Phthursday Musings: The Red, with the Bat, in the Hall

For a week I’ve shuffled around on whether to write something long about, or merely muse upon, the situation whereby the late Pete Rose is now technically eligible for the Baseball Hall of Fame. I wrote something, I deleted most of it, I wrote something better, and I deleted most of that.

I really liked the reference I came up with for a title, and my idea was to find the smallest bat I could, and take a picture of a Clue board with Miss Scarlet on it. This idea was thwarted by our not actually owning Clue. I also had no luck finding an existing image online which would partially work. I probably could have gotten some AI thing to do something but, you know what, fuck AI!

Well, I condensed the Rose stuff, but in the process I wound up repeatedly coming back to a different theme… one which was, I thought, just a tossed off clever post subject.

This is language from the Baseball Writers Association of America guidelines for Hall voting:

Voting shall be based upon the player's record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.

According to this sentence, there is almost nobody imaginable more qualified for election to the Hall of Fame, and also almost nobody imaginable less qualified for election to the Hall of Fame. For those of you not so familiar, in a nutshell, Pete Rose hit more base hits than any other Major League Baseball player, but he also gambled on baseball (the thing which got him banned), and years later it came out he was in an improper relationship with a minor in the 70s, and… yeah, it’s complicated.

I believe Rose will get elected, and I believe there are, very broadly, three different strains of thought which will combine:

1. Rose crossed the bar to get in, and all of the other stuff never should have mattered, the Hall isn’t about anything more than what you did on the field

2. Rose was rightly banned, but he’s dead now, it’s time to forgive and move on

3. Rose was rightly banned, but he’s dead now, fine, whatever

What I find interesting here is that the door was opened by pressure put upon MLB by someone who doesn’t believe in forgiveness, who believes that might makes right, and, well, if you’re a star, they let you do it. And then the people who are likely to make the decisive votes are people who do believe in forgiveness - for whom the concept is some amalgam of Christian and humanist - people coming from a fundamentally different place as the source of said pressure.

It is all a bit of a microcosm of where we are as a country and a civilization, and this is why I think the Rose saga is both compelling and yet also burdensome.

I spent Wednesday night in the presence of one Stephen Malkmus, at a delightful event where he sat for an hour long interview, and then came back ten minutes later and played an hour long solo set.

Malkmus was the front man for Pavement, and as such was probably the most significant artist going for my most formative years. It’s truly difficult to overstate how deeply influential Pavement was to me from age 18 to age 21. They were my favorite band until they were rudely usurped by Silkworm at some point, the Pavement email list (fans all sending email to hundreds of others and then replying in kind) was the one I was most engaged in, blah bah blah.

Pavement exuded an aesthetic of slack - one which seemed to involve not taking things too terribly seriously, not trying too terribly hard, embracing the ramshackleness of existence.

In recent years SM has talked about being autistic - I’m not sure if there was a formal diagnosis or just a conclusion long arrived that - and whatever exactly it is was very much on display in the interview, which was awkward and charming all at once. For me, though, there’s a chance in there to reflect upon the slack aesthetic and wonder how much of this was honed as opposed to, well, just being somewhere on the spectrum. It in turn makes me wonder about the same sort of things in myself.

Malkmus did the interview-and-solo-set thing two nights in a row, and made a comment to the effect that he wasn’t doing any songs he did the night before. The set list I got was astonishing, and it looks like the night before was as well. From the night before, here’s “Frontwards”, one of my top three Pavement songs, in exactly the right form:

The small number of you who might recall getting email from

“murmur’s got style, miles and miles” <[email protected]>

are probably also aware that “Frontwards” is where that came from.

We didn’t get that on night two, but we did among other things get “Unseen Power of the Picket Fence”, which was enough to justify the whole night! Weirdly no video has popped up from night two…

To get to the Old Town School of Folk Music from Brookfield on a drizzled Wednesday night required taking the Stevenson to Lake Shore, Lake Shore all the way to Wilson, Wilson straight across to Lincoln, and then I was pretty much there.

Lincoln Square isn’t a neighborhood I’m in much anymore, but when we lived in the city, I was in and out of Lincoln Square kind of bit. It got me thinking a little last night about whether I wish I was still in the city.

