Three on the street

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Is the All-Star Game Broke?

Can’t we all agree to just relax and like the All-Star game? This year’s game went 15 innings and lasted four hours and fifty minutes before the AL won 4-3, the 12th win by the American League in 13 years. The American League was down to their last pitcher, who went 108 pitches only two days before. It was speculated that manager Terry Francona was about to call the game. Only in 2002 when the game ended with a tie did the AL not win since 1996, and some say that’s when the All-Star game broke. Played at his hometown in Milwaukee Commissioner Bud Selig decided that game should end in a tie when both teams ran out of players, but that all future All-Star games should “count”. It was decided that the winner of the game would get home field advantage for the first two games of the World Series. The slogan “this one counts” which has been bandied about the last six years has been endlessly mocked for the exhibition game which, by all counts for the first 73 years used to not count for anything but a good time.

I’ve always loved the All-Star Game. I love it more than the 4th of July. It’s a better celebration of the summer than fireworks and cook outs, mainly because it always falls within a day or two of my birthday and it signals the non-official middle of the baseball season. I remember when I was thirteen (the beginning of my first flirtation with baseball back in the late 80s) getting a small 15 inch television for my birthday and setting it up in my room to watch the game on a sultry summer night. I admit that I don’t watch it every year, if there’re more important things to do then there are more important things that I’ll do, but I enjoy knowing it’s there. I like that everyone who isn’t an All-Star gets a three day break in the middle of a very long season to go home, relax and see their families. I enjoy that for those who watch the game, you get to see the best of the best all together on the same field, even if those over skilled players usually cancel each other out, making the game low scoring and often threatening extra innings. I love the home run derby, having a stand full of people show up for the night before the game just to watch a handful of heavy hitters go long with perfectly pitched fastballs.

I understand the criticisms too. The All-Star players, especially the pitchers, deserve a three day break also. The potential for someone to get hurt during an exhibition game could devastate a contending team for no reason. The AL has won the last 12 games, so it’s unfair to keep giving them home field advantage in the World Series. Also that that advantage will only matter to the two teams who make it to the series in October, but the other 28 teams still have to play the game to the bitter end. That having at least one player from every team represented means that other great players from leading teams have to sit out so an average player from a losing team can be there. That even now the home run derby is thought to affect batters arms.

These are all valid points, but they highlight one of the disappointments in the sport for the modern era. Too much emphasis is put on winning it all. What happened to enjoying the thrill of the game? And is there anything more thrilling than watching a team of All-Stars go head to head for one night, players that may never compete against each other throughout the whole season? It’s true that of 162 games, every game is important to a team. We’ve seen many instances of the last few years where at the end of the season a team makes it to the playoffs simply by winning one game more than the next team. But baseball started as an exhibition game, it developed with no thought of a championship or huge money prize at the end of the season. Teams used to play an extra lot of exhibition games. If Chicago was driving to New York to play a series, they would stop an extra day Ohio and play a game just to give the fans a chance to see their players.

In a season where 162 games count and teams race through September to the finish , wouldn’t it be reassuring to have a game or two where the purpose is to just sit back and watch a few good players hit and pitch? Maybe if you were lucky that year, you got to sit in your home stadium and watch the best players of both leagues compete, just for the hell of it.

Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives

In the early 90s, a singer slowly introduced himself to the underground alternative scene by calling himself -E-, and releasing two melancholy solo albums. Possibly he was the first musician to start solo then join a band, the Eels. But like Nine Inch Nails, the Eels turned out to be a band in disguise, and after about the fourth album –E-, real name Mark Oliver Everett, was the only member left. The story of -E- was a mystery at first, but slowly through very autobiographic lyrics that told the stories of his life, we learned about a very tragic life behind the music. Growing up in the Virginian suburbs of Washington, -E- portrayed himself as the typical misfit and loner kid, with aloof parents and very little friends. The first Eels album, "Beautiful Freak," introduced -E- with two other band members to a larger audience, receiving airplay on alternative stations and getting exposure on various TV shows and soundtracks. It was a hit on the alternative stations at the time.

By the second Eels album, "Electro-shock Blues", we were let in on the story of his father's death when -E- was only 19, his sister's suicide and his mother contracting cancer and eventual death. While not an album that sold well, it did attracted attention for being so starkly revealing and morbid. The four following studio albums saw the fan numbers decrease even more, though the last album, being a double album four years in the making, brought a cult following back to the Eels with 33 beautifully rendered tales of woe and optimism. After a couple experimental albums, Blinking Lights and Other Revelations brought the Eels back to their original sound.

But after 15 years of being an -E- fan, imagine my surprise when it turns out that the downhearted music is not the only thing that Mark Oliver Everett is famous for. Mark, as his family surely called him, turns out to be the son of a quantum physics named Hugh Everett III. Physicists typically aren’t households name, but Hugh had one big idea that should’ve made his name well known. In 1957 in a paper for Princeton University Everett developed his theory of parallel worlds.

