I graduated in 1990, so I was too late for the 80s investment banker boom and too early for the dot.com boom of the mid-90s. Instead, my proudest accomplishment for the first two years after graduation was that, unlike many of my cohorts, I managed to avoid moving back in with my parents.

Jobs and other life parts got shittier. It would be another two years before I would have sex for the first time, which introduced a whole new set of troubles. I lived on pretzels and peanut butter for more winters than I cared to, staffing the counter of Portland’s second-largest liquor store (unlike Josh, I’m not even a drinker, but ask me about scratch-off lottery tickets sometime) and armed with my solid gold bachelor’s degree.

And then, it got better. Catfish and others, I hear you. Know that the human condition can just as randomly improve as decline — well, provided you’re a college-ed-ja-ma-cated honky male like myself. For most other folks, it’s a steady ride through purgatory. So we got that going for us, which is nice.

Another interesting item in this box score from April 6, 1987 is just seeing Bill Buckner’s name in the Boston line up, knowing that it was his first game after his memorable performance in the 1986 World Series…

I have often wondered if there is another sport in this world like baseball where, if one has enough imagination, it’s possible to relive the played game with just names and numbers on a page. I imagine that possibly a game like Cricket could be reduced to some kind of a box score and a short “inning by inning” description of the events (of course the world ‘inning’ has it’s origins in Cricket) but I have to admit that I don’t have enough time, energy and motivation to develop an intelligent understanding of the game. Several attempts by enthusiastic Cricket fans to explain the intricate details of their preferred sport to me have never bore fruit in the same way that I have never been able to successfully explain the inner workings of Baseball to someone who hasn’t grown up with the game.

As I have lived in France for the last 22 years, I continually amaze myself at how I have kept up my enthusiasm for Baseball with very little direct contact with the game over the last 2 decades. For years, my only relationship with Baseball was studying the line scores on the next to last page of the International Herald Tribune that I bought several times a week to try and keep up with what was happening each summer. And at least once a month, I would take the subway into the center of Paris to buy the Wednesday international edition of USA Today that always had a full page of box scores (instead of the cryptic line scores in the IHT) and each Wednesday – a full list of NL statistics (being a Los Angeles native, I’ve always been more interested in the league where the pitcher bats…). And when I should have been working, I would spend hours going over the box scores and the stats (of course no OBPs, VORP or ERA+, just meat and potatoes stats like HR, RBI avg ERA W-L etc). If it was the month of June, from my apartment in the Paris suburbs, I would use my “research” to determine who should be selected to go to the All Star game or the starting rotations of each team. If it was August or September, I would try and figure out who was in the running for MVP and the Cy Young as well as trying to understand why a certain team was going to win (or lose) 100 games.

In October 1986, I remember reading IHT articles about Bob Stanley and Bill Buckner (during the World Series there was always a little bit more than the regular season line scores) in my VW bus (which was my official residence on the streets of Paris until December of that year). From time to time if I was patient enough, I could pick up static filled broadcasts of the World Series on American Armed Forces Radio in Germany on my radio-cassette, but this was never a given, as reception depended upon the cloud cover. Unfortunately, AAFR went off the air 2 or 3 years later and so did any direct contact, however ephemeral, with the world of Baseball.

Then, as the internet developed, in the late 1990s it became possible to watch Baseball on the internet and read infinite amounts of detail about the game on line. In any part of the world, if one isn’t careful, it’s now possible to read about and listen to Baseball 24 hours a day. It’s sure a long ways away from USA Today box scores once a month! In fact the International Herald Tribune must have realized that us expatriate baseball junkies have stopped using their paper as a source for Baseball news: this June, they stopped publishing the line scores for each game and now only print the standings.

By the way, has anyone ever looked at a representation of a soccer match in a newspaper? It’s virtually impossible to have any idea about what happened by looking at a statistical or even a written account of the game without having watched the game.

And thanks so much Josh for Cardboard Gods: my favorite site on Baseball Toaster. And thanks for the feature on Larry Biitner. . For me the “nagging question” about Larry Biitner was always where did he get that extra “i” !¡!?¿? And when I went to Holland and I saw all their double vowels everywhere, I immediately intuitively figured out that Larry Biitner must be Dutch. And I wasn’t under the influence of any legal Dutch substances while entertaining that thought. Now Bert Blyleven can have some company in the Dutch Hall of Fame.

Also, it’s an immense pleasure to read such great Baseball writing knowing that the writer’s world view is much closer to mine than that of George Will.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/MIL/MIL198704060.shtml

Another great episode about the SteamAH. I don’t think I could say it any better than that-nothing good ever happens to Bob Stanley.

IIRC, Stanley started on Opening Day in 1987, due to a Clemens holdout and other chaos, and the first batter of the tear tripled.

I should have just shut the TV off right then.

Somehow by the mid ’80s the idea of being a young person out on your own with no job or attachments had lost the romantic cachet it had in the ’60s and kept throughout most of the ’70s. In the ’80s, you were either a trainee investment banker or you were shit. (Of course, this was before the 90s, when all you needed was keyboard skills and a snarky attitude to get showered with job offers and stock options. Which would prove worthless in the ’00s, but no one knew that at the time.)

And that summer my team, the Phillies, sucked – the brief hopes that the seventies dynasty still lived were cruelly, utterly quashed. Don Carman was Steve Carlton, only without the consistency. Von Hayes was Mike Schmidt, only without the ability to hit in the clutch. Juan Samuel was Larry Bowa, only without the warm, lovable personality. Everything was debased, the certainties of the past were gone, unrecoverable, the future looked like an unpromising abyss you could climb up in, but never out of.

I wound up making one, epochal, life-changing decision: to apply to grad school so I could postpone working for a living just a few years longer.

Great blog, Josh – been reading it for a while (found it while Googling Bake McBride) – you speak to our generation – keep it up!

And Catfish, we’re all pulling for you. Step back and think about what you want, and what you need, and what you deserve. Sometimes a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do …

11 I feel bad for you, and I can’t help but recommend you shift the ultimatum from “your mom or me” to “three options: me, counseling, o or your mom”. Ultimata are lose-lose propositions. Okay, pop-psychology mode turned off now….