Yet another literary questionnaire, this one from Lance Phillips for his Here Comes Everybody interview blog. I’m not going to answer all the questions here – just a couple under the “William Burroughs First-One’s-Free” rule – to give you a taste of what I’ll be sending to Lance. Here is one:

 

What is something/someone non-"literary" you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues?   Why do you read it/them?

 

I’ve been a reader of the Baseball Register literally for decades & a deep reader of baseball statistics since the Giants moved to San Francisco when I was 11 years old. I love baseball rather the way I do comic strips in the newspaper – because I live a reasonably stressful life & it’s valuable to have some interests that patently “mean nothing,” even tho they really do. Both connect me to habits from my childhood – and that in itself is also a worthy justification.

 

Baseball statistics have been a more conservative field even than School o’ Quietude poetics, yet in recent years stats – especially the “major” widely recognized stats – have been undergoing dramatic change. Were he to return to life, my grandfather would be startled to see pitchers being gauged by their WHIP numbers – walks plus hits per innings pitched – or to discover that on-base percentage has become nearly as important as batting average, which it may soon eclipse. Not to mention OPS, which is on-base percentage plus slugging percentage. The new stats for hitters only accentuate how much better a hitter Barry Bonds has become than any other player since at least Ted Williams.

 

These new numbers come out of the sabermetrics, the use of statistics to analyze anything about baseball that might be counted & measured. While sabermetrics has been around for over 20 years, it has only been in the past five years or so that some baseball teams have actually begun to use the new methods to make key decisions as to personnel. Although sabermetricians like Bill James are sometimes treated in the media as supernerds seriously in need of a life, their application of some basic analytic tools to something like baseball strikes me as the sort of thing we ought to be thinking about with many endeavors in contemporary life – and I definitely include poetry.