I Miss The HardBall Times

Yes, that daily paper that I discovered one time while searching for different baseball web pages has a special spot in my mind and soul. It had the originality of the classical newspaper, the smell of grass and hot dogs mixed with some scent of beer on the canvas of the ball rebounding from the bats and striking against the gloves, but went beyond with a kaleidoscope of angles and views I’ve never experienced before since I met baseball. The Hardball Times impressed me from the first line I read. It had a taste of those unforgettable Saturday afternoons when we isolated from everything to just move according baseball kinetics, the euphoric experience of being chosen to play when there were many guys who played very well, the exciting moment of looking for pieces of cardboard or even flat stones to set home plate and complete the diamond by placing every base, the frightening moment at the sunset when our parents came to tell us that was all and we kept playing asking for finish the inning. There were very well documented stories, deep essays, interesting reports, but also a lot of memories, short stories and a lot of the human side of baseball from the fans point of view, from their relationship with players through the fugacity of a ballgame or the emotion of a broadcast. That was the kind of writing I was looking for a long time. Of course I enjoy the statistics, the technical analysis and other articles about baseball, but that originality coming from the first time someone knew the game, the surprise of knowing that all those sports heroes also feel the monster of fear when they perform at the bottom of the ninth inning with a runner on third base meaning losing the game, the nostalgic images invading the mind when the guy, or the girl remembers that specific time when they enjoyed an afternoon at the ballpark and at the same time shared three hours with their fathers fro the first time in years. I couldn’t believe I have found such a page, such a treasure, such a piece of a museum.

I left the page and returned to it most of ten times the day I discovered it. I just wanted to prove myself I wasn’t dreaming. When I kept visiting the page for a whole week I convinced it was for real, so I couldn’t stop reading all the articles and choosing the ones I would translate into Spanish. Little by little, while enjoying the readings and telling myself I still couldn`t believe I had found that kind of gem I had imagined for so long, sure in my more deepest thoughts I dreamed about creating a page like The Hardball Times. Now I had it in front of me I couldn’t stop revisiting it searching for new articles. When I wrote to the page coordinator he told me it was ok, that I could send him any piece of story about baseball, so they could evaluate it to see if it had the potential to be published. I got very impressed when they told me they also accepted fiction. I finished a short story I was working on and send it to them and for my surprise it qualified to be published, I was ecstatic. One of the first articles I read had to do with a girl who wrote about her Dad while he was ill in a hospital and how his passion for baseball and the Yankees had helped them to confront those hard days of disease and bad news. Each one of their memories going together to the ballpark, talking about the players’ stats or attitude on the field, discussing about the manager’s strategies at the end of the game; or listening to the broadcast of the games on the radio, the girl brought all her baseball cards and leaned against the radio the of the player who was batting, and also her fathers’ old ones to compare with players from the pasta as Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford or Mickey Mantle. All those remembrances somehow matched with my own experiences, so at a specific point in the text I could see myself as a character in that story. I had never seen a book, magazine, blog, with such an intensity and emotional strength that could transport back and forth in your baseball dreams.

I recognize Fangraphs is a tremendous analytical baseball page or blog, there you can find very original, poignant, punching articles that dissect and build the game at any possible or impossible configuration, according to conservative or eclectic points of view. The universe of very different points of view makes of Fangraphs a place where you can go to reinvent yourself about how connect o relate the past and the present of baseball, how the last changes have affected the fluency of the game, to learn about observing the many positive aspects still remain in baseball as the presence of such players as Madison Bumgarner, Mookie Betts, José Altuve, or Clayton Kershaw, all of them capable of hitting and inside the park homer, scoring the go ahead run in the ninth inning by sprinting from second base with a grounder to the hot corner, making a fantastic defensive catch by clashing against the outfield fence or going down through the dugout’s steps, all this shows us that baseball keeps being a great sport. Looking at those different opinions about past and present baseball, the pros and cons of the two realities, how they can be the topic of interesting discussion that can provide very positive conclusions, the issues for revamping the game without hurting its essence; observing the intensity and depth of all those essays or reflections coming from the most sensitive pieces of family or friendship bubbling in the writing of experts and simple fans, I’ve come to understand how The Hardball Times has made me recover the optimism on the coming of better times for the game by respecting both its basic rules while adapting the changes of modernity to the fluency and dynamics of the original game. Through the pages of THT I have understood that it’s really possible, those stories, those analysis, those reflections painted on my mind the landscape, the kaleidoscope of better days for baseball, no matter all that involution some modifications have brought to the game, no matter how specialization excess has made many pitchers look like statues when a bunt, grounder or popup is hit to the mound, there is still a lot to enjoy inside a baseball diamond.

The kind of intimateness enclosed at articles like Johnny Antonelli and Me, written by Pete Dreier, discover all those scenery where a fan can write a letter or make a telephone call, and get the big chilling of getting a response letter or call. You get mute for a while, start to talk like if you were a two-year-old child and hopefully you realize that your childhood baseball hero is as considerate and good guy as you always dreamed. Reading that Dreier got even an invitation to Antonelli’s home made me feel a little envious and immediately recalled I also had been very fortunate for having the chance of meeting one of my baseball idols when I wrote the biography of Dámaso Blanco, third baseman of the Navegantes del Magallanes in the Venezuelan winter league. So I could feel all that emotion of Dreier when he talked for hours with Antonelli about baseball and personal issues, it was like watching a game but from what’s inside the ball player’s mind. Those different focuses, those distinct distances of appreciating how baseball can disrupt in a life sometimes from the pertinence of the knowledge, sometimes from the curiosity for the mystery of a ball bouncing between the odors of green grass and the plasticity of orange clay. That was a sensation I’ve never felt in my whole life as a reader and writer of baseball stories. I got petrified while reading that piece of poetry written by Dave Parker and Dave Jordan about the parade of emblematic songs from the 1960s and 1970s that landscaped Parker’s experiences about the time when he was a vendor at Crosley Field in his native Cincinnati through his wonderful times with his teammates in the “We Are Family” team of the Pittsburgh Pirates that won the 1979 World Series championship, through his bitter moments because of the Pittsburgh Drug Trials at mid 1980s. An immense roller coaster that really took all of my breath from my lungs and left me floating in the air. As a consequence of the quarantine applied to control the spreading of the coronavirus, the Fangraphs web page or blog coordinators, decided to close The Hardball Times. At first they said the closure would last until MLB got back to normality or something similar. So I understood when the section remained closed during the whole 2020 year. But when the year 2021 arrived and MLB started to announce they were going to return to that kind of normality by recovering the whole schedule of 162 games per team, and even allowing the presence of some percentage of people in the stands, I immediately thought that it could also mean that The Hardball Times would be back. Then it finished the spring training, came Opening Day and no news or signs about The Hardball Times appeared in Fangraphs. Now we are approaching to the middle of the season and there isn’t any signal that wonderful section will reopen at Fangraphs. So the only way of enjoying it again is by that nostalgic reading of all those punching articles filled with a very original style.

Alfonso L. Tusa C. June 3, 2021.