Throw natural ⚾️
Absolutely loved this interview with Leo Mazzone in The Atlantic today.
An Old-School Pitching Coach Says I Told You So by Michael Powell
No one knows, objectively, what’s best for the health and longevity of baseball pitchers, and there’s certainly something to be said for all the new fangled metrics we have to measure pitch effectiveness like spin rate and movement, etc. But, as a fan, I so miss the days of the dominant starting pitchers who could go 7, 8, 9 innings at a time and put a whole team on their back in some of the most important games1. Mazzone is, from a coaching perspective, one of the best representatives of the 1990s iteration of that era of dominant starting pitching. At the time, I hated his Braves teams–but even then I couldn’t help but respect the impressive rotation and pitching staff that they’d put together. Mazzone no doubt had a big hand in that. And he sure can provide a good quote.
Here’s one of the better stories from the piece, featuring the great John Smoltz.
In 1987, the Braves traded a fine but aging starting pitcher, Doyle Alexander, for John Smoltz, who came from the Detroit Tigers’ Minor League system. People chattered that the Braves had been fleeced. Take the kid out back to a pitching mound, then–General Manager Bobby Cox told Mazzone, and tell me what we’ve got. Scouting reports suggested that the 20-year-old Smoltz had a lively but erratic fastball. Mazzone and the kid walked to a back lot in the Braves training complex. “I told Smoltzy to just throw natural,” Mazzone recalled. On the fourth or fifth pitch, Smoltz shook his head and muttered,: “This ain’t right.” “What ain’t right?” Mazzone asked. “Well, my left leg has to go here, and my right leg has to go there,” Smoltz said. “When I was in Detroit—” Mazzone cut him off. “You’re not in fucking Detroit. Throw natural.” Smoltz—who has recalled their conversation similarly—calmed down and tossed one fastball after another across the plate, beautiful as could be. From there, Mazzone worked on developing Smoltz’s off-speed pitches. A year later, Smoltz reached the majors at age 21. A year after that, he pitched more than 200 Major League innings. “I said to myself, Damn, this was too easy,” Mazzone recalled.
The whole thing was a really fun read and, if you’re a baseball fan who’s nostalgic for those starting pitchers of yore, I encourage you to check it out.
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Even as a Pirates fan who had to suffer through the “Madison Bumgarner game” in 2014. Watching Bumgarner throughout the rest of that postseason was almost worth falling victim to his dominance in the Wild Card round. ↩︎
Finished reading: The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt 📚
Finished reading: Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg 📚
Finished reading: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin 📚
🔗 I Want To Focus On My Salad by Drew Magary
What a great power it is to make another person feel loved. There’s a world out there that you and I have little control over. America, in particular, is a problem I can never solve. But in my home, and in yours, there is another world. Smaller. More manageable. You can accomplish things in this world. You can change lives, even. It’s in this world where you’ll find true love, true progress, and true hope. Also, a good dinner.
A perfectly on-point description of the current Google search experience from Tom Scocca in the Flaming Hydra newsletter.
When I type “baryshnikov”into a Google search, what I mean is what I’ve meant ever since Google first appeared and began conquering the search industry: out of everything people have filed away on the internet, please show me what would be in the drawer marked “Baryshnikov.” What Google now assumes I’m asking is “Baryshnikov????”
Finished reading: Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer 📚
Finished reading: The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef 📚
Had a tough time with this one considering the author provides the following consecutive examples of this mindset in practice: Elon Musk, Trevor Bauer, and Jeff Bezos. The Scout Mindset, at least in some cases, seems to be a secret code for how to be ultra successful in spite of (or maybe because of?) utter moral bankruptcy.
Finished reading: Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer 📚
And just like that I’m sucked back into Area X and planning another re-read of the series, now with additional fascinating backstory.
😥 📺 Really going to miss the show Evil.
Notes, 2024-08-19
It’s been quite some time since I’ve done anything with any of my various blogs. I got super busy with work and, since a lot of that busy-ness deals with writing words and thinking about topics, the blogs tend to suffer when it picks up like that. But since things have slowed back down a bit, I’ve still had a hard time getting back into the habit (not that it was every anything approaching _regular_). Part of that, I think, is the initial hurdle of thinking of something worth writing about. Then I read this post from Thomas Rigby today and figured it was as good a time as any to take a shot at a public day note. I’ve kept day notes in Obisidian (or before that, Notion/Roam/BuJo, etc.) for things I’m working on but haven’t ever tired combining them with the more personal “whats-going-on-in-your-life” kinds of notes. I don’t know why. So, with that preamble, here are some notes from today.
👌 3 Good Things
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On the way home from school pickup, my daughter was asking for a song but didn’t really know any of the words or the melody or really anything about it other than the singer’s voice being “so smoothing”1. We tried the whole way home but didn’t get anywhere. I love this game and get a little obsessed with trying to figure it out, so I kept thinking about it while we prepared dinner. I eventually got it. Mel McDaniel’s “Louisiana Saturday Night.” What a trip.
