Yy usual 5-to-7-day output scramble will now look vastly more competent, ah, well, complete. Not actually be smarter, mind you, but radiate the comforting glow of effort by someone who has their temporal ducks in a suspiciously photogenic row.
Improvement? No. But the illusion of improvement? Practically Nobel-worthy. I'm already enjoying this change.
I'm not sure how to parse all this, but I really appreciate the mental image of temporal ducks in a photogenic row. Sounds great for my Star Trek themed, very slow Sunday morning.
Been toiling with a new client, ingesting their documentation, and improving it with a Hitchhiker's Guide twist, so the next person needs less caffeine and weeps less.
It is bleeding into other aspects, but it's my pleasure to help with your Sunday morning imagery!
I first encountered Forth on a TI-99/4A, complete with that magnificent expansion box that looked like industrial HVAC equipment. Hearing me complain about TI Extended BASIC's glacial pace, my parents saw in one of my magazines that Forth was faster and bought it hoping I would find it helpful.
It was mind-bending but fascinating. I managed a few text adventures, some vaguely Pac-Man-esque clones, and a lingering sense that I was speaking a language from another dimension.
I've since forgiven my parents. Forth resurfaces now and then, usually when I reread Leo Brodie's thought-provoking Forth books, and I feel like I'm decoding the sacred texts of a minimalist cult. I came away thinking better, even if I've never completely caught up with the language.
Ah, how wonderful, to stumble upon lost Kerouac like this, tucked away not in some Yale archive but in the collection of Paul Castellano of all people, as if the road had detoured briefly through the Five Families. That it reads like a missing chapter from On the Road makes the find all the more mythic, like a Polaroid from a dream you forgot you had.
But this, for some reason, reminds me that Kerouac was also a devoted baseball mind. Not just a fan, but a proto-fantasy league commissioner before the term existed, meticulously tracking invented teams and players in private box scores. Kerouac, a fantasy baseball writer.
And he wasn't alone: Corso batted lines like fastballs, Ferlinghetti cheered from the dugout of City Lights, and Ginsberg, ever the cosmic catcher, enjoyed the sport. Baseball wasn't a pastime but a parallel Beat narrative, complete with innings, errors, and the occasional poetic balk and haiku.
Very cool! You lived down the street! And yes, Kerouac's turn toward health mainly counteracted the booze.
Oh, and another fun fact:
Kerouac once befriended a former minor league baseball player who'd also played college football. He encouraged the guy to try acting. In a roundabout way, we have Jack Kerouac to thank for Paul Gleason, one of the '80s movies' most memorable villains. (An interesting man in his own right.)
(There are enough quotes and parentheses in this reply to resemble a LISP program, sorry about that.)
Why your comment is being dragged down I think is best described by staring at The Torment of Saint Anthony. The creatures you see are the creatures here, fondling the arrows that point in the only direction they know.
movie pitch: Kerouac has some debt that falls on Castellono's people to collect. Kerouac tries to get out of it by convincing them to take a story instead of cash. They lock him up in a room somewhere until he writes the story. Movie is basically two or more people talking in a room, or just Kerouac seen talking with whoever is in the room, off screen.
Not far beyond. I'm old, so second-hand it seems that the entire reason he toured to do readings (at least in the 80s and 90s) was to stay with locals who had young male children. I know two horror stories myself.
It was sort of a hippie/counterculture/futurist/Berkeley thing to let pedophiles openly operate and attack anyone as nosy lame perverts who would accuse them of being a problem, even after multiple arrests. See the Breendoggle.
There was a similar attitude in some French intellectual circles in the seventies and eighties.
For example I know Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre were involved.
Having known several victims of CSA and some of their abusers, I think many people would be surprised at the amount of effort and planning that goes into ensuring access to a pool of potential victims. Abstractly it's a supply chain problem and is treated as such by the abusers.