The details are best explained in a BBC Special going around the internet named “Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives.” In it –E- allows a camera crew to follow him as he discovers his father, who he describes as never really being social with his own family, and the highs and lows of his career before his death of a heart attack in 1982. In what’s surely an emotional journey for him, -E- travels to Virginia and to Princeton to talk to Hugh’s old friends and colleagues. There he not only learns what quantum physics is about, but also how controversial and revolutionary his father’s exploration of the physics behind parallel worlds has become. When first proposed, the idea that each decision we make, no matter how big or little, splits us off and creates alternate universes was seen as borderline crazy. It contradicted the leading physicist of the time Niels Bohr’s assertions that radiating atoms would split apart, but come back together.

While the documentary does a sufficient job of explaining to the layman the basis of quantum mechanics and what Hugh was proposing, it doesn’t explain enough the result of the theory that took hold in science fiction and how it’s grown in popularity. A lot of our science fiction physics believes that there are alternate worlds out there, where men and women have superpowers or extraordinary things happen to them. From Star Trek to the X-Men, the idea of parallel universes has generated thousands of stories, ideas and what ifs that allows us to explore actions, decisions and pivotal moments in history. Possibly this theory is so far advanced that we won’t see any real results on the physics side of it in our lifetime, but as they say, “science fiction is the science of the future” and has actually been the predecessor for many actual advances in science. Possibly in some other alternate future it already has vastly changed science and the universe. In this one at least, both –E- and Hugh Everett have done a good job of getting us to dream a bit more.

Red Wing Nights

Some things just spoil you and you can’t go back to the pedestrian way of doing things. I was a baseball fan in the late 80s, lost it somewhere in the high school swirl of punk music and girls, and didn’t get it back until 2003. I was a broadcaster looking for a gig, and on a random February afternoon I passed by Frontier Field in snowy downtown Rochester and thought to myself, “I know they do a television feed in there, I wonder if anyone can join?” So I walked in the front office door and asked if they needed a cameraman. I was given an immediate yes, told to report to a meeting at the end of the month, and ever since I’ve been going through that door from April to the end of August. By the end of the season, I always feel like I need the break, that the days of baseball are too numerous, but by January, I’m itching in my seat to start again, and I begin a rough countdown in my head to opening day.

I wish I could go back to the season I worked every game. It was a different feeling watching the team play every day, I knew the players names and styles better that year. I was also doing cameras at that point, instead of directing the video feed for the game. Being on camera gives you a better perspective of what’s going on over watching the game through four different monitors. On camera, especially the one high up behind home plate, your job is to follow the ball. So you square up the shot between the pitcher and the batter, and then at every crack of the bat you jerk the camera to follow the ball, sometimes to centerfield, sometimes to the foul area in the stands by first base, sometimes and the hardest, straight to the shortstop for a quick out. It’s a learned instinct for sure. But high home as we call it, allows you to take the moments in between pitches to see what other players are doing, to scope the entire ball park, to people watch the fans in the stands and suites. Other camera positions, though just as necessary for telling the story of the game, are far inferior but still give you the sounds, the smells, the feel of being at a ball game from a unique perspective. Sometimes after a few days of shooting from behind the net, it’s worth the break to go work a camera in either team’s dugout. From that point of view you get to hear the cheers and disappointment of the ballplayers as the game goes back and forth, or as is sometimes the case, merely plods along leaving you in desperate need of a bathroom break.

I now however walk in the front door to a different job. It starts an hour or more before game time, I push pass the fans already queued up waiting to get into the suites, and I’m immediately greeted by Phil, the friendliest usher on the face of the earth. A few years ago, the Democrat and Chronicle did an amazing story on Phil and agreed wholeheartedly that starting a work day with a handshake, a hug and a “great to see you” really puts you in the mood to enjoy your job. From there I turn a quick corner, ride the elevator up the two flights to be greeted by the second best usher in all of baseball; Charles. If you’re in a rush Charles will readily accept your quick wave, but if you want to meander and sit a bit, he’ll hold a great conversation on anything from how the team’s doing, to the weather, to the vacation he‘s planning for late September. The next stop is to say a quick hello to everyone in the operations control room. They’re the guys who put up the scores, stats, player pictures and the fan rousing graphics on the scoreboard. After seeing who’s doing the PA announcements, and asking long-time organist Fred how’s he’s hanging, I head to the broadcasting control room.

When I started, the television control room was literally a closet. Only one person could fit in it, and it had a quickly aging video switcher with the audio board and graphics built into it. The only other console was for the replay machine, which, simple enough, was a VCR with slow motion capabilities. Not everything had a monitor assigned to it, and you had to spend most of the game craning your neck up at a fuzzy TV that sat five feet above your head. Fortunately as of last year, we’re now looking at a sweet HDTV that shows all four cameras, the replay computer, various stills and graphics, and program and preview monitors. Occasionally this is too much for the system, the processor can’t keep up in the late innings, the picture freezes and we have to do a quick reboot. The new switcher, while plastic and quite light feeling, is digital and can handle many more inputs, more channels of graphics, and stores both still pictures and short video clips. However it runs Windows XP, so you can imagine the dread of unreliability an operating system that’s no longer produced creates. The new replay computer is has a greatly increased quality picture and can instantly recall plays from past innings. A full Mackie audio board gives much better control over the announcers and the sounds of the game, and the graphics computer sourced right into the switcher gives the director the ability to keep up the score line and add titles for batters and pitchers.

