Designated Hitters
Image courtesy of @britozour
Bazzers,
The lead character in a not great movie I saw this weekend brought up something I’ve had at the tip of my tongue without even knowing it. How we’re all so disconnected from each other because we’re all living in our own little bubbles and maybe even fractals of time. This is a thing I often think about in relation to art and pop culture, how discovering and consuming things at each of our own paces doesn’t necessarily give any of us a sense of FOMO — how I, for one, no longer go, “Now where the fuck was I while all this was happening???”
This character really nailed the point home, when he said even the way we communicate is subject to how we individually perceive and utilise time. You send me a message, and I can wait several minutes or several hours to interact with it. If two people were to do this with a conversation, it’d be the equivalent of freezing each other’s verbiage in the air, and conducting experiments with it before actually returning serve.
At will, we choose who to let into our unique little space times — if I could please be so careless — and my nephew has recently had a profound effect on the seismic activities that unfurl mine. For all of two weeks I was a Chicago Cubs fan, because I surmise it renews me to disrupt my way of rooting, my way of feeling, in order to disrupt my way of thinking. Sometimes I talk myself into the political ramifications of representing 0.00025 percent of some wealthy billionaire’s revenue, by spending far too much of my own money on sports merchandise or streaming services, and what message that sends to the world, into the future, or into everybody else’s space time, about my personal brand. (Though with authors, we can agree, it is more of a mythos.) I take these revelations into someone else’s space time, usually my nephew’s, sometimes yours, hoping they’ll be proven to be revolutions. On this occasion my nephew quite bluntly called me an ass, and prophetically informed me that in less than six weeks I would surely voice-note him again, claiming I have seen the light, and that the light is New York and its Yankees, and I should never have deserted them an umpteenth time.
Perhaps when I have settled down with baseball and have tired of its power structures, I’ll be more antagonistic towards the game — less enamoured with the colours and crests of every team in the league. (This is what it came to in the end with Tottenham Hotspur: the numbing realisation that football, though beautiful, is essentially pointless.) I am just surprised to be admitting that when the music stops and the chairs run out, it’s the Yankees I’ll adore still. I have made an art, sure, of attaching distant love affairs with art capitals to the sports franchises that sometimes grace those capitals’ novels, songs, movies; but I didn’t expect to wind up with the bad guys.
For years the Yankees logo, like that of the Chicago Bulls, like Coca Cola’s, has struck me as symbolic of the herd mentality I so resent in humans. People wear the black hat and sometimes the pinstriped jersey with zero reverence for what Herculean feats Yankee stadium has witnessed — because New York, to everyone else, is Manhattan and exclusive parties attended by celebrities, and a gentrified, consumerist Oz, and not odd restaurants tucked into secret nooks, or the hustle and bustle of every culture in the world pursuing a hopeless but at least common dream. The easy out against this vampirism and in response to the death of ‘the old city’, for me, was to represent the Cubs of Chicago or the Cardinals of St. Louis. Where the branding and even the recruitment policies spoke to the romance of an America that didn’t exist in the first place, but has no chance in hell of existing now.
These are the thoughts I figured I should gather for you, while everyone at the office waited forever for IT to sort out the email server. The word I’m looking for and will struggle to define is ‘Americana’. I think in a nutshell it symbolises a time and a place or maybe several times and places when a nation’s youth stashed its dreams into bags and made all the way across the land to compete for their right to exist. To state capitals, to California, to New York. Kids that graced stages, film sets, ball parks, and with very particular skills in baseball’s case. The trouble was (and still is) you were only allowed to have a certain kind of dream if you weren’t the right colour, and that’s very clearly a legacy the nostalgia struggles with now. But the impurity of it is sort of the point: that black athletes eventually rose above the designation of the Negro Leagues, and that even subconscious reflection serves as a quiet reminder of what evil we all remain capable of.
I don’t know whether that’s any use to being better people, but I like that we’ve at least proven it immaterial to the act of spectating and winning ball games. Baseball can take forever — Yankees at Rays yesterday was four ungodly hours — but when an inning cracks open for a line drive, because the ball slips past a fielder’s glove, that elation baseball fans experience together feels like the point; or, as close as people will ever get to putting aside their prejudices.
I get all of these feelings from football, and football, and basketball; this is precisely the reason I have suicide pacts with so many self-destructive sports teams. But with baseball, I’m outside of time for a while. It’s been well over a century, and humanity’s innovated enough that there’s no real need to endure anyone else’s orbit, or wait several hours for a final score. But the fraternity’s still just sitting around, waiting, hoping something wild happens.
CC.
Image courtesy of @theinfluencermarketingfactory
Cholls,
I’ll take your positive attitude towards the consumption of ‘things’ (I daren’t term our exchanges as ‘culture’) at one’s own pace as a pre-meditated and implicit — if disgruntled — acceptance of how late this letter reached you. It has been over a month already. We always begin these exchanges thus, with an apology, and I’d hate to spoil the rituals we have created for one another. So, sorry?
Time, for sure, has its own rituals; and although I don’t wish to elaborate on such (perhaps this is a discussion for another time?) there is a peculiarly American way of encountering time that baseball exemplifies, and complicates. I am often struck by the ability for American consumerism to commodify the pathos of time. An America that didn’t exist in the first place is in a better position to sell a pathos as mythos: a floating feeling that we have to tie down with consumerism, whether it through purchasing objects — baseball caps, if you like — or consuming culture, like film.
We have discussed elsewhere that baseball is a long game, and that it is facing declining interest from younger generations. Cricket — I can only think of baseball in terms of cricket — is facing similar issues. Recently, there has been a marked decline in the commercial value of test matches, often purported as the ‘purest’ form of cricket. Currently, there are a number of T20 franchise leagues that have filled up the traditional cricket schedule, made of domestic and international fixtures. A test match can go on for five days; a T20 match doesn’t last beyond 3 hours.
The financial equation is simple here: the former is inefficient at generating the types of revenue that the latter does through broadcasting deals, which articulates value through the amount of people watching at any given time. Test cricket simply cannot hold an active audience for five days in the same way that a T20 game can for 3 hours. The broader point about contemporary capitalism here is that value is increasingly tied to commodifying time. Every second is tied to how much revenue it can rake in, distributed along a line of vying parties – broadcasters, national sporting boards, agents, players, etc.
Cricket has changed because of this. The manner in which it is played is different, and what indexes we associate with good, bad, or useful play too. Whilst cricket has always relied on statistics to infer legibility onto itself, there is a long and interesting history of writing about cricket that is increasingly being subsumed under statistics. Taking a cue from the financialization of the game, these statistics are increasingly concerned about the productivity of teams and players in relation to time. The result is a type of cricket match that values productive play above the non-productive, the ad-hoc above the graceful, the ugly above the beautiful.
Sport may complicate this picture. Yes, cricket is dying. It is becoming a beast that no one wants but cannot do without. But when you speak about a line drive slipping past the fielder’s glove in a baseball match, I think of a cover drive dissecting the off-side field in a cricket match. In that moment time stops, and all that matters is the poise and grace of the batsman, whilst the bowler puts his hands to his head, knowing full well that there was nothing he could have done. In that moment nothing else matters: no politics or economics of the game, no discussion about culture or art or aesthetics that could add to this moment.
Perhaps it is like that ‘Americana’ you find so uncontainable, or ungraspable. It is irrelevant, sure; but it is beyond ourselves, and those are the only experiences worth having.
Bazzers.
