As usual, check out parts one through three by clicking their respective links on ye olde sidebar.
What do you do after a catastrophe?
Last time we looked at the wholly remarkable "train wreck" which punctuates (with several exclamation points) the development of the Third Symphony. It is, in short, a total musical catastrophe. The development section, up to the train wreck, is a seething mass of competing themes already. Indeed, even without our catastrophe and the third theme to follow, this development section would have been unusual in Beethoven's time for its length and intensity. But the train wreck raises the bar. It plunges the piece into a warlike chaos, destabilizing any sense of harmonic, melody, or even rhythmic balance.
So what do you do after a catastrophe? Beethoven, in a sense, had written himself into a corner with the train wreck.* So he responds by doing something completely new and different. He plays us a melody.
* In a hilarious understatement and/or misunderstanding and/or ironic quip the editor of the Liszt piano transcription notes, in the space between the train wreck and the theme to which we are, by degrees, coming: "Here the genius of Beethoven saw the necessity of a change." Um, yeah. Considering the entire piece just fell apart, I don't know that it takes a genius to see that something pretty amazing has to happen. No, the genius is the one who can put it back together.**
** Scratch that, the genius is the one who is so confident in his ability that he knows he can put it back together, and therefore chooses to break it in the first place. The "genius of Beethoven" saw this whole thing coming a mile away. Then again, maybe that's the ironic quip: the necessity of a change is not in this piece, but in composition itself.
Not to say that the previous two themes are not melodies. They are, in a rudimentary, arpeggiated kind of way. But this one actually is a melody. It includes tones that are not the one, three, or five of the tonic chord. Said another way, it moves stepwise instead of by chord tones. Said another way, it's something you can actually sing without sounding totally ridiculous.*
*Seriously, try singing the opening theme with this lyric I was cursed enough to hear: "Oh my word, it's Beethoven's Third, again." It may be a fantastic theme, but I defy you to take it seriously as a melody.
What do we make of this melody? Well, on its own it's quite pleasant. It's not harmonically all that complex (just a series of tonic to dominant and back; about as simple as it gets). It's rhythmically straightforward. It's, well, a song. Which is perhaps nothing special in itself, but remember how we got here.
You see, what strikes us as a simple, pleasant, but largely uncomplicated melody on its own is transformed into a kind of symphonic messiah in context. This third theme literally saves the movement from total chaos, swooping in just after some of the most dissonant, ugly, weird chords that any composer has dared write into a symphony. It's simplicity is chief virtue: we are rebuilding a melody. Indeed, we are rebuilding melody itself.
Following the metaphor from the last post, this theme is an attempt to recreate that beautiful life of the Viennese waltz after bombardment has destroyed the city. It is not melancholy, particularly, even if it has a touch of minor tonality. Rather it is resignedly determined, complete with a simple-minded view that everything can and will be alright, that the city can and will be rebuilt.
But war - and music - is never that simple. For where do we go after this theme but once more unto the proverbial breach.
The third theme - as you may have noticed in the first two snippets - doesn't resolve itself. Instead it launches right back into the opening theme. That opening theme, far from being a return to "normal," becomes a catalyst for rapid and unpredictable harmonic motion. We sway from major to minor and back, we change keys, and we end up back at the third theme, only a half step (!) higher. This time the third theme isn't around for long, either, taking a new melodic turn before leading us into a new statement of the opening theme in which it's not clear where our attention should go. Are we meant to follow the broiling flutes, or the arpeggios in the bass?
This potential second train wreck is stopped by a harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic reset that is not quite as intense as the one that introduced the third theme, but is jarring nonetheless. Instead of chaos, we see a kind of sickeningly quiet order, a plucking of pizzicato strings set against the tension of a sustained dominant chord. And then, of course, the horn comes in (early), and we're back to the opening of the symphony in the form of the recapitulation, where things are very much the way they were when we started. Except, they're completely different. All of which will be the subject of part five.
Anyway, the purpose of all that is to give us context for thinking more about this third theme. As a piece of music, this third theme is hardly amazing. As a piece of narrative, it is brilliant. Standing between total destruction and the remainder of the development section, it speaks to a kind of naive optimism that, once beaten down, cannot help but return again (and once against get sent away). Now, I don't think that Beethoven means to discount this theme, but I also don't think that we can take it at face value.
What would taking it at face value look like? Well, I think it would be easy to look at the third theme and to say it's a nice maneuverer, a clever ploy to allow Beethoven to go boom boom and get away with it. It's easy to say it's pretty, and nice, and beautiful. It's easy to say that it's genius. It's a lot harder to say why it's all of those things, however, and harder still to say that, maybe, we're not supposed to actually like this theme.
That is, we are supposed to like it, but only because it's so much nicer to listen to than the noise that came before it (or, for that matter, the strangeness that comes after it). We like it by contrast. But, as mentioned above, it's not a particularly great piece of music, nor does it really get its chance to play itself out. No, I believe this theme is a stand in, a joke, a classic example of Beethoven thumbing his nose at his listeners (especially the uptight ones that would have really hated the train wreck). It's a statement that, no, everything is not alright anymore. In the face of the kinds of harmonic and melodic atrocities - so-called, anyway - Beethoven commits in the development section, the tradition of music cannot be the same.
While examining the opening theme, I talked about the infamous C#. It raises questions about heroism, about music and narrative, about harmonic and melodic function. This third theme, I think, starts to answer those questions, but in a subtle and subversive way. If music is powerful, I asked, is it also dangerous? The answer, in this development section, is yes. Music is dangerous. Music can change mediocrity into greatness, or vice versa. Music can tell a story about power and conflict, music can persuade, music can frustrate and anger, music can inspire. All of that makes music dangerous.
I don't think, to be clear, that it's the train wreck that is dangerous, for all of the chaos that it embodies. No, it's this third theme that's the dangerous one, precisely because it's so perfect. The chance for easy redemption, the opportunity to pretend that a revolution isn't really a big deal, these things are a danger. And music, too, is a danger, if it chooses not to unfurl itself. Before Beethoven composers rarely, if ever, wrote about themselves, about music, about power. They wrote, largely, to be pleasing, to make money, and to praise God. Beethoven does all of those things, but he also drives deeper, and in so doing unearths the flaw of the music of his predecessors (however great much of it was): it can't stand up to true musical force.
We have further to go in this movement, but I want to leave with a glimpse of the entire development section. In the last two posts I've subdivided the development into two parts: pre-train wreck, and post. It's worth listening to the whole thing as one unit. I won't offer any more commentary, since the last two posts have more than enough. Rather, I'll let the music do the talking. Here's the entire development section of the Third Symphony.
Showing posts with label narrative. Show all posts
Showing posts with label narrative. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Listening to Beethoven's 3rd Symphony, Part Three: Catastrophe
To get to parts one and two, as well as the introduction, use the handy-dandy side bar. These posts are listed just under the "search" and "subscribe" widgets.
"Catastrophe" is a Greek word, a combination of "strophe" - meaning turn - and "kata" - meaning down. "Strophe" was used primarily to describe the actions of the chorus in Greek plays, with each choral poem either a Strophe or an anti-strophe, a figurative motion in one direction, or in another. Catastrophe, then, is a total interruption of that process, a proverbial wrench in the works, a form-defying event in the course of the narrative.