Here’s my thought: there’s no better place for walking around in a cool drizzle than Chicago. There is a quality to the city that lines up so very well with it being wet enough to be glad you’ve got a hoodie, but not so wet that you need an umbrella. It’s like being in a minor key but without the misanthropy, and Chicago’s the perfect setting for that.

We were talking last week and my wife asked a question along the lines of, what would I be doing if it were 40 years ago? As in, what would 48 year old me be doing at home in 1985, no cellphone, no Internet, and for sake of argument, no computer of any kind, and no cable TV?

My first thought was, well, I’d probably read more. But then my next thought was, well, there’d be a stereo in the living room, right? But today there isn’t one.

I’ve written on variations of this theme before but I thought this particular exchange was interesting because for me in the mid 80s, the reality was, there always was some electronic device or another on, it was just either the television or the stereo or what passed for a computer back then. Not to say that’s the same thing as sitting in my living room typing on this here ThinkPad (and may I say how thankful I am to have found a laptop which still has a freaking right click button), but… I do think that in a lot of ways, my kid’s existence is more like mine, and my existence is more like my father’s, than my father’s was like my grandfather’s. I don’t even have a real concept of what my grandfather had around the house when he turned 11 in Centralia in 1940, but it sure wasn’t much. Maybe some books?

Like so many other people I have a hard time slowing down, putting the phone down… I wish at times I could do what I remember my dad doing, putting a record on the stereo, listening to it, and… that was it.

Well, I actually said out loud maybe we should put a turntable in the living room, nevermind that there’s no stereo there to connect it to, things don’t need to work like that anymore, the turntable can just have a speaker inside it or whatever. And the response I got was that there was nowhere to put it because of all the books!

A couple of nights ago a request was made to play a board game. That almost never happens. At first the ask was for Monopoly, but it was too late and that wasn’t going to happen. I got out Yahtzee.

I played a LOT of Yahtzee as a kid. We had it where it came with a barrel to shake the dice, and we also had Yahtzee for the TI 99/4A, and I played it a lot both ways, and it occurred to me the other night while playing just how easy it all came to me, that I could roll the dice and if I had to take a roll as a chance I had the pips counted without thinking about it, and… I wondered if Yahtzee actually helped me be able to do some of the rapid computation I can do.

I think this is probably backwards. I think it more likely that Yahtzee appealed to me greatly because of how easy it was for me to see and know what to do, than it is that Yahtzee somehow trained me. But… I wonder.

In trying to find an ideal photo of a Clue board, I stumbled upon something odd: just how different Miss Scarlet has looked over time. Her name hasn’t even always been spelled the same: sometimes she’s Miss Scarlett!

This web page has an interesting look at the different ways Miss Scarlet has been represented over time. I never would have pictured her as a blonde. How about you?

Maybe this is actually the answer to my wife’s question though: If you hoisted our family back to the mid 80s, maybe we’d just be playing board games every night, because that’s what we did then. Even in college, admittedly card games instead of board games, but still, games around a table… how many hands of euchre did I play in 1995?

There’s a board game story near us in downtown La Grange, and there’s a lot of interesting stuff there, but all of it feels like it would take a real commitment, you know? But maybe that’s okay. Maybe we should put a turntable in the living room after all, get weird old versions of some of these board games, and spend our evenings listening to the Talking Heads and trying desperately to reach the conservatory.

Stephen Malkmus would probably be an excellent person to play a board game with, if you picked the right game. I’ve never had the occasion myself. But this did happen once:

Halloween night 2001, I was living in Normal, and Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks were playing that night in Champaign. I drove over, and somehow I was extra early (and I am never extra early). I got to the club when almost nobody was there, but the band was there, and Bob Nastanovich recognized me. I wound up drinking a couple of the band’s Budweisers, playing pinball with Malkmus, and then he and I wound up sitting at the bar watching the end of Game 4 of the World Series, when this happened:

Malkmus actually claimed this week that he wasn’t a big baseball fan, but then he also clarified that as a kid he had really liked the 79 Pirates, and then he mentioned the Brewers to that means the 82 Brewers, and this after noting that his family has “White Sox in the blood”. And I happen to know that while he was living in Portland he was in a softball league. And now, somehow, he’s actually moved to Chicago.

So maybe I should invite him out to the Downs to get his picture taken with the Pope, then have him come over for a round of Yahtzee. It can’t get much more slack than that.