Athletic Supporter

Last week America's insatiable appetite for college and professional football was brazenly on display as millions of gridiron worshipers tuned in to the most over-hyped, banal non-event of this or any other year, the 2010 National Football League Draft -- so many, in fact, that the combined ratings for the broadcast on ESPN and the NFL Network exceeded those for a couple of live-action NBA playoff games, by a hefty three-to-one margin, prompting one NBA executive to lambaste the sports viewing public for its deplorable taste.

I didn't see any of the NFL Draft, but, having glimpsed a few snippets in the past and on Sports Center recaps, and acknowledging an embarrassing fondness for sports talk radio (this being a slow news period), I believe I have a vague understanding of what transpires.

While a digital clock inexorably ticks away the precious seconds, a gaggle of glib talking heads and presumed experts for whom this spectacle is their crowning joy (most notably, the nasal-toned, indefatigable Mel Kuiper, Jr.) analyzes each player ad nauseum -- his size, speed, strength, quickness, athleticism, ball-hawking savvy, and, suddenly relevant with the disgraceful antics of Ben Roethlisberger fresh in mind, his character -- until, lo and behold, some NFL official, perhaps the Commissioner, steps ponderously to the stage and announces with all the solemnity of the Academy Awards (but less suspense) that the Tampa Bay Buccaneers select with the seventh pick of the second round Arrelious Benn, confirming exactly Mr. Kuiper's prediction.

One reason I find this exercise so synthetic is the speed with which its pomposity dissipates, like air escaping from a balloon. While I am sure there are legions of fans and fantasy players who inhabit a football nirvana and can name every offensive and defensive linemen on every professional team, can any of them remember when they were drafted or in what round? And does anyone really care? And while the lucrative contracts awarded high draft choices -- like $25 million dollars to number one -- are guaranteed, their on-field success is not. One who took his money to the bank but his team to ineptitude was JaMarcus Russell, drafted first by the Oakland Raiders out of LSU in 2007; his career to date has been abysmal.

For those addicts who desperately need need a football fix in the middle of April, I guess this soporific sideshow serves the purpose; to animate all the non-action and vacuous blather, viewers are treated to clips of players in actual or simulated game mode. Saturday morning in the YMCA locker room I could not avoid a puff-piece on some three-hundred-pound defensive lineman about to be drafted in the third or fourth round, in which he stands like a hulk before the camera, breaks into a sly grin, and repeats ominously "I love to hit," before launching himself with the torque of an automobile into and over another human being, to the unabashed glee of the sycophantic commentators -- an assault for which he would be arrested had it occurred anywhere other than on the football field.

This diatribe is only further evidence of my aversion to football, which has been previously documented on this web site. I find it brutal, violent, and depressingly repetitive -- its popularity a function of its facile translation to the television screen, where the camera can focus on the critical elements of every play, revisit them from all angles, and obscure all the wasted time consumed in unpiling bodies and reassembling them, which reduces the minutes of actual engagement in a three-hour contest to a meager ten. Aside from a youthful gravitational attraction to the Washington Redskins, a brief infatuation with the New England Patriots when they were undermanned underdogs (I admired the stoic iconoclasm of Coach Belichik), and a stubborn weakness for the intensity of playoff games, I'd rather read a book.

Or watch baseball on Gameday. Compared to the NFL Draft, there's some real excitement.

If forced to choose a favorite sport, I prefer the summer game, to study, that is, not to play, since I learned, sadly, at an early age, that I lacked the requisite hand-eye coordination. It suits my temperament: mathematical -- every individual act precisely quantifiable, by means of statistics both ordinary and arcane -- symmetrical -- performed on a four-cornered infield and triangular outfield manned by nine players over the course of an equal number of innings through a series of four-ball, three-strike, three-out batting opportunities -- leisurely -- both in conception and pace, as spectators and participants wait patiently for action, either routine or spectacular, to erupt in a sudden, graceful, powerful burst of motion, a pitch, a swing, a line drive, a catch, a throw, a slide -- and timeless -- limited by no hourglass, only by a full complement of twenty-seven outs per team, for 162 games, which in April seem to stretch infinitely into the future, replete with bountiful promise, only to end all too soon in disillusionment and disappointment, unless you are a Yankee fan.