> The signatories to the January 1977 petition included Gabriel Matzneff (the petition's author), Jean-Louis Bory, Pierre Hahn [eo; fr; ia; pt], Jean-Luc Hennig [ar; fr; ru], Guy Hocquenghem, Françoise d'Eaubonne, René Schérer, Pierre Guyotat, Louis Aragon, Francis Ponge, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, Philippe Sollers, Patrice Chéreau, Bernard Kouchner, François Châtelet, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jean-François Lyotard.[6]
> Notably, the signatories did not include Michel Foucault,[6]: 16 Marguerite Duras, Hélène Cixous, or Xavière Gauthier [fr; sv], who all refused to sign the January petition.[5]
When I was a physics student at Oxford in 1983-86 I was a voracious reader and the Beats figured in that. Ginsberg travelled through Oxford for a day or two and gave some street performances. His nephew (Vincent?) was travelling with him, playing guitar IIRC. I must admit, I had my concerns at the time.
German Wikipedia conveniently left that part out and in the english Wikipedia you have to scroll quite a bit to read it mentioned.
"I said I've had many young affairs, [with those who were] 16, 17, or 18."
Still, it matters a bit to me, whether we are talking about consensual things or not. 16 year olds might be naive, but they are also not small children and usually capable of saying no. (Body language no, is also a no). So do those horror stories involve ignoring a "no" from Ginsberg towards a minor?
16 year olds might be naive, but they are also not small children and usually capable of saying no.
You can't generalize the ability to say no to 16 year olds. You also can't ignore the position of power a famous person might be in, or what grooming might have occurred (which is being alleged up thread). Morally, I hope this is obvious. Even legally, many jurisdictions have laws that recognize these nonviolent sexual offenses as illegal.
If a 16 year old cannot say no to unwanted advances, I would say education failed him very much in the first place.
"You also can't ignore the position of power a famous person might be in"
And no, I don't. I am also not a fan of grownup men going after boys in general.
Still, I do see a difference in men going after 16 year or 8 year old boys and how they approached them.
"horror story" is pretty strong language and implies certain things to me.
Precise use of language matters. Case in point, I am at a unconventional gathering right now and things happened, that were communicated as rape... so people wanted to take drastic action quickly. What happened? A "tantra" teacher giving massages and "solving blockages" of young (adult) women in their genital areas.
So they said yes to a massage and "healing" in general, but never said no afterwards, they just didn't realized what was happening. They met later and shared their stories and then things came to light.
So, definitely sexual abuse, but rape?
Well their body was raped in a way as sexual things happened that they did not consent to. But the right term here is rather sexual abuse I believe. Because to me and most others, rape implies penetrating with the penis against their will. If you use the most strong word for everything, what word will you use for actual violent forced sex? That just creates confusion that can has drastic consequences.
(As it did, with people wanting to take drastic violent action assuming something way worse. In the end the guy was banished, but no criminal charges were brought up as that would have required the victims going to police which they didn't wanted to).
> Still, I do see a difference in men going after 16 year or 8 year old boys and how they approached them.
Agreed.
> If a 16 year old cannot say no to unwanted advances, I would say education failed him very much in the first place.
It's not a matter of education. Mature adults have trouble saying no (to all sorts of things) depending on the social situation, and the power relationship is a significant factor, which weighs against 16 year olds who not only have little power but are raised to trust and obey adults. Look at all the people who couldn't say 'no' to their institution supporting rapists. Consider adult female soldiers, for whom sexual assault is a relatively widespread problem (at least in the US military).
Can we please not advocate in defense of statutory rape of minors here. Your discussion is consideration of defense of a predator's documented acts. He gets plenty of whitewashing support already.
This is a disingenuous request. We can point to any sentence we think illustrates it and you will simply say “no that is not what it means” and we’re right back where we started.
The other person (and I) believe what you wrote whitewashes the issue. You obviously think it does not. There is nothing we can point to that would make you go “oh damn you’re right.“
This is the difference between being attracted to prepubescents, and being attracted to minors who have undergone puberty:
Prepubescents do not have the physical sexual maturity that human beings should be attracted to. By definition. Being attracted to them shows a profound disturbance in normal brain function.
Being attracted to a 16 or 17 year old shows much, much less deviation from normal human sexual behaviour. Again, by definition. Going through puberty = becoming sexually mature. Now, notice how i said “being attracted to” not “hanging around the local school trying to pick up minors.” It’s illegal for a reason. Kids need to be protected from much older adults who know how to exploit and abuse them.
