End of an Era

[kevin_standlee]

Tonight was Barry Bonds' last game as a Giant, and I was there, in nosebleed seats, but in a good location looking down on the field from above home plate.

Bonds has been injured for several days, and probably shouldn't have played tonight, and they say he won't play the final three games, which are on the road in LA. But, injured or no, he had just barely enough medical okay to play tonight, the final home game of the Giants' season. Some folks expected him to play one inning, take one at-bat, and then leave. But he stuck it out for three at-bats and stayed in the field for six innings -- committing a fielding error, limping around, and obviously playing through pain -- before finally hanging it up. And he tried to give us the storybook ending to his Giants career by smashing a ball to deep center field that would have been a home run in nearly any baseball park except AT&T Park Emperor Norton Field, whose center field is where home runs go to die.

It was an anticlimactic end for Bonds' night, and unfortunately, the game itself was highly forgettable as well, as the San Diego Padres destroyed the Giants 11-3. Probably the only thing keeping a lot of fans in the park after the sixth inning were promises of a video tribute after the game, and an expectation that Bonds would come out and speak after the game. We got the video tribute -- a nice montage of Barry's greatest hits with Frank Sinatra singing "My Way" as the accompaniment -- and we got the Giants going back out onto the field to throw baseballs into the stands as a thank-you gift to the fans who stayed to the Bitter End -- but we did not get Bonds. Barry had taken one final curtain call -- I was part of the final Giants chant of "Barry! Barry! Barry!" after the near-home-run -- and headed for the locker room. I heard some folks after the game saying that Bonds had already left before the game ended, headed for a flight to his home in Southern California, but I don't know if that's true or not.

I'm glad that I worked from home today and took BART to San Francisco rather than taking Caltrain, because it meant I could stay for the post-game tribute and take my time walking out of the park, taking the longest route I could before running into security people who were doing the shoo-em-out patrol. I then walked down the Embarcadero to the BART station and caught a train home to Fremont.

So now the Bonds-Giants era is over, and my team can start concentrating on rebuilding. Maybe we'll have a championship team again in my lifetime. They've won before, they can do it again. Meanwhile, I can start counting the days until pitchers and catchers report next year.

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

By "field position" in baseball I meant exactly what you said is critical: the count and the men on base. Not where the fielders stand. Good grief. That can be changed at will (within the limitations of the rules), just as in football lineups can be changed strong side/weak side. That's not what is meant by "field position" in football either.

Your second paragraph is entirely true - within the course of the half inning. But when the half-inning is over, it all gets wiped clean. All that's left is the score, and who's up to bat.

That's exactly how I said the sports differ. In baseball, it's cleared off the board twice an inning. In football, it only happens once, at halftime.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, you know, if you are going to get nit-picky with Kevin about using "forgettable" to mean "he'd rather forget about it" then maybe I should get picky with you for using "field position" to mean "the state of the count". Just where on the field does this count stand, hmm? (I like think that he hangs upside down from a girder in the stands.)

As for baseball wiping the slate clean at every half-inning, I could just as well argue that American football wipes the slate clean at the end of every play. All that is left is the score, who has possession, and the position of the ball. All of the players go back to a fairly standard configuration (with a few minor changes such as who is actually on the field, where the wide receivers stand, and so on, but then baseball can change players between innings too).

If dependence of previous conditions is what you are after, you should prefer soccer or rugby, where the game only stops at half time, or cricket where there are at most 4 (US-style) half-innings.

- Cheryl

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Oh, come on, Cheryl. I was not "nit-picky" with Kevin. I not only said I thought that "forgettable" meant "forgettable", I explained what led me to such a peculiar conclusion. Either you're not reading what I wrote or you're being deliberately insulting.

Admittedly "field position" may not have been the best term, but I didn't say it meant "the state of the count" (by "the count" I presume you mean balls & strikes). I said it meant the count AND the the men on base, and the men on base are, as you have surely not forgotten, standing on the field, and their exact positions and movements are of great importance in the game.

As for whether the count is standing on the field, I also assume that you know that if the count reaches 4 balls, or if it reaches 3 strikes on third out, it has a large and immediate effect on where the players are standing on the field.

Same thing with football. In football, "field position" does not mean just what yard you're on, but the downs and the yardage remaining, and those do not literally stand on the field either. (I do not count the spectral lines that appear on your TV screen; in my day of prime football watching they didn't have those.) This is part of field position because if you don't make first down it has a great and immediate effect on what happens on the field.

American football does not "wipe the slate clean at the end of every play." The position of the ball, i.e. what yard you're on, is the most self-evidently vital part of field position. It of great and continuing strategic importance. And the downs provide a continuing smaller scale pulse. (First down does not wipe the slate clean either, because the ball position remains critical.) Ball position and downs serve roughly the same plot function in football as men on base and the count do in baseball. The closest football equivalent to the end of inning changeover is the turnover of the ball after a score. But even then there's a kickoff, so the field position is affected by what happens before, and since football is a game of fixed playing time, the length of the previous possessions affects how many more there will be. Baseball doesn't do that.

I don't know rugby well enough to comment, but soccer, which I've actually played, is not the kind of game I want to watch. Continuous action, which soccer has, is not at all the same thing as dependence on previous conditions. What's going on on the soccer field can shift suddenly without any reference to what had previouly been going on, and the scoring is so low that even that doesn't have much of a plot-building effect. At least in basketball you can watch the scores quickly mounting; that's the plot in that game.

