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[This is the last of a series exploring the Baseball Tarot. If you would like to prompt for a part of the game or a card from the deck, regrettably, there are no more open slots. All comments are still welcome, of course.]
Wow. I did it. Thirty-one posts, one each day. That's exhausting. I think I understand the elation of finishing a NaNovel a bit more now.
As befits the ending point of this series, there's very little left to do but tally up the score. Which is easy enough for television graphics or newspaper box scores to do at the end of their games, often with neat rows and columns about RHE, and then individual player statistics for the game - how many at-bats, hits, runs scored, runs batted in, walks, strikeouts, and so forth. Very nicely arranged in straight rows as befitting a summary meant for quick and casual consumption or the fantasy sports players to see how their team of awesome did in the game for that period of time. The television-era equivalent of this is the highlight reel, where particularly noteworthy plays off the game are played in mostly-chronological order, but without any context surrounding them. You'll see the pitch that results in the home run, but you won't see that the batter fouled off two pitches like it right before finally getting to turn on the third one and put it in the stands. You don't see the methodical work of the pitcher that gets ground balls all the time, but the one pitch that got a away from them a bit and looked for all the world to be a hit before the shortstop proved that white men occasionally can jump and snagged it out of the air as it was passing overhead. We remember the exceptions quite well, but an appreciation of the efficiency of a pitcher requires paying closer attention. Much like Association Football, baseball looks to be a lot of nothing punctuated by short bursts of Very Interesting, and the long stretches and breaks in between action lends both sports to work well as social outings. (I highly recommend seeing sport with other people. A good time can be had by all inexpensively if you don't have to have Major League Baseball.)
If you want to know how a game ended, you can just look at the box score. If you want to see what happened during the game that brought about that score, you need to see the notebook of someone keeping score. Every game has an Official Scorer whose job it is to rule on whether particularly tricky plays should be counted as hits for the offense, errors for the defense, or other designations, based on rules and their judgment about the play as it unfolded. I don't know what their books look like, nor what their complete system is. Most sport supply shops, however, will carry a notebook that will give people a basic layout to record the game as it happens. Typically, on one page, there will be space to record the name and number of the players in the batting lineup (and their substitutes) for one team, the pitchers in the game (and their substitutes) for that team, the names or numbers of the umpires for the game, and a space to record the action of an at-bat during an inning for each of those players, and any other action that might happen to them on the basepaths. On its most basic level, I can look at a score book and know that in the third inning, #25, Mr. Bunny Foo-Foo, hit into an inning-ending double play off a 3-1 pitch from the starting pitcher, #13, Ms. Bar None. I'll know how the double play went down, as each defensive position is represented by a number from 1-9. (In order: pitcher, catcher, first base, second base, third base, shortstop, left field, center field, right field.) So a 4-6-3 (second-shortstop-first) is fairly common, but a 1-5-6 (pitcher-third-shortstop) is going to be memorable. (Most likely, it's a poorly-executed bunt.)
After that, though, it's mostly up to the scorekeeper and their system to provide as much or as little detail about the game as they want. One common addition is to mark a strikeout with whether it was a swinging strikeout or a looking strikeout by changing the orientation of the K symbol. Sometimes an out is given extra letters to indicate what kind of out it was (for example, F can be Fly out, P a Pop Fly, FO indicates a Foul (Fly Ball) Out, FC indicates a Fielder's Choice), or someone might make notations about pitch speed or selection through the use of colored pens and pencils when marking the balls and strikes. Each keeper develops their own system based on what they want to remember about the game as it goes on our when it is over. Keeping score is a way of staying engaged with the game at all points of the game, not just the ones where the crowd gets on their feet. And it's still easy enough to do and maintain the social aspects of the game, as well. The prize for keeping score is that, at the end of the game, you have a record of what happened, which serves as a memory aid for describing the game later. For many games, that may not be that important, but for the ones that are going to etch themselves on your memory, or for when you want to give a gift to a young child that says "I was there for you, and I was paying attention", a scorecard is a really good way to go. I remember that I watched my first live professional game at a young age at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull, that my dad and uncle were in attendance with me, that we sat behind the foul screen...but I don't actually remember the game itself, other than that the home team lost. (I have a bad record with live professional game attendance - most of the time, the team I'm supporting doesn't win.) I would have liked to keep a scorecard from that game so that I could look back and remember what happened that day. Instead, I have mildly-embarrassing video of myself expressing my team love at home while a televised game plays in the background. Some things are better left to live performance.