Maybe if you only look at them, but once you hear them speak you know they're kids and any attraction goes away. Same with university students.
Just listen to them talk for a minute and you won't attracted to them. Even better, let them have a presentation about maths or some project they've done. You can sit there and attempt to keep a polite face and not cover your eyes. It doesn't matter how smart they are, at least usually: even the smarts ones are still kids and therefore completely crazy.
Oh, I certainly don‘t want to debate what counts as abuse. I just like to form an opinion on Ginsberg, so some clarification what exactly "horror stories" mean here, would be helpful.
>16 year olds might be naive, but they are also not small children and usually capable of saying no. (Body language no, is also a no). So do those horror stories involve ignoring a "no" from Ginsberg towards a minor?
Bruh you're justifying statutory rape due to a highly unjust power imbalance.
Also have you met a 16-year-old in real life? They are children.
I am not justifying anything, I merely said there is a difference to me and I like to know more before forming a final opinion, see my shared anecdota as for why.
The post above where I replied literally said:
"young male children"
But are 16 year olds really "young male children"?
I don't think so, but stating it like this makes it a much, much worse accusation against Ginsberg in my eyes.
16 is the age of consent in most of the US (by land area at least). Not that US laws around sex are necessarily good policy, but it reflects that there is no broad societal consensus on whether or not the 16-year-olds have the ability to consent.
If I -- someone in their mid 40's -- had a friend my age who had a string of sex partners that were are 16, 17, 18 and gained access to those individuals through a network constructed from fame and friends, they would cease to be my friend because that is pretty disgusting, laws be-damned.
(and you seem to not factor in that many statutory rape laws have age gap determinants)
I'm quite sympathetic to what you're saying, what he did was very creepy regardless of legality. I merely take issue with the idea that 16 year olds cannot consent - most people seem to think they can if the legal standards is to be used a rough indicator of societal consensus, and I can also remember being 16. That doesn't mean I think it's OK for people to molest children or that adults structuring their lives around access to teenagers or children isn't likely criminal predatory behavior.
This is such a worthless and pedantic hill to die on, and one that seems to reveal a profound lack of empathy. Not everyone comes from the same background, not everyone had a good start free from abuse, and some 16 year olds are far more vulnerable legally, societally, and mentally than even their slightly older peers.
With the benefit of being quite a bit older I’m increasingly struck by just how young and frankly childlike teens are. The age of consent isn’t perfect, it’s a compromise and an exercise in drawing lines, but that doesn’t make it worthless or indicate that you should “well actually” people who are abusing them.
Why not read Virginia Giuffre’s book about her experiences for more insight into something you should frankly listen and learn about a lot more before you lecture.
Then what are we debating? Should we debate if 3 murders is as bad as 5 murders while we’re at it? Or if stabbing someone to death is better/worse than shooting someone to death?
You’re treating this like some cold academic exercise or game of “what if” when it is a very real thing that happens to people literally every day. We are talking about a person who actually did this - an act that you yourself consider “bad.”
Missunderstandings it seems. My goal was to find out what exactly he did.
"We are talking about a person who actually did this"
Because I still don't know what he did exactly. To me approaching a 16 year old is in a very different ballpark than approaching 8 year olds, but if it is the same to you, we should indeed stop right here.
You are really going to regret having this comment history one day I guarantee it.
As for your question in the other comment chain: Whitewashing/downplaying =/= justifying. We didn’t say you “justified” it. Though neither is a great look.
Have a good one dude. I’ve stomached all I can of this thread.
"You might have underestimated the degree to which defending child abusers might upset people?"
I underestimated how quickly people even here will engage in dishonest tactics like this. Anyone requesting fair trial for the witch is automatically a witch itself that should be burned as well.
That is not a climate where you can find out truth, but activly preventing it through invoking fear.
The fact that Ginsberg was involved with NAMBLA is creepy enough for me, to not wanting to engage with his works btw. and I did not so much defended him, but the concept that 16 year olds are not small children anymore. Still children, yes, but not "young children". There are 16 year olds who started a family already. Not ideal, sure, but putting all those in the same bucket as 8 year olds?
Unless you're OK with 16 year olds having sex with 50 year olds who have been given access to them because of their fame an accolades, as well as personal connections?
