Respect

On Tuesday April 9 I am going to work my first game as data operator, or scorekeeper on a laptop instead of a scorecard, at the Memphis Redbirds game. This is different from the Baseball Info Solutions gig I worked for eight years before the company stopped sending people out to live games. This is for Major League Baseball, although it's still minor league games at the AAA level. I've been running hard collecting data for BIS in their new iteration as Sports Info Solutions, getting stats at ten college football games this past autumn and the six March Madness college basketball games here in Memphis a couple weeks ago. I decided to have some job opportunities e-mailed to me automatically by Indeed.com even though I got scammed by some fuckers last year, and out of nowhere this gig with MLB came up, watching baseball and putting in every pitch and every play, and I decided that I had to apply for this even though it almost felt like a scam, felt too good to be true, and they sent me a test of baseball rules which I aced, and they set up a Zoom interview the next day and I aced that so well that they offered me the job on the spot. I've ran the gamut of emotions about it in the past month since it happened: pride, awe, shock, worry, fear that it's a scam which won't go away until the moment they let me into the press box to do the job Tuesday night. And I didn't know when I would post here about it, but I knew I had to because it's such a major moment in my life--the fat broke loser Negro from the West Side of Chicago is an employee of Major League Baseball. Still a wow just to type that.

Then today another major moment happened, a moment I had been waiting for and a moment that I knew was probably coming soon but still came as a total stunner. I checked my phone after work and saw a missed call and voice mail from the Chicago Teachers Pension Fund, and I knew exactly what that meant. Finally, at long last, my father is dead.

There has, predictably, been no reaction from me because that's just how I handle everything. Yes, lots of thoughts and memories (mostly bad) and racing emotions, but nothing to make me physically exert any kind of feeling outwardly. There was something I thought to do out of respect for him, I don't even remember what, but I stopped stone cold when that word popped in my head. Respect. That's what my enmity towards him is all about. I have co-workers who don't understand how I could go years not speaking to him. No matter what he did to me, he's still my father, they'd say. I won't offer this explanation to them because I don't want to get that deep into it. But it's a matter of respect. He did not have respect for me as a person. He's my father, so obviously there's a level of authority that says he didn't have to show me respect, he just had to raise me. He didn't do a good job of raising me, but way more important than that, he didn't treat me like I was a Goddamn human being. It's more than the beatings, the airplane spinning me and threatening to slam my body to the concrete, the choking my mother in front of me, the cheating on her in our apartment while I was there and she was not...etc. I took all of that and continued to talk grudgingly to him as an adult, but he never treated me as more than his son, and he never apologized for his behavior, and he reminded me of Donald Trump in that he never even understood that the things he did hurt other people badly. He couldn't see anything other than what affected him. He didn't respect me other than when what I was doing may aggrandize him. When I won the spelling bee in 1990, he said to me in front of other people, "I want you to win nationals so I can go on Arsenio!" Not we, he. Always.

So fuck him. Burn in hell. Eternal apologies to my mother, and I'm forever grateful that she birthed me, but I will never understand why with him.

48 Years Of Perseverance

I'm not the "keep pushing 'til you make it" type. Anyone who knows me knows that I get frustrated and defeated when I don't get my way. This year I had occasion to apply for different job opportunities since my day job keeps losing business year to year. It didn't go well this spring and summer. I got scammed by a job posting on Indeed, and by the time I figured it out they had already shipped me a check in my name for over $6,000 that I was supposed to use to "buy" supplies for the job. That was not going to end well. I sent it back. Then I applied to a couple of different companies that were looking for people to watch college football games and do some basic scout work for them, including the company that I worked for doing scorekeeping for minor league baseball before they went remote. I was humbled by the depth of questions on the interviews and embarrassed that I didn't know certain play calls or formations or even who won the football national title last year. I don't watch college football, mostly because I worked on Saturdays. But still, when I didn't hear back from one group and the other sent me a form rejection email, I was very down in the dumps. But the group that I previously worked with when it was Baseball Info Solutions was now starting up the same type of position going to college football games. So I persevered, swallowed my pride, and applied for that one too, and I did much better in that interview because they weren't trying to drill my football knowledge for 45 minutes. They mostly wanted to know about my real life job record and responsibilities. They also said something to the effect of "We already know about your accuracy and dedication because of your work with the baseball side, we just want to get to know you here on the football side." It seemed like a formality that I would be selected to work the University of Memphis football games. Then weeks went by, all the way into the beginning of August, and I heard nothing. That was a very tough stretch. If I wasn't good enough for this gig with all of my prior experience, what would I do? Go back to applying for scam data entry jobs? Finally, finally, they one morning sent me the contract to sign for the gig. And my perseverance paid off. I greatly enjoyed working with what is now Sports Info Solutions, even accepting the chance to work Arkansas State football games 85 miles away, and now I wait for them to develop a similar program to work college basketball games. I will certainly be applying for that too. I know now that I can't get discouraged when I don't instantly get rewarded for my efforts. The blessing will come. I just have to wait for it sometimes.