Gameday is real-time baseball on the Internet, without a video or audio feed. Click on the game you want to watch on the mlb web site and a three-section page opens on your computer screen. On the left, two capped faces stare back at you, the current pitcher and his opposing batter, each perched atop his up-to-the-minute statistics (won-lost record and era for the pitcher, batting average for the batter) and in-game performance (number of pitches, balls and strikes for the pitcher, at-bat results for the batter). Below them are identified the on-deck and in-the-hole batters with their averages. And below that is a diagram of the field, showing distances to the fence along the foul lines and to left, center, and right fields, and placing the names of every defensive player at his respective position.

On the right side of the screen is the box score, listing each team's batters and pitchers; after each plate appearance, the result is posted and all averages are updated.

In the center of the screen is the piece de resistance, a pitch-by-pitch depiction of each at bat. An icon of the batter stands in isolation at home plate, looking into the void. Suddenly, like a shooting star, a color-coded circle flashes into the foreground, aimed toward a faintly-delineated strike zone hovering over home plate -- red for a strike or foul, green for a ball, blue for contact in play. And just in case you want to know what type of pitch was thrown (fastball, curve, or slider), its speed, and how many inches it broke, that information scrawls below the icon, pitch by pitch.

Why watch -- and I use the term loosely -- a game this way, when, for a mere $49.95, one can purchase a season pass to receive the audio/video feed?

In a perverse way, Gameday heightens the normal suspense of not knowing what will happen next. As the play unfolds and an omniscient entity interprets and inputs the data, an excruciating 20 to 60 seconds elapses between the time that blue dot materializes on the screen delivering the titillating message "in play, no out" or "in play, runs" and the result is revealed. There is only one foregone conclusion: with no one on base, "in play, runs" obviously portends a solo home run.

Second, aside from one's own mental wanderings, there are no distractions -- no raucous fans, no patronizing announcers, no annoying commercials, no tight camera shots selected by some ubiquitous director. The players positioning, the windup, the pitch, the swing are all creations of one's unfettered imagination, which continually wills its team to success, until harsh reality intrudes.

Third, while the Gameday devotee will miss the running catch, the diving stop, the perfect throw, the towering home run -- all of which he can see on replay -- he exults in the statistical record laid out before him, which resets with every pitch, sometimes dramatically, especially now so early in the season. A few days ago I watched mesmerized as, out by out, the era of Oakland's precocious lefthander, Gio Gonzalez dropped from 5.40 to 3.68 through seven shutout innings.

Actually, football might be more palatable on Gameday, faithfully transmitting all the skilled-player runs, throws, and catches, while antiseptically screening out the massed scrums, vicious hits, and flying bodies.

I'm not really a Gameday addict. I only watch one team, the Oakland Athletics, the reason for which I will disclose shortly.

Unless, like a friend of mine, one enjoys the fantasy version -- which entails the day-to-day tracking of individual rather than team performance -- baseball fandom, compared to that of football or basketball, seems to be more a function of one's attachment to a particular team. While football and basketball fans are notoriously rabid about their favorite college or professional franchise, it is my observation that most will tune in to just about any contest the schedule-makers toss their way. On the other hand, baseballers, except for a few diehards and World Series loyalists, become religiously fixated on their chosen team and mindlessly shun all others, perhaps because they so easily become invested in its player's vital statistics.

Why else must they be subjected to a steady television diet of New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, New York Mets, and Los Angeles Dodgers, teams which presumably have large followings in their home towns and across the country? Further evidence of this phenomenon -- although working in reverse -- was the widespread popularity some years ago of the Atlanta Braves and the Chicago Cubs, which was birthed and fueled by the national broadcasts of their games on the superstations WTBS and WGN.

As a budding baseball enthusiast enamored of the numbers but pathetically overmatched on the field, I naturally sympathized with the underdog, and at an early age latched onto the Pittsburgh Pirates -- a not wholly random choice, since my mother was a native of the area; the team did enjoy a modicum of success in the late fifties, stealing the World Series from the despised Yankees in 1960.

When the Pirates fell on hard times, belying my putative disdain for winners, my allegiance shifted briefly to a perennial powerhouse, the Baltimore Orioles, a poor surrogate for a home team, but the closest available following the flight of the hapless Washington Senators to Minnesota in 1961, not to be confused with the expansionist imposters who occupied the Nation's Capital for a subsequent ten-year dalliance before themselves being carted off to Arlington, Texas.