Yes, of course I’m okay with that. The power dynamic imbalance probably makes it even more interesting for the 50 year old. It’s legal, I’m not going to judge what some old man is getting off on.
Even the most conservative societies on earth still have the legal age of consent be post puberty. Frankly I don’t think any group could successfully lobby for no age of consent.
Ah, Borland’s IDE! An absolute delight. I’ve yet to find anything modern that matches it. Sure, nostalgia turns everything syrupy, but I actively hunt for excuses to use Free Pascal just to fire up that interface. Okay, fine—I like Pascal too. You caught me.
I also use Sam and Acme from Plan 9 (technically from the excellent plan9port), but let’s be honest: those aren’t IDEs. They’re editors. Tools that let me think instead of wrestle.
There’s a lot we could (and probably should) learn from the old TUIs. For example, it’s perfectly acceptable, even heroic, to spawn a shell from the File menu and run something before returning. Seems people are afraid of losing style points with such grievous actions.
And the keybindings! So many of those classic TUIs adopted WordStar’s sacred keystrokes. They’re burned into my muscle memory so thoroughly that using EMACS feels like trying to type with oven mitts. For years, joe (with the blessed jstar alias) was my editor of choice.
Anyway! Time to boot the Dr. DOS VM, spin the wheel of Advent of Code, and be nostalgically inefficient on purpose.
One thing about the "professional" DOS software (and you can see it in things like Emacs - eight modes and constantly shifting) was you were basically expected to live in it - it had the full attention of the computer and the user.
You were also expected to learn it; which meant you became "one with the machine" in a way similar to an organ player.
I remember watching Fry's Electronics employees fly through their TUI, so fast that they'd walk away while it was still loading screens, and eventually a printout would come out for the cage.
About twenty years ago I did a consulting gig for a government agency that wanted to create a web interface for their CSRs to replace the green screens they had been using. The long time employees hated it because they had deep muscle memory for most tasks on the green screens and could get far ahead of the screen refresh. With the web UI, not only could they not type ahead, but many of the workflows now required use of the mouse.
The agency was happy to have something new and modern but more important to them was that new employees could be trained on the system far faster. Even though there were a small number of long term employees, they had high turnover with the frontline CSRs, which made training a major issue for them.
Agreed. I do a lot my writing in Typora which, in addition to a full-screen mode, also has other "Focus" style features which get rid of distracting UI/UX elements, etc. so you can concentrate on the task at hand.
Even normal windows applications used to be like this (outside of crashing). I could alt-tab, type stuff and click where I know a button would show before I even saw the application window. It never missed a key stroke or type into the wrong window. Nowadays you load a webpage and start typing, and half you text appears and then the other half just never shows up.
Paying at Best Buy was torture - watching the cashier move their mouse around (on the slanted mousing surface they were given so they couldn't just let go) and click the buttons, going through 3 or 4 screens and waiting for them to load vs. using the keyboard. They would have been done with me and on to the next customer in half the time.
They are control key sequences that are arranged so that a typist need never remover their fingers from the keyboard. The control key was to the left of the A so easily pressed with you left little finger.
You had full control of the cursor without the need for dedicated arrow keys or page up and down keys. It worked on a normal terminal keyboard. I first used it on an Apple ][ with a Z80 add-on that ran CP/M.
That's true-ish. But the thing about Wordstar is that it is a word processor not a text editor. Other word processors don't make this so easy. Also the standard keybindings for cursor control in Emacs are much less ergonomic.
^ = control
In Wordstar: ^S/^D moves left/right; ^E/^X moves up/down; ^A/^F word left/right; ^R/^C moves page Up/Down
Notice that all of those use only the left hand. In Wordstar almost everything to do with cursor control uses only the left hand.
Emacs is mnemonic ^b for left (back), ^f for right (forward), ^n for next line, ^p for previous line, etc. You need both hands and the keys are all over the keyboard.
This useful, but it also seems like a very comparable feature set to editors like Emacs and Vim. So I'd still love to hear from someone who has the background to do a direct comparison, especially if they prefer WordStar.
