Baseball Toaster was unplugged on February 4, 2009.
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TV and more ...
1) using profanity or any euphemisms for profanity
2) personally attacking other commenters
3) baiting other commenters
4) arguing for the sake of arguing
5) discussing politics
6) using hyperbole when something less will suffice
7) using sarcasm in a way that can be misinterpreted negatively
8) making the same point over and over again
9) typing "no-hitter" or "perfect game" to describe either in progress
10) being annoyed by the existence of this list
11) commenting under the obvious influence
12) claiming your opinion isn't allowed when it's just being disagreed with
Years ago, I wrote about the value of backstory and character development in appreciating baseball:
... But I'm pretty sure the main thing that keeps me coming back to baseball is that I care about the characters. I've cared about the characters for more than 25 years. They are part of my life, and I care about just about everyone that makes an impression. And so many of them do - both major and minor characters.Having said all that three years ago, I want to point out that the reverse is also true. Any baseball game can be entertaining even if you don't know anything about the teams or the players. The game can also be dull, but the potential for quality is there with every pitch.Just the ones named Pedro alone could keep me occupied. Pedro Martinez. Pedro Astacio. Pedro Guerrero. Pedro Borbon. Pedro Borbon, Jr. If these guys are doing anything, whether pitching a shutout or using the disturbing but effective low-IQ defense, I care.
It's all about backstories. The Pedros have backstories. Kevin Brown has a backstory. Hiram Bocachica has a backstory. Jackie Robinson and Babe Ruth - all-time backstories. All the teams, from the Dodgers to the Devil Rays to the 1899 Cleveland Spiders, have backstories. The sport as a whole has its own collective backstory. And then, when these actors take the field - either at the ballpark in front of you, or on television, or in a book or newspaper clipping, you have all this set-up to appreciate the significance of everything they do.
Baseball is a stage, a movie set, a comic-book world in which all these characters enter and exit and live and die. As you begin to care about one character and watch his journey, it snowballs and you begin to care about others upon others. It is not waxing mystical or fantastical to say that it is a world filled with drama and comedy and exhilaration and heartbreak. It just is - in a deeper, more evolved sense than any movie honestly can ever offer.
What a movie offers ... for better or worse, is that it ends. Baseball doesn't.
Now, you can get into arguments about why baseball, as opposed to football or curling. That's not what this is about. You can take the above philosophy and apply it to any sport or to all sports.
I happen to pick baseball - not to the exclusion of all others, but certainly above all others - for the ballpark and the hot dog and the rhythm of the game and so many other things. But the game itself is the set dressing - perhaps the best set dressing in the world, but a backdrop nonetheless.
The addiction is to the characters. Nothing else assembles a more compelling cast than baseball does.
There is something for everyone to love about baseball. If you want to share that love with someone, and that person doesn't seem to care about double plays or hot dogs, then start telling stories about the people who play the game. Give them the opening minutes of the movie - the part before the plot thickens. Think of what just hearing the name Odalis Perez or Adrian Beltre or Jim Thome evokes. Each has a story. And the next big chapter in those stories will reveal itself at the ballpark tonight. With chapters upon chapters to follow.
No special effects. None needed. Give anyone the characters, and see if down the road, that routine grounder to second doesn't become poetry.
The reason I bring this up today is to pick a beef with some television fans, fans of any of the many serialized dramas on the air today: Lost, The Sopranos, Veronica Mars, you name it. I talk to people, I read some critics and some message boards, and find a disturbing preoccupation with guessing outcomes, weeks, months or years before the endings will come.
Some folks particularly gang up on Lost, trying to solve the mysteries of the island and its characters right now. Keep in mind that Lost is a huge success and probably is good to run from this, its second season, through at least three more, into the spring of 2009. Nevertheless, people want answers immediately. In particular, the editors, writers and readers of Entertainment Weekly devote hundreds and hundreds of words each week to sussing out the ultimate ending to a show that won't end for years. To me, they are threatening the golden goose with death by a thousand keystrokes.
