Each weekday during the regular season, the Box Score Banter series highlights a moment of two from the previous slate of action, then recognizes top performances and previews the best games of the day ahead. Here are some of the best pieces of shortform writing that the year provided.
The Company You Keep
Written by: Matt Sussman
Tigers 11, White Sox 2
| IP | H | ER | BB | K | |
| Olson (W, 2-8) | 6.1 | 4 | 2 | 0 | 3 |
Marlins 6, Mariners 4
| IP | H | ER | BB | K | |
| Puk (W, 1-8) | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
Reese Olson is largely indistinguishable from the plethora of apple-cheeked mound-dwellers strewn about the majors. The 24-year-old Detroit righty is a touch above average in most categories, with the ornery exception of pitching wins and losses. And it’s all about run support, which is not his fault. Olson is definitely not asking his team to score fewer runs so he can go it alone, in some sort of macho baseball/euchre hybrid where wins count double if your team scores one run. But entering yesterday, his .111 winning percentage was dead last among starters. In his previous 14 starts on the calendar, his lineup never scored more than five runs. He threw partial shutouts four times, once going eight innings. But he was not victorious on any of those days. His lone win was about a month ago, a 2-1 nailbiter against the Blue Jays, an animal which does not bite, and a team that rarely does, either.
Such antediluvian luck with such reliable performances has to give. Which is to say, at some point they would play the White Sox. It only took for the first inning for his lineup to match their best output for Olson, thanks to a complete cycle of hits leading to five runs, followed by four more in the second; the Tigers coasted from there. Colt Keith had four hits and nearly a cycle all his own but missed out on the triple. The 11 runs of support is the most of his short career. The previous high: 10 runs, also against the White Sox. From hard luck springs predictable patterns.
A.J. Puk’s season, meanwhile, has been a pot of Kevin Malone’s chili mixed with a pot of Chidi Anagonye’s chili. The onions and the M&Ms were both undercooked. His season began in the Marlins rotation but after just four starts—all defeats—he took an ignominious detour to the injured list with arm fatigue. Once his appendage caught up on its sleep, he was siphoned to the bullpen, where he shouldered four more pitching losses. He did record one save (the game where Reese Olson threw eight shutout innings, if you can believe it) but when he wasn’t thrust into extra-inning catastrophes, he was typically given the business end of mop-up games.
However, yesterday Kyle Tyler was making his first career start for Miami. The name “Kyle Tyler” may ring a bell because of the numerous Kyles and Tylers in your mental airspace … but both of those names assembled in the same human? Completely hazy. It could be a pseudonym. The 27-year-old rookie was called up after making one April appearance, and his four innings against Seattle’s best was insufficient work for a win, according to rules we made up generations ago. Puk joined the action in the fifth and couldn’t have done better: six up, six down, six runs already on the board, 20 pitches. The bullpen ahead of him then did just enough to protect the victory, including bases-loaded trouble in the ninth.
For one day, A.J. Puk and Reese Olson were comparable, thanks to their teams doing proper baseball accomplishments behind them.
Today In Relaxing Scenery Interrupted By Threatening Graphics
Can Baseball Be Pretentious?
Written by: Patrick Dubuque
Brewers 4, Pirates 3
| AB | R | H | RBI | HR | |
| Frelick | 3 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 1 |
The Seattle International Film Festival has begun, and every year my family makes it a tradition to fit in a couple of showings despite the fact that we really don’t have time for it. Tuesday evening I went to see a 4K restoration of the 1987 Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire, the story of an angel who abandons his immortality for the chance to experience life, and love, as a human. I don’t want to spoil the plot, but that literally is the entire plot. The story takes maybe 20-30 minutes, most of it at the end. The rest of the film is all languor, as various angels observe the poetic thoughts of humanity, take notes, reflect, and otherwise do absolutely nothing, an audience between the movie and the actual audience.
In other words, the movie is utterly pretentious: narrated thoughts provided in verse; gorgeous and unnecessary swooping cinematography; long, loving closeups of anguish and pleasure. I loved it. Cinema, it feels like, has crossed paths with journalism heading the opposite way: As reporting becomes increasingly personal, accepting of creative nonfiction and reflection, many people have turned away from art that draws attention to itself, that seems to enjoy or at least be a little too proud of what it’s accomplishing. Perhaps this is just a natural ebb tide, a recoil from the irony poisoning of turn-of-the-century culture. Perhaps it doesn’t exist at all.
Much like irony, pretentiousness is a word most people use incorrectly. They use it the way I used it above: to describe something that believes that it’s great, that’s showing off. That’s not what the word means. It means that something takes on that affectation, that believes that it’s great when it isn’t. Something that is great and knows this fact is just great. Baseball, somehow, has grown to actually get this right. The rise of on-field celebration, much maligned by the sport’s old guard, is the opposite of affectation: It is organic, full-throated, and correct.
Sal Frelick is having a rough couple of weeks; after a hot start to the year, hidden somewhat by every other Brewer’s hot start to the year, Frelick was batting .184/.244/.237 in May before Quinn Priester hung a slider over the heart of the plate in the second inning, giving him his first home run of the year. He followed it up with a stolen base and two exceptional diving catches, in sum essentially winning the game single-handedly.
In both cases, Frelick did not celebrate his leaping grabs; instead, he simply lay in the grass. His home run was equally unostentatious, as he spent just a couple of seconds watching the path of the ball before going into an unsmiling trot. This is the sort of behavior we expect of a man with a 76 OPS+. We expect our serious young men to be serious. But this is the pretentiousness. This is the affectation. The idea that detachment elevates the sense of accomplishment, that the act of creation and joy should be so rote as to become joyless: that’s the real sin. Art needs to have a little twinkle; even Wings of Desire throws Peter Falk into the film for no good reason, and even stops to make a Columbo joke. It’s the best moment in the film, and it only works because it’s earned by two hours of bald sincerity.
It’s the same with baseball. Baseball is, despite everything that affixes to it like barnacles, an incredibly earnest thing. I hope Frelick is being earnest, too, that this face is who he is and wants to be.
Also, the Brewers don’t have a staged home run celebration prop, and we need to celebrate that as well. Because those things really are pure affectation.
Faraway, So Close!
In 1993 Wenders filmed a respected, but not beloved, sequel to Wings of Desire. It tells the story of the angel that the first film’s protagonist left behind, as he struggles with an endless existence of permanence, doubt, and helplessness, unable to taste the human feeling of triumph. Those Angels exist to this day.
That’s Gotta Hurtubise
Written by: Catherine Galanti
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