As noted philosopher Ferris Buehler once said, “life moves pretty fast, and if you don’t stop and say, ‘man am I grateful for that,’ now and again, you might miss it!” Or something like that. Anyway, the point is: I’m a believer in counting up my gratitudes. My wife read several years ago that it’s a healthy habit to end every day by saying three things you’re grateful for, and three things that are challenging you — a plan we’ve put into practice…oh….once every month or so. But we’re always meaning to get to it more often! And almost inevitably the process does spur the sort of intimacy and connectivity — the sense of being present in our lives — that makes for a happy, healthy living environment.
So while the turkey thaws and the groceries start sorting out into their respective lines to form our harvest feast, it feels like a good time to bring a list of gratitudes over to this community as well. I’ll start with a list of my own, but I’d love it if folks contribute in the comments section. Let’s all take a gander around the green fields of our minds, as A. Bartlett Giamatti put it, and really soak in the joy and the meaning of it all for a day.
Herein, a list of baseball gratitudes for me:
The Inspired Words
Speaking of Professor Giamatti, the one-time literature instructor in me has always been grateful that baseball is the most literate of sports. And so now, when we face the cold winter without ball, we can capture a spark of its presence through the words of its best prose stylists. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read Giamatti’s great opus in my life. The first three sentences of that awesome piece are, alone, as great as anything ever written about the game:
It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.
And they aren’t the only great sentences in that piece. Right behind “Green Fields” in my personal hierarchy is John Upton’s amazing piece on Ted Williams’ final game, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” which includes this extraordinary encapsulation of the uncanny sense of anticipation that can whip a crowd into a frenzy:
Understand that we were a crowd of rational people. We knew that a home run cannot be produced at will; the right pitch must be perfectly met and luck must ride with the ball. Three innings before, we had seen a brave effort fail. The air was soggy; the season was exhausted. Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.
And, perhaps the greatest of all baseball chroniclers — yet another associated with the New Yorker — Roger Angell, who penned a piece that I have sitting forever on my desktop, just in case I feel the need to pop in a moment and remember this little miracle of a paragraph:
What I do know is that this belonging and caring is what our games are all about; this is what we come for. It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look – I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring – caring deeply and passionately, really caring – which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté – the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the hap hazardous flight of a distant ball – seems a small price to pay for such a gift.
Yes. I am deeply and eternally grateful for the people who are capable of reaching into my heart and taking the inchoate sentiments lying about there and turning them into a brilliant jewel of thought. And that sentiment extends right down the long list of great baseball writers (the Peter Gammonses and Joe Posnanskis) to two of our very own: I’m grateful for the delightful, individual prose styles of Grant Brisbee and Andy Baggarly who make reading about the Giants a joy even (especially when?) watching them is a chore.
The Warmth of the Sun
As we have a long, lingering late summer in DC this year, my trip to see the Arizona Fall League didn’t have any sense of “escape” about it — as my spring training trips almost invariably do. Still, if I close my mind and imagine myself on a ball field, there are two things that immediately are foregrounded in my mind: the sounds of ball hitting glove or bat (which are absolutely a special thrill of their own) and the feel of the warmth on my skin.
I’ve told the story before about my wife trying to help me out of a rough patch at work by asking me where I was happy, and closing my mind, those two things — the sun on my skin and the sound of players playing catch — floated to the surface of my imagination. Nowadays, I might add in the smells of a stadium getting ready for the night’s crowd by grilling up plenty of sausages and burgers. But of all the sensory delights of hanging around a stadium, it’s that warmth that holds a primary spot in my sensory memories. Oh, there are plenty of April nights when I curse the early spring chill and perpetual spring rains, and late in the summer in Richmond that “warmth” tips over the scale into “soul-sucking heat.”
But the Capitol Weather Gang has already put out their winter snow forecast for the year, and the early models are predicting plenty of late winter snows, and, as much as I’m a snow lover sitting by my fire with a Scotch and a book, I’m already eagerly anticipating that some early March morning I’ll ditch the heavy overcoat, gloves, and ski caps, and pack my suitcase with nothing but short-sleeve shirts and cargo pants for that annual return to Scottsdale and the soft, warm feel of sun on my skin.
A Life-Time of Learning
I know that “analytics” has become firestorm of larger cultural divisions these days, but I’m grateful that the sport is constantly evolving and changing. My mother, a life-long educator, always told me that to be really living meant to be learning new things, and my devotion to understanding the game of baseball and, particularly, player development, gives me a never-ending set of constantly changing coursework.