In the development section of the first movement of Beethoven's 3rd Symphony, the listener confronts what can only be described as a catastrophe. The common name of this section is "the train wreck," and it shows Beethoven at his most intense, most devious, and most, well, catastrophic. Here's the development section of the opening movement, up to and including the "train wreck," but leaving out the resolution that follows (because that's the next post):
As you can hear, the beginning of the development is a tumultuous back and forth between the second theme (see part two) and the opening theme (see part one). I think it's fair to say the development starts out relatively cohesive, but each repeat of either theme adds further and further chaos. The opening theme starts to sway against itself, raising in pitch and intensity, the secondary theme finds itself beset by all kinds of strange counterpoint. New melodies are introduced, adding tension due to their dominant feel and the urgency of the violins playing them. Before long, the back-and-forth of strophe (the militant first theme) and anti-strophe (the pastoral second theme) collapses on itself in what can only be described as catastrophe. As the piece bucks and writhes, it reaches its climax in the "train wreck," separated from the development below:
All semblance of meaningful melody or rhythmic progress disappears from the piece here. While harmonically the progression still makes sense, that's hardly the point. This section is barely, by the classical definition, even music. So many of the chords are dissonant, the entire orchestra is blaring, and there is nothing to do but to push on from one horrible, full-voiced, dissonant chord to the next.
It's too easy to focus just on the train wreck itself, however, and that's why I've included the build-up to it, also. If the first and second themes truly are incompatible - as I suggested earlier in this series of posts - it's no wonder that, once they were really forced to reckon with each other in the development section, they created a kind of musical conflagration. A potentially helpful image, if an imperfect one, would be the Viennese elite at their dancing and partying (the second theme) suddenly beset by an invading revolutionary army. The result is chaos, the destruction of the court itself, and along with it the decomposition (so to speak) of the courtly music to which the nobles were dancing.
A particularly interesting part of this collapse, to my mind, comes not in the loud and flashy places that jump out even during a cursory listening to the development. No, there's a subtle trick Beethoven plays in the buildup to the train wreck, an inversion of the melodic and rhythmic quality of the second theme that says more about what's going on here than just about anything else. Listen again to the last statement of the second theme before the train wreck, and then the passage that follows it and leads into our catastrophe:
Can you hear the rhythmic inversion? Here again is a piece of the theme:
And here's the inversion:
The waltz is still there in the inverted version, but it's hidden behind a strange and different rhythmic emphasis. All that's really different, actually, is that strong beat of the melody used to fall on the first beat of the measure, in the original theme, but instead falls on the second beat of the measure in the "inverted" version. The result of this minor change, however, is a fundamental shift in the feel of the melody, a transformation from Viennese waltz to urgent escape from impending disaster.
That this variation of the second theme leads into the train wreck is telling. Rather than returning to the opening theme, which has found some measure of stability in its back-and-forth washing earlier in the development (perhaps it's not a satisfying kind of stability, but like a pendulum, at least it's not going anywhere), it's the second theme that leads us into catastrophe. And it does so by allowing itself to be broken, by succumbing to the chaos that surrounds it in the development section.
As for the train wreck itself, there's little to say except that it is completely different from anything in any symphony that comes before it. As I said earlier, it would hardly be considered music by Beethoven's contemporaries, chiefly because of its dissonance and lack of melody, but also because it plays more of a narrative role than a musical one. By pointing out the strange motions of the second theme, I hope I've helped you to see how the train wreck is not just a sudden and loud interruption, but rather an inevitable collapse after increasingly strained efforts to put the square peg of the second theme into the round hole of the symphony.
As a wrap-up to this post, I want to ask a couple of questions about meaning. Well, a question anyway. What, really, does all of this mean? In the first couple of posts of this series, I've talked some about potential narrative interpretations we might impose on the symphony, but at the same time I've been hesitant to pick one and stick with it. Even in this post, I've used the "Viennese nobles confront revolutionary army" idea, but I tell you know that it's only a crutch, a way to help getting at the music.
I suppose, as I listen more and more to the Eroica, as I dive deeper (and I'm diving deeper now than I did even when writing my thesis), I truly am starting to feel like the music has its own narrative, its own meaning, and its own mode of communication. I don't think that's purely emotional, because I can trace it with some semblance of literary objectivity. Nor do I think it's purely spiritual, because, while it's mysterious, I'm not sure how meta-physical it is (would, for example, I be able to follow the narrative in the same way were I deaf?).
No, I think the narrative of Beethoven's music is musical, and its meaning equally so. It's unfortunate that we're stuck using words like "meaning" to describe a meaning that is non-linguistic, but then again isn't that exactly the point of this effort, to find a way to bridge that gap? Ah, but the point is also to help bring myself (and my readers) closer to an understanding of that musical meaning, even if that understanding is fundamentally non-linguistic. What I mean is, I will not be able to write a sentence that says: this is what the Eroica means, but I hope that, by sharing the process of trying to understand and - inasmuch as it possible - translate it, we might all get a little better at our music comprehension.
It is no accident, either, that the train wreck raises this conundrum. I know of no moment in any other piece that is so direct an attack on the notion that music has no meaning, no narrative value on its own. Then again, it remains one of the most difficult-to-penetrate moments in Beethoven's oeuvre, precisely because its lack of melodic structure makes it less "musical." Perhaps, then, our next assay into the symphony will help, when we look at the third theme, the resolution of the catastrophe.
"Catastrophe" is a Greek word, a combination of "strophe" - meaning turn - and "kata" - meaning down. "Strophe" was used primarily to describe the actions of the chorus in Greek plays, with each choral poem either a Strophe or an anti-strophe, a figurative motion in one direction, or in another. Catastrophe, then, is a total interruption of that process, a proverbial wrench in the works, a form-defying event in the course of the narrative.
In the development section of the first movement of Beethoven's 3rd Symphony, the listener confronts what can only be described as a catastrophe. The common name of this section is "the train wreck," and it shows Beethoven at his most intense, most devious, and most, well, catastrophic. Here's the development section of the opening movement, up to and including the "train wreck," but leaving out the resolution that follows (because that's the next post):
As you can hear, the beginning of the development is a tumultuous back and forth between the second theme (see part two) and the opening theme (see part one). I think it's fair to say the development starts out relatively cohesive, but each repeat of either theme adds further and further chaos. The opening theme starts to sway against itself, raising in pitch and intensity, the secondary theme finds itself beset by all kinds of strange counterpoint. New melodies are introduced, adding tension due to their dominant feel and the urgency of the violins playing them. Before long, the back-and-forth of strophe (the militant first theme) and anti-strophe (the pastoral second theme) collapses on itself in what can only be described as catastrophe. As the piece bucks and writhes, it reaches its climax in the "train wreck," separated from the development below:
All semblance of meaningful melody or rhythmic progress disappears from the piece here. While harmonically the progression still makes sense, that's hardly the point. This section is barely, by the classical definition, even music. So many of the chords are dissonant, the entire orchestra is blaring, and there is nothing to do but to push on from one horrible, full-voiced, dissonant chord to the next.
It's too easy to focus just on the train wreck itself, however, and that's why I've included the build-up to it, also. If the first and second themes truly are incompatible - as I suggested earlier in this series of posts - it's no wonder that, once they were really forced to reckon with each other in the development section, they created a kind of musical conflagration. A potentially helpful image, if an imperfect one, would be the Viennese elite at their dancing and partying (the second theme) suddenly beset by an invading revolutionary army. The result is chaos, the destruction of the court itself, and along with it the decomposition (so to speak) of the courtly music to which the nobles were dancing.