I Love It When We're Cruisin' Together

I'm quoting a Smokey Robinson song from the '80s because my wife and I are going to embark on a cruise this summer!  Yay!  But we agreed to it before this recent Carnival ship issue with the burned-out engine and the days of floating with no power and few working toilets.  Ewww.  So, yeah, I never really planned on going on a cruise before this happened because I was afraid of something like this happening, and of course now that I'm going, this happens.  Perfect.

How did I get roped into it?  It's all my uncle's idea.  He is graduating with his Master's degree this summer and also retiring from his career after over 30 years.  He wants his family to all go on this cruise with him as a celebration of his achievements and a way to gather and have sort of a reunion on water.  That's pretty cool, actually, but initially, my wife and I were going to politely back out because of the enormous cost of a cruise.  Then my uncle dropped a couple of heavy guilt trips on me while agreeing to take on a large portion of the costs:  First, he told me that he wanted me to take the cruise because it's the kind of fantastic life experience that my sick mother could never have done.  She did not travel much before her death at age 32, that's true.  He said his 2 adult sons and I aren't very worldly, and that he really wants us to do this for the experience of traveling outside the U.S. borders.  I certainly can't argue that I'm not worldly--he informed me that I would need a passport to do this cruise, and I had no clue despite him telling me the cruise would leave America and go to the Bahamas.  And second, he dropped a big one on me that I could have taken personally as an insult if I wanted to:  He said that he knows that my wife and I basically stayed home as a honeymoon (we went to Graceland, less than 25 minutes from home, then we went to Tunica Roadhouse Casino in Mississippi for a few nights, less than 30 minutes from the house) because we didn't have money, and he wants us to take the cruise in order to enjoy a "real honeymoon" and get our marriage off right.  Well, okay then.  Since I'm not man enough to give my wife a real honeymoon...but I understood my uncle's intentions, so I calmed down and accepted his offer.  This was about two months ago, before the engine fire shit.  I'm hoping that my uncle will have great news in the near future about saving money towards the cost of the cruise since cruise prices are dropping everywhere due to the bad publicity from the "Crap Cruise," but since he's going through an agency, I don't think it's going to happen.  I fear these prices we're paying are locked in.  And the amount my wife and I are saving every month in order to pay my uncle our share when we see him is a hefty amount.  Basically, if this old car gives us any more trouble before July, or any other emergency arises, we are in deeper shit than those people on that boat.

But we're staying positive and getting ready for what we hope will be a great, great time.  We're ordering clothes, we went through the passport protocol and received them last week, and my wife is immersed in cruise blogs and YouTube videos chronicling the experiences of others.  As with everything else she encounters, she's trying to be as prepared and studied as possible.  We already booked the flight to Miami, where the cruise originates, and she already booked a hotel to stay in Miami for one night so that we're not trying to fly in the day of the cruise, which I totally would have attempted if I were alone and risked bad weather or some kind of flight delay making me miss the cruise.  That's not something where you shrug and catch the next cruise departing.  You miss embarkation, you're royally fucked.  But the thought of paying $100 and up to stay in Miami just to make sure you can catch the boat would have made me wretch, so I just wouldn't have done it.  But that's me.

In other news, I didn't make time to update my experiences being a scorekeeper for Memphis Redbirds minor league baseball games last year.  That's misleading, actually.  I didn't officially keep score for the Redbirds.  I worked as an independent contractor keeping fielding and pitching stats for the renowned Baseball Info Solutions.  They have a "private client" who wants that information from all AAA and AA-level minor league games.  My experience was fabulous.  It was such fun that I've had dreams about getting back out there to do games for this upcoming season.  One dream that was very vivid was where I found out that a new team had sprung up overnight a relatively short distance from home, and I convinced my wife to come to a game with me playing that day at noon on no notice.  I know exactly why I had that dream.  It's because there is a second minor league team not that far from here, in Jackson, TN, about an hour's drive, but a couple of issues stop me from volunteering to score some games there:  Being a black man in an unfamiliar part of Tennessee gives me goose bumps, and the car gives us such trouble that we're not confident in its ability to make it there and back, presenting a scene of a black man in an unfamiliar part of Tennessee at 11P on the side of a road with a smoking engine.  No, not going anywhere near that one.