Last March, when I was camping out at Papago Park taking notes on all the kids, I also made sure to listen to the conversations taking place around me, and one I remember hanging on with keen interest was about the different ways that pitchers and hitters use the strength in their trunks — with pitchers trunk strength was important mostly for the stability it lent to their motion, while for hitters it really is a source of power production — and how to measure an individual’s ability to transfer power efficiently from the ground up through their base and into their trunk. I’m fairly certain that at least one of the people taking part in that conversation had a PhD in biomechanics, and I was reminded of a SABR seminar I attended in which one of the panelists’ previous professional experience before working for an MLB team was as a NASA scientist working on the effects of zero gravity on astronauts on the Space Shuttle. Another conversation I had involved the benefits of wearing earplugs while batting to enhance visual perception. Every time I plunge into a baseball environment, I come away knowing that I’m going to be chasing new discoveries and new knowledge for as long as I choose to care about this fascinating game.
Generosity of Baseball People
It goes without saying that much of my learning comes from the people who devote their lives to the game — the scouts, coaches, evaluators, analysts, and others who love the game and spend an unbelievable number of hours working on it. A long-time scout I was talking with this summer who reflected with near amazement on this life that they’d chosen, saying, “it’s not a job that I have. I don’t have hours, or work weeks, or weekends. It’s an all encompassing life that you try to fit your other life around somehow.” It’s hard and, I would imagine, often lonesome, as baseball folk live huge quantities of their life apart from their family and loved ones.
And yet, for all of that, their generosity in sharing their knowledge with outsiders like me is nearly unlimited. While I got into this project thinking that time to watch all of the ball was going to be the great reward — and it certainly is a huge part of it — what I find myself thinking about most of the time are the conversations that I’ve had with the people around the game. Talking with scouts after batting practice, conversations with coaches and managers and players, trying to learn how these people see the game they’ve been watching obsessively for years and years, is my real obsession. How do I watch the game more intelligently and see more?
And, I’m almost never shut down or held at bay as an outsider or amateur. Long time industry insiders and executives from fairly high up the ladder take the time to talk to me, share their insights with me, and even, on occasion, ask my opinion of what I’ve seen. And it always strikes me that behind that generosity, all of these people are on the same quest as I am — though they’re typically much further down the trail — trying to make sense of this deceptively simple and yet complex and chaotic activity. They love to talk ball on and on and on, and in talking about it, they try to make sense of it as well. That scout was right: it’s not a job, it’s an obsession.
The Amazing Young Men Who Strive
I’ve said this many times before, but it’s always worth repeating: the quality and character of the young men that the Giants bring into their organization has been one of the real joys of this pursuit for me. Whether it’s by plan or happy accident, when you sit down and talk with a player in this organization, they are almost uniformly thoughtful, articulate, earnest, and good humored. Even the ones who cast a wary glance at first, still uncomfortable with the idea of being interviewed by members of the media, will warm up quickly and sincerely once you start discussing the prime obsession of their own lives — the complicated path towards improvement. They are polite and genuine, fun and funny, happy to talk about non-baseball pursuits and rarely shy away from discussing aspects of their game that have given them difficulty.
I’ve had so many instances where players came up to me to introduce themselves and say hello — despite my being little more than an intrusion on their work and their world. Late in the 2023 season, I showed up to Richmond for the start of a new series and noted that Will Wilson, who had spent the season heretofore in Sacramento, had been sent down a level. Thinking he might be a little sensitive and raw at the demotion, I kept my distance, trying to signal that I wanted to give him space. But as soon as he espied me on the field, he came up with a jovial smile, shook my hand, and said it was great to see me again. And I remember being struck by the strength of character such a small act revealed, and felt confident that Will will be successful in life far beyond his exploits on a ball field.
That’s a feeling that I have almost continuously in my interactions with the players in this system. They strive for a goal of dizzying ambition, and the dedication and focus and eternal joy with which they attack that goal is, in itself, the measure of their worth — far more than the ultimate results. It’s impossible not to root for every last one of them to get their shining moment of glory.
The Passion of Giants’ Fans
If you happen to interact with social media much these days (not a pursuit I’d suggest indulging in too much), you might notice that the sort of tribal animosity that has infected our world overall is highly noticeable in the enclosed world of Giants’ fans. There are those who will never be happy with Farhan Zaidi’s innovative and data-based strategies, and there are those who will defend his every move to the end. Farhan’s friend and collaborator, Gabe Kapler, was similarly a lightning rod for endless, dichotomous vituperations.
It’s easy to overload on such ferocity quickly, but in small doses, I choose to see the good of that kind of passion. For so much of my youth and early adulthood, being a Giants’ fan meant toiling obscurity over a passion that few others seemed to share. Certainly in my hometown in the Central Valley, I felt myself a tiny island in a sea of Dodgers’ fans, alone and slightly ashamed of my perpetually woebegone team.