A particularly interesting part of this collapse, to my mind, comes not in the loud and flashy places that jump out even during a cursory listening to the development. No, there's a subtle trick Beethoven plays in the buildup to the train wreck, an inversion of the melodic and rhythmic quality of the second theme that says more about what's going on here than just about anything else. Listen again to the last statement of the second theme before the train wreck, and then the passage that follows it and leads into our catastrophe:
Can you hear the rhythmic inversion? Here again is a piece of the theme:
And here's the inversion:
The waltz is still there in the inverted version, but it's hidden behind a strange and different rhythmic emphasis. All that's really different, actually, is that strong beat of the melody used to fall on the first beat of the measure, in the original theme, but instead falls on the second beat of the measure in the "inverted" version. The result of this minor change, however, is a fundamental shift in the feel of the melody, a transformation from Viennese waltz to urgent escape from impending disaster.
That this variation of the second theme leads into the train wreck is telling. Rather than returning to the opening theme, which has found some measure of stability in its back-and-forth washing earlier in the development (perhaps it's not a satisfying kind of stability, but like a pendulum, at least it's not going anywhere), it's the second theme that leads us into catastrophe. And it does so by allowing itself to be broken, by succumbing to the chaos that surrounds it in the development section.
As for the train wreck itself, there's little to say except that it is completely different from anything in any symphony that comes before it. As I said earlier, it would hardly be considered music by Beethoven's contemporaries, chiefly because of its dissonance and lack of melody, but also because it plays more of a narrative role than a musical one. By pointing out the strange motions of the second theme, I hope I've helped you to see how the train wreck is not just a sudden and loud interruption, but rather an inevitable collapse after increasingly strained efforts to put the square peg of the second theme into the round hole of the symphony.
As a wrap-up to this post, I want to ask a couple of questions about meaning. Well, a question anyway. What, really, does all of this mean? In the first couple of posts of this series, I've talked some about potential narrative interpretations we might impose on the symphony, but at the same time I've been hesitant to pick one and stick with it. Even in this post, I've used the "Viennese nobles confront revolutionary army" idea, but I tell you know that it's only a crutch, a way to help getting at the music.
I suppose, as I listen more and more to the Eroica, as I dive deeper (and I'm diving deeper now than I did even when writing my thesis), I truly am starting to feel like the music has its own narrative, its own meaning, and its own mode of communication. I don't think that's purely emotional, because I can trace it with some semblance of literary objectivity. Nor do I think it's purely spiritual, because, while it's mysterious, I'm not sure how meta-physical it is (would, for example, I be able to follow the narrative in the same way were I deaf?).
No, I think the narrative of Beethoven's music is musical, and its meaning equally so. It's unfortunate that we're stuck using words like "meaning" to describe a meaning that is non-linguistic, but then again isn't that exactly the point of this effort, to find a way to bridge that gap? Ah, but the point is also to help bring myself (and my readers) closer to an understanding of that musical meaning, even if that understanding is fundamentally non-linguistic. What I mean is, I will not be able to write a sentence that says: this is what the Eroica means, but I hope that, by sharing the process of trying to understand and - inasmuch as it possible - translate it, we might all get a little better at our music comprehension.
It is no accident, either, that the train wreck raises this conundrum. I know of no moment in any other piece that is so direct an attack on the notion that music has no meaning, no narrative value on its own. Then again, it remains one of the most difficult-to-penetrate moments in Beethoven's oeuvre, precisely because its lack of melodic structure makes it less "musical." Perhaps, then, our next assay into the symphony will help, when we look at the third theme, the resolution of the catastrophe.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Defining a Season: 2007-2010
Part the last of a Rockies mini-series of posts.
Part three is here. Part two is here. Part one is here. The introduction is here.
2007 Colorado Rockies: 90-73, 2nd place, 0.5 GB, Wild Card, Lost World Series
The Rockies 2007 season is best remembered for the absurd late-season run of 14 wins in 15 games to close the regular season. By sweeping the first two rounds of the playoffs, the Rockies ultimately won 21 of 22 before being swept by the Boston Red Sox in the World Series. Because of that flukey run, however, it's easy to forget that this Rockies team was actually solid top-to-bottom all season. Indeed, the Rockies underperformed for much of the year, and that they needed such a winning streak just to make the playoffs was not indicative of their quality season-long. There truly was no weakness on the 2007 Rockies roster: the rotation, bullpen, and lineup were all solid, if not spectacular. Nevertheless, the transition from under-performance to playoff darling was fueled by two out-of-nowhere players.
Defining Players: SPs - Ubaldo Jimenez and Franklin Morales
These two pitchers' careers went in opposite directions after the miraculous 2007 runs, but that only masks how fundamentally similar their mutual arrival on the scene was during the Rockies World Series season. If anything, Morales was the better of the two in 2007, starting 8 games and putting up a 3.43 ERA (compared to Ubaldo's 15 starts with a 4.28 ERA). Regardless, both players were a surprise to people outside of the Rockies organization, young guns who came from nowhere to lead - or at least serve as 2/5ths of a dominant rotation - the Rockies into the playoffs. In a sense, their careers since 2007 are also perfectly indicative of the Rockies: Morales's failure to harness his awesome stuff speaks to the 2008 and 2010 additions of the team, while Ubaldo's better command and work-horse mentality indicative of the 2009 campaign.
2008 Colorado Rockies: 74-88, 3rd place, 10.0 GB
The 2008 season was extremely disappointing for the Rockies, both because they had just made the World Series the year before, and because the NL West was as weak as it had ever been (the Dodgers won it with a 84-78 record). It's hard to say exactly what went wrong in '08. A number of offensive players took small steps backwards and the rotation was just a touch worse. Above all, the late run that saved '07 from the same fate failed to materialize, with the team all but collapsing down the stretch.
Defining Player: SS - Troy Tulowitzki
After nearly winning both the Rookie of the Year award and the Gold Glove (but losing out on both) in his 2007 campaign, Tulo suffered as bad a sophomore slump as a great player can. His batting average fell from .291 to .263, his OBP from .359 to .332, and his SLG from .479 to .401. In all, his value to the team was so much less in '07 that a not-insignificant portion of the Rockies failings can be pinned on him. Add to that an injury that cost Tulowitzki much of the '08 season, and it's not hard to see how 90 wins became 74 for a team that was never quite great in the first place.
2009 Colorado Rockies: 92-70, 2nd place, 3.0 GB, Wild Card
The '09 Rockies were eerily similar to the '07 version. After a slow start, a solid rotation and reasonably deep lineup woke up under new manager Jim Tracey - after Clint Hurdle, who had been at the helm since 2002, was fired - and eventually rode a late-season charge into the playoffs. The trade of Matt Holliday the previous off-season proved a stroke of genius, netting both the young and improving Carlos Gonzalez and excellent closer Huston Street in exchange for a player who was destined to leave Colorado after '09 anyway. While Gonzalez would share time in the outfield with Brad Hawpe, Seth Smith, Dexter Fowler, and Ryan Spilborghs, Street was the anchor of another excellent Rockies bullpen. Beyond the solid performance from the pitching staff and the Holliday-less outfield, bounce-back seasons from two key Rockies both lead the way, and were symbolic of the season as a whole.
Defining Players: SS - Troy Tulowitzki and 1B - Todd Helton
Both Tulowitzki and Helton has miserably disappointing seasons in 2008, but both bounced back to produce well-above league-average campaigns in '09. While the rest of the lineup and pitching staff improved incrementally from their under-performances in 2008, it was Tulo and Helton's giant leaps forward that propelled the team back into the playoffs. Helton's .325/.416/.489 slash line harkened back to the good old days of his early career, while Tulo's .297/.377/.552 showed that Tulo might end up being more than just a great fielder with a decent bat. Indeed, Tulo eclipsed 30 homers for the first time in 2009, becoming not just the leader on the field for the Rockies (a role he shared, by default, with the veteran Helton), but securely becoming the leader in the lineup as well.
