do you still want to argue with the Almighty?
You are God’s critic, but do you have the answers?”

Then Job replied to the LORD,
“I am nothing—how could I ever find the answers?
I will cover my mouth with my hand.
I have said too much already.
I have nothing more to say.”

Sometimes, horrible things are just horrible things. And I have said too much already.

As the A’s try to win the AL West today, I thought I’d post a little thing I wrote on a friend’s Facebook feed. My friend was making the old complaint about how Moneyball ignored Hudson, Mulder, Zito; that the real reason for the A’s success is not the Scott Hattebergs and their on-base percentage, but pitching.

* * *

Yes, the A’s have consistently developed good pitching — but really only since Billy Beane took over as GM in 1997. BUT: the A’s had the third best ERA+ (ERA adjusted by ballpark) in the AL this year. The A’s had the third best ERA+ in the AL last year, too. If it was the pitching that gave the A’s their success, they would have won 93 games last year, too.

The point of Moneyball isn’t that Hatteberg was the REASON for winning. It’s that everything adds up: pitching, defense, hitting, baserunning. The big things (Hudson, Mulder, Zito, Tejada, Chavez) — those reasons for winning are easy to see. The point of Moneyball is to find those small little advantages beyond the obvious. Add a run from hitting here, a run on baserunning there, save a run on pitching here, a run on fielding there — it all adds up. That’s the story, that’s what makes the A’s different.

So in the book/movie, the A’s took a catcher from another team (Hatteberg) and turned him into a first baseman, and that helped them _partly_ to overcome the loss of Giambi’s numbers, at a very low cost. They also saved some other runs on the pitching side by acquiring Chad Bradford and Ricardo Rincon.

This year’s team has THREE Hattebergs: Brandon Moss started the year as an outfielder, and ended up as a first baseman. Josh Donaldson started the year as a catcher, and ended up as a third baseman. And a year ago, Sean Doolittle was a first baseman, now he’s a left-handed relief pitcher.

This year, the A’s have also added up all those little runs by platooning all over the place: at catcher, first base, second base and DH. These sorts of thing won’t always work. But when you’re a poor team, that’s what you have to try sometimes. And sometimes, you get lucky and all those risks actually all work at the same time. That makes this year’s team probably a better example of Moneyball than Moneyball itself.