As for last season, like I said, I had a great time.  Nothing I experienced would impress anyone--no meeting minor league players who go on to get called to the majors and become big stars, no huge celeb sightings in the stands (unless you think TNT basketball reporter Craig Sager is a big star).  Just 17 baseball games where I didn't pay for the ticket and sat directly behind home plate and watched baseball, and got paid for the information that I collected.  That's all, and that's awesome.  Some things that were memorable to me: 

• I had some teenagers come to me after a game ended and look at me and then at my blue folder and then at me and excitedly ask, "So, what team do you scout for?"  Those of you who know how large my ego can get can imagine how proud I was at that moment, that someone actually thought I was a major league scout.
• It took a while, but I started finding spots to park for free, which were blocks from the beautiful stadium but it was worth the walk because of the exercise and because saving $10 in parking should never be sneezed at.
• While making one of those walks back to the car after a game, I came across a black barber shop where three or four old men were still sitting there in the dark watching TV at 10 o'clock at night, laughing and enjoying each other's company, and that struck me as poignant.  There are endless jokes about the stereotypical black barbershop with old men firing inappropriate commentary and bullshitting all over the place, and we're the first to make those jokes, but we really do find a certain kind of male bonding and community in those places.  And the state of the black man in this country made me take even more pride than usual in finding a group of guys not drinking, not shooting, not setting the worst kind of examples of how to behave, but simply living and enjoying each other.
• I attended so many games that one day I found myself playing the role of Deacon Frye on the TV show Amen, going through the people I normally go through and being recognized on my daily way.  I approached the same young attendant at the ticket booth, and instead of waiting for me to pull out my business card that indicated I was with BIS and needed one of their paid tickets from Will Call, he smiled and said "I gotcha!" and grabbed the ticket for me without me having to say a word.  Then I had the ticket scanned at the gate by the same tattooed woman who was there several times previously.  I nodded at the funny beer vendor who has his unique cadence in his call that makes him sort of a local known figure:  "Cold beer here, I got 'em ice cold!  They need to be sold!  Too cold to hold!  Cold beer, it's hot out here!"  The best part is, he'll keep the line "It's hot out here!" as part of his schtick even when it's 60 degrees.  Then I approach the aisle where the BIS seats are always located, and the elderly white usher was so familiar with me, he shook my hand and said "How's it going today?"  I took my seat and smiled at the concept that I now knew what it felt like to be a VIP.  It was pretty fucking cool.
• The one time I convinced my wife to come out to a game with me, the second BIS scorer (there are two assigned to every game) had a friend with him, and they were going crazy over how many minor leaguers they were getting to sign shit for them.  So if my wife thought that we scorers were anything but fat sports nerds reveling in the whole experience, she amended that thought on that day.  I may get her back out there this season, though, because the Redbirds are introducing Two-fer Twosday, where hot dogs and sodas are 2 bucks each.  Hard to turn that down, even though I find myself addicted to the BBQ-smothered nachos at the ballpark, which run $9 but are so worth it.
• The game where Craig Sager was in attendance because TNT was in town to broadcast the Memphis Grizzlies in the NBA playoffs?  I didn't recognize him but my scoring partner did, hardly anyone approached him, he sat right in front of us a section to the right with a guy and a couple of hotties twenty years his junior, they all drank beers for about three innings, and then they left.  I may have gotten the nerve to say something if I wasn't busy scoring the game.
