Once More In Thrall To Baseball

Dames Nationals of Summer!

It is I, Sports Dame Sophie, here to yell enthusiastically with you about baseball! You might be thinking, “surely not, Sports Dame Sophie! As you well know, the Men’s World Cup of International Football is taking place! Many of those games are being played in your own great nation of Philadelphia! You mean to yell enthusiastically about how Croatian fans got to meet Philly Elmo! Or about how that German guy’s criss-crossing the US has led him on the most joyful odyssey of all time! Or about how the US Government has done Team Iran unspeakably dirty and refused to grant entry to Team DR Congo’s greatest fan!”

Here’s the thing, friends: I know scarcely anything about football of any type. I am notionally open to learning, though. So! International football fans of Dames Nation, now is your time to shine! For the benefit of your fellow Dames Nationals, please share your favorite World Cup stories, arcs to watch out for, fun facts, and searing critiques in the comments or via email/carrier pigeon/semaphore code so I can round them up in a future issue.

And now: to baseball! America’s pastime! A quirky as hell, pastoral bat-and-ball sport invented in the 19th century! We’ve published baseball coverage here and there over the years, of course – book recs from former Nationals pitcher Sean Doolittle and Damespal AK; some fevered romantic reflections by me; a conversation between me and Dame Karen – so it feels like it’s time for a bit more.

Let’s start with a very funny and wholesome story coming to us from Damespal Kathryn, who has charmed all of BlueSky with the tale of how her husband — who follows zero sports — is crushing his first season of fantasy baseball by hiring a true expert to manage his team. The expert? His 10 year-old neighbor, the daughter of another friend and fellow fantasy league member, with whom he has agreed to split the profits should they win the season.

Great plan, but we have a wrinkle. With his tiny, yet fierce, general manager off at sleepaway camp for the next six weeks, Kathryn’s husband is sending her updates via emails from her parents. His young GM can reply with feedback and advice about trades, but only in letters sent via the good old US Postal Service. Letters! Written by hand! We love this!

As you can imagine, the good people of BlueSky are very into this whole situation. Here at Dames HQ, you can be sure that we are following the situation closely and will share important updates as we receive them. I am particularly tickled by how appropriate it is for a team born of a 19th century sport to be managed remotely via Epistolary Guidance Delay™. What a perfect example of what we’re talking about when we talk about being romantic about baseball.

I think one of my favorite things about getting into baseball in middle age is being able to perceive what my childhood brain could not: baseball is a sport for, by, and about Weird Little Guys. Weird Little Guys, or WLGs, come in all shapes, sizes, genders, and ages. For example many of the players are also Weird Little Guys (often they’re Tall Variety WLGs). Some WLGs wear non-prescription glasses they don’t need when they’re pitching because they are deeply superstitious. Some wet their hair before every at-bat and say things like “stay loose and sexy, baby!” while they’re mic’ed up on the field, somehow managing to make it sound encouraging rather than skeevy. Others seem capable of playing their best only when opposing teams’ fans are raining verbal abuse down on them. (I’m not here to kink-shame, just noting a clear stimulus-response pattern.) One of these Weird Little Guys has yet to acknowledge publicly that he is part cat, but those with eyes to see know the truth.

And yet! These contemporary Weird Little Guys could not hold a candle to the Weird Little Guys of old-timey baseball. I only know about these historical oddballs (complimentary) thanks to the good offices of Jade, a former nurse who started getting into baseball last winter and now shares tales from some of baseball’s strangest years.

Kait from Baseball For Baddies demystifies the sport and keeps us all up to date on important storylines across both the National and American Leagues. The folks at SportsBall give us meaningful, visually snazzy explanations of the meaning behind the economics & sociology of sports broadly, and behind the reams of data generated by every baseball game.

My last two stops for today are both very pure expressions of their creators’ love of the game: Boxscore and the Sleep Baseball Podcast. Boxscore is a free service that sends you the daily box scores of every MLB game, or team-specific box scores. That’s it. So simple, so elegant. Sleep Baseball does what it says on the tin, being a podcast about a fictional rec league of teams in Michigan and Wisconsin. Each episode is a full game, called by its host, Wally McCarthy, and features advertisements from local businesses and PSAs on topics pertinent to its communities. Wally’s voice isn’t a monotone, but he does keep it all in a narrow, soothing decibel range so you can listen attentively, or not, as you drift off to sleep while the Tomah Tigers go up against the Baraboo Bombers. The Northwoods Baseball Radio Network might be my favorite radio station now.

To close out, I have a question for my fellow baseball Dames: is there a particularly good reference work you’d recommend for my home library? Something cheeky or even silly, but erudite? Something in the vein of the approach these guys take, maybe?