“The sheer quantity of brain power that hurled itself voluntarily and quixotically into the search for new baseball knowledge was either exhilarating or depressing, depending on how you felt about baseball. The same intellectual resources might have cured the common cold, or put a man on Pluto.” – Michael Lewis, “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game”
Why write about sports?
Growing up, I was never much of an athlete. Sports were a fun outlet, but I found myself lacking the requisite skillsets to be successful at any of them. In baseball, lack of hand-eye coordination doomed me in the batting box (later, in my adult life, this would culminate in an embarrassing showdown with a slow-pitch softball machine in a batting cage down in North Carolina).
In basketball it was my lack of height, lack of speed for soccer, strength for football and so on and so forth. And, the soccer fields and basketball courts my friends and I played on in youth sports became artificial shrines of shame on game day, a medium for personal embarrassment.
On particularly-challenging days, I would sit on the bench and wonder: what separated someone like me from the gifted athletes – who’s ability to hit a little white ball several hundred feet awed me. It was like witchcraft, as if they had been ordained by the good Lord Himself.
So why devote a good portion of my adult life to watching and writing about the same activities I once regarded with mild dread?
The answer lies not in success or failure but, rather, the gap between; the gap that so often mimics life, where outcome cannot be illustrated in any color but grey.
Modern society tends to eschew the gap. We’re trained to be polarized. Every event needs to be categorized and rated with salacious sensationalism – where the Greatest of All Time is a less of a concrete concept than an amorphous cocktail bestowed composed of whatever instance was most-freshly consumed.
We build our idols overnight, and rush to tear them down at that same, voracious enthusiasm. Motivation, context – these factors too are often swept to the wayside. Those things spark my interest as a writer and a human being.
Having been born and raised right outside of Washington, D.C., I tend to favor the local sports teams. However, if an interesting story develops outside of the region, I won’t hesitate to throw my two cents into the ring.
The content may deviate outside the lines of sports and weave into other lanes, and then back again. I plan to set no boundaries, no limits. Just be warned, I am my own editor, so I can’t promise it will be brief.
The title of this website is inspired from that Michael Lewis quote, on the intellectual movement in sports. I harbor no illusions that many will find interest – let alone merit – in the words found on these pages. In fact, to those of you who have better things to do with their time, I salute you.
Have fun on Pluto.
-M.C.