Baseball and Beatles fans, he who is king, time itself, The Can

Sunday 4/19/26

From 1984-1986--that's three seasons for those scoring at home--Red Sox pitcher Dennis "Oil Can" Boyd--also called "The Can"--had 33 complete games. The Can, whom I wrote about for the Globe, was...okay.

He was good in 1985, then thought he should have been an All-Star in 1986 and went ballistic when he wasn't named to the squad. He was by no means a great pitcher in these years when he was at his best (he did have something of a surprising comeback season in 1990) and wasn't some "Time to lead the league in complete games again!" type of guy either.

Those 33 career complete games, though, would be like ten careers' worth today for a "great" pitcher. There are no great starters now, historically speaking and through the lens of history, as far as I'm concerned.

They don't pitch enough. If you don't do something enough, you can't be one of the best ever at it, no matter what it is.

This seems very basic to me, but I'm sure few would agree with what I'm saying about current starters and what the starting pitcher position has become.

People don't have real interests, they want attention, and this includes most sports fans, who aren't interested in sports, especially most modern baseball fans when it comes to baseball. They want community.

Red Sox fans on Reddit sound awfully like Beatles fans on Reddit--that is, people who wouldn't know it was the Beatles if they didn't already know what they were listening to and for whom their interest is mostly a matter of the parasocial rather than any real interest in or knowledge of the music, by which I mean, having a clue what is happening with that music, how it works, that kind of thing.

Take away the community, take away all of the associative aspects that come with Beatles music, and make it just about a series of LPs made by a band, and they'd have zero (feigned) interest.

Along these lines, I saw a post the other morning in which someone did one of those, "Can I ask my baseball friends..." things--which you'll see people do with so many different subjects, because they don't actually care, being people who care about nothing save attention, which is what they're trying to get in this instance for the latest time, as they will in many other instances throughout their day and every day, because this is all their lives are--and then proceeded to make it seem like they really wanted to know if anyone tries to hit for a percentage these days or is it just home runs.

A percentage. Not a batting average. It's like the people who try and center their baseball fandom as their identity, or this leading bit of telltale information about them, and don't know that it's the manager in baseball and not the coach. ("If we fire Alex Cora as our coach who could we get as our new coach?")

They want that attention, though. The internet has made attention the number one commodity in our lives. It's one of the many reasons, but among the strongest reasons, why there is no substance in life now, and why most people are depressed, and so many are mentally ill. And of course unfilled. And that makes it harder, too, for the people who could be fulfilled and who aren't mentally ill to make the connections they want and need in order to be fulfilled and happier. It's a vicious cycle and it's as if it grinds up everyone, regardless of how well evolved they are or aren't.

Nor does one have to be online, let alone terminally online, for this to be the case with them; everything is a process of rubbing off, of environment influencing who and what you are, unless you are a fierce individualist, and that's pretty much just going to be me in the year 2026.

In baseball, he who controls the strike zone isn't always king, but he's king often enough.

That's about as insightful a single-line comment as you'll see about the sport. Having posted that comment on Threads, it received zero likes, because this is how the world works. That which is interesting, that which is intelligent, that which is well said, will garner no support, no approval, because the people who encounter it will feel worse about themselves because they have nothing to say that is interesting, intelligent, or well said, and/or because they find it and the person who made it intimidating, whereas the person who says the thing that can be said by anyone, and is said in the same language that everyone else uses, isn't.

Thus, that person who says nothing of value, that is no different than what anyone else says or can say, can be supported, followed, engaged with. It isn't about that person's comment or the article they've written or the job they have or the platform; it's about that person and how other people view that person in relation to themselves. That's the numbers driver of the world now. That's where a following comes from. How much like you are me? And Could I be you? And You sound like I sound.

In this context, in this world, the commonality is everything; the value of the actual words in terms of what their saying is nothing. Those words and their meaning are meaningless to people. The commonality is what they care about. Are you like me? That's what people want to see, what they want to feel.

They don't want to walk away with more knowledge or insight than they have before they arrived. No one is interested in that now. And that's what I offer you. It's all I offer you. While offering you no measure whatsoever of commonality between us.

You can't engage with me. It isn't that I don't permit you to--as if I could or would want to--but what happens on account of my mind, eloquence, and knowledge. In effect, I negate your voice. What are you going to say? You know I've said the correct thing the best way possible. The levels aren't the same.

This is simply the truth. It's how the world works and this is one more microcosmic example the biggest part of my problem. It's also what Thoreau was getting at when he said the public demands an average man.

The veracity of the above line about the strike zone echoes through the ages of the sport once we get out of the Dead Ball era. It was true--big-time true--for Babe Ruth and it is true for Aaron Judge and everyone in between.

The so-called Sultan of Swat led the way to the modern era of baseball (which in a sense started way before anyone thinks) when he began to play the game as it hadn't been played before, as if he was a savant, the first of the count-workers.