By 1969, inspired by visits to the Windy City, the home of my first wife, whom I married in 1970, my loyalties were firmly entrenched in the fertile soil of Chicago's Wrigley Field, where the legendary team of that year -- starring Ferguson Jenkins, Ken Holtzman, Ernie Banks, Glenn Beckert, Don Kessinger, Ron Santo, Randy Hundley, and Billy Williams, and managed by Leo Durocher -- lost seventeen of their last twenty-five games, blew a five-and-a-half game lead in the month of September, and ended the season eight games behind the Amazin' Mets. As symbolic of the Cubs' enduring futility, this unfathomable collapse parallels the frustrating 2003 League Championship sixth game loss to the Florida Marlins, when the infamous Steve Bartman interfered with Moises Alou's attempt to catch a foul ball and opened the floodgates to an eight-run eighth inning.

For years I collected royal blue baseball caps embroidered with the distinctive red "C," memorized every Cubs box score, watched and occasionally recorded those WGN broadcasts, especially when I detected a whiff of contention in the air, cheered as wildly as that notorious homer, Harry Caray, and suffered a broken heart even before the Marlins' debacle, when, in 1984, the Cubs won their first two playoff games against the San Diego Padres and then promptly lost the next three. Like so many, I thought Mark Prior and Kerry Wood were destined for immortality; when their right arms gave out, so did the Cubs' hopes for next year.

My disenchantment with the Cubs coincided with their 2003 setback, but not because of their failure to reach, or win, the World Series. I sensed a shift in management philosophy -- from relying on farm-grown talent and astute trading to produce a winner to embracing the large-market tactics of the Yankees and Red Sox: buying pennants by shelling out big bucks to glamorous free agents.

A little Internet research has confirmed my suspicions. From 2003 to 2004, the Cubs' payroll increased from $80 million to $90 million, and has grown steadily until today it stands at $144 million, third only to those Yankees and Red Sox. The signing of Alfonso Soriano in 2007 to an eight-year $136 million contract was the final blow for me. I garnered little enthusiasm for the Cubs' costly Divisional Championships in 2007 and 2008 and even felt smugly vindicated when they were swept by the Diamondbacks and Dodgers.

By then I had a new paramour, the Oakland Athletics, a choice as surprising as that city is distant from these Virginia foothills. Why would a Southerner root for a West Coast team, which plays seventy-five per cent of its games in the Pacific Coast Time Zone, at night, and sends me off to bed ignorant of victory or defeat? But, oh what an incentive to rouse myself from a deep sleep early the next morning (or from a fitful one at 3:00 AM) and rush to the computer for delayed gratification.

A friend of mine once warned me that reading is a dangerous pastime; having consumed a lot of books in fifty-five years, I guess I've put myself in harm's way too many times to count. In this case, the culprit was a lightweight, breezy volume entitled Moneyball, by Michael Lewis, a former bond trader turned investigative reporter whose work includes "The Blind Side," the inspiration for the award-winning Sandra Bullock film.

Although somewhat dated, having been published in 2003, Moneyball is the story of how Oakland General Manager Billy Beane -- hamstrung by a payroll budget one-third the size of baseball's richest teams, unable to shop for big league stars in the prime of their careers or even afford medium priced players -- turned adversity into success, year after year. On Opening Day 2002, the average major league salary was $2.3 million; the average A's salary was $1.5 million. Yet that team would win its division and make the playoffs for the third straight year. (Lewis, p.119)

He did it by adopting a revolutionary approach to player evaluation, by discovering and exploiting inefficiencies in the market, by identifying bargains and drafting or trading for them -- strategies based on knowledge gleaned from analysts inside and outside the game.

From his predecessor, Sandy Alderson, Beane learned to focus on a player's (and team's) on-base percentage; Alderson, who had studied the historical data, maintained that it was baseball's most important offensive statistic, because it measured the probability that a batter would not make an out and correlated more closely with the number of runs a team scored than its batting average. A former Marine Corps officer, Alderson insisted on organizational discipline, the core virtue of which was patience at the plate; before long, all the A's minor league teams were leading their respective leagues in walks. (Lewis, p. 60)

From Bill James -- who from 1977 to 1988 published his annual Baseball Abstract, each a compendium of 40,000 statistics interspersed with insightful, erudite, radical commentary -- Beane learned to challenge the conventional wisdom, "to think for himself along rational lines, hypothesize, test against the evidence, never accept that a question has been answered as well as it will ever be." (Lewis, p. 98) James's goal, stated in his first Abstract, was "to produce the most complete, detailed, and comprehensive picture of the game of baseball available anywhere." (Lewis, p. 73) His cause was "the systematic search for new baseball knowledge." (Lewis, p. 69)

