This is one of those weeks where I procrastinated a whole bunch and now have neither the time nor the energy to think up some interesting introductory rambling. Go back and read last week’s cast iron pan thing if you’re looking for that, that was probably the best introductory bit one of these weekly posts has ever had. Anyway, Baseball and music! Woooo!
This week, I paid attention to the Twins and the Padres. It wasn’t the most exciting week of Baseball watching, but I was at least more engaged with these two teams than I was with the Orioles and the Phillies. Neither of these teams did very well in the games I watched, but at the very least they made an impression.
Let’s start with the Twins. What a depressing team. I understand that last year at the trade deadline they got rid of most of their big talent (including Louis Varland, which, I’m very sorry, Minnesota, Louis Varland is the best) and, because of their cheapo owners, didn’t really do much over the offseason to make up for that. Despite this, they got off to a pretty good start this season, which really seems like a way to taunt their poor fans further, because let’s all be real for a second, there’s no way this team makes the playoffs.
Byron Buxton and Joe Ryan are probably the two most exciting Twins right now. I didn’t catch a Joe Ryan start, but I did see that photo from a Twins broadcast where he’s overlaid with a semi transparent moon. This is really funny, because the man does always look like he’s one step into a werewolf transformation.
I did get to see some Buxton, of course, since he’s an everyday player. And yeah, that’s a real good hitter. Watching this team reminded me of watching the Blue Jays during the stretch this year where only Kazuma Okamoto was doing anything with the bat. It’s endearing to watch one man put up solid batting performance after solid batting performance while the rest of his lineup engages in steady mediocrity. Baseball is not a game that can be won by one person alone, but that never stops these guys from trying, and that’s sort of beautiful.
The Twins game I caught in full this week was the one where they got totally blown out by the White Sox. Blown out to the point where they sent in a position player pitcher. That was really more like watching a White Sox game, so I don’t feel like I got a super full impression of the Twins. However, everything I’ve heard about this team suggests that I basically did get the Twins experience. Yesterday’s game, which I half watched while focusing on the Padres/Nationals game, seemed like peak Twins: they were getting blown out, then made a wild comeback, then lost by one run anyway. What I’m saying is that this team seems sort of cursed. There are several MLB owners that should be forced to sell their team, but maybe none more so than the Pohlads.
All that said, there is a charm to a team like this. They go beyond being an underdog, becoming something more like the protagonist in a tragedy. There’s an Eliotesque quality to a team like this, every Buxton or Ryan a Doctor Lydgate, whose heroism is undermined by the medium in which he exists. Everybody who’s read “Middlemarch” knows that you root for Lydgate, even or especially when he’s desperately shooting billiards in hopes of repaying his debts. It helps that he’s really, really good at billiards.
Now, the Padres are different, in that they are an obviously good team that is still capable of some real “what the fuck” moments. Yesterday’s game was the one I caught in full, and what a bizarre one. I want to focus first on Michael King’s pitching performance.
It is weird to say that King’s pitching was dominant through six innings, seeing as he gave up two home runs, but really it was. He was blasting through the Nationals’ lineup at a rate of like ten pitches per inning, just inducing ground ball after ground ball. This sort of pitching is wizardlike to watch. Usually an unhittable pitcher is a strikeout guy, because that’s the thing that pitchers can actually control. But sometimes you see somebody who can just make the pitches move such that the bat is always on top of them. Tyler Rogers, Blue Jays reliever, is one of these guys, but seeing one who starts games was nuts.
But then the seventh inning came, and I guess some god or another saw fit to strike King down? He was suddenly giving up walks, loaded the bases, and got knocked out of the game having only thrown like 70-75 pitches. This turned into a rally inning for the Nationals, where they scored enough runs to win the game. The Padres threatened to mount a comeback an inning later by loading up the bases, but they didn’t get anything off of it.
This is the kind of Baseball chaos that endears me both to the game and the people playing it. It helps that the Padres didn’t take it all lying down, and really did nearly strike back. This is absolutely a team you can root for.
