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1. Tuesday. Tuesday. Tuesday. The day that time forgot. Bill Davie croons these words at the top of every Tree House Concert. Tonight, what was I to do? Bill's weekly 7:00 Tree House Concert would air at the same time as the middle and finishing innings of Game 6 of the World Series. Which do I prefer? Which do I care more about? What should I do?
Well, I just created a false dilemma. For me, the World Series and tuning in to a Tree House Concert do not have equal value. I care way more about watching and listening to Bill.
So, at 7:00, I muted Game 6, tried to keep half an eye on it, and relied on text messages, especially from Byrdman, to alert me if I wasn't paying attention to a crucial moment in the game.
I snapped to baseball attention when Byrdman texted me a message of outrage.
The Ray's pitcher, Blake Snell, had been mowing down the Dodgers. It was the bottom of the sixth inning. Snell had struck out nine Dodgers. He'd only given up two hits, the second one being a single to the Dodgers' #9 hitter, catcher Austin Barnes, with one out in the bottom of the sixth inning.
Allow me to put this post on pause for a moment. I'll try to keep this interruption brief.
Many baseball teams, chief among them, the Rays, rely heavily, maybe exclusively on analytics, the interpretation of data, to make decisions about how long a pitcher stays in a game, what batters they want to hit against certain pitchers, and countless other decisions.
I might be overstating what I'm about to write, but here goes: a gospel truth of the analytics approach to baseball is that when a pitcher faces a batter for the third time in a game, the hitter is at an advantage. It's why, if you follow baseball at all, you see so many starting pitchers being taken out of a game in the fifth or sixth inning.
So, when Austin Barnes singled, the next batter was Mookie Betts, the Dodgers' lead off batter, and he would be facing Blake Snell for the third time. He'd struck out the first two times he faced him. So did the next two Dodgers in the batting order, Corey Seager and Justin Turner.
After Austin Barnes singled, Rays manager Kevin Cash came out to the mound.
Cash decided to go by the analytics, the numbers, probabilities, averages, data, and the gospel truth of what happens when a pitcher faces hitters for the third time.
He decided to pull Blake Snell.
Wait a second. Did he really, in this moment, at this juncture in the game, decide? I might be wrong, but I think Kevin Cash had made this decision long before this moment in the game occurred. I think he was following a data-driven plan, a plan that, by the way, worked far more often than if failed for the Rays over the course of the 2020 season.
He pulled Blake Snell and brought Nick Anderson into the game to face Mookie Betts.
Numbers, averages, probabilities, analytics, spreadsheets, and calculations reveal abstract truths. They don't assess at the details of particular moments. These abstract measurements did not and could not take into account the unmeasurable factors at play in the bottom of the sixth inning with one out.
They can't measure Blake Snell's courage, will, determination, confidence, nor the psychological advantage he might have gained by having struck out Betts, Seager, and Turner twice already.
The analytics can't measure the emotional support the other Rays were giving Blake Snell, cannot measure their belief in him, and cannot measure how that belief translates into alertness, quick responses, and sharper play in the field.
So, I know that many of us older guys who have been watching baseball for a long time tend to think (and maybe believe) that intangible, unmeasurable factors are at play in, say, a pitcher's performance and that factors like emotion, courage, will, determination, inspiration, and psychological advantage might transcend what the numbers say.
But, Rays' manager Kevin Cash whole heartedly subscribes to the idea that the numbers, the analytics are more reliable because they remove the emotion and subjectivity out of the game plan, out of determining what to do in any given situation.
Pulling Blake Snell didn't work. Reliever Nick Anderson wasn't sharp. He immediately surrendered a double to Mookie Betts and, later, Austin Barnes scored when Anderson uncorked a wild pitch. Betts scored on a fielder's choice and, later in the game, Betts iced the Dodgers' win with a home run.
The final score: Dodgers 3, Rays 1.
I'm unwilling to say that the outcome of this game was solely a result of Cash's decision to pull Blake Snell.
The Rays put runners on base in the first couple of innings and stranded them. The whole complexion of this game would have changed if the Rays had scored three or four runs early instead of only one.
I felt a sense of inevitability when the Rays didn't capitalize on those early scoring chances. All series long, the Rays had left a lot of runners on base. They were struggling to score runs, unless a Ray homered. The gnawing in my gut after the second inning turned out to be prophetic. The Rays didn't score again after Randy Arozarena's first inning solo round tripper.
The Rays were what they had always been.
The Dodgers were the superior team and now, for the first time since 1988, are World Series champions.
2. I just made it seem as if my full attention was on the World Series and not on tonight's Tree House Concert. Well, tonight, as a way of continuing the celebration of Diane Schulstad's birthday (Oct. 26), Bill tonight's concert featured both Bill Davie and Kat Eggleston. Bill performed from his Word Shed, also known as the studio of Vitamin Audio, and also known as the Tree House in Shoreline, WA. Kat performed from Vashon Island Books, an independent bookstore in Vashon, WA. Performing together fulfilled Diane's wish that her two favorite singer/songwriters and two best friends would give a shared concert.
It took a little while at the top of the show for Bill and Kat to untangle some technological knots related to Facebook, ZOOM, and pushing the right buttons and other things. I enjoyed watching them work it out, but, as they did so, I paid closer attention to Game 6, muted, closer attention to the action I described above.
I had never seen Kat Eggleston perform and am unfamiliar with her work. I loved her songs and loved hearing her play and sing. Her songwriting is tight, intelligent, vivid, and stirring. She sings her lyrics with beauty and clarity and I loved her guitar playing.
Even better, she and Bill share deep mutual respect for each other and expressed touching appreciation for one another's work and, even though they weren't in the same room, a most comfortable and casual chemistry existed between them as they talked with each other and listened to one another's stories via ZOOM.
Both Bill and Kat played songs with Diane in mind, either fulfilling requests, or, in Bill's case, performing songs written about Diane and their deep friendship and marriage.
At the poetry break, Bill read poems for Diane, including Herman Hess's "Stages" and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's, "The Children's Hour", a poem Diane's father recited to her nightly. I was especially struck by Kat's reading of "Beauty as a Shield" by Elsie Robinson.
To enhance my enjoyment of this concert, I mixed myself two hot buttered rums, flavored with nutmeg, allspice, brown sugar, cinnamon, and butter. It's the most aggressively flavorful hot buttered rum I've ever mixed. I loved it. I'm especially happy that I'll always associate this tasty and warming drink with hearing Bill and Kat perform tonight in what was an enchanting and moving Tree House Concert.
3. Earlier in the day, I finished what I had started on Monday: I watched the last hour of The Case of the Three Sided Dream, a documentary movie about jazz musician Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Kirk was obsessed with sound, whether the sounds of musical instruments or the sounds of screeching tires or wind blowing through trees. His devotion to sound and to the deep history of African and African-American music informed his genius as a composer and multi-instrumentalist and inspired him to teach himself to play more than one instrument at the same time.
If you watch this movie, you'll learn that Rahsaan Roland Kirk would not let either his blindness nor his later in life paralysis deter him from becoming one of jazz music's most innovative, passionate, and learned figures. He died at 42 years old in 1977 after suffering a second stroke. Not only did he leave behind a prolific outpouring of music, he also had a profound effect on fellow musicians, to me, most notably Ian Anderson whose career as a flute player with Jethro Tull was inspired by Kirk's playing of the flute and his eclectic styles.
Here's a limerick by Stu:
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