After living in San Francisco in the 90s, I left California for good late in 1998, and thus have mostly missed the in-person experience of Oracle Park-era of Giants’ ball, except as an occasional tourist. And yet it always makes my heart gladdened to see the stadium full of happy throngs, and, in a small sense, these ferocious arguments about the future of the club do as well. This is an engaged fanbase now — engaged even when it’s enraged. And, while there’s a little too much internecine cross-fire at times for my taste, I generally think that it’s good for a fanbase to hold ownership and front offices to high standards. While I do NOT believe, as many apparently do, that the top of this organization is happy to settle for “good enough” (I can’t believe that any Executive Council that includes Buster Posey would ever strive for less than the best), fan unrest can have its useful purposes in forcing bold action.
So, “good on you, Giants fans,” I say! Continue to advocate for greatness. It’s why we devote so much time to this silly pasttime, after all. As Angell says above, the point is to care passionately about something, and that passion is definitely spilling out these days. But go gently on those whose passion is expressed slightly differently from yours. That would be nice, too!
The Hope For a Better Tomorrow
My guess is that it was 1974 that started me down the prospect-watching path. With Willie McCovey traded away to the Padres and Juan Marichal sold to the Red Sox the previous winter, the post-Golden Era was fully on display — and going badly. That ‘74 Giants’ team finished 72-90, finishing in fifth place for the second time in three years, and beginning a run of four consecutive losing seasons that is still tied for the longest stretch in franchise history.
But that same summer, a group of youngsters in Fresno destroyed the California League, finishing 30 games over .500, and taking the league title. As the Fresno Bee was the daily paper in my house, it was a daily ritual for me to follow up the bitter pill of reading the San Francisco Giants’ game stories, with the much more pleasant stories on the exploits of the Fresno Giants, led by Jack Clark, Bob Knepper, Johnnie LeMaster, Greg Minton and more future big leaguers.
In so doing, I found that I could live that baseball summer on a sort of double timeline, or perhaps two different parts of the multiverse, one present, one future. The present may be dour, but there’s always hope for the unknown and unknowable future — forever lovely and triumphant in our imaginations.
Of course, it doesn’t do to dwell on the fantasy future as a substitute for the now — after all, Clark and Knepper and LeMaster and company didn’t exactly usher in a new era of Giants’ dominion. The present is what we have to live in, for good and for ill. But it’s good to keep one foot in the lived-in present and one in the hoped-for future, always remembering that how things are now is not how they will always be, but also that we can never dream things into being. And, as Hunter Pence would say, the journey from here to there is the real reward.
My Readers and My Community
The thing that drives me is my personal education, as I’ve already said. But as the first human who ever discovered how to start a fire or who perfected a way to bring down the wooly mammoth no doubt discovered, personal knowledge that never goes beyond oneself is somehow a little emptier and less satisfying than shared knowledge.
Learning is gratifying, but sharing that learning is far more so. And so, my greatest gratitude of all comes to those who let me share what I’ve found — and who share back in response. Without a readership, there is no There R Giants — sending words out into the void is purposeless. That a community of Giants’ fans care about my writing and my podcasts and my thoughts at all never ceases to fill me with awe and gratitude. You make my work possible and you give it meaning, and I couldn’t repay you in many lifetimes of saying “thanks.”
But in this week of all weeks, I want to make sure you know how much I appreciate that you’re here.
Have a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend everybody. May it be rich and joyful and shared with those you love most!
I’ll be dark on Friday, as I sleep off the food-coma, but don’t worry, I’ll be back to real baseball writing on Monday, picking up the Way Too Early Roster Previews with Eugene. In the meantime, I’m going to try to get a bonus podcast out this afternoon — yet another KROG edition with Kerry Crowley. After that, it’s on to the food preparation. Popcorn, toast, and jelly beans, just like Snoopy makes!
Happy Thanksgiving!
PS. Those are my gratitudes, how about yours?
Luna, our darling cat wants me to start things off for her by saying: “don’t forget to be thankful for all the boxes!”
I am TRULY thankful to have your writings to rabidly consume every day.
I remember when I “discovered” Baseball America in a bookstore magazine rack in the 90s. I couldn’t believe that I there was a whole magazine dedicated to prospects! Before that it was a couple of passing snippets about Dante Powell or Jason Grilli in the beat writers daily beat once or twice a year.
Fast forward to the granular, data driven, scout informed SFG prospect posts you share with us almost every day. To say we are lucky is a major understatement!
AZ
I’m thankful that you bring us all the opportunity to dream about the warmth of the spring and summer sun in the cold days of winter. Your work is terrific and we’re all so incredibly grateful for it.