2010 Colorado Rockies: 83-79, 3rd place, 9.0 GB
It's easy to forget how much better a season 2010 was than 2008 for the Rockies, because the narrative that has been constructed is that they were parallels. The narrative goes like this: coming off of an improbable last season charge to make the playoffs, the Rockies followed it up in the next season by promptly collapsing and failing to compete. But the '10 Rockies did compete, only falling apart late in the season, echoing 2007 in the reverse by losing 13 of their last 14. Before that collapse, the team had been a very respectable (and competitive) 82-66, well within reach of the 91 wins that would have won them the wild card. The problem was, beyond the continued excellence of Tulowitzki and the emergence of Carlos Gonzalez, the offense lacked a single other player who put up a 100 or better OPS+. The offense wasn't bad, per se, but it just wasn't good enough, even with an excellent pitching staff and a near Cy Young season from Ubaldo Jimenez.
Defining Player: C - Miguel Olivo
Like the team he played for, Olivo actually started well in 2010, making a strong case for an all-star berth. Like the team he played for, however, Olivo ended up not having enough offense. By the end of the season his OBP - his longtime nemesis - rested at .315. That was a career high for Olivo, but not good enough for an every-day Major League player, even a catcher. His 27 walks were also a career high, but it bears remembering that he drew the vast majority of those in the first half of the season. Perhaps the most damning moment for Olivo in 2011, however, has nothing to do with him, but with the front office. After extending Chris Iannetta in the offseason, Olivo's hot April, combined with some early-season struggles from Iannetta, resulted in 'netta's demotion to AAA and Olvio's promotion to full-time starter. That itself was not the cause of the Rockies shortcomings in 2010, but it certainly did not help.
Conclusion
Trying to determine a defining player for a single season is, ultimately, an exercise in futility. But it doesn't look like it.
The reason it doesn't look like it is simple enough: we love to construct narratives. It's how we understand what goes on around us, how we make sense of a complex and often confusing world. It's a lot easier to remember, in short, a season as a failure or a success, a disappointment or a surprise, than to remember the exact won-loss record, the number of games back, the statistics of each and every player.
In trying to find a player whose individual narrative either matched up with or underscored the narrative for the entire Rockies team, I did exactly that: I looked through the won-loss record, the number of games back, and the statistics of each and every player. But then I turned it into a narrative, and that's where the futility comes in. Ultimately, how can I do justice to Miguel Olivo's 2010, or Todd Helton's 2006, or Andres Galarraga's 1994? Sometimes I listed statistics, but only to illustrate a point: the players I selected were, in some sense, a microcosm of a team's successes and failures. But in other ways they were no such thing: they were merely grown men playing a game for a lot of money, men who undoubtedly care about winning, but whose narratives are far less intense than those of a fan.
In the end, though, it's impossible to escape narratives, and undesirable to boot. Ironically, even the most sabermetrically-minded baseball fan is doing little more than building narratives. Are his narratives more quantitative? Sure. Are they more objective? Probably. But they are narratives just the same, built of words and sounds and ideas and stories, even if those stories are contained in season-long numbers and fancy statistical acronyms instead of anecdotes and clutch homers.
Of course, I've been more stat-head than story-head in this series, but that's exactly the point. The stats tell a story, too, and an interesting one. Silly though it may be to pin a whole season - for better or worse - on a single player, doing so might just give us a certain insight, or help us better enjoy a sport we already love.
Part three is here. Part two is here. Part one is here. The introduction is here.
2007 Colorado Rockies: 90-73, 2nd place, 0.5 GB, Wild Card, Lost World Series
The Rockies 2007 season is best remembered for the absurd late-season run of 14 wins in 15 games to close the regular season. By sweeping the first two rounds of the playoffs, the Rockies ultimately won 21 of 22 before being swept by the Boston Red Sox in the World Series. Because of that flukey run, however, it's easy to forget that this Rockies team was actually solid top-to-bottom all season. Indeed, the Rockies underperformed for much of the year, and that they needed such a winning streak just to make the playoffs was not indicative of their quality season-long. There truly was no weakness on the 2007 Rockies roster: the rotation, bullpen, and lineup were all solid, if not spectacular. Nevertheless, the transition from under-performance to playoff darling was fueled by two out-of-nowhere players.
Defining Players: SPs - Ubaldo Jimenez and Franklin Morales
These two pitchers' careers went in opposite directions after the miraculous 2007 runs, but that only masks how fundamentally similar their mutual arrival on the scene was during the Rockies World Series season. If anything, Morales was the better of the two in 2007, starting 8 games and putting up a 3.43 ERA (compared to Ubaldo's 15 starts with a 4.28 ERA). Regardless, both players were a surprise to people outside of the Rockies organization, young guns who came from nowhere to lead - or at least serve as 2/5ths of a dominant rotation - the Rockies into the playoffs. In a sense, their careers since 2007 are also perfectly indicative of the Rockies: Morales's failure to harness his awesome stuff speaks to the 2008 and 2010 additions of the team, while Ubaldo's better command and work-horse mentality indicative of the 2009 campaign.
2008 Colorado Rockies: 74-88, 3rd place, 10.0 GB
The 2008 season was extremely disappointing for the Rockies, both because they had just made the World Series the year before, and because the NL West was as weak as it had ever been (the Dodgers won it with a 84-78 record). It's hard to say exactly what went wrong in '08. A number of offensive players took small steps backwards and the rotation was just a touch worse. Above all, the late run that saved '07 from the same fate failed to materialize, with the team all but collapsing down the stretch.
Defining Player: SS - Troy Tulowitzki
After nearly winning both the Rookie of the Year award and the Gold Glove (but losing out on both) in his 2007 campaign, Tulo suffered as bad a sophomore slump as a great player can. His batting average fell from .291 to .263, his OBP from .359 to .332, and his SLG from .479 to .401. In all, his value to the team was so much less in '07 that a not-insignificant portion of the Rockies failings can be pinned on him. Add to that an injury that cost Tulowitzki much of the '08 season, and it's not hard to see how 90 wins became 74 for a team that was never quite great in the first place.
2009 Colorado Rockies: 92-70, 2nd place, 3.0 GB, Wild Card
The '09 Rockies were eerily similar to the '07 version. After a slow start, a solid rotation and reasonably deep lineup woke up under new manager Jim Tracey - after Clint Hurdle, who had been at the helm since 2002, was fired - and eventually rode a late-season charge into the playoffs. The trade of Matt Holliday the previous off-season proved a stroke of genius, netting both the young and improving Carlos Gonzalez and excellent closer Huston Street in exchange for a player who was destined to leave Colorado after '09 anyway. While Gonzalez would share time in the outfield with Brad Hawpe, Seth Smith, Dexter Fowler, and Ryan Spilborghs, Street was the anchor of another excellent Rockies bullpen. Beyond the solid performance from the pitching staff and the Holliday-less outfield, bounce-back seasons from two key Rockies both lead the way, and were symbolic of the season as a whole.
