Dr. Metablog

Baseball 1958-2018

1958:  First batter of the game is Smith. He's batting .278. First pitch is a ball. Smith is 5'9", 155 pounds. Married, two children, makes his winter home in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Sells tractors in the off-season. Good curve ball hitter.

2018:  First batter is Smith. He's batting .278. His slugging percentage is .342. His OBP is .335. His OPS is .445. He hits .225 against right-handers and .303 against left-handers. First pitch is a ball. On first pitches he's batting .225. With a count of 2 and 0, he's batting .247. Second pitch is a ball. On two strike pitches he's at .175. On fast balls in the upper right quadrant of the strike zone, he's batting .345. On fast balls in the lower left quadrant he's hitting .175. On two strike pitches, he strikes out 25% of the time and hits fly balls 30% of the time. He bats .283 in his home park, .246 on the road. Day games, .290, night games .225. His OPS in away night games against a left-handed pitcher is .341. In this ballpark he's batting .283. He's batting only .125 against this pitcher, just two for sixteen lifetime, and one of the hits was a double, but that was in a different ballpark and in a previous season. He's batting .285 against fastballs, .276 against curves, .225 against four seamers, .215 against split fingers, and .275 against change-ups. He sees an average of 4.3 pitches per at bat against right-handers and 5.1 against left-handers. He swings and misses 38% of the time. Here's the next pitch; it's a strike. When he connects against a left-handed split finger fastball in the lower left quadrant the ball comes of his bat at an average velocity of 85 miles per hour to left field, 87 to center field, and 76 to right field. His average launch angle is 18 degrees. With men on base, he's hitting .285. With runners in scoring position, .290; his launch angle to right field against right-handed split finger fastballs in the lower left quadrant rises to 25 degrees, but only on his first at bat in a game. Afterwards, it declines to 17 degrees. But that's in April and May, on weekends. In August and September, under the lights, his launch angle is 20 degrees against change-ups from right-handers who throw into the upper right quadrant when there's a man on second or third and fewer than two outs. There's ball four.  

Here comes the manager out to the mound. That's all for this pitcher. We'll be back in a moment. 

A Cliffhanger

I've been reading the novels of Thomas Hardy. Some of them are familiar old friends, like Jude the Obscure and Return of the Native; some I've read so long ago that they're new again (Mayor of Casterbridge, Far from the Madding Crowd);  and then there are a few that I know I've never looked at before, such as The Woodlanders, Under the Greenwood Tree, and, the one I just finished a half a second ago, A Pair of Blue Eyes.

Blue Eyes is an early novel (1873), moderately autobiographical. In it, young Stephen Smith is an apprentice architect of working class origins (as was Hardy) who woos Elfrida Swancourt, a maiden of a higher station. He has a rival for Elfrida's hand in a former teacher, elegant and prudish Henry Knight.

It's safe to say that this is a novel only for confirmed Hardy enthusiasts. There's little in it that Hardy doesn't do better later on.

On the other hand, Blue Eyes contains one rather wonderful piece of melodramatic excess. Elfrida and Knight go hiking on a dangerous cliff and Knight slips and gets himself into an awkward position, hanging on six hundred and fifty feet above the ocean. His foot "was propped by a bracket of quartz rock, balanced on the edge of the precipice." She's clinging to him and they're both stuck. Knight is ever the gentleman. "Clamber up my body till your feet are on my shoulders: when you are there you will, I think, be able to climb on to level ground." "What will you do?" asks Elfrida. Knight answers that he will wait "whilst you run for assistance." But just their bad luck, there's no one around. And so the chapter comes to a cliffhanging close (the novel was originally published in serial form in Tinsley's Magazine).

Several minutes and several pages of reflection pass. At last, Elfrida reappears, her form "singularly attenuated."  She carries a bundle of white linen.

Jumping jiminy, holy moly, I say, -- the girl has removed her underclothes.

She tears the linen into thin strips, knots them, and forms "a perfect rope, six or seven yards long." Knight 'clambers' up the rope, and is saved.  But by surrendering her undergarments,  Elfrida has, as Hardy delicately puts it, "absolutely nothing between her and the weather but her exterior robe or costume."  Goodness gracious me, the poor dear is clad only in her "outer bodice and skirt."  So, of course, to spare everyone further embarrassment, she runs away as fast as her little legs will carry her.

Poor struggling Thomas Hardy has wrestled Mrs. Grundy to a draw.  

