Of course, the title of this post comes from the famous (infamous?) exchange from the movie Titanic:
CAL: [scoffing as Rose’s paintings are unpacked] God, not those finger paintings again. They certainly were a waste of money.
ROSE: The difference between Cal’s taste in art and mine is that I have some. They’re fascinating. It’s like being inside a dream or something. There’s truth but no logic.
TRACY (a servant): What’s the artist’s name?
ROSE: Something Picasso.
CAL: [scoffs again] Something Picasso? He won’t amount to a thing. He won’t, trust me! [to his manservant] At least they were cheap.
Here’s a different “Self portrait”, this one by the great Marisol, from the Buffalo AKG:
The information placard for this piece read thusly:
This was the first of many self-portraits by Marisol that are paradoxically both multiplied and fragmentary. Although a “self-portrait”, the sculpture is composed of seven dramatically different heads atop a single wood-block body. They are accompanied by an assortment of other body parts: six carved legs, a single pair of breasts and, at the back, five pairs of variously cast, drawn, or carved buttocks. The multiple heads may allude to the many different sides of every personality and the impossibility of presenting a unified face to the world. Marisol once suggested in an interview that the last head was perhaps like Sunday, yawning with fatigue at week’s end.
I find it interesting to consider new ways of approaching what sounds like an obvious task: creating a self-portrait.
There’s been some debate lately after last week’s NFL games, regarding whether or not it’s right, or good, for teams that have secured their playoff positions and who are thus facing a game that is essentially meaningless to not play their best players. The Kansas City Chiefs rested their starters, having already locked up the Number One seed in the AFC, and because they proceeded to lose to the Denver Broncos, who very much did have something to play for, the Broncos made the playoffs and the Cincinnati Bengals did not. (That the Bengals could have made the playoffs had they actually not lost a pile of games early in the season is not something that a lot of Bengals fans want to admit, for whatever reason.)
Likewise, the Buffalo Bills rested a bunch of their best players in their final game against the New England Patriots, who also won. Now, the Patriots had a very bad season and had they lost they would have secured the First Overall pick in the 2025 draft. By winning, they lost the first pick. Again, much rending of teeth and gnashing of garments. (We mustn’t feel too bad for the Patriots, who will pick 4th, and who will likely be looking to trade down for a package of picks anyway, since they likely aren’t looking for a quarterback in the draft.)
I personally have no problem with resting players if you can. Football is a brutal game, and many times in recent years the Super Bowl has come down to “Who is the least banged up.” Plus, there’s the fact that those backup players are still players who want to play. Maybe they want to shake off some rust before their playoffs, or maybe they want to make a good impression in hopes of securing their roster spot next year. And this quote below, by Patriots quarterback Joe Milton, reminded me of a book I read years ago, a wonderful baseball book by John Feinstein. First Milton’s quote, and then the post I wrote about Feinstein’s book years ago.
So the World Series kicks off tonight. [The 2014 World Series, that is. The San Francisco Giants defeated the Kansas City Royals in seven. -Ed.] I know, that’s the wrong metaphor. Sorry. I used to be a huge baseball fan, and I still find the game itself utterly beautiful to watch unfold, a game of moments where things happen one thing at a time. Baseball may be the last major sport that isn’t a constant flow of motion. As for rooting interests, as the League Championship Series started in each league, I noticed that of those four teams, none were a team I dislike in any major way. Generally, my approach in such cases is this: when there are no teams left for whom I have a rooting interest (be it rooting for a team to win or for a hated team to lose), I root for the remaining teams in order of how long it’s been since they won. In the AL you had the Orioles versus the Royals, whose last World Series wins were in 1983 and 1985, respectively. The Royals haven’t even made the postseason since then. (The Orioles have, but have not won any pennants.) As for the NL, it was the Cardinals and Giants, two teams who have each won it at least twice in the last few years. So no matter who won the AL pennant, I would root for the AL champion in the World Series. Hence, go Royals!
The remainder of this post is a book review. My sports fandom is nowhere near what it once was, and I see little reason to expect it to rebound in any significant way in the future. That said, I do still enjoy good sports writing, and John Feinstein is one of the betters sportswriters out there. He has a new book about baseball, called Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life in the Minor Leagues of Baseball, and it’s definitely worth a look.
