Life Is a Misery and I Do Not Know When Death May Come. Play Ball!*
Happy April. This is the fourth issue of Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit — where I share content with the internet once a month, against my better judgement.
The return of baseball means there’s always something good to watch on TV.
Looney ball
After a long hiatus, Sam Miller, one of my favorite baseball writers, has returned to baseball writing. And his new Pebble Hunting newsletter has not disappointed.
My favorite issue so far is about the rise of the World Baseball Classic, a lightweight exhibition that suddenly became a super fun tournament — and possibly host to the best baseball moment we’ll see all year: the epic, bottom-of-the-ninth, two-out, full-count, championship-deciding face-off between the world’s two best baseball players, who also happen to be teammates during the regular MLB season. That Shohei Ohtani–vs–Mike Trout at-bat is about as good as baseball gets — and it happened while MLB teams were still in spring training.
So how did the WBC suddenly get so good? Mostly because the players and the fans decided it should be good — despite the cynicism of cranky commentators. “It’s not like Plato invented the World Series,” Sam writes. “A barkeeper who wanted to sell beer did. It’s what happens when people get ahold of it that makes something what it is.”
Sam tells you the story of that barkeeper — and how he invented the proto-World Series to help him peddle beer and whisky — but that issue requires a paid subscription. So here’s the lead-in to one of his free issues:
I recently learned about the sunflower sea star. Let me tell you quickly about it: It’s about a meter across, so roughly the size of a human child. It’s the world’s second-largest sea star and it lives along the Pacific Coast from Alaska down to Southern California. There’s a virus called sea star wasting disease that makes its limbs fall off and then causes the rest of its body to dissolve into a puddle of goo. In the past decade, this has killed off more than 90 percent of the sunflower sea star population. Ninety percent! Officials have called it “the largest marine wildlife disease outbreak on record.”
How many sunflower sea stars remain? I’m asking you to guess. Without doing any further research, just pick the number that feels right to you. Why am I asking you? Don’t ask why. Party trick. Doesn’t matter. Remember that number.
A story about sea-star goo is pretty much all I want from a baseball newsletter. You can read the rest here.
Zen way of baseball, part deux
The other thing I want from my baseball writing is samurai swords.
At the end of last month’s email, I noted a Boston Globe report from spring training that said Red Sox Bobby Dalbec had reread Sadaharu Oh’s A Zen Way of Baseball to help him find his swing again.
I didn’t know much about Oh — a home run hitter who played in Japan in the 60s and 70s — but I was immediately enamored by the book’s title and cover, and so I bought it on eBay. Still, I assumed it would sit on the shelf collecting dust, like most of the books in my library. (Who reads books anymore when there are so many email newsletters piling up in your inbox?)
But after reading just a couple of pages, I was hooked. This book is a delight. A real gem of a story that has everything you could want — a young boy growing up in post-war Japan, experiencing the racism that came from having a Chinese father and Japanese mother, discovering baseball, struggling in the big leagues, then being taken in by a mentor — who uses Aikido, Zen, and Bushido philosophy to train him — practicing swordsmanship as a way to improve his baseball skills, and eventually going on to surpass Hank Aaron’s home run record. It should be a movie.
Everything is written with a straightforward, thoughtful voice, aided by his co-author David Falkner. It’s simple, direct, and affecting, and you feel like you get to know Oh. Here’s his description of the pressure of performing well:
I wish I could have said at that point that miserable success-seeking was a thing of the past, but that wasn’t so. To do well meant that I had to do well again. The joy of the present moment in no way relieved me of fearing that I might not be so lucky in the future.
That’s my kind of angst! On the other end of the spectrum, here’s his description of what it feels like to hit a home run:
No one can stop a home run. No one can understand what it really is unless you have felt it in your own hands and body. It is different from seeing it or trying to describe it. There is nothing I know quite like meeting a ball in exactly the right spot. As the ball makes its high, long arc beyond the playing field, the diamond and the stands suddenly belong to one man. In that brief, brief time, you are free of all demands and complications.
And here he is describing a moment late in his playing career, back in the dugout after striking out against a mediocre pitcher and suddenly realizing his days as a baseball player are behind him:
I sat on the bench trying to hide the sense of shock and disbelief that assaulted me. My “strategic” decline, it turned out, lasted only to this finite point — one summer evening in Tokyo.
There is too much to quote, and these short snippets do not do the book justice. But one more great thing about the book: Oh’s signature one-footed batting stance and swing are presented as a flipbook in the middle pages. What else could you want from a hardcover from 1984?
Unfortunately, in the end, Oh’s memoir didn’t seem to help Dalbec as much as he’d hoped, as Dalbec did not make the opening day roster with the big league team. I can only hope that Bobby is somewhere in Worcester swinging a samurai sword to try and get his baseball zen back.
Other rabbit holes
Say no to Ted Lasso. Season one was good. Season two was not so good. Season three, I find to be nonstop cringey. If you’re looking for a quirky, warm-hearted, funny time in England, I highly recommend giving the The Detectorists a shot instead.
Say no to The Mandalorian. Another series that went downhill almost immediately. Then, after the dumb Boba Fett series and the dumb Obi-Wan series, suddenly we got the best Star Wars thing since The Empire Strikes Back — and nobody watched it?
Say yes to The Last of Us. Despite a couple of so-so episodes in the middle, I enjoyed this zombie apocalypse. (Also, Sam Miller contends this is a baseball show.)
Say yes to “Baseball Bugs”. Seven minutes of Looney Tunes greatness. That’s the ol’ pepper, boy!
That’s all, folks. Have a good month. *Play Ball!
jf