Radio, Video Games, And A Beloved Doomed Ballpark

I realize I've plugged this piece before, when it first ran in the inestimable Classical Magazine, but last month it ran online in its entirety. Read up!

Two hours before first pitch, Brad Tammen combs his stadium for peanut shells. He sees one wedged into a seat back, and points it out to a staff member, who prises the stubborn, seemingly-fossilized shell out with his fingernail.

"I swear, I thought we had every one of them," says the general manager of the Nashville Sounds. It's peanut-free night at Herschel Greer Stadium, which means no peanuts, Cracker Jacks, or (oddly) Dippin' Dots. Tammen has faith in his grounds crew getting the stadium clean. He's worried about the sky. "I don't need another thunderstorm," he says. "We don't need any more rain."

Not bad stuff, eh? I bet you want to find out what happens next, eh? Well click up there! Click click click!

I've had some other odds and ends run in the Classical this month, all quite heartfelt. The first is an appreciation of the most wonderfully verbose-named video game I've ever played: World Soccer: Winning Eleven 7 International. Just rolls off the tongue, don't it?

It was not a functional relationship. I gave and gave, time and energy and effort, and got nothing back but hurt. But we do not always have a say in such things, and the video game that stole my heart was Winning Eleven, a mid-2000s soccer franchise that was, for all its mastery over me, as awkward as my fifteen year-old self.

Its cover was ugly, its graphics were bland, and its generic team and player names ranged from forgivable (Merseyside Red, for Liverpool) to absurd—meet Ruud Von Nistelroum, star striker for, um, Trad Bricks. Even the name was clumsy, as the European Pro Evolution Soccer 3 was rebranded as World Soccer: Winning Eleven 7 International.

And yet, as with many early-life relationships, I saw something in the object of my affection that was, maybe, not there. It was janky and goofy and unconvincing, but beneath the surface was one of the smartest soccer games of all time. I have found healthier relationships since then, in life and on various gaming platforms, but I still believe that bit to be true.

If so inclined, you can enjoy that beauty here.

And last, out of fear that the Mets ace radio partnership was on its way to being broken up, I wrote a plea for continuity in an organization that has none.

What's the best season to need crutches? Look out your window at the blackening New York slush, and it seems reasonable that, if one absolutely must spend three weeks Rear Windowing inside a walk-up apartment, January would be the ideal time to do it. Why waste summer sweating in your bandages, staring out at clear blue skies and aching to be in a park? Only a fool, you’d think, would prefer crutches in July.

Unless that fool was backed up by Howie Rose.

Crutch-bound for three weeks last summer, I left my apartment only four times. Once was for lunch, when a foolish attempt to crutch my way to a nearby park left me feeling like I'd attacked my arms with a meat tenderizer. The other three excursions were for baseball. I'd slide down the stairs, crutch to the bench in front of my building, and spend three or four hours breathing and smiling, the Mets chirping from my transistor.

A person on crutches wants to vacate the body, head floating off cramped shoulders and away into the blue. Sports, at their best, make that possible—and nothing can deliver us from our blighted physical form quite as well as good sports radio. In the world of good sports radio, I know of no pairing so transporting as Josh Lewin and Howie Rose.

In Which I Begin Jumping On The Islanders Bandwagon

A friend took me to the first ever NHL game in Brooklyn last weekend. I was charmed by the sight of an organist in the antiseptic Barclays Center, and so I wrote about him: 

Paul Cartier is an air traffic controller, and monitors flights around the country from an FAA facility at Long Island's MacArthur Airport. The job offers unique stress—a friend of his was manning the radar for the second plane hijacked on September 11, and understood the scale of that disaster before almost anyone else in the country—but it doesn't get to Cartier. In the morning, he is happy to get out of bed. At night, he goes to the Nassau Coliseum, to watch hockey and play the organ.

Paul Cartier has been playing the organ for the New York Islanders off and on since 1979. He was there during the Stanley Cup days, when "it was just the PA and the organ—no rock, no nothing, no DJ." He was there during the lean, leaner and eventually leanest years that followed, when recorded music took over a progressively more zombified coliseum and the organ was pushed to the sidelines. Today, he said, "I don't play a whole lot other than the clap stuff, and the little ditty to get the crowd going.

"I used to play a little bit for warm ups and stuff, but as with everything else, advertising becomes the key. So they kind of lost out on that."

On the second-to-last Saturday in September, in a place where advertising is not just lucrative subtext but something like the entire point, Cartier and his organ made their Brooklyn debut at Barclays Center. The Islanders came, too.

