Post people and arrhythmia

Wednesday 6/3/26

I expect to see bad Red Sox teams from time to time, and for there to be stretches with only bad teams even, but never would I expect any Red Sox team to be 9-20 at home as this Red Sox team is after last night's Fenway loss to the Orioles.

As I predicted in these pages, the Sox lost two out of three at Fenway to the Braves before embarking on a more successful road trip--they're over .500 on the road--before returning to Boston to start losing again.

I saw where someone opined--in the way everyone now does, as if they're all knowing--that the reason the Sox lose at Fenway is because they have no right-handed power, whereas other teams do. On the road, in bigger ballparks, the Sox' pitchers are able to hold down the opposition's offense by limiting homers.

It's a nice idea, but I don't think it has much veracity. Fenway is overrated as a park for right-handed power hitters. The people who think it's this banquet at which righties feast are people who usually aren't that seasoned in the nuances of baseball, those details that really determine outcomes.

Fenway is a lefties park. Doesn't mean it's anti-righty, but it's a hell of a place to be a left-handed hitter if you let it be and don't insist on trying to pull everything like your life or next contract depended on it.

The fly ball left that would be an out elsewhere is a double at Fenway. It's a very good park for extra base hits. With the deep triangle in center and the capaciousness of right field, it's even a pretty good triples park. Not that triples happen that often. My point is that it's a good place to be a gap hitter and a line drive hitter and not just a big-fly to left type of hitter.

No, I think there's more going on here, as I intimated earlier. It's not just a between-the-lines thing. It's an off-the-field issue and/or a psychological one. 8-20 is just too abysmal, I'm sorry, for it to be roster construction. Not with the Sox, not with that ball park.

The Red Sox are 0-24 in games in which they trail by 3 or more runs at any point. That's also remarkable. They're rally-less. On the season. Which is more than a third of the way over. They can't even mount a small rally. Including after they fall behind early. If you come to the plate in the top of the first and put a three-spot up on the board, the Sox are done. Game over. That's just not very baseball-y even. It's like total capitulation. In baseball, it's expected that you go back and forth some. That you'll get some runners on and string some hits together in a frame or two.

I will just say again that I hate what baseball has become. The strikeouts, the starters going five innings, no complete games, shutouts by committee with it being some national news event when it's just one guy going the distance and holding the other team scoreless. No plays are put on. No runs are manufactured.

Baseball is a lot like softball now with greater pitching velocity. It regularly feels like you're waiting interminably before you get to see a fielder make a play on a ball. The game is arrhythmic. There's just no flow to these affairs. A good story has a rhythm, a good radio program over the course of its episodes, a good painting, a good jazz album. And so does good baseball.

You get an inkling of flow and that's halted by another ABS challenge, which is such a ridiculous thing. An unserious thing. Let the game be a game played by humans with imperfections and quirks and individuality and good fortune and bad fortune and making the most of breaks and overcoming adversity and let it all come out where it may on the scoreboard and in the standings over the long season.

It feels so sophomoric to me. Like we don't have our priorities in order, and, of course we don't. And like we have no proper perspective as to what's important and what isn't and where our focus should be.

I don't respect this game that I see in front of me now. This iteration of it, I mean. Everything in our society gets worse. It is everything. More robotic, less human, more soulless, more bland, stripped of quirks, nuance, cool features, layers, contrasting styles, and individuality.

A single-player example. Call it typification. Jarren Duran has rebounded some. He's up to .220 or so, and hit 9 home runs in May. If he goes 1-for-4, his average goes up. Did just that last night with a triple. Three total bases. But he struck out three times.

That's the modern player. And this is an athletic modern player. A run-around-the-field kind of guy. And he's doing a lot of walking back to that dugout. He's not even running to first to be thrown out on the grounder to short.

What do you like about that? I'll tell you what people like: not watching the games. What do I mean by that? They'd rather post something about how some pitcher average 102.5 mph on his last ten pitches of his outing in the fifth inning than they would watch baseball. They don't even know what baseball as baseball is.

It's the dashboard. You know, the Instagram dashboard. The Instagram dashboard approach to life, which isn't life at all. It's just posting. And thinking in terms of posts. Being a post person. Even one who doesn't post. Because that's the way society works. We aren't individuals. Everything is a product of the rub-off. You become like that around you. And the pod people around you. The post people.

I want a game. A good game. A game of mobility and rhythm and action and reaction. This makes me the odd body, so to speak--mentally, I mean, and spiritually really--in today's world. Most people just want to be post people. Most people have made themselves so that all they can be is post people. This is the world we then get. Nothing is left unharmed and untainted to something nuanced and compelling. It'd be lost on us anyway.

And then people don't get their malaise, despondency, the emptiness they feel. I'm doing this with baseball in this entry, but as in every sports-related entry in this journal, and in my formal writing, it's never just about sports, or even principally about sports. Bigger ideas, always. But that we can see this play out in sports, how we "watch" sports, what we expect from sports, and what becomes "enough" for us with sports, is telling about so much more.

You have to be able to see that.