Minor-league baseball is sometimes seen as the more “pure” version of the baseball experience these days, where you can still go to the ballpark and take in a game for a few bucks, where goofball promotions are often used as enticements, where ads for local businesses still cover the outfield walls, where players still endure long bus rides from town to town, and where brushes with true baseball celebrity come mainly from young phenom players or Major Leaguers sent down to the minors to work their way back into the game after an injury.
Feinstein’s portrait of the minors has all that, but he also captures something that a lot of fans may not come to realize: that the minors are, in addition to being a training ground for guys not yet ready for the Majors, a place of frustration. The fact is, especially at the AAA level, nobody wants to be there. This is a fact that everyone must acknowledge, and some managers come right out and say it. Nobody wants to be in AAA baseball, because AAA is the cusp of the Majors. When you’re in AAA, your dream is almost there, constantly tantalizing you and torturing you with every single injury with the big club, with every time the manager’s phone rings, with every invitation to spring training. Triple-A baseball is a land of players who are this close. For some, it’s just a brief spot, while for others, it’s a place to spend years without ever getting to “the show”.
Feinstein focuses his book mostly on just nine men: six players, two managers, and one umpire. Some have made it and will make it back; others haven’t made it yet; some have made it and will never make it back. The central fact of this book is that while dreams do come true, they don’t always stay true. It’s a hard lesson for some of these players, and it’s very easy to understand why they keep signing up for one more year, why they keep trying to catch on someplace, even as they pass their 30th birthdays and start approaching their 40th.
It’s interesting to me, as well, that Feinstein includes an umpire in his journey through AAA baseball. Fans don’t think too much about umpires, really, and the only time their names really come up is when they screw up. If a baseball fan knows Don Denkinger’s name, it’s almost certainly because he blew a call in a World Series game; and even then, it’s not like umpire’s names stay in the memory for long. I couldn’t tell you the name of the umpire who screwed up a call a couple years back that cost a pitcher a perfect game on what should have been the final out. (For the record, I still think that MLB should have reversed the call and credited that guy with the perfect game. The idea that umpire’s calls are sacred and must never be changed, ever ever ever, is deeply bizarre to me.) Umpires work their way through the minors just like players do, hoping for that call to become an umpire at the Major League level. What I didn’t know is that umpires’ time is limited even more than players. A player can stay in the minors as long as some organization is willing to have him, but not so an umpire: you only get so many years, and if by that time the people who choose the Major League umpires don’t think you have it, that’s it: you’re done. There are no career minor league umpires.
I was likewise surprised at the degree to which winning isn’t much of a concern in the minors. They like to win, but winning is mainly seen as a function of playing well, and playing well is seen as the means to the end of reaching the Majors. Feinstein depicts the feel of a championship-winning minor league clubhouse as a pretty surreal place. It’s an accomplishment that nobody much gives a shit about. This reminds me of the great movie Bull Durham, which spans an entire season and yet except for one brief segment in the middle of the movie, you get almost no sense for how the team’s doing in the standings. No one cares. All that matters is who gets the call to go up, and who gets the call to go home.
Minor leaguers, it turns out, put up with a lot of crap. They’ll fly with their team in the morning to a new city for a day game, only to be told as soon as they plane lands that the big club needs an arm for that night’s game, so they’re to turn around and get on another plane entirely. Mets pitcher Chris Schwinden, for example, got a call up to join the Mets in Toronto. After sitting in the bullpen, he flies with the team to Pittsburgh, where he’s told that he’s been sent back down already, so he has to turn around and get to Buffalo (the Mets’ AAA affiliate was the Buffalo Bisons at the time). At this point in the night, a direct flight from Pittsburgh to Buffalo isn’t available, so they fly him to JFK, where he’s supposed to catch a flight to Buffalo. That plane is delayed for two hours, so the team sends a car to drive him from NYC to Buffalo. After a series of mechanical mishaps with the car, Schwinden finally gets back to Buffalo eighteen hours after leaving Pittsburgh. This whole passage had me laughing, because you can drive from Pittsburgh to Buffalo in less than four hours.
