Friday Forum: Why We Love Baseball

To wrap up our "Why I Love" week of warm-fuzzies (see 'em all here), we asked our staff a to write a few paragraphs on a really simple, intentionally open-ended question:  


"What is the one baseball-related thing you love the most, and why?"


So before we get back to being hateful bastards, here are each of our flowery sissy-pants answers to that question. Believe it or not, I went to the list randomizer on Random.org, typed in each of our names (plus Dan Hennessey's, who wrote a great guest post for us last week and will be popping in for at least a couple more), and it came out in the following order:

Why I Love: Stories

By The Common Man

Yet again, we delve into the things we love about baseball in an effort to combat the really disappointing news from around the game in recent weeks, and the potential flurry of negativity we'll be reveling during the upcoming Hall of Fame debate.  Here are links to our previous efforts, which document our love of movies, Twitter, grittiness, NotGraphs, and minor league free agents.

The Common Man loves baseball stories.  More than any other sport, baseball seems to lend itself to narratives both on the field and off of it, and those stories become absolute bedrocks of our American identities.  For instance, that Babe Ruth was so supremely confident, he'd promise to hit home runs for kids and called his own shot.  That Satchel Paige would tell his outfielders to sit down before he pitched.  That Jose Canseco would meet with teammates in the clubhouse bathroom to inject each other with steroids. 

These stories are not just compelling when they're told well, but they invoke the essence of the players and time in question.  Ruth was a god in the 1920s and early 1930s who could do anything. Paige and his Negro Leagues were as much about showmanship as about baseball.  And steroids were seedy and shameful, as were the men who did them.

Why I Love: Minor League Free Agent Signings

by Jason Wojciechowski

(Thanks to whichever of my fine fellows posted this for me, allowing me to contribute to "Why I Love" week despite my being 2200 miles from home and without Wifi due to my lack of desire to pay $13 for the privilege of connecting my computer to the internet.)

Minor-league free agent signings are the best. Put aside the question of how well your favorite team has deployed its resources in minor-league roster space in recent years, or how entertaining the local AAA squad has been. Consider the practice in general. A list of positive characteristics of minor-league signings reads like a small-town newspaper's Fourth of July ode to the greatness of America.


Freedom: it's right there in the phrase "free agency." Many players signing minor-league deals will have been free agents before, but some of them are choosing where they can play for the first time since, at best, college. They're toilers, strivers after the dream of just a single big-league plate-appearance, a story for the grandkids, a chance to be legendary, and they've been riding the buses for the team that drafted them ever since they were innocent babes, unsullied by the particular habits of mind and body of the small-time professional athlete. Suddenly, these players can choose. Outfielders can go to Oakland. Starting pitchers can ring up Brian Cashman. Backup catchers can visit the Twins. Offers can be collected and weighed in terms of pleasantness of weather (Tucson or Pawtucket in July?), chance to make the big-league roster, and orneriness of AAA hitting coach. They are free.

Why I Love: NotGraphs

The Common Man has been writing two columns a week (on Wednesdays and Thursdays) over at NotGraphs, by the way, if you had not yet been made aware. And given that this is “Why I love…” week, TCM really needs to tell you how much he loves NotGraphs. While we can get caught up in our numbers, NotGraphs is a reminder that baseball is full of joy and whimsy if you know where to look.


Today, The Common Man is especially loving former catcher Jamie Quirk, who was just named the Bench Coach of the Chicago Cubs. Thus, TCM provided a dozen mostly true facts about Quirk’s career, including the strange discovery that Quirk never actually played an inning of catcher as a professional until four years after he debuted in the Major Leagues, and yet ended up playing five times the number of games behind the plate than at any other position in what was truly a very strange 18 year career. Check it out.

Why I Love week: True Grit

By Bill


This week, TCM and I are ignoring all the horrible things we could be complaining about these days and trying to keep things light and positive. Here's the first installment, here's the second.


"Gritty," thanks largely to the brilliant Fire Joe Morgan, is probably the most hated word in the English language to people like you and me. That or "scrappy," or "Plaschke."

I have a confession to make, though: I love gritty players. Not the little white guys who journalists like to praise because they get their uniforms dirty, provide good quotes and have no discernible baseball-related skills. Rather, I mean legitimately good players, who legitimately help their teams in tangible ways, who may or may not be media darlings or even speak English, but who also happen to be the all-out, max-effort, self-sacrificing types. Who crash into walls, play whatever position they're asked, have valuable but particularly unglamorous skills, play (well) through pain, and so forth. And maybe some of it is show -- I do tend to believe that almost all players are "max-effort" guys, or else they'd never get to the majors -- but so what? A lot of the fun of baseball is show.

So here's my own personal top ten list of gritty scrappiness:

Why I Love: Twitter

By The Common Man

As Bill pointed out yesterday, we’re trying especially hard to be positive this week about the game we love and why we love it. The Common Man can’t promise to remain completely cynicism-free (after all, The Common Man essentially runs on cynicism), but he’s gonna try his level best.

All of us speak through a filter, based on how we want the world, or parts of it, to perceive us. Baseball players are exceptionally good at this, having learned at an early point to speak in platitudes and clichés as they give interviews with the media. After all, one misquote or misstatement could be hugely embarrassing to them and to their employers, like Luke Scott’s paranoid and racist interviews with Dave Brown and ESPN earlier this year.

There simply is no incentive for a ballplayer to be himself, which means we’re left to get to know them second hand (through the descriptions of sportswriters) or to simply admire them from afar. Sometimes, though, that’s not enough. Certainly, we’re all too mature to still idolize players like we did as kids, but isn’t it nice to be able to root for a person as much as you’re rooting for a player?

Why I Love week: Take Me Out to the Ball Game

By Bill


So it's been pretty gloomy around here lately. On the same day a bit over a week ago, Bill and TCM wrote posts whose titles began with "Why I Hate" -- first the new playoff format, then the new draft rules. Last week came the announcement of the new CBA, the magnum opus capping Bud Selig's diabolical twenty-year plan for the utter destruction of the national pastime. People are giving Michael Young MVP votes. There's just a lot to be bitter about right now. 


So we've decided to completely ignore all that and observe a cynicism-free week of utter frivolity and happiness (TCM Note: TCM does not promise to keep this site cynicism free.  Without cynicism, what would The Common Man be? He will, however, try and refrain from being a Negative Nelly once a day). Bill and TCM (Jason and Mark can certainly participate if they want to) will alternate providing daily posts celebrating one little baseball-related thing we love, or that helps explain why we love baseball.


I'm a big fan of Frank Sinatra, and I'm obviously quite into baseball. So I really don't know how I got through more than thirty years of life without ever becoming aware that there's a movie in which a singing-and-dancing Frank Sinatra plays the part of a turn-of-the-century big-league shortstop. But there is, and it's called Take Me Out to the Ball Game, and once I learned of this, of course, I had to see it.