Zen Way of Baseball
Happy March. This is the third issue of Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit — it’s just like any other email newsletter, except it’s shiftless and has no ambitions in life.
I’d say this sucker crept up on me again. But I’ve actually been worrying about it in the background all week long.
Late edition
I am an inveterate procrastinator. A very slow-thinker combined with a cautious, self-doubting, and skeptical nature (plus, a healthy scoop of lazy on top) results in thinking, then rethinking, then overthinking, then ignoring, then drinking, then napping, followed by paralyzing indecision, followed by more overthinking. Eventually, there’s writing.
This way of working — cautious, making sure everything is perfect and impervious — is more and more out of step with the modern world, where the big energy is to have hot takes, move fast and break things, put a “minimum viable product” out there quick, who cares how ugly or janky it is.
It’s not really me.
But working at ambitious tech companies these last few years — with fast-moving product and dev teams who recognize the shortcomings of everything they release, but are somehow totally at peace with it — I’ve started to appreciate the good things about this approach. Having a big, dumb idea and putting it out in the world usually works out better than you think/fear. And fast doesn’t only have to mean sloppy or thoughtless (despite what a certain idiot billionaire — who bought a zoo social media company and burned it to the ground in a few short weeks with his dipshit ideas — might have you think).
These aren’t new ideas or exclusive to tech companies, either. Perfect is the enemy of good, etc. But I buy into it all a tiny bit more now, seeing it in action day to day at work.
This newsletter was meant to help me practice that approach a little bit for myself. To ship things more frequently. To plunge ahead with release dates and deadlines, even if I didn’t really have a fully formed idea of what I was releasing. I can always fix it as I go.
All of which is to say: I’m not doing a very good job of it. Like last month, I’ve left this writing almost entirely to the very last minute, with this email going out a little later than it was meant to. My OKR (another idea from the tech world I’ve learned; one I like a lot less) for this project is simply to ship, to look back and see 12 emails in the proverbial sent folder. But the real goal is to look back and feel like something was worth sending. We’ll see how I did nine months from now.
Goodbye, Sun
It’s the month of March and before it ends, we’ll have baseball again. But this will be the first season at Camden Yards where the lovely logo for The Sun won’t be sitting above the centerfield scoreboard. From Andrew Ratner’s story at the Baltimore Fishbowl:
“The Sun” sign was removed recently as the Orioles plan for a new sponsor for the prominent placement above the JumboTron. The newspaper reportedly hadn’t kept up its payment. Lucchino estimated that the deal was initially in the range of $250,000 to $400,000 a year.
Besides the great drawings and blueprints above, that whole article is worth checking out to hear about the guy who built the sign, how the original sponsorship deal got done, the reason the sponsorship kept going under Orioles owner Peter Angelo, and how the demise of the sign is, of course, really the death of newspapers (which probably goes hand in hand with the death of democracy). Most likely, the sponsorship will go to a casino or online betting site.
But can’t leave without mentioning Janet Marie Smith, the architect who oversaw the Camden Yards project, the first of the retro-style ballparks:
“Our goal was not just to be a new ballpark but to tell a story about the history of baseball in Baltimore,” said Janet Marie Smith, the architect and urban planner whom Lucchino hired to guide the stadium project. The green trusses that supported the sign were similarly intentional, she said: to evoke the port city’s proud history of steelmaking.
“It wasn’t just ornamentation and decoration, the way you might do at a theme park,” she said. “It was storytelling.”
I became a baseball fan late in life, at a Yankees-Red Sox game at Fenway Park, circa 1999. For all she did to restore and improve Fenway, I have Janet Marie Smith to thank — as much as Pedro and Papi — for many pleasant evenings and afternoons there since.
Other rabbit holes
Bally Sports is collapsing. When Disney bought Fox, they sold off Fox’s regional sports networks to Bally’s. Now Bally’s and other RSNs are going the way of NFTs. I do not feel bad for Bally’s. Besides being another annoying sports gambling advertiser, their broadcasts also had the most hideous scorebug. Good riddance!
Baseball is also moving fast and breaking things. Among the myriad new rules this season, a pitch clock for the pitcher — and the batter. The Sox walked off with a tie when a Braves batter earned his third strike — making the last out in the bottom of the ninth with the bases loaded — because he wasn’t set in the box in time.
Return of the living dead. A rule born in the pandemic officially becomes permanent. Extra innings during the regular season will start with an automatic runner on second, aka the zombie runner, aka don’t call him the ghost runner!
A Zen Way of Baseball. Also in the story about the automatic strike call, a note about Red Sox Bobby Dalbec finding his swing: “Dalbec re-read the book A Zen Way of Baseball by Japanese legend Sadaharu Oh during the offseason.” Can’t beat that title. It’s already in the mail.
Have a happy Opening Day. See you back here next month.
jf