Defining Players: SS - Troy Tulowitzki and 1B - Todd Helton
Both Tulowitzki and Helton has miserably disappointing seasons in 2008, but both bounced back to produce well-above league-average campaigns in '09. While the rest of the lineup and pitching staff improved incrementally from their under-performances in 2008, it was Tulo and Helton's giant leaps forward that propelled the team back into the playoffs. Helton's .325/.416/.489 slash line harkened back to the good old days of his early career, while Tulo's .297/.377/.552 showed that Tulo might end up being more than just a great fielder with a decent bat. Indeed, Tulo eclipsed 30 homers for the first time in 2009, becoming not just the leader on the field for the Rockies (a role he shared, by default, with the veteran Helton), but securely becoming the leader in the lineup as well.
2010 Colorado Rockies: 83-79, 3rd place, 9.0 GB
It's easy to forget how much better a season 2010 was than 2008 for the Rockies, because the narrative that has been constructed is that they were parallels. The narrative goes like this: coming off of an improbable last season charge to make the playoffs, the Rockies followed it up in the next season by promptly collapsing and failing to compete. But the '10 Rockies did compete, only falling apart late in the season, echoing 2007 in the reverse by losing 13 of their last 14. Before that collapse, the team had been a very respectable (and competitive) 82-66, well within reach of the 91 wins that would have won them the wild card. The problem was, beyond the continued excellence of Tulowitzki and the emergence of Carlos Gonzalez, the offense lacked a single other player who put up a 100 or better OPS+. The offense wasn't bad, per se, but it just wasn't good enough, even with an excellent pitching staff and a near Cy Young season from Ubaldo Jimenez.
Defining Player: C - Miguel Olivo
Like the team he played for, Olivo actually started well in 2010, making a strong case for an all-star berth. Like the team he played for, however, Olivo ended up not having enough offense. By the end of the season his OBP - his longtime nemesis - rested at .315. That was a career high for Olivo, but not good enough for an every-day Major League player, even a catcher. His 27 walks were also a career high, but it bears remembering that he drew the vast majority of those in the first half of the season. Perhaps the most damning moment for Olivo in 2011, however, has nothing to do with him, but with the front office. After extending Chris Iannetta in the offseason, Olivo's hot April, combined with some early-season struggles from Iannetta, resulted in 'netta's demotion to AAA and Olvio's promotion to full-time starter. That itself was not the cause of the Rockies shortcomings in 2010, but it certainly did not help.
Conclusion
Trying to determine a defining player for a single season is, ultimately, an exercise in futility. But it doesn't look like it.
The reason it doesn't look like it is simple enough: we love to construct narratives. It's how we understand what goes on around us, how we make sense of a complex and often confusing world. It's a lot easier to remember, in short, a season as a failure or a success, a disappointment or a surprise, than to remember the exact won-loss record, the number of games back, the statistics of each and every player.
In trying to find a player whose individual narrative either matched up with or underscored the narrative for the entire Rockies team, I did exactly that: I looked through the won-loss record, the number of games back, and the statistics of each and every player. But then I turned it into a narrative, and that's where the futility comes in. Ultimately, how can I do justice to Miguel Olivo's 2010, or Todd Helton's 2006, or Andres Galarraga's 1994? Sometimes I listed statistics, but only to illustrate a point: the players I selected were, in some sense, a microcosm of a team's successes and failures. But in other ways they were no such thing: they were merely grown men playing a game for a lot of money, men who undoubtedly care about winning, but whose narratives are far less intense than those of a fan.
In the end, though, it's impossible to escape narratives, and undesirable to boot. Ironically, even the most sabermetrically-minded baseball fan is doing little more than building narratives. Are his narratives more quantitative? Sure. Are they more objective? Probably. But they are narratives just the same, built of words and sounds and ideas and stories, even if those stories are contained in season-long numbers and fancy statistical acronyms instead of anecdotes and clutch homers.
Of course, I've been more stat-head than story-head in this series, but that's exactly the point. The stats tell a story, too, and an interesting one. Silly though it may be to pin a whole season - for better or worse - on a single player, doing so might just give us a certain insight, or help us better enjoy a sport we already love.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
A New Mini-Project: Constructing Narratives with the Colorado Rockies
I want to try an experiment. For a while I've had this idea of going through the Rockies history and picking the player from each season that most exemplified the team that year. I don't mean the best player, or the most famous, or the most highly paid, or anything like that. I mean the player who's individual narrative most mirrors that of the team as a whole.
There are a few ways to do this, I think, but the method I'm going to use is this: I'm going to write a sentence (or maybe a haiku?) to describe each season, and then I'm going to look through the roster from that season and see which players best reflect the sentence I've written for the team. While the result, hopefully, will be an interesting - to a Rockies fan anyway - trip down memory lane, I also expect to do some meta-analysis, to ask questions like the broad "How do we construct narratives?" and the more specific "What is the relationship between statistics - like W-L record or home runs - and the words that make up our stories?"
To save both you and me from an incredibly long post, I'm going to break this up and post a bit of it each day or two. After that, and barring any significant event that demands a Nicht Diesian commentary, I promise I'll get the next Beethoven post up soon.
Part one, covering 1993-1997, is here.
Part two, convering 1998-2001, is here.
Part three, covering 2002-2006, is here.
Part four, covering 2007-2010, is here.
There are a few ways to do this, I think, but the method I'm going to use is this: I'm going to write a sentence (or maybe a haiku?) to describe each season, and then I'm going to look through the roster from that season and see which players best reflect the sentence I've written for the team. While the result, hopefully, will be an interesting - to a Rockies fan anyway - trip down memory lane, I also expect to do some meta-analysis, to ask questions like the broad "How do we construct narratives?" and the more specific "What is the relationship between statistics - like W-L record or home runs - and the words that make up our stories?"
To save both you and me from an incredibly long post, I'm going to break this up and post a bit of it each day or two. After that, and barring any significant event that demands a Nicht Diesian commentary, I promise I'll get the next Beethoven post up soon.
Part one, covering 1993-1997, is here.
Part two, convering 1998-2001, is here.
Part three, covering 2002-2006, is here.
Part four, covering 2007-2010, is here.
Monday, April 18, 2011
The Language of Degree and Kind in Baseball and Life
This post is also available - with pictures and dancing bears - at Pitchers and Poets. I lied about the bears.
When we construct our little narratives to explain the strange things we see every day, we tend to lump our world into broad categories. Actions are "good" or "bad," "smart" or "dumb." People are "tall" or "short," "happy" or "sad." Sporting events are "entertaining" or "boring." Politicians are "liberal" or "conservative." And so on, a veritable smörgåsbord* of quotated and contrary descriptors. Here at Nicht Diese Tone, of course, we think this stuff is all hogwash. Most of the time, when you're confronted with a duality, it's very probable that you're oversimplifying things. While that oversimplification may be a real time saver - indeed, our ability to do so with such verve and expertise might very well be a key part of our relative evolutionary success - it can also be extremely dangerous.
* Much to my surprise and pleasure, my spell check added the umlaut and the circle thingy over the a.
Much as I'd love to illustrate the point with something profound and socially meaningful, my April-addled mind can't help but turn to baseball as a perfect locus for the issue. The advantage of baseball over things like, say, politics or morality are numerous. The chief reasons, however, are only two: 1) baseball is far less contentious than politics or morality* and 2) baseball is much, much, much easier to quantify, which will help to illustrate the point.
* This is not, strictly speaking, true, as the recent Dodgers-fan led assault against a Giants fan - leaving the man in a coma - attests. Nevertheless, it's much easier for most of us to put aside our sporting-related differences than our political ones.