Coordinating all this with the four cameras is what the job of directing the broadcasting feed is all about. Usually everyone is asked to keep quiet for an inning as the director regains the feel and the pattern for the game. After the first six outs a conversation starts on anything of interest, as nine innings is a long time even for participants to focus on a baseball game. Hopefully underneath the conversation, the camera people can hear what framed shots are being requested and can realize through their tally lights when their camera is hot. If there starts to become too much talk and too much confusion is the moment the stress starts, but hopefully a pattern is set up of which camera gets what shots.

With a bit of luck the game goes quicker than its average 2 hours and forty-five minutes. In case of rain or extra innings, usually someone is found to blame who could’ve possibly jinxed the time frame by mentioning the threatening skies or pitching ability of the reliever. The recipient of the blame gets heavily harassed on this point. Win or lose, by the end of the ninth, everyone is happy to have the game finished and assignments are made for either a post-game interview or to help the camera people break down their stations.

About mid-way through each season, I start to feel that this should be my last season of directing ball games on my valuable days off. That just a few years ago it was more fun to come and punch the buttons between cameras, and that we laughed more on our headsets to pass the time. But at the end of each summer, I can already tell I’ll be back next year, because I’ve been spoiled too much not to want to be a part of a professional baseball game from behind the scenes.

Train Time

It’s past time this country sat down and had a deep conversation about its transportation problem. Yes, that’s right; one of our biggest problems in this nation is transportation. We’re so used to being able to easily move ourselves around like never before. We expect shipments of goods to fly across the country to us as soon as possible. But we’re facing truths that we’ve swept under the rug for too long. The following list is the obvious; the rise in price of a barrel of oil has increased gas cost that hurt our ability to cheaply move in car and airplanes. Trucking firms have to pass on the cost of gas to the consumer as it costs more and more to ship thinks across country via the highway. Meanwhile trucks congestion is at an all time high in metropolitan areas and on cross country highways. Airlines have drastically increased fees, tacking on fuel surcharges, extra baggage fees, and all the while cutting back routes, decreasing services and comfort and having a difficult time staying on schedule. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we have a transportation problem that’s going to come crashing down on us all.

But as the defeatists spread this message all over the media, Harvard Professor John R. Stilgoe has a unique solution, let’s go back a century to when the transportation of the country was ruled by… wait for it… locomotives. His solution starts out by visualizing a young boy walking along old, unused train tracks in a country field. Where once these lines had constant use now these tracks have weeds and tall grasses growing between the slats. They’re an unused and wasted part of our past. With the infrastructure already there, Stilgoe argues that our best way forward in this country, would be to rebuild the trains. Sure, we still have freight trains crisscrossing through the countryside, and we still have Amtrak taking passengers from Chicago to New York to Washington. But what we have today, compared to what we had yesterday, are a fraction of the ability to use trains to their fullest potential.

Sometimes the myths of the past are all we know. We all know the romance of the old west, where trains cut through the desert, went into every little boom town, and were a prime target for horse riding bandits. We are aware of how trains were the main mode of transportation before cars, they dominated cross country travel before the quick and easy airlines we now take across country for vacation or work. Trains ran up and down the coasts, left and right across the divide. They were the first networks that could move information, people, and packages from Boston to San Francisco using standard routes and timetables. Every large city had a grand, central station that its residents used as a gateway, every small town had a little depot to carry one or two passengers away for the day, picking up the mail in the process. The only limitation was that the trains had to run on tracks that were unmovable, and if a train got behind a slow moving freight, there was no way around.

But after the first World War, something changed and trains were no longer fashionable. The mass production of automobiles gave more and more people a chance to own one as the nation moved into WWII production. Post-war air travel was propagandized as the new hip way to travel faster than ever before. Interstate highways made it easier for tractor trailers to find shorter routes from point A to point B. So train use fell. The first to go was passenger service, then mail cars, and slowly freight use, while still around, became less of a choice for many companies. The government meanwhile was over regulating the train industry, while giving financial breaks to the airlines, highways departments, and shipping companies. Eventually bankruptcies and mergers were the end story for some great, major rail lines.

So why does Professor Stilgoe want bring back trains and make them a more important part of the US infrastructure? Because the ways trains are set up, they’re cheaper, faster, safer and better for the environment. Cargo carried on trains will free up lanes of our over clogged superhighways making them safer and quicker for cars. You can get a bigger load to go a longer distance, at a faster speed on a train. The quick moving Acela from Boston to Washington transports people in fewer than five hours, and ridership is up all along Amtrak’s routes. More remote parts of the country are seeing that trains can help get tourists into areas hard to travel to by car, such as the mountains of Maine. Others are using their locomotive history to draw viewers to museums and onto refurbished trains that ride from one country town to the next. It’s fun for all.

It’s time to say that we finally understand that you can’t just pave more roads, or you can’t just add more airplanes in the sky. Bring back the trains as a major mode of transportation. It’s an old solution, which if made new, would help out a lot of people. Fund it. Use it. Benefit from it.