Feinstein is an honest sportwriter, which means that he can’t just depict baseball’s poetic and pastoral beauty. Baseball keeps going, and as big as some players get, there is no player so big that the game can’t keep being played once they hang up their cleats. Throughout the book, Feinstein makes clear that each and every person is aware that they are just minor cogs in the game’s history and that the game will go on without them when they’re done, almost as if they were never a part of it at all. At times this aspect of baseball can be bluntly heartless: near the end, when the umpire is finally told that he simply isn’t good enough and that his career is over, one reason given is the time he has missed from umpiring. How much time did he miss? Two weeks once, for the birth of his own child, and two days one other time, so he could attend an uncle’s funeral. That’s pretty brutal.
The emotions go the other way, though, and Feinstein shows this as well in many passages. Why do these players work so hard to chase a dream that few will ever get, for whom the odds get smaller with each year? This passage, from the introduction, explains it perfectly.
Every player knows how much the first call-up means. Which is why there is almost always a celebration of some kind in a Triple-A clubhouse when someone gets the call for the first time. Everyone understands what an extraordinary moment it is in a player’s life. Those who have been called up remember what it meant to them; those who have not know how much they want it to happen.
J.C. Boscan’s story isn’t quite the same as Jimmy Morris’s, because he never stopped playing. He signed with the Atlanta Braves in the summer of 1996 at the age of sixteen and spent the next fourteen seasons bouncing around the minor leagues. He first reached Triple-A in 2002 but couldn’t take the next step, because, even though he was a solid catcher, he just couldn’t hit well enough to be regarded as a serious big-league prospect.
He left the Braves for a couple of years to play Double-A and Triple-A for the Milwaukee Brewers and the Cincinnati Reds. He signed back with the Braves in 2008, because the people running the organization had so much respect for him as a clubhouse leader and someone who would set a good example for younger players that they were willing to bring him back – knowing he was unlikely to ever play in Atlanta.
Two years later, playing in Gwinnett, he had his best offensive season. Nothing spectacular, but a career-high five home runs and a batting average of .250 – higher than his lifetime average of .222. Late in August, Boscan began to hear that he might be on the September call-up list.
Every year on September 1, major-league teams can expand their rosters to as many as forty players (the regular roster size is twenty-five). Rarely do they bring up more than five or six players. Those who are brought up usually provide depth in the bullpen or on the bench of are young players being given a taste of the major leagues. Every once in a while, a team will give a player a “good guy promotion” – bring him up so he can make major-league pay for a month as a reward for being a good guy and not complaining about being stuck in the minor leagues.
Boscan had been in the minors for fourteen years and had never seen the inside of a big-league clubhouse except during spring training. At thirty, he was a long way from being the bright-eyed teenage prospect the Braves had brought to the United States from Venezuela in 1997.
On August 31, the word in the Gwinnett clubhouse was that the Braves were going to make their call-ups after the game. Boscan remembers being more nervous that night than at any other time in his career.
“I walked on the field that night, and all I could think was, ‘If I don’t get the call tonight, it’s never going to come,'” he remembered. “I honestly thought this was my last shot and my best shot to ever get to the majors. I could barely keep my mind on the game. All I could think about was what was going to happen after it was over. I was praying to God to let this be my time.”
When the game ended, Boscan sat in front of his locker and picked at the postgame meal. Hitting coach Jamie Dismuke had been designated by manager Dave Brundage to bring players into his office so they could be told they were going to make the thirty-seven-mile trip down I-85 to Turner Field. As Dismuke worked his way around the clubhouse, that thirty-seven miles felt more like a million to Boscan.
The first player called in was Freddie Freeman, the twenty-year-old phenom, who was hitting .319 and was considered a lock call-up. He came out of Brundage’s office with a huge smile on his face and was engulfed in congratulations.
Dismuke continued his rounds. One player after another walked around the corner to Brundage’s office and came out wearing the giveaway grin. The congratulations continued. No one had made a move to leave because this was a happy night – for those going up.
Six players had gone in to see Brundage – entering as Gwinnett Braves and coming out as Atlanta Braves – and there was no sign of Dismuke for a couple of minutes. Boscan’s heart sank. That was it – six guys. His dream had died.
Dismuke appeared again, this time walking directly toward Boscan.
“Skip wants to see you, J.C.,” he said. He wasn’t smiling. Boscan panicked. Maybe Brundage had gotten the good news out of the way first, and now he was going to let Boscan know that the team needed him in Double-A to work with a young catcher. Or, maybe he was being released.