In particular I want to look at the beloved home of my beloved (and, as of this writing, 12-3) Colorado Rockies, the notorious Coors Field. Coors Field is, in our dualistic narratives, a "hitter's haven." It's a miraculous spa where batting averages go to recover and ERAs go to die, a slugger's wet dream and a scrappy, replacement-level slap hitter's salvation. Otherwise insignificant careers have been forged (Neifi Perez, Juan Pierre), mediocre major leaguers have been saved (Preston Wilson, Kurt Manwaring), over-the-hill sluggers reborn (Jason Giambi), stars made into superstars (Todd Helton, Larry Walker), and aspiring pitchers wrecked (Mike Hampton, Denny Neagle, Pedro Astacio, Daryl Kile, Bret Saberhagen, Greg Harris, and on and on) by its thin air and its cavernous outfield. In the popular narrative of Coors Field, it is an almost mystical place, one man's Heaven and another's Hell, a Miltonian paradox.
Until the advent - and advent is exactly the right word - of the capital-H Humidor, playing at Coors Field was like stepping into a video game. Every decent hitter would hit .350 and slug 40 or 50 homers, as if controlled by some over-obsessive teenager on his X-Box. It was so easy, scores were routinely closer to football (or even basketball) proportions than proper baseball ones.
The Humidor, of course, changed all of that, transforming Coors Field from Bichette's Paradiso to the upper echelons of Purgatorio instead.* No longer a panacea for ailing bats, it became, instead, a kind of minor boost along the lines of many other so-called hitter's parks. Suddenly pitchers with mediocre stuff like Jason Jennings and Jeff Francis could throw complete game shutouts, and Rockies 8-hole hitters stopped hitting above .300. The narrative transformed, enough that Coors Field and Humidor became opposing watchwords, simultaneously an excuse to disparage Rockies hitters for their advantages and mock pitchers for their crude, cigar-inspired handicap.
* I will not apologize for the Dante reference, even though it is also a terrible pun.
Undoubtedly you can tell what I'm going to say, but I'll say it anyway. It's all a bunch of sensationalist nonsense. Because we like to explain the world through clean, discrete, and ultimately meaningless categories Coors Field is painted as a "hitter's park." And it is. The problem is, it's only a marginally better place to hit than anywhere else in baseball. It is, by degree, a better environment for hitters than, say, the Ballpark at Arlington or Fenway Park, but we have created a narrative where it is fundamentally different in kind. Coors Field is a magical place in that narrative, even if its (post-humidor) Park Factor of roughly 115 means that only 15% more runs are scored there than the average stadium (let alone other good hitter's parks).*
* The pre-humidor PF for Coors was, again roughly, 125. Big? Yes. Infinite? Not quite.
This "difference in kind" thinking is responsible for the hullabaloo about the Rockies cheating by storing some balls in the humidor, while keeping others in the dry mountain air in case of late-inning emergency. The difference between the pre-humidor 25% increase in runs and the post-humidor 15% increase in runs is, of course, only 10%. Since, even at Coors, most teams average less than one run an inning, the difference between using the non-humidor balls and the humidor balls in the final inning of a game comes out to somewhere around one extra Rockies run every month (which, we can assume, would lead to maybe one extra win over the course of the entire season). That's a real difference in degree, of course, but that's not the narrative we hold dear.
Instead, as last season drew to a close, the Rockies were accused of cheating, their successes at home pinned on a vast late-inning conspiracy. With humidorized baseballs, the story went, the Rockies were a normal baseball team, capable of scoring runs, yes, but also capable of striking out, hitting into double plays, and regularly stranding runners who reached third with no one out. Bring out non-humidor balls, however, and the Rockies became unstoppable, a force not merely capable of destroying even the best of pitchers, but indeed destined to overcome any deficit, no matter how large. To this way of thinking, the difference between the humidor and non-humidor baseballs was not 10% more runs, but rather "win" instead of "loss." The whole picture became about differences in kind (wins and losses) instead of differences in degree (15% more runs than average and 25% more).
The same, of course, is true about pre-humidor Coors. That Park Factor of 125 is big. Really big. Big enough that the Rockies routinely had one of the worst offenses in Major League Baseball during the early 2000s, and yet were mistakenly believed to have one of the best. But, even with a Park Factor that large, the difference remains one of degree and not kind. While the cumulative effect of a PF of 125 leads to the kind of mis-evaluation that makes Neifi Perez look like an actual Major League baseball player, that is only because the baseball season is 162 games long, and because the actual difference between Albert Pujols and, say, Aaron Miles is much, much, much, much smaller than we usually believe.* Another way of reading, then, that Park Factor of 125 is this: teams that would score 4 runs a game elsewhere scored 5 at Coors. Suddenly that doesn't seem nearly so insane as the narrative of "hitter's paradise" made it sound.
* While Pujols certainly hits more homers than scrappy middle infielders, and by a long shot, his unreal career high in Wins Above Replacement is 10.9. That's epically, historically great. It's also 11 wins out of 162 games, or about 6.8% of the season. I'll let you decide: difference in kind, or difference in degree?
Once our narratives have been constructed, we reinforce them with the stainless steel of confirmation bias. When the Mets come from behind by four in the bottom of the ninth at Shea Stadium (or their new digs, Citi Field), we think of it as a great comeback. When the Rockies come from behind by four in the bottom of the ninth at Coors, we think of it as Coors Field up to its old tricks. A 12-11 slugfest at Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City is the result of bad outings from both teams' pitching staffs. A 12-11 slugfest at Coors Field is the result of the absurd ballpark. The special category of "Coors Field" explains and is the cause of all offense in the Mile High City, while elsewhere it's just normal baseball.
Now don't get me wrong, and allow me to reiterate my point one more time. Coors Field does matter. It used to inflate scoring by 25%, and now inflates scoring by 15%. The Rockies, on the whole, will come from behind to win in the bottom of the ninth more often than other teams. But only very, very slightly more often. The difference is one of degree: the Rockies will score 23 late inning runs for every 20 that a comparable offensive team scores, thanks to playing at Coors. The problem is, our narratives, our categories, our confirmation biases all conspire to make every single run we see at Coors a product of the park, and not of the million other things that go on in a baseball game.
But wait, I'm not done yet. We can apply the same logic to steroids (gasp). While there may be a categorical difference between Barry Bonds, All Time Home Run Champion and Barry Bonds, Great Hitter, we tend to forget that we don't even know exactly how many extra home runs Bonds hit because he used steroids. And we can't know. What's more, we don't know who else benefited, and to what degree. What we do know, however, is that the easiest thing to do is to look at the picture and to discount any player who had a peak season during the "steroid era" as a "cheater," whose whole body of offensive work is attributable exclusively to his steroid use. Rather than imagining that steroids help a player become X% better, we see steroids as being the difference between "good" and "bad," or "great" and "good." We can't even begin to suppose, in our absolutist narrative, that Bonds may well have hit 700+ home runs even without steroids. No, every single home run he mashed is tainted, cheap, unfair. They categorically, absolutely, definitively do not count.
Is that right, though? My answer is no. Of course the steroids issue is a big deal precisely because we do not and cannot know exactly what the effect is, but to imagine that the effect is categorical instead of incremental is absurd. Even if players hit twice as many home runs because of steroids, they didn't hit infinitely times as many. And I think that would be easier to accept if our categories hadn't also been violated. Barry Bonds is not merely a guy who hit X% more homers, but rather is the Home Run King, both in terms of career and single season jacks. Those categories carry far more weight for us than numbers do.