 Read more here, my friend.

I Love You, Greer Stadium, I Really Do

While I wasn't getting married last month, I watched a little baseball, talked to some people, and combined my experiences and their words into an "article." Apparently, it's called "sports-writing," and it's something that people publish in certain places. One of those places is The Classical Magazine, which you should purchase posthaste for your various mobile devices. It is a beautiful little app, full of smart writing about the enchanting nature of sportsliness. Despite all that, they agreed to publish my blather. 

Here's the lede, for free! 

Two hours before first pitch, Brad Tammen combs his stadium for peanut shells. He sees one wedged into a seatback, and points it out to a staff member, who pries the stubborn, seemingly-fossilized shell out with his fingernail.

"I swear, I thought we had every one of them," says the general manager of the Nashville Sounds. It's peanut-free night at Herschel Greer Stadium, which means no peanuts, cracker jacks, or (oddly) Dippin' Dots. Tammen has faith in his grounds crew getting the stadium clean. He's worried about the sky. "I don't need another thunderstorm," he says. "We don't need any more rain."

Greer Stadium is the third-oldest AAA ballpark in the country, and does not stand up well to rain. On a gray afternoon, its seats are rusty, its concourses spotted with puddles that seem decades old. Today there is a leak in the front office roof, and the famous guitar-shaped scoreboard is, as always after a heavy rain, only partially operational. But the field is spitshine perfect, and Tammen sounds like the proud captain of an aging diesel sub when he calls it, "the best playing surface in the Pacific Coast League."

Because excellent grass is not, by itself, enough to draw a crowd, the Sounds have been agitating for a new stadium for a decade. But just as Nashville finds itself on the upswing, plans for relocation have stalled out. The Milwaukee Brewers have been "patient," Tammen says, in their wait for a new AAA facility, but there's no evidence that patience extends past their current two-year agreement with the team.

This leaves Tammen, who will give a speech at this year's winter meetings about "how to make the best of an old ballpark," in limbo—patching leaks and fixing seats, but holding off on major renovations in hopes that a new stadium is on its way. As it turns out, limbo is an excellent, or at least fascinating, place for a ballpark. Greer Stadium's concourses are cramped, damp, and lit by eerie fluorescents; concessions are limited to burgers, hot dogs, and—most nights—peanuts. There are no amenities but cold beer, green grass, and cheap tickets. Its problems are plain enough, but Greer Stadium is one of the finest minor league parks in the country, precisely because it is good for absolutely nothing at all but watching baseball.

There are about 3,300 words after that, each one better than the last! Devour them now, you insatiable word addict. Devour them!

Did You Miss Me? No? That's Fine. No Biggie.

I've returned to you, good people of the Internet, and not a moment too soon, I'm sure. What was I doing while I was away? Well, mostly, thinking about baseball.

In a Mediterranean country, not very long ago, my sunburnt family chugged its way through pasta and a €7 jug of rosé and I banged my head against a foreign wifi connection, struggling to tune in New York’s sports radio station WFAN. This was not a good look, maybe, but Matt Harvey was considering throwing a no-hitter and everyone at the table understood. By the time the connection crackled to life, it was clear from Howie Rose's gutpunched tone that something Metsian had happened, and another near no-no was gone.

So: deep breath, and back to vacation mode. Harvey has carried three no-hitters into the seventh this year, and looks sure to throw one at some point this season. Of course, I thought the same thing last May about R.A. Dickey, before Johan Santana’s duct tape shoulder beat him to it, suggesting that Flushing may yet be due for a Shaun Marcum perfect game. What worried me, as I returned to slurping pink wine and slapping away high-class European mosquitos, was the name of the man on the mound. Not his stuff, which flattens hitters like a boulder does Wile E. Coyote. Not his future, which appears bright enough to confound every pessimistic Mets fan urge imaginable.

No, just: he’s Matt Harvey, alias Matt, alias Harvey. Nothing more. No nickname, nothing for short. Full stop.

How can we solve this great player's nickname drought? Read on, at the Classical.

And now it's Friday, it's four o'clock, it's hot as hell in my apartment—I'm gonna take a nap and then make something yummy to drink. Happy weekend, all! 

One Review And Two Heartfelt Bits of Sporpswriting

Been lying awake at night wondering what sorts of things I've been writing? Well, for one thing I just finished a rough draft of a heist play about Parisian chefs. (If you want to read it, let me know. It's good!) But as far as writing for money goes, well, I've been doing a bit of that. For instance, this pulse-pounding review of A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About The Death of Walt Disney , which wowed audiences last month at Soho Rep.

