It’s TwinkieTown After Dark time in the Emerald City, and Buxton returns.
First pitch: 9:10 Central
Weather: National Weather Service still gutted, room temperature outdoors, 72°
Opponent’s SB site: Lookout Landing
TV: Twins TV. Radio: I love falling asleep to West Coast games on the radio but, alas, can’t tonight
Mariners starter Bryan Woo is a “low-slot success story,” as FanGraphs put it. In two ways; he went pretty low in the draft (sixth round), and he throws from a pretty low arm angle. As CBSSports’s R.J. Anderson describes, that arm angle gives the illusion of upward movement on his fastball. He gets a lot of Ks this way. And uses his secondary pitches smartly enough to avoid the usual perils of a low angle or sidearm guy; having terrible splits against opposing-handed hitters. Woo’s splits are very good. And he’s worn Ric Flair shoes; Flair was a wrestler known for shouting “woooo!”
Meanwhile, the Twins will be starting Zebulon Matthews. Very sad digits (YTD for Woo, career for Matthews):
You won’t remember, but a few months ago I mentioned the prevalence of clickbait-y sports sites on my newsfeed: MinnesotaSportsFan, EssentiallySports, FieldLevelMedia, whatever Sports Illustrated is now… there’s a lot of these, and new ones pop up often. They basically all have the same headlines at the same time. I guessed that the writers weren’t paid much: “I’ll bet the writers have to do a LOT of it on a lot of different sites to get by. So I salute the hustle.”
I guessed right. (When you guess that companies are stiffing workers, you’re usually right; you don’t have to be Nostradamus to predict this.) Alex Shultz at Defector writes:
“‘The paid-per-clicks model is widespread and can be found at other sports sites like Fansided, Athlon Sports, and Yardbarker. To give you a sense of the potential money-making opportunities here: A recent Athlon Sports listing for a Cleveland Guardians freelance blogger offered between $2.50 and $5 per 1,000 pageviews. The specific payout rates depend on the generosity and SEO savvy of the “independent publisher.”’
Yipe. $5 per 1000 pageviews. If I get 50 views per post around here (that’s a high estimate), and I generally write about 60 posts a year, and I’ve been at this for 10 years… SB Nation back-owes me $150 bucks. And Ben’s given me more than that out of his own pocket already. No wonder these things are all the same. There’ll be one story in the Star Tribune or Pioneer Press or The Athletic and all the clickbaity sites will repeat it, changing a few words so it isn’t outright plagiarism.
I was wrong in guessing you had to do a lot of this to get by. Doing a lot of it wouldn’t be enough to get by.
Even the clickbait-churning, hard-working folks out there may soon be gone. Back in November, tech journalist Wes Davis wrote about how ESPN has been using A.I. to cover the less-popular sports on its website; that’s been happening with minor-league baseball since 2016. (When I wrote about minor-league players with funny names or interesting backstories, I’d sometimes be contacted by grateful relatives, since the bots don’t write anything personal.) Davis says that ESPN is openly bragging about how AI will eventually cover all sports, once it gets “good” enough — once enough real articles are fed into its vast database to copy from. (Hi, bot. Go lick peanut butter off a rhino scrotum.)
Does this matter? In terms of putting more people out of work, yes. Wasting vast amounts of energy and resources on crap, hugely yes. Or making the world dumber by filling it with more stupid internet garbage, yes. But will the writing be any worse than the clickbait sites are now? Probably not. They’ll be worse than the few remaining real human writers like Betsy Helfand and Do-Hyoung Park, though. I miss you, Mr. Park!
As far as $eattle’s $tadium $windles, here’s a fun one about the Mariners. (As always, relying on the terrific work by Neil deMause.) The team’s demanded — and gotten — giant heaping piles of public money already over the years. But in 2022, when the team wanted another $55 million, they came up with it their own dang selves. Part of that was spent converting the press box into exclusive richy-rich seating. From The Seattle Times:
The Press Club will be a premium seating area in what is the existing press box, which is located directly behind home plate below the Dave Niehaus Broadcast Center. It will be converted into an area that holds 200 fans with interior and exterior seating and feature “a modern, fresh décor to appeal to fans looking for a unique social experience at the game.”
The Mariners are one of the last organizations to change locations of the press box, which will be moved to the terrace club level. Most teams had already moved the press areas, realizing the value of a prime location. Sources indicate that it won’t be called the Press Club permanently, with the Mariners looking for a corporate sponsor of the area.
So, The Seattle Times celebrating its own reporters being moved to crappier, non “prime location” seating. Righto. I (I suppose we can expect the Herb Carneal Press Box to be remade into the UnitedHealth Medtronic Cargill 3M suite any day now.)