To return to where we started, there's a good reason we think in categories instead of increments, kind instead of degree. It helps us survive. It's better to assume that the unusual ripple in the tall grass we see is dangerous (it might be a tiger) than to assume that said ripple is only marginally more pronounced than usual. In nature, nuance leads to destruction. That's no excuse to turn away from more nuanced thinking, however. If anything, it's an exhortation towards the opposite. That we like to see things as either categorically good or categorically bad makes us easy to persuade and, as a result, hoodwink. If, for example, a politician speaks eloquently to our absolutist moral sensibilities, we're quick to cast our vote in his favor. In the process, we forget that the difference between him and his opposition might not be categorical, but rather incremental, that there are perhaps a range of (non-linear) possible solutions to any given problem instead of two diametrically opposite ones.
The narrative of absolute, dichotomous categories is an extremely dangerous one exactly because it is beautiful. Coors Field as "hitter's haven," human beings as fundamentally good (or bad, as the debate goes), politicians as liberal or conservative, such characterizations make it easier to think, easier to live, easier to write. Poetry may owe itself to complexity, but on some level it also owes itself to simplicity: without a sense of Good and Evil, Joy and Misery, how do we understand No Second Troy? Without the narrative of great plays or bad ones, how do we appreciate an unrepeatable Tulowitzki play in the hole?* The possibility that the narrative value of categories is ultimately empty - of a kind of brute, practical use, but devoid of substantial, metaphysical meaning - is what drives the anti-statistics crowd of baseball fans mad. The reliance upon and manipulation of categories is what makes so many religions so powerful, and - along with hefty doses of confirmation bias - it is what makes Fox News and MSNBC so persuasive to so many Americans.
* Another little pun for which I will not apologize.
Ah, there I go breaking my own rules. You see, I too am talking in categories, in differences in kind instead of degree. The notion of diametric opposites, the need for clear categories like Good and Bad cannot be, if we are to challenge it, innately and fundamentally Bad. To say so would undermine the argument. The problem is, every single word we read is a category, every single idea a kind of absolute. We can deconstruct and deconstruct, and then reconstruct and reconstruct, and what we'll end up with is words that stand for something, some category. Words that can never be truly specific, for true specificity would require a new word every second, every thought, every sentence. Communication, as much as miscommunication, is built on categories.
So what is there to do? Uncomfortable though it may be, I believe it remains useful to deconstruct, to analyze, to see where differences of kind actually are differences in degree, even though every difference is, in the end, actually both. To my mind, we do not need to destroy the narratives of politics, religion, morality, or, most importantly (of course), baseball. We need, instead, to dive into them, to see where they come from and why, and then to reconstruct them in some new form so that we can once again communicate. Analysis and synthesis stand together, it turns out. Like any set of supposed opposites, they actually are more alike than disparate. Is there an endpoint to all of this analyzing and synthesizing, a point at which narrative and myth turn into Truth? Maybe, but probably not. Instead, it seems to me that the very act of trying to understand, of insisting upon being a learner, an asker of questions, a thinker, a skeptic (though we might also insist on being ignorant, a provider of answers, allowed to zone out, and a believer) is at the heart of what it is to be human.
When we construct our little narratives to explain the strange things we see every day, we tend to lump our world into broad categories. Actions are "good" or "bad," "smart" or "dumb." People are "tall" or "short," "happy" or "sad." Sporting events are "entertaining" or "boring." Politicians are "liberal" or "conservative." And so on, a veritable smörgåsbord* of quotated and contrary descriptors. Here at Nicht Diese Tone, of course, we think this stuff is all hogwash. Most of the time, when you're confronted with a duality, it's very probable that you're oversimplifying things. While that oversimplification may be a real time saver - indeed, our ability to do so with such verve and expertise might very well be a key part of our relative evolutionary success - it can also be extremely dangerous.
* Much to my surprise and pleasure, my spell check added the umlaut and the circle thingy over the a.
Much as I'd love to illustrate the point with something profound and socially meaningful, my April-addled mind can't help but turn to baseball as a perfect locus for the issue. The advantage of baseball over things like, say, politics or morality are numerous. The chief reasons, however, are only two: 1) baseball is far less contentious than politics or morality* and 2) baseball is much, much, much easier to quantify, which will help to illustrate the point.
* This is not, strictly speaking, true, as the recent Dodgers-fan led assault against a Giants fan - leaving the man in a coma - attests. Nevertheless, it's much easier for most of us to put aside our sporting-related differences than our political ones.
In particular I want to look at the beloved home of my beloved (and, as of this writing, 12-3) Colorado Rockies, the notorious Coors Field. Coors Field is, in our dualistic narratives, a "hitter's haven." It's a miraculous spa where batting averages go to recover and ERAs go to die, a slugger's wet dream and a scrappy, replacement-level slap hitter's salvation. Otherwise insignificant careers have been forged (Neifi Perez, Juan Pierre), mediocre major leaguers have been saved (Preston Wilson, Kurt Manwaring), over-the-hill sluggers reborn (Jason Giambi), stars made into superstars (Todd Helton, Larry Walker), and aspiring pitchers wrecked (Mike Hampton, Denny Neagle, Pedro Astacio, Daryl Kile, Bret Saberhagen, Greg Harris, and on and on) by its thin air and its cavernous outfield. In the popular narrative of Coors Field, it is an almost mystical place, one man's Heaven and another's Hell, a Miltonian paradox.
Until the advent - and advent is exactly the right word - of the capital-H Humidor, playing at Coors Field was like stepping into a video game. Every decent hitter would hit .350 and slug 40 or 50 homers, as if controlled by some over-obsessive teenager on his X-Box. It was so easy, scores were routinely closer to football (or even basketball) proportions than proper baseball ones.
The Humidor, of course, changed all of that, transforming Coors Field from Bichette's Paradiso to the upper echelons of Purgatorio instead.* No longer a panacea for ailing bats, it became, instead, a kind of minor boost along the lines of many other so-called hitter's parks. Suddenly pitchers with mediocre stuff like Jason Jennings and Jeff Francis could throw complete game shutouts, and Rockies 8-hole hitters stopped hitting above .300. The narrative transformed, enough that Coors Field and Humidor became opposing watchwords, simultaneously an excuse to disparage Rockies hitters for their advantages and mock pitchers for their crude, cigar-inspired handicap.
* I will not apologize for the Dante reference, even though it is also a terrible pun.
Undoubtedly you can tell what I'm going to say, but I'll say it anyway. It's all a bunch of sensationalist nonsense. Because we like to explain the world through clean, discrete, and ultimately meaningless categories Coors Field is painted as a "hitter's park." And it is. The problem is, it's only a marginally better place to hit than anywhere else in baseball. It is, by degree, a better environment for hitters than, say, the Ballpark at Arlington or Fenway Park, but we have created a narrative where it is fundamentally different in kind. Coors Field is a magical place in that narrative, even if its (post-humidor) Park Factor of roughly 115 means that only 15% more runs are scored there than the average stadium (let alone other good hitter's parks).*
* The pre-humidor PF for Coors was, again roughly, 125. Big? Yes. Infinite? Not quite.
This "difference in kind" thinking is responsible for the hullabaloo about the Rockies cheating by storing some balls in the humidor, while keeping others in the dry mountain air in case of late-inning emergency. The difference between the pre-humidor 25% increase in runs and the post-humidor 15% increase in runs is, of course, only 10%. Since, even at Coors, most teams average less than one run an inning, the difference between using the non-humidor balls and the humidor balls in the final inning of a game comes out to somewhere around one extra Rockies run every month (which, we can assume, would lead to maybe one extra win over the course of the entire season). That's a real difference in degree, of course, but that's not the narrative we hold dear.