Brundage was, in fact, preparing that kind of speech for Boscan. “I was going to look very sad and tell him that sometimes things don’t turn out the way you want them to in baseball,” he said. “But when he walked in here, he was shaking. I couldn’t go through with it.”
The entire Gwinnett staff was in the room when Boscan walked in.
“Have a seat, JC,” Brundage said, trying to look grim.
Boscan sat on the couch across from Brundage’s desk.
“You ever been to the big leagues?” he asked – knowing the answer.
“No,” Boscan said, shaking his head.
Brundage couldn’t keep up the charade.
“I was going to mess with you, JC, but I can’t do it,” he said, feeling himself start to choke up. “This is your day. You’re going up.”
Boscan burst into tears. Everyone else in the room was fighting to hold tears back.
“I’ve been a minor-league manager a long time,” Brundage said. “I can honestly say that was the best moment I’ve ever had.”
After Boscan had thanked everyone and shaken everyone’s hand and been hugged all around, he walked out of the office. Brundage’s office is in a hallway that leads to the clubhouse area where the players’ lockers are located. When Boscan turned the corner to reenter the locker area, the entire team was waiting for him.
Feinstein doesn’t reveal what became of JC Boscan after he finally reached the Major Leagues after fourteen years of minor-league toil, because that’s really not the point of his book at all. But I couldn’t help wondering, so I looked it up. That’s the thing about baseball: you can always look it up. He only had one plate appearance with the Braves that fall, in which he drew a walk to load the bases; he would then score a run when a subsequent hitter doubled. Over the next two seasons with the Braves and then one season with the Cubs, he appeared in a total of 17 Major-League games, collecting 7 hits in 28 at-bats, for a .250 average. He has 2 career RBIs, and zero home runs. After the 2013 season he signed with the Dodgers organization, and he’s still there, playing Double-A ball with the Chattanooga Lookouts.
I should write more sometime about how much their music meant to me, but as I listen to this…I can’t make out the words I’m typing. My laptop screen is all blurry for some reason.
A new composer to me! And thus, hopefully, to you.
One of my favorite eras of “national” classical music is the English music of the 20th century, starting with Holst and Vaughan Williams and continuing on to Britten, William Walton, and others. To that roster I now add Ruth Gipps. (Provisionally, thus far. I’ve only listened to two pieces of hers, after YouTube Music suggested a new album of her work the other day.)
Gipps lived 1921 to 1999, and she had a full musical life in her years: she founded two orchestras, composed fairly prolifically, and taught extensively. Her impact on British musical culture was such that she was appointed an MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) for her work. And yet, her own compositions are mostly unknown. Perhaps this is because her style is Romantic and tonal in nature, and one cannot rule out simple sexism. Whatever the reason, Gipps’s work is only now starting to see some reappraisal, partly because of conductor Rumon Gamba’s ongoing series of recordings of her work.
This piece, the Coronation Procession, dates from 1953, several months before the official coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. It’s a fine work in a genre that has produced some stunning classics like the Elgar Pomp and Circumstance marches. Katherine Cooper of Presto Music writes:
It’s a little gem of a piece, relatively light on pomp and circumstance until the final stretch but brimming with colour, energy and excitement as Gipps evokes cavalry, fanfares and the poised elegance of the young queen with almost cinematic vividness. In lieu of the broad string themes which sit at the heart of similar works by Elgar and Walton, Gipps gives us a minor-key melody for her own instrument, the cor anglais (which features prominently in several works on the album) before the music swells to a suitably majestic climax as the Procession enters the Abbey.
If you read my 2024 wrap-up post–which if you didn’t, why not, and hey, it’s right here, go read it and come back!–you noted that I decided to defer any photography in that post in favor of a separate one, because otherwise the original post would have become way too long. Well, it’s time, folks!
First, here are my favorite self-portraits of 2024. In a way, they do all look kinda similar, I must admit….
Charles Burchfield Nature and Art Center
Orchard Park Railroad Station
Chestnut Ridge Park
Overalls look cool from the back, too!
My “Renaissance Faire” fit for 2024!