What's even more disconcerting is the lack of faith some people have that a brilliant serialized drama will have a satisfying ending. Yes, I know it went all wrong for Twin Peaks, but that doesn't mean that it will go all wrong for every program. More than one person I've talked to has complained that the producers of Lost seem to be "making this stuff as they go along." Uh, yeah. It's called creative writing. That's how we do it.
I've written for television shows with seasonal arcs and mysteries beneath the surface. I'll make no pretense about the epic quality of them - they were children's shows, and although I think they've been underrated, I'm not going to claim they were robbed of an Emmy. In producing these programs, the show runners do have some general idea about where they want to take the show, some knowledge of the mysteries and above all, intimate familiarity with the characters. But they don't know every last detail. They let smaller truths lead to bigger ones. A good story will, to a great extent, tell itself.
Now, I'm no different from most in wondering what's going on in Lost with the island and wondering what the show's about. If I read a crime mystery, I try to solve the murder. But I don't let these curiosities inhibit my enjoyment of the show. If it's a great ride, I enjoy the ride. And it's not as if any individual episode in any of these shows doesn't have a self-contained plotline or three that resolves itself in 60 minutes or less (or, to the irritation of my brother's VCR, 60 minutes or more).
April 5. Q: What's going on with Hurley? A: Well, for one thing, Hurley is schizophrenic. So that's one mystery solved, with (thankfully) other answers to come. That's something. One of the great joys of Lost is how meaningful the small revelations about each character can be. There is too much to explore on Lost to be worried so soon about tying up every loose end.
The latest article in this debate comes from Jeff Jensen of EW, who is perhaps the Frank Pembleton of Lost detectives, relentless in his pursuit of the case. Jensen is also a fan of Veronica Mars, but is threatening to abandon the show because it is "becoming too protracted, too twisty, and, yes, too Veronica Mars-ish for its own good."
Jensen picks on last week's episode, "I Am God," and says that it "may have been the creative high point of the season, steeped in so much plot, so much detail, so many great character moments and hilarious lines, that it really needed to be seen twice to be fully appreciated." This is a bad thing, he argues, because he doesn't have time to watch it twice. So now he's questioning whether he should watch at all.
Not having time to watch shows more than once - man, I can relate. Still, the idea of abandoning the show because I can't study it like it was the material for a final exam makes no sense to me. I absolutely protest the argument that it's better to skip the show than watch it only once and draw some joy from it but potentially have some things go over your head. Certainly, there is a limit to the amount of unfathomability one can take, but shows like Lost and Veronica Mars don't go anywhere near that limit.
It's bad enough that, as Jensen points out, the scheduling of Veronica Mars is difficult to track in Los Angeles thanks to, of all things, preemption by baseball telecasts. But TiVo, which many of us have, solves that problem. Let's not make it worse by complaining out loud that a show is complex or layered. The last thing we need is for network executives to get the message that television need to be dumbed down to retain an audience. It's practically criminal to let this train of thought out of the station.
If it's a choice between a show or a viewer feeling stupid in a given week, let it be the viewer. Don't be so fixated with trying to solve every mystery before the mysteries are over. The "I Am God" episode of Veronica Mars had a lot of seasonal arc stuff going on, but also had enough that was self-contained within the episode to enjoy. Television is just like baseball - it can be enhanced by the backstories of the participants, of the great and small characters in the game, but ignorance of those backstories doesn't mean you can't enjoy it.
If you need to have immediate complete understanding of an experience to appreciate it, you're setting yourself up for a pretty sheltered life. Let the good storytellers tell their stories. Let the seasons unfold. Don't undermine your own pleasure by trying to outwit the future.
There are two different viewers for serialized dramas: the active viewer who wants to figure everything out and the passive viewer who wants to be – pardon the word – lost in the fictional world. Perhaps the former would be better served playing more Soduku.
http://tinyurl.com/mwukq
Despite the injuries, I think we're looking good. The key is to get Drew and Kent hitting for power. I advocate that Nomar rehabs for 1 week in Vegas before returning to LA. I also advocated the same for Lofton, but I guess veterans don't do the rehab thing. If we get out this 1st month at .500 it should be smooth sailing the rest of the way. Our catalyst, Furcal, needs to put this pesky month of April behind him. Furcal getting out of April and the inevitable power that Drew and Kent will provide has me longing for warmth of May. Mueller has been better than advertised which has been a plus. We just need Nomar back and healthy ASAP. This offense is going to be a force to be reckoned with once the long balls start.
