| Writing and Artistic credits- Cameron Dodworth I love baseball. I also love many other sports: football, basketball, soccer, hockey, just to name a few. The baseball-adjacent sport of cricket is one that I’ve most recently gotten into, triggered primarily by an English friend of mine, but also bound to happen due to my academic interests in British literature and culture, and also past visits to and stays in England. Like baseball, the batter or batsman has less success than the pitcher or bowler in cricket. There’s no batting average in cricket, but the point of the bowler is to at least keep the batsman from scoring any runs, and to at most get a wicket by getting the batter out. So, going off of the fact that a .300 batting average is actually pretty stellar in baseball these days, and on “average” a batsman in cricket is lucky to just protect the wicket with their bat for oftentimes zero runs, it would appear that the bowler or pitcher has more success than the batsman or batter. Or do they? What is success for a pitcher? Getting the batter out? Okay. What about throwing strikes rather than balls? Sure. But how often does a pitcher throw the ball in the exact spot that they intended? Probably impossible to tell, but the batter tends to only have success by essentially putting the bat in the exact spot that they intended in order to make contact with the Ball. But what about foul balls? “Foul” balls are sometimes great in cricket. Due to playing on an oval field, a cricket batsman can score the highest number of runs, a 6, by whacking the ball into the area that would contain the off-key “singer” of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” for that day at Wrigley Field. But a foul ball in baseball is sometimes just millimeters away from either a home run or a duck snort to the shortstop. So, really, whether you’re swinging a round bat at a round ball, or a flat bat at a bouncing round ball, any sort of contact should seem no less than remarkable. That is measurable evidence of success. Granted, depending on the field’s dimensions—oval, diamond, presence or absence of a wall, distance to the wall, height of the wall, etc.—that base level of success has varying levels of success beyond a foul ball and up to a home run. With all of that in mind, baseball’s parallels to life seem rather obvious, and have already been pointed out in interesting ways in “Approaches to Baseball and Life” part 1 (or un?…sorry, I can’t resist a reference to one of the more stupidly/hilariously named films of all time: Hot Shots Part Deux). Are you a big swinger or do you play small ball? And to what extent does that approach tend to vary according to the circumstances that you’re in? Are you privileged by stepping up to the plate with runners in scoring position or even with the bases loaded, or by stepping in front of the wicket when there’s a power play on? (I’m not gonna explain that last cricket reference, would just take too long…Google it!) Or is there a microfracture in your bat that you’re not even aware of, so unbeknownst to you, even if you make contact, that swing is rigged against you? What will be the circumstances for the Raleigh ________s? Will we indeed be middle-of-the-pack from a financial standpoint, as argued in “Financial Might and the Trade Deadline”? And will our ownership pony up and actually spend the money needed to make us competitive? And what if it’s the Nashville ________s, instead? Is the game rigged against us getting a team in the first place? I think winning a Stanley Cup and the amazing spectacle of regional celebrations that ensued at least give us a shot against a city that’s got an NHL team as well as an NFL team. But does our population growth, sports culture, and other MLB-worthy circumstances stack up against that bachelorette party powerhouse with a Lower Broadway that frankly blows Fayetteville St. and South Glenwood collectively out of the water?! Only one way to find out…let’s swing big, Raleigh! |
Guest Author Cameron Dodworth: Approaches to Baseball and Life- Part Deux
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