Cricket, because of its fewer innings, does have more of a continuing plot, but please refer to what I said about baseball in the first place: that it lacks sufficient action for me. Cricket makes baseball look like an absolute whiz of frenetic activity.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Cricket makes baseball look like an absolute whiz of frenetic activity.

Really? Have you ever actually watched a match?

Considering that most cricket matches have several hundred runs scored in them, I would have though it had a lot more action than a baseball game.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

A cricket run is not at all the same thing as a baseball run.

[(Anonymous)]

At this point I have come to the conclusion that you have entered Humpty Dumpty Land are are making up meanings for words as and when it is convenient to you, so there isn't really much point in continuing the conversation. I have no objection to you preferring one sport over another, but your attempts at providing spurious justification for your preferences are about as convincing as my mother's complaints that she doesn't the taste of some foods because they have "funny names" (and occasionally just as insulting).

- Cheryl

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

That sounds exactly like the kind of rude bluster that comes from someone trying to bluff their way out of an argument that they can't win.

A cricket run is in fact not like a baseball run: they require much less effort to score, and they tend to come in large clusters, according to my long-ago memory of what cricket I've seen.

As for "field position," I acknowledged that was a bad choice of words, but I explained in great detail what I meant by it, and penned what I think is a pretty thoughtful essay on the aesthetic resemblances and differences between baseball and football, that stands on its own regardless of the term.

And all you want to do is give me the finger. Well, to heck with you too.

[(Anonymous)]

someone trying to bluff their way out of an argument that they can't win.

It is impossible to have a rational conversation, let alone win an argument, with someone who changes the meaning of what he says on a regular basis and makes up qualitative distinctions when it is convenient to his biases but denies that there can be any when it is inconvenient to him.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Possibly so, but that person is not me.

I am as capable of making a bad choice of words, or inadvertently misleading readers, as anybody; but when I find I've misled them I try to correct myself.

I have not changed the meaning of anything that I've said; I've been trying to explain what I said. Evidently you are taking as "changes" my attempts to correct your misapprehensions of what I'd said. Perhaps you're continuing to think that I said what you originally took me as saying (which also enables you to continue thinking that I'm making no sense, because indeed your mistaken idea of what I said does make no sense), but when I attempt to explain it, instead of going back and applying that to what I wrote earlier, you get to accuse me of changing my meaning.

Look: if you're watching a game on TV, and someone comes in and wants to know what's happening, you might say something like, "Bonds is 2 and 1, no men out, one man on first, top of the fifth" if it's baseball, or something like, "The Niners are 2nd and 8th on their own 35, 3 minutes to go in the half," if it's football.

In football, as I understand it, that's called field position, and I made the mistake of assuming you'd have the wit to grasp I meant the same sort of thing when using the term about baseball. I was wrong.

That's the kind of information of which strategy is made in both games. It's also the information that's cleared off the board twice an inning in baseball, but only at the halftime break in football. This makes football a more continuous game.

That's the sole summary of my original comment about the difference between baseball and football. That's what I meant from the beginning, that's what I've meant all the way along. I haven't changed the meaning of anything.

I have no idea what you mean by your remark about "qualitative distinctions" but it's doubtlessly an equally specious criticism.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Typo: for "2nd and 8th" I meant "2nd and 8."

Doubtlessly that means I am again changing the meaning of what I said.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

That sounds exactly like the kind of rude bluster that comes from someone trying to bluff their way out of an argument that they can't win.

No, I agree with Cheryl. Trying to compare sports is much like trying to compare religions, but it does seem to me that you are (probably not consciously) trying to change the terms of comparison arbitrarily so they'll line up with your conclusions.

Cricket is more complicated than you recall it being, and has a lot more strategy. The fielders in cricket, for instance, move around a lot more than they do in baseball. Cheryl mentioned the "Bonds shift" as a specific adjustment to the way Bonds tended to hit. And baseball fielders do move around a little bit -- you can sometimes see the catcher setting the defense on specific plays. (As the only defending player who faces out toward the field, catchers are responsible for setting defense the way a conductor runs an orchestra.) But cricket defense is changing all of the time, and I think there's a bit more action than in baseball. It's also easier to hit the ball in cricket, thanks to a bigger and flatter bat, which means the ball is in play more often.

You might like rugby, which has more of the continuous action and (usually) isn't so low-scoring as to put people to sleep. Also, as you like American football, it wouldn't be that difficult to explain rugby -- Cheryl did, some years ago, a good article called "Rugby for Football Fans," that did a good job of explaining the game in American terms. As the games have common ancestry -- even more so than cricket and baseball (-> rounders) -- it doesn't surprise me that one can explain one game in terms of the other.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

No, Kevin: we're talking about different aspects of the game. I have no wish to dispute that cricket, like baseball, is a game of subtlety and strategy. But that's not what we were talking about.

All I said was, "A cricket run is not at all the same thing as a baseball run," which was meant to argue that no, despite being much higher-scoring than baseball, cricket is not a more action-filled game. In fact cricket is legendarily dull to those who don't know it.

I don't know how many times I have to say that I'm not looking for continuous action. Evidently twice isn't enough. I said that I like American football because of the balance: action, but not too much of it, and a more continuous "plot" than baseball. People raised on soccer often say they dislike American football because the action keeps stopping: it drives them crazy.