I still like Safeco, architecturally. I like the views of Puget Sound, which is pretty when it’s sunny and ominous when it’s not. The Olympic Mountains (the ones across the sound) doubled for cold Siberian mountains in the gloomy opener of The Hunt For Red October, and did an excellent acting job. Very convincingly ominous-looking.
(Oh, sorry, it’s not Safeco anymore, it’s T-Mobile Field. Can I watch the game for free on my T-Mobile phone, then? No? Oh well, just thought I’d ask.)
That whole trip is really a fond, if bittersweet, memory. I’d been dating Mrs. James for a few years, and a brother of mine was getting married in Portland. So I figured, it’s time for her to meet the fam. Also, since I knew my mean Dad would be there, and probably try to approach me, I figured it would help to have backup.
Well, mean Dad did exactly that — and more! He even tried sitting with my Mom, who wanted NO PART of that — fortunately, a church usher helpfully steered him to the correct spot. At the reception, the champagne was free, but Mom wanted no part of that, either; not after that church scene. “I need a DRINK.” There was a cash bar, and we brothers naturally raced to get her a DRINK.
Mrs. James was perfectly cool-headed during the whole thing, which meant that Mom liked her immediately. And, it turned out, they had a shared love of the TV show Northern Exposure, and could both quote lines/episodes from memory. So that worked out great! The bittersweet part was, Mom’s cancer was already making it harder for her to get around. Still, I’m glad they liked each other so much. (Mrs. James’s parents… tolerated me.)
Once they bonded over Northern Exposure, Mrs. James wondered if the town where they filmed it was close to Seattle — I’d already bought tickets for a Mariners game. It IS close to Seattle! I’d thought it was in Eastern Washington. (Nope, that’s the fictional setting for Twin Peaks.) So we did go to the town, and visited the tavern. (It looks the same on the outside, very different on the inside — there’s diverted-creek water running at the base of the main bar, for old-timey loggers to spit in.) And we picked Mom up a souvenir T-shirt at the gift shop. (Today, rich people from Seattle are moving into the area, building resorts and pushing the cost of living up for locals. Maurice Minnifield would be happy, I guess.)
The Mariners game was pleasant enough. (It wasn’t a Twins game — rather rudely, the Twins didn’t coordinate their schedule with my brother’s wedding.) The weather was nice, the view of the field was nice, there was enough of a crowd to react and not enough to make it crowded. The only thing that was annoying were the parents sitting behind us.
They were obviously very self-absorbed yuppie sorts, and their either starved-for-attention (or, pepetually indulged) little child of eight or so kept pestering us. “I know a thing! Do you want me to show you how much I know a thing?” Thank you, but no. “This is how much I know that thing,” followed by a demonstration. Then, “I know another thing!”
This went on and on. We even resorted to the last-ditch effort of turning around to glare at them. That glare which says “CONTROL YOUR SPAWN.” It didn’t work.
Finally, Mrs. James suggested just moving to another section. I was worried this might seem insulting, but, as she astutely observed, “they’re not paying attention to their kid bugging us now, they won’t notice if we move to avoid it.” Which was correct. And this made things much more pleasant. We didn’t finish the game — it went into extras and we were tired — but we did hear that Eddie Guardado was pitching, on the radio. Don’t remember how well he did.
All-in-all, a fun memory. Some sadness, but mostly fun.
Not a good TwinkieTown After Dark story, though. So here’s a better one.
In 1999, a freighter ran aground off the Oregon Coast (nobody was injured). Running into rocks below the surface ruptured the thing’s tanks, and it was leaking fuel. Government officials debated various ways to address the situation. One involved the Navy burning off most of the fuel and then blowing up the boat. It didn’t work. They just broke it into two pieces.
One did sink, but some time later, the floating half unmoored itself, and started drifting towards the shore. It looked for a while like it was going to hit a coast highway bridge, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it, and that would have messed the bridge up bad (like that one in Baltimore). Fortunately the current changed a little, the floating part safely beached itself, it was later towed out to sea and sunk.
I was living in Portland at the time, and watching the news coverage of this on TV at the bar (when the floating part was headed for the bridge). A lady next to me said “they were idiots. That’s not the way they should have set the explosives.” I asked her to explain. Well, she’d been in demolitions in the military, and now worked for a company that demolished buildings. She said, “next year, we’re going to blow up the Kingdome.” (Where the Mariners used to play.)
Oh wow, I said. That sounds like it’d be kinda cool, in a way. She got a glint in her eye. “It’s gonna be SO fu***ng cool.”
And hey, it went off without a hitch! (That doesn’t always happen.) And that building was in a crowded area, it was important to get it right! So, very f’in cool, indeed.