Good thing Elfrida was clothed in sufficient unmentionables to construct a rope seven yards long. Suppose Knight had been down there couple more yards and she had to remove her "upper bodice."  Would she have done so, or would she have let Knight plummet?` Hardy arranges it so that Elfrida can defy social norms, but not to the point of actual nudity. Hardy is bold, but not too bold.  

I suspect that if Hardy had his way and wasn't enchained by the humbug prudery against which he struggled all his life, he would have stripped Elfrida to the skin. How would Henry Knight have responded? Probably keeled over from the shock.

What would Elizabeth Bennet have done in the same situation?  Removed her underclothes to save her suitor?  Probably not. The most likely answer: Jane Austen would never have let her go out walking near a cliff with a gentleman.  

For My Grandchildren: Anne Goss

Dear T, O, E, L, L, C, A:  This is about your great-grandmother, Anne Goss. She was born Hannah Sarah Krull in 1912 in New Jersey, but I've forgotten which city, although I know that as a young person she lived in Bayonne, Hackensack and Paterson. Her parents, David and Katherine Meltzer Krull, were recent immigrants from eastern Europe. She was the oldest of five siblings: Anne, Jacob (Jack), Hyman, Freda, and Max (Mendy). Her father installed metal ceilings, her mother was what was then called a "practical" (i.e. unlicensed) nurse. The family was not wealthy. The five children shared two beds, boys in one, girls in the other, sleeping crosswise. Anne had a bout of polio at sixteen months which left her with a permanent limp and weakness in the left side of her body. Because of the effects of the illness, she endured an unusually difficult childhood -- marked by a series of surgeries on her leg which may or may not have helped. But she was quick-witted and talented, learning to play violin and viola and graduating as high school valedictorian. About the Jewish religion, important to her parents, she told me, "I gave up that stuff when I was thirteen." She was intent on a college education which her parents opposed because the few dollars that she made as a dental assistant were crucial to the family economy. She won a full scholarship to Barnard College but it's sad to report that when she arrived on the first day of classes she discovered that she had to pay for room and board, which her family could not afford. She returned home but was admitted to Montclair State Teacher's College where she majored in chemistry. In a world with more advantages he would have gone on to medical school and become a distinguished physician, but such a career was not in the cards. At Montclair she played string quartets and met your great grandfather, Daniel Goss. There wasn't enough money to allow them to marry and no one lived together before marriage in those days. Anne once told me that the greatest mistake of her life was that she didn't go to bed with Dan until after they married, which didn't happen until he was 26 and she was 24. I think those premarital depression years must  have been hard and unsatisfying. And even after they married, still not so good because Dan and Anne couldn't afford a place of their own but shared an apartment with his parents (actually shared a bedroom, with a curtain between the parents'  bed and theirs). Dan's parents disapproved of Anne: "Why would you want to marry a cripple?" Eventually Dan was hired as a teacher of mathematics at Paterson High School and then in 1946 moved to Utica College in Utica, New York. Although Ann had been told that the polio made it impossible for her to carry a child, she gave birth to three daughters (Althea -- your grandmother --in 1939; Phyllis in 1942, and Paula in 1951). She taught mathematics until she retired at the then-mandatory age of 65 but continued with her tutoring business through her seventies. Meanwhile, she had mastered the domestic arts: cooking, baking, sewing (she made all her daughters'  clothes through their childhoods) and knitting. She was a hard-working woman, often to be found knitting, reading a book, and watching TV at the same time. Dan died in 1966 and so she spent many more years as widow than as a wife. Her life was filled with pain (two dozen major surgeries) but she never complained. She was independent, frugal, and adventurous. She was also strict, cool, not at all affectionate, and humorless. Not exactly humorless -- she never laughed, that I can remember, but sometimes she would respond to a joke by saying, "That's funny."  She played bridge to win and not for fun and she liked a rough game of Scrabble with her grandsons. She was easy to respect but difficult to love.

She moved to Boulder at age 87 and lived to be 97, though much impaired. At her 90th birthday party, in 2002,  she was still functioning well but "looping."  If she had died at 90 she would not have missed much. She was demented and bedridden for the last few years of her life. The last coherent statement she made to me, in her last month, was "I'm not afraid of this dying business."  

A good memory: Anne spent most of her early life wearing a heavy metal brace on her bad leg. But when she was in her early 90s, she acquired a brace made of a light space-age material. I took her walking in the mountains. First time. She was thrilled.

Here's another: she liked to help grade Althea's math exams and she liked to talk calculus with her grandsons. I remember saying to them, "You have to understand something. This is unusual. Your standard run-of-the-mill grandmother does not understand calculus."