Now, more general photos. But first, how did 2024 go for me, photographically? I think it went very, very well. I can only remember one or two outings that didn’t go terribly well, and that’s because the light on each venture was…disappointing. That’s to be expected, honestly, and I’m still trying to figure out my approach here. Some photographers won’t even venture out if the light isn’t great, while I am definitely more tilted currently toward “Meh, go out anyway, maybe you get an image or two you can do something with, and even failing that, being out is its own reward.” Honestly it’s not the light that tends to dissuade me from going out, it’s the weather. I can’t really be out shooting a lot if there’s precipitation (Miranda, my Lumix FZ1000ii, has no weather-sealing), and if it’s extremely cold or very windy, it just isn’t pleasant.
I’ve most definitely become more skilled with the technical aspects of photography, which was the whole goal all along when I bought Miranda in the first place. I’m learning more and more about composition and exposure, and just what all those dials and buttons on the camera actually do. And the upshot of that is learning to make better photographs, now that I’m finally to the point of having a solid foundation of the techniques involved. For a while, any really good photos I got were more a matter of luck than anything else, but now I’m starting to be able to visualize and compose my shots before I ever aim the camera.
Another couple years, and I think I’ll be able to start getting really good at this!
(I think I will write a longer-form exploration of my year in photography on the Substack.)
Anyway, here’s a short selection of my favorite photos from 2024. I went through all of my photos from last year and picked out a whole bunch of favorites which I gathered into this Flickr album, for a total of 50-some shots. (Maybe 49 or 50, and then add in the self-pics above.) I’m not reproducing all of those photos here, because who wants to scroll through 50 photos, but these are representative. And at bottom is my favorite shot of the entire year. All of these were edited either with Snapseed (for photos taken on my phone) or Lightroom (for photos taken on Miranda…I also started shooting RAW in 2024).
Here we go! I’m going to group these by photography genre.
Nature/Landscape/Wildlife
I’m not sure what I’d call myself when it comes to these three related, but distinct, genres. I think “Nature” is probably the best descriptive term to what I do, because, well, I shoot anything and everything that captures my eye. I’m just as likely to seek out and shoot a spectacular vista as I am to capture a small waterfall on a stream in the woods that’s not even big enough to have a name on the map. As far as wildlife goes, I like shooting it–but I don’t have anywhere near the right equipment to really get into making wildlife photos, and I also don’t have anywhere near the knowledge the good wildlife photographers need. All of my best wildlife shots to date are birds, and they’re almost exclusively of birds taken near local waterways where there’s lots of people and walking paths and boats. Why is that? Because the birds who hang out in such places generally aren’t terrified of humans and are easier to predict and photograph.
You’ll also notice throughout, in many of my genres, that “People walking away from me” is a common thread. I suspect this is all part-and-parcel of my fascination with street photography and my slow progress at it…but more on that below.
Chestnut Ridge
Chestnut Ridge. This waterfall is very small; the total drop is probably all of three or four feet.
Pure luck! I barely registered that a bird was flying over, so I aimed Miranda and hit the shutter. I didn’t realize it was an eagle until I got home and reviewed that day’s shots on my computer.
A strong contender for my favorite shot of the year. I learned some stuff in making this one. I may discuss it in a video!
It’s amazing to me that I owned Miranda for about 15 months before I ever ventured up to Niagara Falls with her.
Golden hour at the Outer Harbor. I took a lot of good bird-in-flight shots that evening.
Streetscapes/Infrastructure
My favorite genre may well be what’s called “Street Photography”, though I’m still not entirely sure what qualifies as street photography and what does not. Does street photography require people to be present? Does it have to be an urban setting? Is it all candid, or can it sometimes be posed or at least prompted? I’m honestly not sure. I love photographing people doing interesting things, but I also love photographing buildings and architecture and roads and also infrastructure; the way things are made tends to fascinate me. So, all of this falls under that general view. My personal preferred term is Streetscapes, because it echoes Landscapes and because I think it generally sounds a bit more inclusive than Street photography.
Umbrella mobile at the Botanical Gardens.
Woman with phone, Highland Park, Rochester, NY. Taken during the Lilac Festival. She was sitting here talking into her phone. I don’t have any idea if she was on a call or recording a Tiktok or what. I like photographing people doing things. Doesn’t matter if I know what they’re doing.
Person walking along the Outer Harbor. I like the giant grain elevator as backdrop. Also, this photo was my first test-case for Lightroom’s “Remove objects” tool. Originally there were two big, ugly garbage cans marring the shot. Not there aren’t!