The associated card for all of this is Nostalgia, which can be both an act of looking back on the past with fondness and the physical collection of stuff as reminders of the past, preserved from the now so that the future can see what we were up to and what we considered important. "Retro" as a styling is an intentional invocation of the past, whether to evoke nostalgia while maintaining technological advances, or to produce some sense of the past, often sanitized to greater or lesser degrees, for the future to try and understand and experience. The card represents looking back and seeing how far the journey has come, rejoicing in the highlights and reliving some of the pain of the lowlights. It's associated with Retirement pretty strongly, as those who realize their time is coming to an end often come to the question of whether their career had been a good one, and whether the Hall or a retirement of number is coming in their future. This can sometimes evoke a panic and a flurry of attempted activity in service of making the career look better in retrospect. Right around the end of the year and the Vague Early Winter Possibly Religious Festivals, a lot of movies get play that are about this kind of nostalgia - It's A Wonderful Life, A Christmas Carol, the original Charlie Brown Christmas - these are all about looking at one's legacy and seeing how everything, good and bad, produced the person looking back on their life. In most of these cases, there's a major decision to be made based on this information, one last possible push before time seals what history will think of them. If Nostalgia appears, it's time to think about both past and future - what lessons from the past have you taken to heart and how do they guide you, how are you going to inspire others, and what artifacts are you leaving for others to collect as they think of you? Beware of doing things for cynical or manipulative reasons to try and influence opinions, though - most people can see through it, and the statistics will win out in the end when it comes to your career.
There's a bad side to nostalgia as well - if you spend too much time in the past, time will eventually take apart your carefully constructed world, fiction by fiction. Refusing to acknowledge that Time Marches On will eventually put you in a bad position - you'll become someone who believes in a Past That Never Was and try to dictate policies that do not apply to the reality around you. Later generations may find you pitiable, others will find you laughable. This is not to say that the past must be discarded wholesale and that there is nothing to learn or keep from it - I suspect many ventures and adventures in our current world could have been prevented by studying the history a bit more. But lionizing what was often requires willful ignorance of the entirety of the past - life may have been good or simpler for you, but that was probably the result of privileges, and sometimes laws, that protected you or unfairly put burdens on others so that you could be comfortable. It may have been nice, if you were of a certain social class or race, but things were not universally rosy, nor are they now. Our careers are too short to have to relearn everything, so part of our work is to preserve those things that will mean later generations do not have to learn those lessons. Whether they can is up to them, but we must provide them with the opportunity to do so, or we are just as guilty of living in Nostalgia.
The game changes, always, as new methods and new ways of gaining advantage are discovered, perfected, and eventually patched by changes in the rules of the game or the imposition of luxury taxes and revenue-sharing methods. The past may appear better, and memories are with cherishing, but the pitfall is a big one. It's up to you to decide whether or not this is something to aspire to or to be repulsed by:
Wow. I did it. Thirty-one posts, one each day. That's exhausting. I think I understand the elation of finishing a NaNovel a bit more now.
As befits the ending point of this series, there's very little left to do but tally up the score. Which is easy enough for television graphics or newspaper box scores to do at the end of their games, often with neat rows and columns about RHE, and then individual player statistics for the game - how many at-bats, hits, runs scored, runs batted in, walks, strikeouts, and so forth. Very nicely arranged in straight rows as befitting a summary meant for quick and casual consumption or the fantasy sports players to see how their team of awesome did in the game for that period of time. The television-era equivalent of this is the highlight reel, where particularly noteworthy plays off the game are played in mostly-chronological order, but without any context surrounding them. You'll see the pitch that results in the home run, but you won't see that the batter fouled off two pitches like it right before finally getting to turn on the third one and put it in the stands. You don't see the methodical work of the pitcher that gets ground balls all the time, but the one pitch that got a away from them a bit and looked for all the world to be a hit before the shortstop proved that white men occasionally can jump and snagged it out of the air as it was passing overhead. We remember the exceptions quite well, but an appreciation of the efficiency of a pitcher requires paying closer attention. Much like Association Football, baseball looks to be a lot of nothing punctuated by short bursts of Very Interesting, and the long stretches and breaks in between action lends both sports to work well as social outings. (I highly recommend seeing sport with other people. A good time can be had by all inexpensively if you don't have to have Major League Baseball.)
If you want to know how a game ended, you can just look at the box score. If you want to see what happened during the game that brought about that score, you need to see the notebook of someone keeping score. Every game has an Official Scorer whose job it is to rule on whether particularly tricky plays should be counted as hits for the offense, errors for the defense, or other designations, based on rules and their judgment about the play as it unfolded. I don't know what their books look like, nor what their complete system is. Most sport supply shops, however, will carry a notebook that will give people a basic layout to record the game as it happens. Typically, on one page, there will be space to record the name and number of the players in the batting lineup (and their substitutes) for one team, the pitchers in the game (and their substitutes) for that team, the names or numbers of the umpires for the game, and a space to record the action of an at-bat during an inning for each of those players, and any other action that might happen to them on the basepaths. On its most basic level, I can look at a score book and know that in the third inning, #25, Mr. Bunny Foo-Foo, hit into an inning-ending double play off a 3-1 pitch from the starting pitcher, #13, Ms. Bar None. I'll know how the double play went down, as each defensive position is represented by a number from 1-9. (In order: pitcher, catcher, first base, second base, third base, shortstop, left field, center field, right field.) So a 4-6-3 (second-shortstop-first) is fairly common, but a 1-5-6 (pitcher-third-shortstop) is going to be memorable. (Most likely, it's a poorly-executed bunt.)
