Being A Bit More Social
A thank you to my readers. What you do is not lost on me. Beyond a perhaps catchy title1, my Substack has no label, no shape, no place, and I am a nobody. You read me blind. And yet you trust yourself and your judgment and evidently find value. It is an extraordinary act of independence and spirit.
Because this Substack counts for nothing, you also get nothing from it beyond the actual reading of it. You don’t get to tell your friends the next day that you read me. On the surface it seems a waste of time. I write, you read, and it ends there. We do not interact. We are then wholly lacking in the one thing that reading amateur Substacks generally has over the experience of reading accredited writers. There is not the aspect of interaction that can make them more fun.
Lurkers make the world go round, and I am not looking to pressure anybody. The “likes” have brought tremendous support, and I don’t want you to feel like you are now being perversely punished for them and are being called out. But I invite any and all to ask me questions. Thanks to you, I no longer have to toil without recognition; you deserve the same opportunity and respect.
I am paranoid about being wrong about things, and this is why my analyses and characterizations err on the side of being overly detailed. Please don’t let that fool you into believing that I never am wrong about things, however, or that I carry all of this information around in my head. The edifice has cracks, and you should not be intimidated. I invite comments. I am looking to have a relationship with you, and it must be a two-way street.
I know that Joe Posnanski told readers he would answer absolutely any questions they had. From his perch of achievement and security, almost masochistically, “have at it,” he seemed to being saying. The more excruciating the question, the better.
That is not me! I cannot make a pretense of security. I am the guarded and private type. Not to speak out of both sides of my mouth, but I have certainly suffered questions as often as I have enjoyed them in my life.
So, the way we’ll do this is, ask your questions by private message. If they are of a nature that I think they’d be good for a public response, and you give me your permission, I’ll include them in a mailbag post. Otherwise, I will get back to you privately.
A prerequisite for any question, here or otherwise, is curiosity. If curiosity isn’t behind it, it’s not a real questions. The “wrong” question or the uncomfortable one that is rooted in curiosity is better than the perfunctory one.
Now, the questions that I generally like to answer are something different, and might be said to be neither too easy nor too hard.
Straight factual ones like which computer programs I use not only bore me but make me feel hemmed in and even violated, being the private person I am.2 In one sense they are easy, but not in another.
Then I’m not crazy about the “wrack your brain” kind of question, like “Who would you say were the three best left-handed pitchers in Mets history?” The problem with these questions is that the answers are only as good as the research. The inputs can be analyzed in a better or worse way, but you never finish your answer in a better and different direction than where you started. Discovery in the answering is limited. School was full of those kinds of questions, and I hated school.
As usual, I don’t know how to conclude. If we go with “tell ‘em what you told ‘em,” I suppose I should be humble enough to just repeat my thanks. I am truly appreciative and humbled.
If I had to do it again, I think I would call it Baseball Associations, as that is most true to the endeavor. Mathematical skill is not a part of my identity, and I have the transcript to prove it. The title is not entirely wide of the mark, and over time, even if it doesn’t conform to everybody’s idea of it, I have come to realize that I do have a deep mathematical interest of sorts.
Hemmed in because not wanting to lie, but maybe not loving my answer. I am sometimes quizzed about what I eat and about daily routines and that kind of thing, and being a bachelor, those things can take a curious form. And, not being as strong- and independent-minded as my readers, my thought is, “Gee, if I knew I was going to be reporting on it, maybe I wouldn’t have done things in quite this way!” I believe Chuck Klosterman’s The Visible Man is pertinent here.