Acrobatics at the Sterling Renaissance Festival
Below a power-line tower, looking straight up.
Buffalo Metro Rail train arriving at the station. This is inspired by Kenneth Hines Jr., a favorite photographer and content creator online. He loves subways and public transport and trains and he always takes wonderful photos of trains in motion (or not).
The Giacomo, Niagara Falls, NY
Underside of the observation platform, Niagara Falls State Park, NY
Candid, through foliage. I’ve been practicing my framing skills.
Grain elevator at golden hour. I’m telling you, folks, Buffalo has some of the best sunsets anywhere.
Finally, you gotta get the dogs, because…dogs.
(Dogs are also great practice for wildlife action photography, especially for working with shutter speed and using burst-mode!)
Big stretch!
And here, finally, is my favorite photo of the year. I thought it would be harder to choose, but for some reason, this one just registers with me. I love that I was able to capture this…even if I may have done something slightly, um, less-than-legal to do it.
What happened was this: I spent a Sunday morning shooting at the Buffalo Outer Harbor, but then when I was done, I decided to venture into the city just to see if I could find any inspiration. So I turned onto NY 5 heading east, which in this case takes you up and over the Buffalo Skyway, a big concrete bridge that crosses the Buffalo River and the ship canal area before descending again into downtown. (There’s been a lot of debate in recent years about whether or not the Skyway should be demolished, since it theoretically hurts waterfront development to have this big bridge towering over everything. I personally think that of all the problems facing Buffalo that one is really far down the list, and anyway, I like the drive over the bridge.)
The light that day wasn’t terrific, but I had a nice clear view of downtown looming ahead of me…and a glance at the rear-view mirror revealed that there was literally nobody behind me for at least half a mile. And also, I had not turned off Miranda, so the plan was simple: slow to a crawl on the skyway, grab Miranda and snap a photo of Downtown Buffalo, and then resume acting, well, normal.
It went off perfectly. A bit of processing in Lightroom later, and voila:
Downtown Buffalo, NY, as seen from the apex of the Buffalo Skyway.
Yes, it was a really good year for me and my camera. Here’s hoping for even better returns in 2025!
(Every year now, social media around the 716 lights up on the anniversary of the Bills-Oilers wildcard playoff game in January 1993, almost always simply called “The Comeback Game”. I wrote these thoughts a couple years ago when that record comeback was finally exceeded. I’ve been thinking a lot, more recently, about the degree to which numbers have taken over sport discourse in this country, and some of these thoughts might be pertinent to the current “race” for the NFL MVP award.)
From The West Wing, Season Three, “Stirred”:
VICE-PRESIDENT HOYNES: I heard you had Caps tickets.
SAM: Yes, sir.
HOYNES: How was the game?
SAM: Not very good.
HOYNES: Have you ever seen a good hockey game?
SAM: No.
HOYNES: Me neither. I love sports, I just can’t get next to hockey. See, I think Americans like to savor situations: One down, bottom of the ninth, one run game, first and third, left handed batter, right hand reliever, infield at double play depth, here’s the pitch. But scoring in hockey seems to come out of nowhere! The play-by-play guy is always shocked. “LePeiter passes to Huckenchuck who skates past the blue line. Huckenchuck, of course, was traded from Winnipeg for a case of Labatts after sitting out last season with–Oh my God, he scores!”
A warning for those who don’t care about football: Football blathering ahead!
In the Wild-Card weekend following the 1992 NFL season, the Buffalo Bills famously fell behind by 32 points, 35-3, to the Houston Oilers before coming back to eventually win the game in overtime, 41-38. The comeback was the greatest in NFL history…until just a few weeks ago, when the Minnesota Vikings fell behind 33-0 to the Indianapolis Colts before coming back to win, 39-36. So the Vikings now hold the record for the greatest NFL comeback of all time.
But…do they?
Well, obviously in one very key sense, yes, they do. The numbers don’t lie: a 33-point deficit is greater than a 32-point deficit. And much of the “debate” that followed as to whether this was really the greatest comeback of all time centered on Buffalo fans who just don’t want what’s probably their franchise’s greatest singular on-field accomplishment erased. That’s the problem with records like that: every record can be erased, or pushed to second place, eventually. Championships are forever, but records are transitory, and a record that stands for 30 years before being pushed to second place is still the second-place record. So yeah, I get it.