Vim was never a steep learning curve for me; more of a gentle slope. But then again, I cut my teeth on ed, and when I met sed, it felt like a revelation. On DOS, I even used edlin, a kind of ed junior with training wheels and a sadistic sense of "functional."
You have to understand: my first DOS machine was a Tandy 1000, acquired before I had a driver’s license. It was upgraded over the years and not retired until the grunge was well underway and I had already been married and divorced.
MS-DOS’s edit had WordStar keybindings; Ctrl-S to move back, Ctrl-E to move up, and so on. My dad "brought" home a copy of WordStar from work, and oh, the things that trio, WordStar, me, and a dot matrix printer conspired to create.
Borland carried those keybindings into Turbo Pascal, which I learned in college, having finally escaped the Fortran 77 gulag that was my high school’s TRS-80 Model III/IV lab. The investment into the Apple II lab didn't happen until AFTER they gave me my exit papers at a spring awards ceremony.
Why do I still prefer these tools?
Because they’re what I know. They don’t get in my way. We have history, a better and longer history that I have with my first wife. Those keybinds helped me write my first sorting algorithms, my first papers on circuit design, and the cover letters that got me my first jobs. They’re not just efficient. They’re familiar. They’re home.
Thanks for sharing! (And to be clear, that's totally a great reason!) I wasn't familiar with these bindings and was curious to hear more about them, both the history and the subjective preference for them are both interesting to me.
> So I'd still love to hear from someone who has the background to do a direct comparison
Can do.
> especially if they prefer WordStar.
I don't. I dislike both WS and Vi.
Vi (and its variants, I am covering all of them here) is a Unix tool. In the 1980s, Unix was big and expensive, and usually ran on boxes so expensive they had to be shared. So, mainly found in academia and research.
WordStar is a CP/M tool which became for a while took that dominance to DOS.
It ran on affordable standalone microcomputers you owned and didn't have to share with anyone else.
What they share is that they are designed for keyboards before things like cursor keys, Insert/Overtype, PageUp/PageDown, Home/End were added. They do not assume theys; they expect just letters, a few shift/meta/ctrl type keys, and nothing else.
So, they redefine all these functions with letters and letter combinations.
So, cryptic, idiosyncratic, hard to learn, but once you learned, fast and powerful. Touch-typists loved them, because your fingers stayed on the home row and you never needed to reach off the alpha-block and into the extra keys. (The ones that are a different colour on the classic IBM Model F and Model M keyboard.)
Vi is the Unix flavour of touch-typist's UI, for those from universities and research and maybe big rich corporations.
WordStar is the DOS flavour of touch-typist's UI, for those who bought or built their own computers and installed and ran their own software on inexpensive machines.
In its time, WS keys were everywhere in DOS. The cracks started showing when WordPerfect took the DOS wordprocessing crown, with its even weirder function-key driven UI, which really favoured the Model F layout (f-keys down the side) and contained built-in copy protection in the form of colourful keyboard templates.
Then IBM CUA came along and mostly swept that away. I was there and using DOS then and I much prefer CUA.
Same functional role, but different commercial markets.
I've used all three and I think it's just a matter of what you're used to. I mostly use vi but have no problem switching to the other two schemes when needed. But maybe that's just me not having strong preferences. I know some people who have trouble switching from Chrome to Firefox and those are practically identical.
There's a lot from Plan 9 I love, but I couldn't find Acme's mouse-dependent UI acceptable in the least. I can't deal with any UI that requires precise aim when I have to use it hour after hour, and I'd hate to imagine using it if I had an actual disability.
Most days, you’ll find me in sam, regexing my way to bliss like some monastic scribe with a terminal fetish. When I feel the urge to let AI stroke my curiosity or scaffold a long template like magic, I cut, paste, and drop it into a local or remote model like a well-trained familiar.
But I’ve also written larger applications and, frankly, a ridiculous amount of documentation in Acme. That 9P protocol was my backstage pass: every window, every label, was accessible and programmable. I could, for example, hook into a save event and automatically format, lint, and compile ten or fifteen years before most IDEs figured out how to fake that kind of integration.
Sure, the system demands precision. It doesn't coddle. But for me, that was the feature, not the bug. The rigor sharpened my thinking. It taught me to be exact or be silent, forcing me to pause when I usually would not.