We shouldn't be surprised that Walt Disney has something up his sleeve. He is a showman, after all, and a showman always keeps something clever in reserve. So when Walt—moustachioed, imperial and cruel—takes a handkerchief out of his pocket, it's natural that it will turn into three, four, seven or eight more. They tumble out of his sleeve, falling to the floor, but somewhere the trick has gone wrong. The hankies are covered in blood. The showman is beginning to die.

Lucas Hnath's A Public Reading Of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney, which opened May 9 at Soho Rep and runs through June 9, is a poetic examination of a famous magician's attempt to execute the greatest trick of all: immortality. It's an audacious gambit, and it's clear from the first scene—and the presence of "Death" in the play's title—that he probably won't pull it off. But watching him try has proven one of the most engaging theatrical experiences of the spring.

Pretty good, eh? I've also been doing a bit of writing for The Classical , the website responsible for coining the word sporps—a wacky neologism that I somehow can't seem to get out of my head. For instance, I wrote this appreciation of Mets fringe player Mike Baxter—a sad-faced local kid who was, tragically, demoted on Sunday.

On a pleasant Friday afternoon last April, Mike Baxter misplayed a fly ball. The Mets were on their way to a 4-0 loss to the Phillies, playing the halfhearted and thunderously mediocre baseball that has been their trademark in 2013, when the fly came Baxter’s way. It was a long run, and could have been highlight-reel worthy had he successfully slid to catch it, but Baxter broke late, arriving just in time for the ball to roll towards his shoes. From right field came the shout: “You’re a piece of shit, Baxter!”

The heckler wore a Yankee hat, but even without that, it would have been obvious he wasn’t there to cheer on the Mets. Met fans love Mike Baxter, with the dull, unconditional affection usually reserved for pets, or a favorite, fading t-shirt with stains and a few expanding holes. It’s a love too rare in stadiums. The Yankee fan, after an inning or two cursing the hangdog right fielder, disappeared to watch the Knick game. But the Met fans did not turn away. In the seventh inning, when it was clear the Mets had no interest in winning that night, two young women serenaded Baxter, hollering, “Hey Mike! You’re gorgeous! We love you, Mike!”

Read mas, if you have a moment. It's probably the best thing I wrote last month, if you don't count my famously engaging grocery lists. Also for The Classical , I did an impression of someone who is qualified to write about soccer, producing this (I think pretty nifty) article about John Isner.

During the last weekend of May, New York got walloped with the first heat wave of summer: three days of humidity and haze dense and unremitting enough to make ordinary men sympathize with David Berkowitz. From the moment I stepped out of the climate controlled sanctuary of my bedroom and into a wall of stale, broiling air, the afternoon was doomed. I slithered onto the sofa, dragging a wheelbarrow of iced coffee behind me, and turned on the French Open. I seldom watch tennis, but it just felt right.

This is an urge I hadn’t had, if I’m being honest, since the last time my apartment did its convection oven impression, during last year’s U.S. Open. When warm weather strikes I find it soothing to watch attractive people grunt, leap, and yell at line judges. This doesn’t seem to need defending, but so rudimentary is my knowledge of the sport that it took me until last year to piece together what a break point is—a mystery I might have solved faster if I weren’t so committed to watching tennis only when hungover, heat-stroked or both.

Because it’s free of the grave mythology that bogs down American team sports, tennis can be easy to like and hard to love. I can get quickly invested in a game of football, basketball, or hockey, even if I don’t care about either team. Just pick a uniform, a city, a player to hate, and bellow until one group of meatheads crushes the other. But in tennis, the focus is too close. Those are real people out there—beautiful, talented, mostly European people. What the hell could they have to do with me?

What the hell, indeed. Find out more!

I'll be out of town for the next couple of weeks, so feel free to drunk a hogshead of whiskey and drunkbernate until I return.

