nick@anize: Baseball Archives

July 12, 2006

fossilized baseball

Ran across Retrosheet.org tonight, a sweet little site about baseball history. They purport to have the record of the first major league baseball game. I could open up the sports pages of the Baltimore Sun tomorrow morning and see a box score and couldn’t much tell the difference.

Posted by nick at 09:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 15, 2005

Games 1 & 2 -- patience

We lost to the Athletics 14-8 on opening day last week. I think they had something like 5 hits, the rest were walks and errors. And we blew a good pitching performance from our ace Alan yesterday against the Senators and lost 3-2. I had one at-bat over the two games, a strikeout looking in the 7th yesterday (we play 7 innings, not 9 ). So I guess that makes my line sad and simple:
0-1, K (looking)

It’s been a harder adjustment than I expected, playing baseball again. It’s not as welcoming as an ultimate field, that’s for sure. I don’t step onto the grass and know that I can at least hang with anyone I go up against. There are so few oportunities to prove your worth during games, and so many constraints. You can’t mess with the structure of the game and can’t have control over the flow in the same way that you can by getting open or playing sick man defense. You can’t will ground balls to be hit into the hole so you can make a diving stop and the on-the-knees underhand flip to the second baseman; you have to wait your turn in the lineup. Opportunites are scarce and especially as a rookie there’s a lot of pressure to show what you’re made of each time. Fuck the numbers that say you’re great if you succeed 30% of the time. To break in as a rookie, you need to be damn close to 100% and squeeze an extra 20% on top in the form of hustle and heart.

I’m not doing that right now. So my resolution for the next few weeks is to step up the mental focus. Not to take the 3-2 pitch because you’re already thinking about getting a walk and stealing on this catcher’s glass arm. This is the biggest athletic challenge I’ve had in a while, a real combination of sports psych and an acute athletic ability. I think it likely that this whole experience will be humbling, forcing me to accept an athletic mediocrity in comparison to these other players. I can accept that, but it would be harder to feel as though I’d lost the mental game.

If there is one part of competing that is transferrable from ultimate to baseball (or any other competition, for that matter) it is the competitive edge, the calm confidence that it takes to win and win big. I’ve had it before, been part of a winning tradition, but right now the trick is to translate it from the disc to the diamond.

Posted by nick at 07:45 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 08, 2005

My kind of church

We woke up late today, Sunday—rolled out of bed and ate our Wheaties. What better way to spend a Sunday than at church, we thought.

One phone call later, and we had fine seats at the best church in town, thanks to the rain which convinced most of the disciples to worship from home today.

It’s going to be hard to leave this house in Cambridgeport, only a ten minute bike away from the 33,993 gleaming holy red and blue seats. At least Baltimore’s got some fine pews of its own.

nick@anize

As I walk out my door, step into the pollution, I breathe in the problems, exhale solutions. -Aesop Rock