In his first Abstract, for example, James debunked the fielding error as a flawed measurement, because it recorded what an observer thought should have been accomplished. A more accurate statistic, he proposed, would be a player's range factor -- the number of successful plays he makes on the field per game. (Lewis, p. 69)

In his third Abstract, writing that a hitter should be measured by his success in that which he is trying to do, which is to create runs, James conceived his revolutionary Runs Created Formula: Runs Created = (Hits + Walks) x Total Bases / (At Bats + Walks). "Crude as it was, the equation could fairly be described as a scientific hypothesis: a model that could predict the number of runs a team would score given its walks, steals, singles, doubles, etc.," a model which implied that walks and extra base hits were to be more highly valued than batting averages, sacrifices, and stolen bases, contrary to the accepted thinking of "inside baseball people." (Lewis, p. 77)

In spite of James's giving up hope in 1984 that baseball insiders would be reasonable, "that if he proved that X was a stupid thing to do, people would stop doing X," at least one professional was paying attention. By the time he became the General Manager of the Oakland A's in 1997, Billy Beane had read all twelve of the Abstracts. (Lewis, p.93)

Another of James's findings, which he wrote about in a newsletter, was that " 'college players are a better investment than high school players by a laughably huge margin.' The conventional wisdom of baseball insiders -- that high school players were more likely to become superstars -- was also demonstrably false." Paul Podesta, whom Beane hired in 1998 to head his Research and Development, made his own study of the college vs. high school argument and confirmed the theory. Beginning in 2000, drafting battle-tested college players became a key ingredient of the A's success. (Lewis, p. 99)

While James's work had been about challenging the traditional understanding of the game, about questioning the meaning of its statistics, the financial experts at AVM, a company created by a couple of Wall Street derivatives traders in 1994 and hired by Podesta in 1998, took these ideas further. AVM collected ten years of data from every major league baseball game on every ball that was put into play, broke what happened into tiny, meaningful fragments, and assigned values to the minute components of a player's performance. Since everything that happened on the field altered, often very subtly, a team's chances of scoring runs, every event came to have an expected run value. (Lewis, p. 134)

Using this analysis, Beane and Podesta could calculate the "expected run value" of every ball hit to center field during the 2001 season and determine how many runs Johnny Damon saved the team compared to his likely replacement. And although Damon's defense turned out to be worth fifteen runs, that was not enough to warrant their paying him $8 million in 2002. (Besides, Damon's on-base percentage was only .321, ten points below the league average and easily replaceable.) (Lewis, pp. 135-136) He went the route of free agency, as did two other stars, closer Jason Isringhausen, and first baseman Jason Giambi.

That 2002 Oakland A's team, which Lewis followed while researching his book, was the quintessential Beane brainchild. On September 4th, it set a major league record by winning its twentieth consecutive game 12-11, blowing an 11-0 lead before a washed-up catcher named Scott Hatteburg hit a pinch-hit solo home run in the bottom of the ninth.

Isringhausen had been easy to replace. In Beane's mind, established closers were overpriced, in large part because they were judged in the marketplace by the "save," a statistic which was often inflated by their insertion into a game situation -- their team leading in the ninth inning with the bases empty -- far less critical than those other pitchers faced. When Isringhausen signed with the Cardinals, Beane received a first-round draft choice and a first-round compensation pick. He traded for fireballer Billy Koch and made him his new closer. (Lewis, p. 125)

Replacing Giambi was a different matter. In 2001, Giambi's on-base percentage was .477, the highest in the American League by .50 and .133 higher than the league average. To fill the hole left by Giambi's departure (to the New York Yankees for $100 million), Beane plugged in three players most teams didn't want to have anything to do with: Jeremy Giambi, Jason's little brother, a decent hitter but the slowest runner in baseball and an atrocious fielder; fading superstar David Justice, who might have lost his home run swing, but, according to research by Podesta, had most certainly not lost his remarkable proclivity to get on base; and Scott Hatteburg. (Lewis, p. 142)

The A's had coveted Hatteburg for several years, even though he had never hit over .270 in his six-year catching career for the Boston Red Sox. "But he had the same dull virtues as David Justice and Jeremy Giambi: plate discipline and the ability to get on base." (Lewis, p.160) He worked himself deep into pitch counts, wearing out opposing pitchers, yet, in spite of hitting with two strikes, rarely struck out. Best of all, for Beane and Podesta, he came cheap, having ruptured a nerve in his throwing elbow, which had ended his catching days.