• There was a small controversy on Education Day, which is a daytime game where evidently area schools purchase or are given a bunch of tickets so they can drag their snot-nosed classes out there.  Some black female teacher just knew we were sitting in seats her class was supposed to have, even though we were shoving our tickets in her face in order to show her that we were in our correct seats.  It turned out that she did have that whole row, with the exception of those two BIS seats.  So we had to sit squished in with loud urban kids who were hardly paying attention to the game, hiding under the chairs and playing tag and being general pains in the arse.  They didn't stay the whole game, but even so, I avoided scheduling Education Day on this year's calendar.  Not doing that again unless I'm really, really desperate to do as many games as I can.
• A sense of independence grew throughout the year as I drove myself to and from these games after my wife came home from work and dropped the car off to me.  I took down dinner for myself after the games, usually at the Wendy's or Arby's on the way home, instead of always eating at the ballpark and burning through a big piece of the $25 I was being paid for the game.  The last two games, I even found a quicker highway to take to the park, making me feel even more independent.  That's a big part of what I miss about doing the games, that feeling of taking charge of something, something that I'm doing all by myself, something I don't have to rely on others to take me there or help me get it done.  I do the games with minimal help from my scoring partner, I put the data into the system the next day and send it off to BIS, and if there's an error in the official scoring found on milb.com, then I e-mail BIS and let them know.  I'm a big boy now!
• I enjoyed seeing players who were highly touted, players who used to play in the majors, players who I never heard of...I just loved watching guys playing pro baseball and showing what they got.  I can't remember all of the names I've seen who will be heard from in the major leagues in the years to come, but there are two who jump out in my mind:  Sluggers Wil Myers, who was in the Kansas City organization when I saw him last year, and Anthony Rizzo, the Chicago Cubs 1B.  Those guys weren't just strong, they had approaches at the plate that made you believe they knew how to get a hit under any circumstance against any pitcher, and I really look forward to what they're going to accomplish in the majors.  The Redbirds have a handful of guys who are highly rated prospects, and I will look forward to seeing them this year before they get called up to play for the St. Louis Cardinals.  I'm nowhere near a major league scout, as those teenagers believed, but I can't wait to get out there and get better at it.  And I appreciated seeing Cards starting pitcher Jaime Garcia come through for a rehab start as he recovered from injury, because he showed me why he's a major leaguer.  His curveball was magnificent.  All the other pitchers I saw all year were garbage compared to him.  And he's not all that in the majors, so it just makes you appreciate how great they are in the big leagues.
• And finally, I appreciated the other scorers.  They were absolutely from Central Casting, and I really appreciated that.  They were all white, mostly doughy, mostly in need of tanning, mostly four-eyed, mostly annoying voices, two of them were a father-son duo that have been doing this for over a decade, one is an official scorer for the Redbirds and Grizzlies and a local college in addition to the BIS duties, so he's the uber-sports nerd among us.  And I needed them to be as nerdy and dopey as I imagined, because I'm nerdy and dopey and have very low self-esteem, so I needed these guys to be like me in order to show that I wasn't being a complete geek choosing to do these games out of love for the game.  They were just like me.  They got me.  I got them.  I found a sort of family that I've been looking for, in a sense.  Not too close, mind you; I haven't had any contact with any of them since the season ended.  But a bunch of like-minded guys who all laughed and understood when I approached each of them in the middle of the season and asked which of them had the misfortune of scoring the game that had a final score of something like 22-16.  And when I finally found the poor saps who did score that game, all they could do was smirk and say, "What can I say, it was torture."  But with that smirk that said, it was baseball, so of course it was orgasmic, but we have to pretend it was torture so that we don't seem quite as geeky as we know we are.