Did you really use vi on DOS in 1991? I don’t remember Elvis being easy to find back then, and I don’t think it was a TSR either, so the compiler couldn’t be spawned in the background like it was with the Borland IDEs.
Almost every C bedroom programmer I knew had a cracked copy of Turbo C / Turbo C++ because they were so modern and convenient. DJGPP was a nightmare in comparison, it filled up the small HDDs of the time, created large executables, and the process of opening edit.com, leaving the editor, running gcc, and then going back to edit.com was tedious.
The few brave souls using DJGPP would usually end up running Slackware from around 1993. This was a step up from bolting an awkward POSIX runtime onto a monotasking system, as DJGPP did on DOS.
DJGPP was a stellar idea, basically the WSL / MinGW of the days, but the limitations of DOS prevented it to shine compared to the Borland IDEs.
It's because Tcl, like SQLite, operates on a peculiar metaphysical principle: everything is a string until proven otherwise, and even then, it's probably still a string.
Also, D. Richard Happ, who we owe thanks for SQLite, was and perhaps still sits on the TCL Board (I may be wrong about that, but Happ holds significance in the TCL community).
In my mind:
Tcl is the quietly supportive roommate who keeps making coffee and feeding LISP-like functionality until the world finally notices its genius.
Lua sits across the table, sipping espresso with a faintly amused expression, wondering how everyone got so emotionally entangled with their configuration files.
Lua is one of the easiest configuration file formats I've had the pleasure of working with. Readable. Has comments. Variables. Conditionals.
Everyone (including me): "oh no, no, you don't want a full Turing complete language in your configuration file format"
Also Everyone: generating their configuration files with every bespoke templating language dreamed of by gods and men, with other Turing complete languages.
You could solve this with a capabilities permissions system. That way the config files can be written in the same language but have configured permissions that are different from the rest of the programming language. So you could restrict the config files from resources like threads, evaling source, making network requests and whatnot. Come to think of it you could even probably section off parts of the language behind capabilties such that the config files could be configured to be a not-Turing complete subset of the language.
TCL 9 brought some welcome string improvements, and things run faster overall. But in my case, it's hard to say how well that's actually played out, partly because I haven't done the work to find out. My TCL scripts and apps work well enough to allow me to be lazy about them.
Performance is up, but so is my inertia. So while TCL 9 could be transformative, for now it remains a white paper I've skimmed, not a revolution I've implemented.
I think TCL does an opaque thing, everything "is" a string, but if you don't use it as a string, it's actually stored in some optimized format. Then it converts back to a string on demand
I still prefer Lua personally. Their type system is easy for me to understand
Yes, the pitch clock and the relievers' requirement to face at least three batters in an inning have done a very good job of handling game times.
At some point, as the game continues to evolve, I think we'll see an upward swing in game times in the future, but I don't believe it will trend as high as it has before. I think that sub-three-hour games will remain the sweet spot going forward.
Now, for sub-two-hour games, this is one I wish I could watch and re-watch
In the middle of a pennant race, Addie Joss pitched a 74-pitch perfect game against Ed Walsh, who had already won 39 games that year. The game kept Cleveland in the running for the pennant. Game time? 1:40 minutes. The minimum number of batters for a nine-inning game is 54, this game had 56.
Wouldn’t the minimum be 51? 932 =54, but if the team batting second is winning after the top of the 9th then they don’t need to play the bottom of the ninth, so subtract 3? Not a baseball person.
And if you have rain , they can call the game "complete" if the losing team had 5 half innings at bat. So that could be 28. Assume 27 outs and one home run by the home team.
The time between half-innings increases, so the radio and TV could play commercials on the broadcast. Pitching changes are longer, etc. You don't see it much at the game, but if you are one of the folks who used to listen to the game on the radio, at the game itself, you get a feel for how the flow of the game is affected by the broadcasts.
I haven't paid enough attention at baseball games. At hockey games, if you can see the scorekeeper, they have a lamp at the glass that will come on during a stopage to let the refs know it's time for a commercial (if you watch for this, you can get a jump on the crowd if you need a bathroom break or refreshments). You can usually predict a commercial timeout, they've got guidelines that are pretty consistently applied [1]
I meant to also say that the light doesn't go off until the commercial break is done, so they don't drop the puck before the broadcasters are ready. Typically an off-ice official holds a door open and stands in it to also signal not to start, if it looks like everyone is ready to go a bit early.