They signed him as a free agent and told him that, at age thirty-two, he'd be playing a new position, first base. Within six weeks, under the tutelage of infield coach Ron Washington, Hatteburg overcame his panic attacks ("There's this thing about first base; you can't drop balls, any of them."), learned how to position his feet, became adept at digging throws out of the dirt, and earned a reputation as an "above average" first baseman. (Lewis, p. 170)

In 2002, the A's won 103 games, lost 59, and finished first in the American League West. They lost the divisional playoffs to another low-budget team, the Minnesota Twins. Hatteburg hit .280 with an on-base percentage of .374. Justice hit .266 with an on-base percentage of .376. Billy Koch won 11 games, lost 4, and saved 44. Jeremy Giambi was traded to the Phillies on May 22nd for John Mabry, who hit .275 (and slugged .523).

The A's repeated as American League West champions in 2003, succumbing this time in the divisional playoffs to the Red Sox, 3-2, losing the last three games in a crushing Cub-like collapse. In 2004 and 2005, they finished second, but stormed back into first place in 2006, the year I became a devoted A's fan.

Besides signing undervalued free agents (like Hatteburg and Justice), in order to remain competitive, small-market, low-budget teams must draft wisely and make shrewd trades, both in timing and player selection. Once its younger players break into the major leagues, a team has control over them for six years at minimum salaries, after which they become eligible for free agency. General Managers like Beane must decide when they can get maximum return for their blossoming stars, trading them for younger prospects who hopefully will become high-level performers themselves and future trade bait.

By 2006, Beane had completely dismantled and rebuilt the franchise. Gone were two mainstays of his pitching staff: Tim Hudson, dealt to the Atlanta Braves for the highly-touted Juan Cruz, Dan Meyer, and Charlie Thomas, none of whom ever came close to his expectations; and Mark Mulder, sent to the St. Louis Cardinals for Dan Haren, Kiko Calero, and Daric Barton. Haren quickly developed into a stud pitcher, which Beane took full advantage of, swapping him at peak value to the Arizona Diamondbacks in December 2007 for six prospects, including Brett Anderson, now a solid member of the A's rotation, and Chris Carter, a slugging minor leaguer whose road to Oakland is blocked by Barton, its current first baseman. The other four have, through various iterations, morphed into the A's starting third baseman, Kevin Kouzmanoff, and "can't miss" minor leaguer Michael Taylor.

Such is the perilous journey of an aspiring athlete on his way to the Big Show -- mapped out behind closed doors by prospecting General Managers hoping to strike gold with limited stakes.

Two stalwarts of that 2006 team were graduates of the 2oo2 draft -- an emotional roller-coaster for Beane, graphically chronicled in Moneyball -- outfielder Nick Swisher, the 16th pick, from Ohio State, and pitcher Joe Blanton, plucked 24th, from the University of Kentucky. (Beane had seven first-rounders that year, all college players, while eight of the first nine teams selected high schoolers.) In their first full season in the Major Leagues, 2006, Swisher hit 35 home runs and drove in 95 runs, and Blanton won 16 games. (Both have since been traded)

Although the oft-injured, temperamental Milton Bradley made significant contributions to the A's Division Championship, he came via one of the worst deals Beane ever made -- for Andre Ethier, now an all-star for the Los Angeles Dodgers.

On the other hand, that team featured one of Beane's greatest coups, the signing of future Hall-of-Famer Frank Thomas to be the designated hitter for a paltry $500,000. The year before, hobbled by a toe injury, Thomas had appeared in only twenty-four games for the Chicago White Sox and had batted .219 with twelve home runs. Given a chance to resurrect his career, he hit 39 home runs, batted in 114 runs, achieved an on-base percentage of .381, and finished fourth in the League Most Valuable Player balloting.

With a late-season surge, the unlikely A's captured the American League West title and swept the Twins 3-0 in the Division Playoffs before falling 4-0 to the Tigers in the League Championship Series.

Since that year of overachieving, the Oakland A's have fallen on hard times -- recording three consecutive losing seasons. Perhaps Beane has lost some of his magic, or his peers have caught up with his methodology. Other low-budget teams -- the Rays, the Marlins, the Twins -- are winning with strong farm systems and exciting young players.

