Four Graphs and a Story

3 recs, no comments.
hahaha

Your writing (and this piece in particular) is as heartfelt, intelligent, and touching as anything your stylistic cousin Posnanski has written.

And if I may tie it more directly to this website: I love baseball statistics because I am searching for truths. I want to weed through what a hundred different analysts are telling me. Often this truth is “true talent level.” At the end of the day it isn’t important that I know if Rajai Davis is a better hitter than Ryan Sweeney; what’s important is the search; having to critically think about the numbers and statistics available to me and determining, for myself, what the truth about their true offensive talent level is. The search for the truth is about learning skills, not who the better hitter is.

Great writing, and great post title.

Everything you write here is great.

We all have some great stories inside us, but the ability to paint and frame one or more of those stories, so that an unlimited audience is touched, is an ability that typically is mastered only after long years of living and writing. Perhaps the tumult and high tensions of the times, the last fifteen years in the former Yugoslavia, have accelerated your awareness?

 You have compressed in but a few years what takes ninety-seven percent of writers decades of repetitive keystroking to accomplish: elegant and memorable writing.

AN wins! wooo hooo!

To be fair, I did plan this as a mixture of a story and some baseball graphs, but then the words took me along the longer road than I expected it to, and when all was written and done, I just didn’t feel like querying and charting anymore. And if you know one thing, you know I’ll be back showering you with graphs and numbers until you can’t take it anymore.

I love them. I went to a private Montessori school for my first few years of elementary and one of the things they taught us at an early age was typing. I had my own typewriter at home from about age 8. I think it was originally for the whole family, but before long I had hogged it and it ended up mine.

I think my horrid penmanship has something to do with this. I typed everything on the typewriter. My mother would bring home rolls of paper from the teletype machines where she worked. Apparently they’d discard them when they were near the end, but they’d still have about 20 or 30 feet of paper left on, so I’d feed one into the typewriter and just keep going.

My typewriter was a big heavy Royal with a long and heavy action that was quite a workout for my tiny little hands. Later, when he was a teenager, my older brother had a sleek little lightweight portable Olivetti, and I was so jealous.

I kept my Royal well into my late 20s, happily writing letters that I would mail to friends and correspondents in the days before Internet, before I finally started doing all my writing on the computer instead (still no handwriting…)

When it came time to unload it, I actually sold it to someone. It was a weird coincidence. Someone in the military had borrowed a Royal typewriter of the same model and lost or damaged it. Due to the bureaucracy they were going to charge him some ridiculous price like $250 if he couldn’t replace it, because that’s what the rules said the value of it was, even though they were obsolete by then and you practically couldn’t give them away. So he bought mine for … I don’t remember, maybe $20 or $30.

There’s no way I could have learned an alphabet like you did….nor would I have bothered. Stupid lack of intellectual curiosity.