A summer afternoon, static on the radio, the low hum of an announcer calling balls and strikes like he’s reading scripture in a Midwest church. Baseball used to be stitched together with silence. You heard the game as much in the pauses as in the plays.
Then the voice came in. Once the game hit the airwaves, it slowed. Had to. The ball waited for the broadcast.
Out of the dead-ball fog came the home run. No more bunting, no more clever thefts of second. Now it was swing, admire, trot. Alongside the homers came the walks and the strikeouts. Fewer balls in play. More staring, less running. Time thickened, and the nature of the game was trending towards longer games.
World War II shaved minutes from the clock. With so many players overseas, the talent pool shrank. The games got shorter because they became simpler. When the talent came back, the games got longer, largely because, after 1947, the game was flooded with previously segregated talent and players who were returning from overseas.
In the 60s, pitchers took over. Dominance from the mound. ERAs dropped. Batting averages plummeted. In 1968 they called it the Year of the Pitcher, then called the rulebook to fix it. Scoring came back, and with it, longer games.
Television followed with commercial breaks and camera angles. The game had to pause for sponsors. The seventh-inning stretch now came with a soft drink.
In the 70s, the bullpen became a revolving door. Specialists. Situational matchups. Every pitching change added minutes. Coaches walked the mound like they were heading to confession.
And the game kept expanding. OPS rose. More runners meant more pitches. More strikeouts meant more throws. Every batter became a saga.
If you look at the graph, you can see a trend that matches well with changes in baseball. We could probably break down every high and low to describe the shift based on rules, personal changes, etc.
Then came the pitch clock. No more dawdling. No more meditative pacing between pitches. And now a reliever has to face at least three batters in an inning. No more one-pitch exits.
It’s not that baseball got lazy. It got layered, commercialized, optimized, and strategized, but it forgot about time management.
The graph shows an outline, with the trends representing a chapter in baseball history, which is very cool.
> It’s not that baseball got lazy. It got layered, commercialized, optimized, and strategized, but it forgot about time management.
This is why I can't stand modern basketball. Deliberate fouling in the last quarter is optimal and strategic as far as winning. I'm sure those extra commercial slots are enticing to the networks as well. But it's boring as hell when the last 5 minutes stretch out to an hour, and the final result now boils down to a lucky draw instead of skill. Any sense of fun has been lost.
You’re a wonderful writer. It made me curious enough to look at your previous comments. (Your comment about your grandma who baked was also like a wonderful short story but in fewer words.) Do you write books as well, by chance? Or a blog, or anything like that? Sorry to anyone if this seems weird. A simple upvote didn’t seem enough.
For a while, I was inflicting baseball history on the unsuspecting readers of Pitcher List[1], until the twin boulders of professional and personal life demanded I focus on pushing them.
One persistent frustration is that my writing voice never quite captured how I meant to express myself. So, this past year, I've been working (sometimes stubbornly) to close that gap, assuming I take the time to think and edit. Your kind words mean a lot.
Most days, pray for a recent sabbatical, I try to post a daily baseball history note[2]. I hope to resume this ritual after this weekend, assuming the stars (and schedules) stay in proper hyperdrive alignment and maintain the boulder automation.
As the chaos of my life dwindles, a blog, or book (or both) remains a possibility.
Ahh, yes. In college, the CS department used Turbo Pascal (hint, I'm old). My first programming gigs out of college were FORTRAN and COBOL. It's nice to see that they are still registering.
Now, time for a Metamucil and a nice nap before my standup.
Funny thing about ed: While it is still one of my most common commands, it is also my dad's name. So, I've spent my entire career regularly typing my father's name at work.
Yy usual 5-to-7-day output scramble will now look vastly more competent, ah, well, complete. Not actually be smarter, mind you, but radiate the comforting glow of effort by someone who has their temporal ducks in a suspiciously photogenic row.
Improvement? No. But the illusion of improvement? Practically Nobel-worthy. I'm already enjoying this change.