Our rotation looks to be getting it in gear. Penny has been a stud. Lowe proved his opening day was a fluke. Odalis is pitching like the Odalis of old. His offspeed stuff has been mesmerizing. Take away that 5th inning with the bleeders and the bloopers and the bunts and Tomko pitched brilliantly yesterday. And Seo was fantastic in his Dodger stadium debut as a starter.
As for the bullpen. Watch out when Gagne returns. The pieces seem to be falling into place here. Baez is an out machine. Saito has been unhittable and looks to dominate as the 8th inning man. Kuo has lost 2 but he's got filthy nasty stuff and he'll only get filthier as the season progresses. Osoria got his act together last night. Once Gagne returns it's going to be a 6 inning game again.
Heed my warning. Load up on suntan lotion. Cause things are going to get hot.
and if our season depends on the return of a slimmed down and less bulked up Gagne, then I am throwing in the towel already
I'm just greatful that Veronica Mars and Lost are no longer on at the same time.
One thing you miss Jon, is that the trepidation with Lost isn't just general trepidation with serialized drama (ala Twin Peaks), but with serialized drama from JJ Abrams, he so totally screwed up with an interesting set-up on Alias, and he did it multiple times with a good set-up and a ridiculously terrible conclusion, that one can't help but feel like he just can't come up with a good ending. It's like that discussion a couple of weeks ago about books and so many start out great, but the author is just completely unable to close it out.
I don't have such fears with Veronica Mars just based on how amazing the mysteries for last season were concluded, Rob Thomas just seems to be able to do it all. I'm sure that there always things that I miss on that show, but it is just incredibly entertaining.
The 2006 World Series might be rotten. Should I tune out the baseball season? (That's a rhetorical question, folks.)
Looking all the way down to Columbus in the Sallie league we seem to have some power at the corners. And this catcher named Apodaca seems to be hitting pretty well. I've never seen him called a prospect, but I notice he is only 19. With the state of Major league catching, he must have something major against him. Does anybody have any info on this?
"24" always starts out pretty fun and then at the end, you just roll your eyes and think "I put up with 23 hours before this for that!"
When "The Prisoner" first aired, it didn't have an "ending". So they went back and added two episodes (one was stuck in the middle) and then we got an "ending". People weren't happy.
I didn't know anorexics played pro baseball.
"Keep in mind that Lost is a huge success and probably is good to run from this, its second season, through at least three more, into the spring of 2009."
This is a big part of my personal worries, and annoyances, with the show. I'm not a huge fan of shows that will continue as long as the money keeps rolling in, because it's a trap, in an emotional sense. Watching the show consistently causes an emotional attachment to the characters, and a personal desire to know how it ends. Especially with a series like Lost that, one would think, has a defined exit point for the show (everybody dies, everybody gets off island, etc... I think it'd be HUGELY disappointing to most of the audience if nothing was explained and the show ended with everybody just stuck there living out their lives).
But the whole point then changes if the goal is not to tell the best story, but to make the most money. Because I feel fairly confident that there has been a significant amount of material written in simply to pad out the episodes. I don't blame the writers of Lost for this... How do you think ABC's execs would react if they had a bunch of scriptwriters come up to them and say, "We know Lost has been one of the biggest shows in years, but we'd like to end it at the close of the 2nd season..."
Whether or not you agree with my opinion on the padding of the episodes, I think it's hard to argue with my belief that there is no chance any television chief would allow a hit show to end like that if s/he believed that the show could continue to make money. And here's where the -type- of show becomes part of the problem. Lost is, as I said above, a show that gets you emotionally invested in the characters. Which then allows the writers to get away with episodes where almost nothing whatsoever happens - because, hey, if you want to know what happens to all your buddies on the island, you're still going to have to tune in next week.