Some of Beane's recent transactions seem as rash and ill-conceived as a riverboat gambler's long-shot wagers. Before the 2009 season, he sent the promising rookie Carlos Gonzalez (obtained in the Haren trade) and closer Huston Street to the Colorado Rockies for slugger Matt Holliday, who was in the final year of his contract and sure to command big dollars on the free agent market; when the team foundered, Holliday had to be moved, but for unproven minor leaguers. The signing of hard-throwing Ben Sheets -- sidelined all last year recovering from elbow surgery -- for $10 million has produced a 1-3 record and a 7.12 era. And Beane's best players can't stay healthy; Oakland consistently leads the league in stocking the disabled list, which now includes five from its opening day line-up and one more waiting in the wings.

The 2010 A's teased their fans early, racing to a 12-8 record on the strength of their starting pitching (in spite of Sheets), only to lose five of their next six games. Five hundred baseball is certainly a stretch for a team whose home-run total of 16 leaves it twelfth in a league of fourteen; whose two designated hitters, the valiant but decaying Eric Chavez (in the last year of Beane's most expensive long-term contract), and free-swinging newcomer Jake Fox, are hitting a combined .212 with one home run; whose featured poster child, Rajai Davis, is mired in a deep slump, returning to the mean after last season's breakout .305 performance; whose best slugger, Jack Cust, languishes in Triple A Sacramento, trying to bring his horrific strikeout numbers under control. Lacking power, the four competent hitters at the top of the order (Pennington, Barton, Sweeney, and Kouzmanoff) will be hard-pressed to carry this team to respectability.

Nonetheless, I gamely soldier on -- flying to Toronto last weekend to watch Gonzalez pitch a gem on Saturday and Sheets get lit up for nine runs on Sunday; urging each batter to get a hit even when the team is getting mauled, just to boost his average; dialing in Gameday when the A's come East for a 7:05 or 8:05 starting time; checking out the Minor League Sacramento Bees box scores to see how the prospects are doing; and reading voraciously online any news available about the Oakland Athletics.

The official mlb team web site usually posts two articles a day, one recapping the most recent game, with video highlights, the other providing backstories on individual players. But the most copious source of information about the Oakland A's is the Athletics Nation blog. Every day reporters named Nico, Marquez67, baseballgirl, danmerqury, emperor nobody and jeffro preview and recap each game and post articles on a variety of A's and baseball-related topics (such as "Managing Pitchers 101: Some Guidelines to Consider"). The writing is engaging, thoughtful, humorous, and literate.

Thus, two nights ago emperor nobody summarized the A's dispiriting 4-2 loss to the Texas Rangers. "There really isn't much to say about what took place, only that this is three hours of our lives that we'll never get back. I'd tell you that Rich Harden (the Rangers' pitcher) didn't walk a batter in his 7 IP, even though he was averaging a walk an inning coming in and was displaying the command of a gaggle of geese on angel dust previously . . . I'd tell you the A's didn't sniff a hit until Raj Davis doubled in the sixth, but, so what, he died there like withered grapes on the vine . . . I scratch my head for reasons why or what happened to furnish such a lifeless result, but I come up as empty as the stands in the Coliseum were tonight."

Fantasy players foolish enough to have A's on their team will enjoy the left sidebar commentary from Rotoworld on the game performance and injury status of key players. On the right sidebar, fans are encouraged to post their own articles -- predictions, critiques, analysis, inquiries -- and elicit feedback.

But the lifeblood of Athletics Nation -- and I assume of other Major League blogs -- is the game thread -- where hundreds of fans watching on mlb.tv or Gameday sign in and post over one thousand comments, cursing, praising, dissecting every pitch, every swing, every managerial move, their emotions rising and falling from intense joy to total despair within seconds, their keyboard conversations digressing into baseball trivia, coarse humor, and personal revelations. Following the thread is like being at the game, immersed in the silence of the crowd, except that you hear more.

I experienced the real thing last Saturday, sitting twenty rows back behind home plate in Toronto, surrounded by empty seats (there were only 13,000 in a stadium that holds 50,000), when a fellow about half my age slipped into a seat in front of me. He was wearing a green jersey over a yellow tee shirt and a green-and-gold cap -- the telltale signs of an Athletic Supporter. "A's fan?" I yelled. "You bet," he said. "I came down yesterday on the train from Montreal for last night's game and today's." And off we were, for a couple of hours, two strangers lost in a thread of our own, knotted together by our undying love of the greatest game and our curious affection for twenty-five anonymous ballplayers.

REFERENCES

Lewis, Michael. Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2003.