Instead, as last season drew to a close, the Rockies were accused of cheating, their successes at home pinned on a vast late-inning conspiracy. With humidorized baseballs, the story went, the Rockies were a normal baseball team, capable of scoring runs, yes, but also capable of striking out, hitting into double plays, and regularly stranding runners who reached third with no one out. Bring out non-humidor balls, however, and the Rockies became unstoppable, a force not merely capable of destroying even the best of pitchers, but indeed destined to overcome any deficit, no matter how large. To this way of thinking, the difference between the humidor and non-humidor baseballs was not 10% more runs, but rather "win" instead of "loss." The whole picture became about differences in kind (wins and losses) instead of differences in degree (15% more runs than average and 25% more).
The same, of course, is true about pre-humidor Coors. That Park Factor of 125 is big. Really big. Big enough that the Rockies routinely had one of the worst offenses in Major League Baseball during the early 2000s, and yet were mistakenly believed to have one of the best. But, even with a Park Factor that large, the difference remains one of degree and not kind. While the cumulative effect of a PF of 125 leads to the kind of mis-evaluation that makes Neifi Perez look like an actual Major League baseball player, that is only because the baseball season is 162 games long, and because the actual difference between Albert Pujols and, say, Aaron Miles is much, much, much, much smaller than we usually believe.* Another way of reading, then, that Park Factor of 125 is this: teams that would score 4 runs a game elsewhere scored 5 at Coors. Suddenly that doesn't seem nearly so insane as the narrative of "hitter's paradise" made it sound.
* While Pujols certainly hits more homers than scrappy middle infielders, and by a long shot, his unreal career high in Wins Above Replacement is 10.9. That's epically, historically great. It's also 11 wins out of 162 games, or about 6.8% of the season. I'll let you decide: difference in kind, or difference in degree?
Once our narratives have been constructed, we reinforce them with the stainless steel of confirmation bias. When the Mets come from behind by four in the bottom of the ninth at Shea Stadium (or their new digs, Citi Field), we think of it as a great comeback. When the Rockies come from behind by four in the bottom of the ninth at Coors, we think of it as Coors Field up to its old tricks. A 12-11 slugfest at Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City is the result of bad outings from both teams' pitching staffs. A 12-11 slugfest at Coors Field is the result of the absurd ballpark. The special category of "Coors Field" explains and is the cause of all offense in the Mile High City, while elsewhere it's just normal baseball.
Now don't get me wrong, and allow me to reiterate my point one more time. Coors Field does matter. It used to inflate scoring by 25%, and now inflates scoring by 15%. The Rockies, on the whole, will come from behind to win in the bottom of the ninth more often than other teams. But only very, very slightly more often. The difference is one of degree: the Rockies will score 23 late inning runs for every 20 that a comparable offensive team scores, thanks to playing at Coors. The problem is, our narratives, our categories, our confirmation biases all conspire to make every single run we see at Coors a product of the park, and not of the million other things that go on in a baseball game.
But wait, I'm not done yet. We can apply the same logic to steroids (gasp). While there may be a categorical difference between Barry Bonds, All Time Home Run Champion and Barry Bonds, Great Hitter, we tend to forget that we don't even know exactly how many extra home runs Bonds hit because he used steroids. And we can't know. What's more, we don't know who else benefited, and to what degree. What we do know, however, is that the easiest thing to do is to look at the picture and to discount any player who had a peak season during the "steroid era" as a "cheater," whose whole body of offensive work is attributable exclusively to his steroid use. Rather than imagining that steroids help a player become X% better, we see steroids as being the difference between "good" and "bad," or "great" and "good." We can't even begin to suppose, in our absolutist narrative, that Bonds may well have hit 700+ home runs even without steroids. No, every single home run he mashed is tainted, cheap, unfair. They categorically, absolutely, definitively do not count.
Is that right, though? My answer is no. Of course the steroids issue is a big deal precisely because we do not and cannot know exactly what the effect is, but to imagine that the effect is categorical instead of incremental is absurd. Even if players hit twice as many home runs because of steroids, they didn't hit infinitely times as many. And I think that would be easier to accept if our categories hadn't also been violated. Barry Bonds is not merely a guy who hit X% more homers, but rather is the Home Run King, both in terms of career and single season jacks. Those categories carry far more weight for us than numbers do.
To return to where we started, there's a good reason we think in categories instead of increments, kind instead of degree. It helps us survive. It's better to assume that the unusual ripple in the tall grass we see is dangerous (it might be a tiger) than to assume that said ripple is only marginally more pronounced than usual. In nature, nuance leads to destruction. That's no excuse to turn away from more nuanced thinking, however. If anything, it's an exhortation towards the opposite. That we like to see things as either categorically good or categorically bad makes us easy to persuade and, as a result, hoodwink. If, for example, a politician speaks eloquently to our absolutist moral sensibilities, we're quick to cast our vote in his favor. In the process, we forget that the difference between him and his opposition might not be categorical, but rather incremental, that there are perhaps a range of (non-linear) possible solutions to any given problem instead of two diametrically opposite ones.
The narrative of absolute, dichotomous categories is an extremely dangerous one exactly because it is beautiful. Coors Field as "hitter's haven," human beings as fundamentally good (or bad, as the debate goes), politicians as liberal or conservative, such characterizations make it easier to think, easier to live, easier to write. Poetry may owe itself to complexity, but on some level it also owes itself to simplicity: without a sense of Good and Evil, Joy and Misery, how do we understand No Second Troy? Without the narrative of great plays or bad ones, how do we appreciate an unrepeatable Tulowitzki play in the hole?* The possibility that the narrative value of categories is ultimately empty - of a kind of brute, practical use, but devoid of substantial, metaphysical meaning - is what drives the anti-statistics crowd of baseball fans mad. The reliance upon and manipulation of categories is what makes so many religions so powerful, and - along with hefty doses of confirmation bias - it is what makes Fox News and MSNBC so persuasive to so many Americans.
* Another little pun for which I will not apologize.
Ah, there I go breaking my own rules. You see, I too am talking in categories, in differences in kind instead of degree. The notion of diametric opposites, the need for clear categories like Good and Bad cannot be, if we are to challenge it, innately and fundamentally Bad. To say so would undermine the argument. The problem is, every single word we read is a category, every single idea a kind of absolute. We can deconstruct and deconstruct, and then reconstruct and reconstruct, and what we'll end up with is words that stand for something, some category. Words that can never be truly specific, for true specificity would require a new word every second, every thought, every sentence. Communication, as much as miscommunication, is built on categories.
So what is there to do? Uncomfortable though it may be, I believe it remains useful to deconstruct, to analyze, to see where differences of kind actually are differences in degree, even though every difference is, in the end, actually both. To my mind, we do not need to destroy the narratives of politics, religion, morality, or, most importantly (of course), baseball. We need, instead, to dive into them, to see where they come from and why, and then to reconstruct them in some new form so that we can once again communicate. Analysis and synthesis stand together, it turns out. Like any set of supposed opposites, they actually are more alike than disparate. Is there an endpoint to all of this analyzing and synthesizing, a point at which narrative and myth turn into Truth? Maybe, but probably not. Instead, it seems to me that the very act of trying to understand, of insisting upon being a learner, an asker of questions, a thinker, a skeptic (though we might also insist on being ignorant, a provider of answers, allowed to zone out, and a believer) is at the heart of what it is to be human.
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