I much prefer shows that are designed more like miniseries, because no matter how profitable an extra episode might have been, they're done. It's been written with a definitive beginning, middle, and end, aired, and shown. Very few television shows on American networks nowadays would be willing to do the same with a 'tv show,' no matter how serialized.
Cheers on the other hand.....Or Coach.
I do notice a difference this year in Lost. It's not about the mysteries; like Jon I don't mind that we're not getting all the answers right away. The difference I notice is in the overall atmosphere and mood of the show - apart from Henry Gale, the show simply isn't that creepy anymore. Remember how much creepiness season 1 had? Remember the pervasive menace every time a character ventured into the jungle?
Nowadays, large portions of the show are more like a typical relationship/soap-style drama than anything else. The island setting has become in many ways largely incidental; much of what we're seeing could be taking place on a regular TV show set in NYC.
I think a lot of this is because of the ongoing flashbacks. In season 1, I thought they were great for giving us some needed fleshing out of characters, and also because many of them were used to add to the island mysteries. Not so much, anymore. The Jack/Kate/Sawyer/Charlie flashback eps are the worst offenders, and Locke's are starting to slide in that direction too. I think they need to mostly do away with the flashbacks, except for ones that truly do add something substantial to the island mysteries, and give that airtime to the island goings-on. Bring the science fiction/horror feel back into the show more.
It's a little weird though to watch nervous, neurotic Cloe after seeing her do the exact same character in Larry Sanders. Without the computers of course.
Their podcast is quite funny and they seem to enjoy that fans are annoyed with them at times.
In other words, smell the roses.
And again, if you don't like the smell of the roses right now, that's an entirely different topic. As far as that goes, I don't agree that Lost is yet suffering for its long-term plans. And I've got a real low tolerance for bad TV.
It's like Sayid pointed out to Charlie a few eps back, no one seems to remember this stuff. The monster that killed the pilot, whatever it was that tried to drag Locke into a tunnel, really murderous Others - all of that is largely a nonentity this season. And while we've had deaths - yeah, I'm a little bloodthirsty - Boone was actually killed in a fall, and Shannon was killed by Ana-Lucia.
The pervasive menace is just a lot less. Instead, like Bernard complained, people are building kitchens and seem perfectly content to stay...on what is supposed to be a freaky dangerous island. Claire has a baby. Sun is pregnant. Yet no one is building another raft or finishing Bernard's SOS - even better, they all abandoned him to it because he was acting like a bit of a jerk, because his being nice was apparently more important than getting off the island. I know why Rose and Bernard don't want to leave, or Kate the wanted criminal, but there are 30-plus Lostaways and some of them should have a different view on the matter. But then again, why should they when the island is apparently so safe to live on?
And that's why the pervasive menace, and attendant creepiness, has disappeared. It's not a survival show anymore, because they no longer have to struggle to survive. They don't even have to worry about starving, now, thanks to the food drops.
I still like the show. But since JJ turned his attention away, it's gone from science fiction to more of a relationship drama. It's not so much that the mysteries aren't being answered; there's just fewer mysteries, period. I think in many ways Lost has been dumbed down to make it easier for viewers who couldn't keep track of all the questions, and to make it easier to syndicate the show later. Check out the Alias TPTB's explanations for why the episode cliffhangers that made S1 so fun went away - that was network insistence because it made the show easier to syndicate.
I should shut up now before Xeifrank shows up and kills me. How about them Dodgers?
Nationals general manager Jim Bowden was arrested and charged with driving under the influence while in Florida during his team's series against the Marlins last weekend.
If I was Jim Bowden, I would drive myself to drink too.
I've always preferred shows that use unusual settings to explore the human condition compared to shows that use unusual settings for the sake of unusual settings.
I tend to think that those type of shows can only go so far before they do something like when Moonlighting put David and Maddie together and ruin it from that point on.
Yes, if the producers of Lost knew exactly how many episodes they were going to have and had the time to plot out every detail of every one of them, you might have a better show. The fact that they don't doesn't mean a) they have no idea about future events or b) that the show isn't worth watching right now.
A television show is an organism. Uncovering one truth leads to another. Yes, there are places you may want to get to - I don't buy into the assumption that the Lost showrunners have no idea what the mysteries are. That being the case, when you have the tentpoles, the larger truths ... there's still room for spontaneity on the journey.