I Am A Writer And Here Are Things That I Wrote

Did you know I am a professional writer? That's right. I type up words—words just like these—and then I put them in a special, top secret order, and mail them off to companies who pay me for them. Truly, it is a wacky life.​

Lately I have been so busy writing things professionally that I haven't had time to tell you about them on this, my blog. Allow me to catch you up, in reverse chronological order, because we writers are saucy like that.​

First, I reviewed Here Lies Love​ for Howlround​, a wonderful website whose name is hard to say out loud. (It's not quite The Rural Juror​, but it's a toughie.) If you click on that link, you can see a picture of me wearing a cat. I talked about this play a bit after I saw it, and what it was like to dance next to David Byrne, but now you can see my fully-fleshed-out critical whatnots. Here is a sample:

Eight drumbeats thud out, a martial pulse that sounds suspiciously like the famous opening bass line to a Talking Heads classic. Two lovers march towards each other through the crowd, and the audience wonders—“They’re not covering ‘Psycho Killer,’ are they? They wouldn't dare!” And then the lovers kiss, the room explodes in disco, and “Psycho Killer” is a distant memory.

Until that moment, I was wondering if David Byrne was the only reason anyone had come to Here Lies Love, the former Talking Head’s new musical, which plays at the Public Theater through June 2. In the last decade, Byrne has dabbled in conceptual art, producing work like 2008’s Playing the Building, a pleasant-enough art installation in southern Manhattan that probably did not deserve the attention drawn by its creator’s name. In his eagerness to cross genres, Byrne is like a much more talented, much less irritating James Franco. Conceptual art is best left to the professionals, but rock is Byrne's beat, and Here Lies Love is a sparkling reminder of why he became a downtown icon in the first place. His name may get them in the door, but the music will make them stay.

​Pretty good, eh? If you like that, you'll love this article I wrote for the Observer​ about Europa Editions, a scrappy independent publisher whose new line of World Noir makes me so happy I could just sneeze. Seriously, I read almost nothing but crime fiction, and these guys have got the goods.

Detective Fabio Montale is having a rough week. His best friends are dead, he keeps getting beaten up, and his city is descending into, as the title of the novel he stars in suggests,Total Chaos. But he still has time for a little bass. Fennel-stuffed and grilled, maybe, with a lasagna sauce and peppers, “gently fried.” Some friends are coming over for pastis and Lagavulin and gin rummy by the sea, and they expect the copper to cook.

“I was finally calming down,” Montale thinks. “Cooking had that effect on me. My mind could escape the twisted labyrinth of thought and concentrate on smells and tastes. And pleasure.”

The kitchen is an escape for this harried gumshoe, but Total Chaos, part of author Jean-Claude Izzo’s Marseilles trilogy, is not mere escapist literature. Mr. Izzo used detective fiction to shine a light on France’s rugged southern port and the corruption that turned his stunning hometown into one of the most dangerous cities in Western Europe. The city loved him for it, and when he died in 2000, Marseilles’s bookstores closed their doors and filled their shop windows with Mr. Izzo’s pioneering novels.

​Pretty heavy stuff? So heavy that maybe you'd like to read something about sports? Or, since this article is on The Classical, perhaps I should say sporps. I write about the proposed Flushing Meadows MLS stadium, and why handing it over to one of English soccer's many billionaires is a totally unfun idea.

This is the dead period in the English Premier League. The title race ended weeks ago, with Manchester United claiming their eleventy-millionth championship in honor of retiring rage-legend Sir Alex Ferguson. At the end, there was nothing left to wonder about but whether or not Wigan Athletic will escape relegation. Coming as it does with the start of spring, this annual tepid period carries a pleasant taste of the English countryside—village greens and quiet pubs and all the other stuff Ray Davies just couldn't get out of his system. But for Manchester City, who will finish second this year, it is a time of seething discontent.

Last May, the blue half of Manchester won its first title since 1966, in five minutes of madness that made the madcap end to the 2011 baseball season look contrived. (Relive it here, accompanied for good or ill by the musical stylings of The Verve.) Manchester City won the FA Cup the year before, and will try for it again this weekend, taking on hard-luck Wigan in a match as well balanced as Goliath vs. David’s asthmatic younger brother. With all their recent success, the placid American fan would expect them to be happy. “You can’t win them all,” we tell them, naively. But if City loses on Saturday, a dapper gent named Roberto Mancini will probably be out of a job. The Premier League is no place for sentiment.

And in a league where a bad season is rewarded with relegation, there is no such thing as rebuilding. (Jeff Fisher, for instance, would not have lasted in England.) Sheikh Mansour, City’s doe-eyed billionaire owner, has dumped nearly half-a-billion pounds into the club, and has no interest in passing a springtime afternoon over a pint of bitter, wistfully crooning, “Wait ‘till next year.” The Premier League system is a mad one, driven by greed unheard of in American sports. So it is maybe or maybe not a good thing that it appears to be on its way to Flushing.