It helps that the lineup has several cool guys. Fernando Tatis Jr. in particular is just really cool. No better way to say it, really. To borrow young people parlance, the man has aura. He hit his first home run of the season yesterday, which was great to see. Then there are guys like Manny Machado and Ty France. Machado hit a home run of his own yesterday, and France at one point was caught on camera blowing a bubblegum bubble while catching a ball to complete a double play at first base. That’s hilarious. France was a Blue Jays bench guy last year, and it’s cool to see him in an everyday role now.
The Padres prominently feature yellow in their colour scheme, which I like, but the dull brown doesn’t really do it for me; it looks sort of desaturated. They also have NL West disease, where their logo is just two letters interlocking. All this to say, I’m not crazy about the aesthetics. Good announcers, though!
So, I like the Padres, and I found the Twins confounding and compelling in equal measure.
1. Seattle Mariners
2. Milwaukee Brewers
3. Arizona Diamondbacks
4. Kansas City Royals
5. Athletics
6. Chicago White Sox
7. San Diego Padres
8. Philadelphia Phillies
9. Minnesota Twins
10. New York Mets
11. Chicago Cubs
12. Baltimore Orioles
13. San Fransisco Giants
14. New York Yankees
Next week I’ll be following two of the winningest teams in Baseball, the Cleveland Guardians and the Atlanta Braves.
Only one album really grabbed me this week, and it was “Birds of Paradise” by Thomas Dollbaum. This is an alt-country album in the vein of Songs:Ohia or MJ Lenderman, or if we’re being honest, Neil Young. Recently a buddy of mine said that he liked MJ Lenderman less after realizing he’s just doing a Neil Young routine; I don’t totally agree with that where Lenderman is concerned, but I feel it’s pretty apt to describe Thomas Dollbaum. There’s an original songwriting voice here with the lyricism in particular, but musically he’s really always just doing either Young or Molina.
I should mention that Lenderman actually worked on this album, playing drums and guitar and contributing backing vocals. Those backing vocals are great.
The songs on this album deal with loss and grief, as well as memory and nostalgia. Mostly the writing is very, very good. I would point to the lyrics as the album’s biggest strength. “Visitation” is a lean, elegant, and touching meditation on spirituality, “Rabbits” is a look back at a difficult childhood that is sweet and troubling in equal measure, “Coyote” is a very real, heartbreaking number about loving someone with self destructive tendencies, and “Blue Meets Blue” is a beautiful take on grief. These were my favourite songs on the album, largely because they’re the ones where the lyrics hit hardest for me. The others have less going on that really grabbed me, though I really do like how “King’s Landing” uses that plane metaphor.
This good lyricism is bolstered by Dollbaum’s performances. He has a great voice, and he really leans into the emotion of everything he’s saying. This elevates the album’s finest bits of writing to real gut punch excellence, and effectively papers over the less effective or more cliche lyrical moments. The vocal melodies are really great, too. “Dozen Roses” is super catchy, largely because of that pre-chorus hook. And I love the way the refrain of “it must be just my magical thinking” on “Visitation” goes. That descending motif over the soft instrumentation is perfect for an introductory track, as it has the song feeling like it’s falling down, like it’s building to something in reverse, if that makes sense, such that the full instrumentation and steady rock tempo of “Dozen Roses” come in strong.
My big issue with this album is just that musically it isn’t super exciting. These instrumental arrangements are where the album gets derivative, in the ways I referenced at the start of this review. This is a very straightforward iteration of the sound that Neil Young pioneered in the 70s, that Jason Molina made his own in the 00s, and that acts like MJ Lenderman and Waxahatchee are playing with today. There’s nothing wrong with this sound, I would even say that I like it a lot, but I don’t find anything particularly characteristic in Dollbaum’s interpretation of it, beyond his voice and his lyrics. I wanted more out of the instrumentation here; it ended up sort of just sounding like a toned down MJ Lenderman.
So overall I can’t really recommend this album in any universal way, but rather I’d say that it merits a listen if you like this kind of thing. If lyricism is the big thing in music for you, also, it’s worth checking out for that alone. I enjoyed it and I’ve been listening to it a lot, but it didn’t really knock my socks off.
Rating: ☆