Rambling with large words

My backyard has two bare spots.  One, where I stand, is longer than wide.  Where Carson stands, the grass is dead over a fifteen by twenty foot area, trampled into bare dirt by the pursuit of innumerable grounders.  We have always played baseball.  When Carson was small, we would adjourn to the basement with his MLB sponsored plastic bat, and he would hit hundreds of pitches with the soft plastic balls culled from his ball pit.  His first full sentence was, “hit by pitch, take your base.”  His bedroom is decorated by a series of shelves, custom-built by his great-grandfather, which exactly replicate the number of teams in the major league divisions.  He has a hat from each team, which he shuffles on the shelves each morning to reflect the current standings.  We are not happy that the Astros are moving leagues.  Those are our baseball bona fides, as they are.  The point is not to impress you.  I am fairly certain that you aren’t reading.

The point is that I thought about all of these things when I read Sam Mellinger’s kind of column reprinting a reader letter disclaiming allegiance to the Royals and Chiefs.  My first reaction, based on the proportion of capitalized letters, was that the reader was primarily a Chiefs fan.  The most severe complaints, if one measures in the upper case, concern the quarterback position.  Perhaps that assessment is uncharitable.  But complaining about the Royals is much like complaining about gravity.  The Royals being a crappy baseball team is really just the natural order of things.  Acting like you are surprised or dismayed about it is a bit disingenuous if you have been paying a modicum of attention over the period of years that postdates 1985.  Now seems like an extraordinarily odd time to abandon the local baseball franchise, considering any reasonable estimate would have to concede a fairly substantial improvement from the days of Mark Redman, All-Star.

The better point is to recognize a profound debt of thanks to writers like Rany Jazayerli and Michael Engel who cemented how our family experiences baseball.  We have always had the zen rhythm of catch in the backyard.  But with the vernacular of BABIP and WAR we have a new and improved way to complain and obsess and compare and laugh and think.  Largely about Jeff Francoeur.  Carson’s gifted presentation is about the market inefficiency of free-market starting pitching.  This is the new iteration of the hoary myth that baseball bonds parents and their children in ways that little else can.  But I believe it.  Thanks, Rany.  And thanks, Michael.  Though, full disclosure, Michael helps coach our U12 baseball team.  Though we would appreciate it if he showed up a little more for practice.