Ruth understood both the value of clearing the bases and boarding them, including via bases on balls. Ruth, we could say, was a proto-Ted Williams, and yet it's Williams who gets the credit as being the smart hitter who worked counts, made the pitcher come to him, looked and even "guessed" for pitches on 200 and 3-1 counts, which is when Williams would pulverize you.

You didn't want to trail Williams in the count--and I think we can use that verb here--2-0 or 3-1. The count is the game within the game that determines the outcome of many and even most games. A comparison in another sport might be the offensive and defensive lines in football, but this is more subtle and more doggedly, tirelessly impactful, like time itself.

For the first at-bat each game, Williams was probably going to let you throw him a strike and watch it go past him into the catcher's mitt. As he wrote in My Turn at Bat, he wouldn't always do this and would sometimes swing just to keep the pitcher honest, but if you threw a first-pitch ball in the first inning the first time you faced Williams, you could be in for a long day. I'm serious. That's how important the count can be.

One of the essays in my book about baseball history looks at this savant side to Ruth and his influence on all the generations of hitters since (to varying degrees). We think of him as dumb, simple, and well-fed, but he thought the game big-time in that batters' box. He was baseball's version of radical thinker.

The less the ball is put in play in baseball, the less that baseball is baseball. The sport requires motion. From that motion comes its rhythms. Baseball without motion, or limited motion, is like going to a concert at Symphony Hall where the orchestra tunes up, plays a few bars, stops, then sits there for ten minutes, tunes up again, plays for a minute or two, then sets the instruments down and starts...milling.

And now, you have calls to this higher power of sorts to weigh in in determining if the second chair viola fully played a tritone at exactly the same nanosecond as this other viola, while everyone waits, like this a game show has been introduced into the mix, which is what the ABS system is like with baseball.

But because people are so stupid, and most of the people who follow baseball don't actually like baseball and need distraction elements like this--lower common denominator stuff ripped from LCD society and applied to this game--and this makes baseball less like baseball but while still being able to be called baseball, the new implement is applauded.

It's kind of like the people who think they like coffee, but they'd never drink it black. Instead, there they are at Dunkin' Donuts dumping four bags of this, three bags of this, into their coffee, turning it something that isn't coffee anymore.

Then they'll share witless memes about how they look before they've had their morning java, kind of like the pretend writers who aren't writers, never will be writers, never could be writers, are as far from being a writer as a person who has yet to be born--hell, will never be born--post their witless, sophomoric, what the kids would call "cringe," memes about the writing life, writer's block, Me Having An Idea for a Bestseller and Then Me When I Sit Down to Write It, etc., etc. etc.

You're not a writer. You aren't even interested in writing or reading. It's just what people seize upon as the lowest bar to clear in order to have this thing that makes and marks them as "special." "Their thing."

I don't think anyone has a clue what goes into really being a writer. It has to be what you lived for, every second of your life, from the moment you came into this world. How you saw everything. Hear everything. You can never stop creating. And this is how it works with honing one's ability, allowing you were born with any, which one almost certainly wasn't.

This is the hardest thing to do in the world. Hardly anyone can even write a simple, clear, correct sentence. Let alone reveal what is behind the veil. The meaning of it all. Such that one--the reader--can bear witness and be aware of what they have seen, feel it in the parts of them that matter most, including their eternal soul. There are infinite variables and possibilities. So much for you to have to know and command. And invent.

There can be nothing else but this, and that's if you happened to be born something far more than a genius, which would be a very small thing here, kind of like the first stop on a long road trip that doesn't speak to what you'd really need to be, which is way beyond that.

People do a version of this with baseball and their proclaimed fandom. And, as is often the case, the thing a thing purports to be--a love of the game, a love of a band, what have you--is itself about other things. The parasocial. The parasocial dominates our world. It's one of the most powerful forces in it at present.

Then there's wanting to be part of a group. Having no life, no friends (in the post-friendship world, in which no one is themselves, no one is not performative, no one is real, no one can communicate, no one is brave enough to be open and vulnerable, no one is an individual with is enough on its own to negate the possibility of any chance of true friendship), emptiness, no meaning, no purpose, no vision, only conformity and answering to expectations in a form of self-corporatization while thinking this isn't so because people have no self-awareness and aren't strong enough to be honest with themselves anyway, and attempting to mask all of that by having a place to go to on the internet with people who are also the same way and lacking the same things and doing the same thing.

This is how almost every comment in the subreddits about baseball and the Beatles read to me. These people almost never seem honestly interested in these things because of what they are, in and of themselves, which is also almost always lost on people.

I don't believe you can truly enjoy something that you don't understand. You're doing something else. If you're enjoying something, that thing is something else that isn't the thing it purports to be or to be about. I'd say this isn't real. As I define realness. Which isn't to suggest its some notion endemic to me, my proprietary blend or prescriptive mandates.