​What's that? You want more? Well I just remembered that I never linked to my Richard Foreman profile on here. Lordy, have I been slacking. It's got a pretty good lede:

One morning last month at the Public Theater, Richard Foreman was having trouble with rage. On a stage crowded with pillows, stuffed animals and string, an actor droned through a monotone monologue. He made it halfway through before Mr. Foreman, the last standard-bearer of the 1970s avant-garde, stopped him in the middle of a line about “incalculable rage.”

“What’s another word for rage?” Mr. Foreman asked the room. “Rage sounds weak.”

“Fury?” suggested the actors. “Ire? Wrath?”

“Maybe it needs another leading word. Not incalculable rage. Black rage?”

The actors offered more suggestions—“blind rage,” “mad rage” “octopus rage”—but their director’s attention had shifted to the lightboard. As the actors waited, he conferred with his staff of 10—some Public employees, some interns—flipping through light cues and eventually casting the theater into darkness. By the time the lights were sorted, and he had settled on “incalculable rage … Rage!” it was time to break for lunch.

Last Week I Was Cold, But Not Too Cold To Type

Continuing my tradition of breaking news, last week I covered the shocking development that it is no fun to be cold at a baseball game.​ Seriously, though, it was goddamned freezing:

How cold was the stadium on Sunday? The weatherman says 54 degrees with winds gusting as high as 44 miles-per-hour. To get a sense of how that felt, try this: encase your genitals in ice, dangle them in front of a battery of leafblowers, and see if you feel like watching Lucas Duda stumble after fly balls.

Despite the gale, the upper deck was crowded, because the Mets had spent the week giving away tickets on Twitter. No strings attached—follow @Mets on Twitter, get a ticket to watch the actual Mets play the Marlins. The unpaid crowd got its money's worth. Dressed for a sunny spring day, they found instead that they had joined the Shackleton expedition. Children shivered through plastic hats full of ice cream. Whirlwinds of garbage swirled ghostly across the infield. Pigeons fought to stay aloft. It was baseball in April, and that is what it’s like.

​Check it out if you want to shiver a little. Amazingly, as cold as that game was—and it really was awful, the coldest I've ever been at a sporting event—the Mets are currently a bit chillier. They nearly got snowed out in Minneapolis last week, and are now in Colorado, a famously warm place. Last night they got snowed out, today they might get snowed out, and if they are able to play at all, it could get down to as little as 9°. Jeepers!

What's Better Than Good Baseball? Bad Baseball

It should be no surprise to you, gentle readers, that I do not spend all of my time thinking about theater. I'd lose my mind. As a respite from the art form, I have a variety of hobbies, including mocking Smash​, complaining about my cats, and thinking much too hard about baseball. Because I'm a weirdo, I don't mind watching sports on DVR, which means that during the baseball season, I will usually record the night's Mets game to watch the next day, while I'm working. Baseball season doesn't start until April, but this week I discovered an altogether weirder version of America's pastime, the World Baseball Classic, and wrote an essay on it for smartypants sports blog The Classical​.

Spring Training is a tease. Baseball addicts survive winter's frosty void on a thin diet of trade rumors, "classic rebroadcasts," and Wikipedia biographies of old-timey players with funny names. (I see you, Ugly Dickshot.) The day pitchers and catchers report, we think, will mean the end of torment, as the most powerful opioid in sports begins to drip again. Invariably, we soon remember that spring baseball is like drinking salt water—it amplifies your thirst, and doesn't taste right, besides.

Parched, bored and desperate for competitive baseball—where players clap when they win and pout when they lose, and where we aren't forced to watch back-up catchers run slo-mo sprints in the outfield during games—I turned to something I had previously been happy to ignore: the World Baseball Classic. Baseball's would-be World Cup, the Classic is an international tournament in a sport that has no true infrastructure for international play. It has only happened twice before, in 2006 and 2009, and both times I dismissed it as a meaningless contest, played by nobodies (or bored somebodies) and watched by no one. Who needs a World Baseball Classic when you've got a World Series?

Well, as it turns out, I do. The World Baseball Classic is flawed, goofy, slipshod, and everything the World Series is not. It's also pretty great.

​There's much more where that came from. Read on, and be amazed!

As the baseball season wears on, hopefully I'll continue covering the sport for The Classical​ and whoever else will take me. Not only will it transform baseball tickets into a tax write-off, it will keep me from having to subject you to topics like my abiding love for Mike Baxter.