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When I arrived to pick up my son from his after school program at the community center, he was in the middle of coloring an Adventure Time coloring page and he was so excited about it that he talked about all of the characters the whole way home (sometimes over his sister’s descriptions of the song with the smoothing vocie). He has this way of getting so excited about something–could be a picture he’s drawing or coloring, or a Lego set he’s working on, or an obstacle course he’s built, or whatever–that he strings words together like he’s sprinting downhill… It’s pretty great.
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Yesterday, I bought a set of hair clippers for about $30 and decided to start cutting my own hair again. As a kid I almost always just let mom or dad or a friend’s dad cut it with clippers, then I started doing it myself as a young adult while in college, and had gotten away from it for the most part (with a short pandemic-related exception), but I’ve always liked the look of it and hated going to the barber even more. So, I’ve embraced it again. I cut it yesterday and did a pretty nice job. If I stick with it, the one-time cost of that pair of clippers is about the same as one haircut but I can use them again and again for years.
⭐️ Bonus Good Thing
- There’s been a coolness to the air throughout the day that feels amazing. Now that the sun’s down it feels almost like fall is rolling in. I’m sure it’s short-lived, but I’m enjoying it while it lasts.
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She always says this. It’s the best. ↩︎
It’s amazing what a few hours off on a Friday afternoon can do for one’s spirits.
Finished reading: Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright 📚
Finished reading: Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport 📚
That feeling when the deadlines were off in the distance but now they’re right here. And they’ve multiplied!
Amazing clip from yesterday’s Fox MLB broadcast at Rickwood Field in Birmingham. Reggie Jackson given an uninterrupted chance to describe his experience playing there. It’s so rare to see this kind of truth in modern sports broadcasts, but Mr. October has always been able to seize a moment. ⚾️
RIP Willie Mays, who "was baseball" ⚾️
Of the many Willie Mays tributes I read through today I, unsurprisingly, thought Ray Ratto’s at Defector was the best.
Willie Mays, who died Tuesday at the richly merited old age of 93, was baseball itself, more than anyone else ever connected with the game. Not just the best player, which he was. Not just the most joyful great player, which he also was. Not only the most extravagantly gifted of all the five-tool players that played during the richest era in the game’s history, although he absolutely was that as well. He was baseball, period, full stop.
Born in 1984, I never had the pleasure of watching Willie Mays play. As a lifelong, die-hard fan of the Pittsburgh Pirates, if given the opportunity to watch any player from the past I would choose Roberto Clemente. But there’s no doubt that Willie Mays would be the undisputed top choice among players who did not play for the Pirates.
Here’s Ratto again.
Mays was there at the moment when talent replaced race as the sport’s prime directive, when even the most recalcitrant segregationist owners finally found the time and financial inclination to teach their scouts color blindness; when the sport finally became what it could be, Willie Mays was something very like the living fulfillment of that promise.
Finished reading: A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers 📚
Johnson City's Blue Plum Festival
Had a great time celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Blue Plum festival last night. Great food and music, lots of fun stuff for the kids, cool stuff from local artisans, and friendly people.
The festival has changed quite a bit over the years since I first moved here more than 20 years ago, but it seems to have regained a lot of its old momentum since Covid.
I’m consistently reminded of how grateful I am to love the place we live.


China Miéville wrote a book with Keanu Reeves
Excited about this collaboration between Keanu Reeves and–of all people–China Miéville as covered in Wired. The books sounds great (though I refrained from reading anything past the spoiler warning), but I was most interested in the little glimpses into Miéville’s life and process.
Some highlights include this startlingly insightful theory about what defines “nerd culture.”
And, though 51, he still plays with toys. At one point I awkwardly gestured at this, and he told me, “I have a theory. One of the things that tends to distinguish nerds and their interests is, broadly speaking, that they have fidelity to their loves in a way that other people don’t. I don’t mean other people are unfaithful in a flibbertigibbety way, but! The stuff I was into when I was 4 is still the stuff I’m into. From as early as I can remember, it was sea monsters. Aliens …”
Further, I think Miéville perfectly summed up my own personal tastes in fiction over the last few years. What he’s interested in writing about is a direct analog to what I’ve found myself interested in reading (which includes Miéville1 but also, in my opinion, other contemporary authors like Jeff VanderMeer and Ray Nayler).
He doesn’t write science fiction because he’s a communist or because he wants to bring about the revolution. Instead, he thinks of himself as pursuing “difference” within and across his books: “Alterity. That’s where my heart beats.”
This “alterity” is something that, since reading this article, I realized I’ve been seeking and finding in my favorite literature going back years. When I think of my favorite novels from McCarthy, DeLillo, and Faulkner, this “alterity” and the ways that affects the characters and plot is at the forefront of what I most enjoyed.
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While I’ve read only This Census Taker, I loved it so much that I feel no hesitation about placing Miéville among my favorite living authors. Perdido Street Station arrived today and I am excited to start it soon. ↩︎