After that, though, it's mostly up to the scorekeeper and their system to provide as much or as little detail about the game as they want. One common addition is to mark a strikeout with whether it was a swinging strikeout or a looking strikeout by changing the orientation of the K symbol. Sometimes an out is given extra letters to indicate what kind of out it was (for example, F can be Fly out, P a Pop Fly, FO indicates a Foul (Fly Ball) Out, FC indicates a Fielder's Choice), or someone might make notations about pitch speed or selection through the use of colored pens and pencils when marking the balls and strikes. Each keeper develops their own system based on what they want to remember about the game as it goes on our when it is over. Keeping score is a way of staying engaged with the game at all points of the game, not just the ones where the crowd gets on their feet. And it's still easy enough to do and maintain the social aspects of the game, as well. The prize for keeping score is that, at the end of the game, you have a record of what happened, which serves as a memory aid for describing the game later. For many games, that may not be that important, but for the ones that are going to etch themselves on your memory, or for when you want to give a gift to a young child that says "I was there for you, and I was paying attention", a scorecard is a really good way to go. I remember that I watched my first live professional game at a young age at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull, that my dad and uncle were in attendance with me, that we sat behind the foul screen...but I don't actually remember the game itself, other than that the home team lost. (I have a bad record with live professional game attendance - most of the time, the team I'm supporting doesn't win.) I would have liked to keep a scorecard from that game so that I could look back and remember what happened that day. Instead, I have mildly-embarrassing video of myself expressing my team love at home while a televised game plays in the background. Some things are better left to live performance.
The associated card for all of this is Nostalgia, which can be both an act of looking back on the past with fondness and the physical collection of stuff as reminders of the past, preserved from the now so that the future can see what we were up to and what we considered important. "Retro" as a styling is an intentional invocation of the past, whether to evoke nostalgia while maintaining technological advances, or to produce some sense of the past, often sanitized to greater or lesser degrees, for the future to try and understand and experience. The card represents looking back and seeing how far the journey has come, rejoicing in the highlights and reliving some of the pain of the lowlights. It's associated with Retirement pretty strongly, as those who realize their time is coming to an end often come to the question of whether their career had been a good one, and whether the Hall or a retirement of number is coming in their future. This can sometimes evoke a panic and a flurry of attempted activity in service of making the career look better in retrospect. Right around the end of the year and the Vague Early Winter Possibly Religious Festivals, a lot of movies get play that are about this kind of nostalgia - It's A Wonderful Life, A Christmas Carol, the original Charlie Brown Christmas - these are all about looking at one's legacy and seeing how everything, good and bad, produced the person looking back on their life. In most of these cases, there's a major decision to be made based on this information, one last possible push before time seals what history will think of them. If Nostalgia appears, it's time to think about both past and future - what lessons from the past have you taken to heart and how do they guide you, how are you going to inspire others, and what artifacts are you leaving for others to collect as they think of you? Beware of doing things for cynical or manipulative reasons to try and influence opinions, though - most people can see through it, and the statistics will win out in the end when it comes to your career.
There's a bad side to nostalgia as well - if you spend too much time in the past, time will eventually take apart your carefully constructed world, fiction by fiction. Refusing to acknowledge that Time Marches On will eventually put you in a bad position - you'll become someone who believes in a Past That Never Was and try to dictate policies that do not apply to the reality around you. Later generations may find you pitiable, others will find you laughable. This is not to say that the past must be discarded wholesale and that there is nothing to learn or keep from it - I suspect many ventures and adventures in our current world could have been prevented by studying the history a bit more. But lionizing what was often requires willful ignorance of the entirety of the past - life may have been good or simpler for you, but that was probably the result of privileges, and sometimes laws, that protected you or unfairly put burdens on others so that you could be comfortable. It may have been nice, if you were of a certain social class or race, but things were not universally rosy, nor are they now. Our careers are too short to have to relearn everything, so part of our work is to preserve those things that will mean later generations do not have to learn those lessons. Whether they can is up to them, but we must provide them with the opportunity to do so, or we are just as guilty of living in Nostalgia.
The game changes, always, as new methods and new ways of gaining advantage are discovered, perfected, and eventually patched by changes in the rules of the game or the imposition of luxury taxes and revenue-sharing methods. The past may appear better, and memories are with cherishing, but the pitfall is a big one. It's up to you to decide whether or not this is something to aspire to or to be repulsed by:
(From The Simpsons Movie, staring at an impending apocalypse)
Comic Book Guy: I've spent my entire life doing nothing but collecting comic books... and now there's only time to say... LIFE WELL SPENT!