But…that’s a pretty starkly numerical way of looking at things, isn’t it?
You can’t escape numbers in sports. Numbers are bound up in sports. They are inescapable…probably because numbers are inescapable in life, but really, numbers are sometimes everything in sports. Tom Brady’s 7 Super Bowl rings, Nolan Ryan’s 7 no-hitters. Ted Williams, last guy to hit .400. The idea then shapes out that numbers, more than anything else, tell us everything about what happens on the field. I remember quoting Fox Mulder from The X-Files a while back, talking about how he can look up a fifty-year-old box score in a yellowing newspaper and know exactly what happened on the field that day, all because of the numbers captured in that box score.
But…can he?
I mean, he can, to a certain degree. But the numbers don’t tell everything.
You can’t look at a box score and tell how blue the sky was that day, or what it smelled like in the park because maybe the breeze was coming from the lake or the industrial park the other way (in Buffalo, with the cereal plants downtown, it often smells of Cheerios). A box score won’t tell you how scuffed up the first baseman’s jersey is after several close plays, or how the catcher is still trying to work off the gimpy ankle from that play at the plate last Tuesday night. The box score won’t tell you the crowd’s mood: Are they giddy and jubilant, or are they kind of grumblingly negative because the team’s having a rough season and they’re sarcastically cheering the guy hitting .197 who just managed to leg out a weak grounder safely to first?
The box score won’t tell you if the players are attacking an early season game with vigor, or if they are visibly just playing out the last few weeks of the schedule, mired in fifth place and just wanting nothing more than to go home and rest for about a month. The box score will tell you that a particular player homered in the sixth, but it won’t tell you that he was on a hot streak and he came up against a tiring pitcher who probably should have already been pulled and who had of late been surrendering homers to right-handed hitters at a surprising rate for a guy who, up to a few weeks before, had been almost unhittable.
Numbers are great and important and useful…but they are also a flattening force, a force that tends to flatten out story. A baseball player who collects more than 3000 career hits is almost guaranteed a spot in the Hall of Fame…but is that all that player does? All I really know about Robin Yount is that he hat 3000 hits in his career. That’s numbers: for me they reduce a Hall of Fame player to a guy who had roughly 150 hits a year over his 20-year career.
But, what if I ask a person who has been a Milwaukee Brewers fan their whole life, “Hey! Tell me about Robin Yount?” Then, I’m not going to hear about 3000 hits. Then, I’m going to hear stories.
Sport isn’t just numbers, it’s also stories. I think that’s why we follow sport so adamantly as a species–well, partly, anyway. I don’t want to discount numbers, after all. But numbers aren’t the whole story.
This suggests to me that there’s another kind of greatness at play here, when we talk about “Greatest Comebacks”: situational greatness, we can call it. Or storytelling greatness? The New England Patriots trailed the Atlanta Falcons 28-3 a few years back in the Super Bowl–and they came back to win it. That’s a 25-point comeback, still a full touchdown “less” than the Bills’ against the Oilers…but 25 points down in the Super Bowl? You have to give that some special consideration, I think, because comebacks just don’t happen in the Super Bowl. The previous record for biggest comeback in a Super Bowl had only been 10 points. That means something.
And it also means something that the Bills’ comeback against the Oilers was a playoff game, at home, after a season that had been a bit of a struggle, when the Bills were banged up and missing several starters (including their quarterback and running back), and had been beaten soundly just the week before by that very same Oilers team. The Vikings’ comeback? A regular season game, at home, relatively healthy, against one the worst teams in the NFL that built its lead on a pile of field goals. The box score will tell you the Vikings overcame the biggest numerical point deficit in an NFL game to date. The box score won’t tell you the other stuff, and the other stuff is what we talk about when we sit over a beer and discuss old sports memories.
So. Is the Vikings comeback the greatest in history? Numerically, yes. Absolutely. Thirty-three points is more than thirty-two points.
But I doubt as many people will still be talking about that game thirty years from now as are still talking about that game in January 1993 when a backup quarterback erased a 32-point deficit in a playoff game.
(Credit for West Wing quote. Disclaimer: I do not endorse the fictional Vice President’s opinion of hockey.)