On my agenda are three different trips out of Memphis.  The wife and I are spending this coming weekend in Tunica, and I already have my money for poker tournaments set aside.  "Jacob" and "Alice" are also spending the weekend in Tunica, as they do a little vacation with their daughter, who celebrates her 1st birthday this Friday.  I'm thrilled to see them all for the first time since they visited last year shortly after their daughter's birth.  The cruise takes place at the end of July.  At the beginning of April, I return to Chicago for the first time as a married man.  I was able to get a couple of days off so that I can join Jacob for the draft in the big-money fantasy baseball league we're in.  I'll be crashing at my uncle's house.  I'm also taking in the 2nd White Sox game of the season, so hopefully I won't need my winter coat to do so, although "PPD-Snow" has happened in the Chi in recent years.  It will be a solo trip, so for the first time since marriage, the wife and I will be dwelling separately, and as much as we love each other and are happy in wedded bliss, I think we're both looking forward to certain aspects of our four days apart.  But I will greatly anticipate my return home.  I already miss her.

The Wrong LaRoche

If I start a new blog about adventures in baseball scorekeeping, I think I'll have to call it The Wrong LaRoche. Having the wrong LaRoche almost cost me this new opportunity.

I'll give you the deets quickly, because it's been a long last three days and I'm ready to go rest before going back to work tomorrow. So about a month ago, I saw a Craigslist ad (yep, Craigslist again...will this work out like my last job in Chicago or will it be another scam like "Shelley"?) looking for minor-league scorekeepers for the upcoming baseball season. Why, there's a minor-league team right here in my new city! They're the Memphis Redbirds, and I went to a few games last year. Good team (of course, since they're affiliated with the St. Louis Cardinals, who only won the World Series last year), great stadium, love the BBQ nachos, but I wonder why they refuse to stock lids for their soft drinks. I don't like flying critters in my Coke. Anyhow, I responded to the ad, and someone replied back with a two-question e-mail interview asking me what numbers correspond to the players on the field when keeping score and how to score a 2nd-to-SS-to-1st double play. Two very easy questions for me, and I tried to give a little flava in my answer by mentioning that my favorite DP is P-to-C-to-1st, the ol' 1-2-3 if you're scoring. He replied that it was his fav too, but he didn't see it at all last year. So I passed the first gateway and was sent to a website that gave me the details of the job, and I almost got scared off by the 17-question sheet that I had to fill out. But it paid $25 per game plus reimbursed parking, so I pressed on.

I was mailed a booklet and a couple of DVDs a couple of weeks later. The booklet described in 57 pages of detail what I'd have to keep track of when scoring games according to their specifics. Oh. My. God. This would be scoring a game in a fashion unlike any I've ever even attempted! I'm talking keeping track of every pitch result, every pickoff result, charting the field location of every single ball put in play, as well as the velocity and trajectory of the ball. And those are the basics! Don't even ask about what you have to do on complex plays, like when there's an out made on a base hit or there's an error on a fielder's choice, or when the defense shifts. Man, my head's exploding just thinking about it. One of the DVDs was the guy who runs this operation sitting at a webcam going over real examples of many various game situations. That DVD runs for over two hours. The 2nd DVD is of a game from a few years ago between the Giants and Pirates that they use as a test game. I had to keep score of the test game and send it in like I would a normal game, and only if that test game was scored as decent would I then finally be allowed as part of the Memphis crew of scorers. Well, I sweated and sent that game in last night, even though they provided a box score of that test game and it had a pitcher officially throwing two wild pitches, and my box score only showed one. The thing is, I went back and looked at my inning-by-inning chart, and I had the two wild pitches recorded. But I didn't even care to figure out what I did wrong. I was so exhausted that I just sent the thing in and hoped for the best.

The e-mail came this morning that my test game had been scored. The guy in charge started the first sentence with "You made two major errors and nine minor errors..." My heart almost stopped. I assumed that the wild pitch discrepancy would be some kind of fuck-up on my end. Where did these ten other errors come from??? Then I kept reading the sentence, and it said "...which is better than average for our test game scores." Really?? My eleven errors is actually considered kosher?? I couldn't help but smile as I skipped to the end of the e-mail, where the guy in charge welcomed me aboard and said that once I went into the software and checked off which Redbirds games I would be available for, he'd schedule me. Whoooo!! "I'm in! I'm in!" I said to my wife on the phone. I was ecstatic and also relieved.

At this point, I went back to the e-mail and read the errors that I made. The wild pitch thing was a major error, and it happened because there's a box that you have to check before the wild pitch gets put into the system, and I neglected to check this box the 2nd time, and that's why it never showed up in my box score. The other major mistake? I put the wrong LaRoche into the starting lineup. The Pirates had two brothers on their team, Adam and Andy LaRoche, and without thinking about the fact that Adam was too clumsy to play third base, I put him in as the starting 3B instead of Andy. Yeah, that's kind of a major mistake, starting the wrong guy. However many games I get to score, I'm fairly confident that I won't put the wrong fucking player in the lineup again. But I'm just psyched that I will get to score some games at all. I'm also intimidated at how much detail I'll have to keep up with. I won't be able to take a piss or get a bite to eat unless my wife comes with me to some games and feeds me while I scribble. But it's hard to complain because I'd be getting paid to keep score of a game. How awesome is that? I only wish they paid more so that I could make it a full-time gig. But hey, I may have to pull out those schmoozing skillz that my father instilled in me and make friends and cohorts along the way, and maybe I'll find my way up the chain into a serious-paying baseball executive role. Don't put it past me. I have a lot of failures in my past, but I've been known to come out ahead at times also. And with the cash flow getting a serious setback thanks to all the car trouble the last several months, I'm as motivated as can be to climb any ladders that I come across.