Whether the ending will be entirely satisfying, I don't know. Whether the show will eventually fall victim to padding, I don't know. In the meantime, all I'm saying is that if the show is good right now, just enjoy it.
I watch "Gilmore Girls" so it would have to be a dual banishment, but the show is slipping in quality this year. I think it has one more year left because the new network needs one show with some renown to give it some PR.
My main t.v. gripe right now is how is it that all of those kids on The OC (including the one who hasn't gone to school in a year because she's shooting people and doing coke) got into Berkeley?
This may have already been answered, but is Kent back in the lineup tonight?
Legacy admissions.
Obvious question: is Ned Colletti a good storyteller? My observation is that he is not. But at least he didn't go full-on Steve Phillips on us and gut the farm to win a weak division.
Except that she is shown doing homework and studying and likely could have gotten in to a lot of schools.
A-bloody-Men. Thoroughly disappointing final weekend that was.
I enjoy the show, and we have a lot of amateur photographers who run around with camera phones and take pix of shoots. (See this thread at a Hawaii message board for some examples, along with wild speculation and discussions of the previous night's episodes for the entire season:
http://www.hawaiithreads.com/showthread.php?t=7177)
My biggest gripe is personal: I haven't had a "must-see" television show in years (not since "Hill Street") and I halfway resent having to budget my time around an hour on Wednesday nights. ;)
See, -that- is what gets to me. American shows aren't allowed to end until they stop making money. But by the time they stop making enough money to be allowed to die, far too often they've dipped significantly in quality for a long period of time.
What's most aggrivating about the situation is that, with many American shows it's not a huge deal because they lack serialization... But shows like a Lost, with a clearly linear storyline, suffer much more heavily. If you had to write 10 new Seinfeld episodes right now, fine (that's rather what Larry David has been doing for a few years, in effect, with Curb Your Enthusiasm). There really wasn't ever much of a 'storyline' to ruin, as each episode stands for the most part on its own (recurring characters exist, but are re-introduced fairly well each time the show up).
This is not the case with shows that have a single running storyline - extending the story means either changing the ending, or filling in the middle.
I'm not really picking on Lost, even if it seems like I am - I do like the show, it's just in a bad time slot for me (and I can't afford a DVR). It's a useful vehicle for my criticisms of the wider American television economic model. I'm not surprised at the way it works, nor do I think networks should stop doing it (it makes them more money). I'm simply lamenting the fact that what often makes more money can have a major negative impact on the shows themselves.
You're right in saying it's unfair to a show to dislike it because I expect it to be bad some time down the line. At the same time, I can like Lost, but expect it to suffer because I've seen it happen in the past to similar shows. Not liking a show, and expecting it to be much less worthwhile in the future, are two entirely different beasts.
Btw, speaking of Lost and the Dodgers, when do our boys in blue get off this mysterious island they seem to have crash-landed on? Why does every team they play seem like The Others right now?
=P
I think this post explains why some of us have had Dodger ennui coming in to the season. The story line which had us glued to the tube (if gnashing our teeth and wailing, also) was aborted, and now we have to gin up an interest in Kenny Lofton and company. But I still want to see how Hee Seop Choi ends!
I hope this thread is as dead as it looks.
I also think the fears about Lost turning disappointing are not misplaced. I adored Alias' first three seasons, but holy cow, it became unwatchable fast in s4 - characters I knew and loved turned into caricatures mighty fast, and the show seemed like it was suddenly written by Spy Story 090 students. It's not an unreasonable assumption that Lost will suffer a similar fate, and yes, then to some degree all the time we spent watching its early run will end up feeling wasted. My biggest fear is that Lost's big "reveal" will be Sloane in a control room up at the Black Rock, wielding control over the island, which turns out to have been the biggest Rambaldi device ever.
While I'm stating minority opinions, the entire three albums of Sandinista! were freakin' brilliant and I get really tired of everyone automatically saying that "it'd make a great one/two albums if it had had an editor." And Interpol really doesn't sound that much like Joy Division.
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