This week my sleep schedule went through many disasters. As a result, I’ve done just a terrible job of preparing the blog. So, there will be no music segment on this week’s installment. The albums I chose to review have proven somewhat tough to grapple with. I think I’m going to give Paul McCartney’s “The Boys of Dungeon Lane” its own essay, and include the other albums I was going to cover this week in next week’s segment. Two of them might actually find their way into the McCartney essay, because they’re from bands -- Of Montreal and Guided by Voices -- who really obviously owe a lot to McCartney. That essay is going to be in part a reflection on McCartney’s legacy and sphere of influence, because this new album of his feels a little bit like he’s reflecting on it himself. So, look forward to that. It’ll be a little higher effort than my music reviews usually are.
As a Blue Jays fan, I decided to take a little vacation from stressful and frustrating Baseball viewing by following the Cleveland Guardians and the Atlanta Braves, two teams that are having pretty great seasons so far. Cleveland has the second best record in the AL right now, and Atlanta has the best record in all of MLB. The stars are unhurt, the pitching rotations are full, and the offenses are consistent. It’s sort of amazing.
So, the Guardians. They’re a hard team to talk about, because they’re just sort of all around good. José Ramírez is great, and his big strength, quick and savvy baserunning, makes him even more exciting to watch than a lot of other great players. He does a lot of base stealing, and he does it well. He’s also a good third baseman (according to my eye test, anyway) and a slugger. Kind of the whole package. It makes a lot of sense to me that he is the Guardian you hear about. From just this small sample of watching the team, I’d already call him one of my favourite players to watch.
Otherwise, not a ton really stood out. The Guardians are just an efficient team who play clean, effective Baseball. I love their stupid logo, also, and I think it’s good that they ditched their old, incredibly racist branding back in 2020. I bring this last point up because it will be relevant as I talk about the Braves.
The Atlanta Braves are extremely, almost frustratingly good. The rotation is solid; in my viewing the only guy who got beaten was Chris Sale (the Blue Jays got to him, yes, I broke my rule and watched a team the Jays were playing, I wanted to have an easier time squeezing in all the requisite Baseball viewing this week), and he’s still Chris Sale, a guy who throws about five miles per hour faster than you expect a 37 year old to. It’s a scary pitching staff, is what I’m saying.
On top of this is an offense similar to what I observed with Cleveland. They aren’t flashy, but they’re efficient. These guys just hit the ball a lot. And, I mean, that’s a pretty good way to play Baseball.
There are a lot of charismatic guys on this team. I’ll point to two in particular: Ronald Acuña Jr. and Ozzie Albies. Acuña is a great, superstar caliber player, which made it all the more entertaining to me when the Sportsnet broadcast caught him in the dugout, holding a baseball in either hand and staring at them, just really scrutinizing them. Apparently, as he explained later, he thought he saw some way in which they were not identical, and had to analyze them to verify that they were, in fact, identical. Now, this is a funny thing for a superstar Baseball player to be seen doing, but it is also intensely relatable to me as a guy with some obsessive compulsive tendencies. The stars are just like us. With Albies, the thing that stood out was just his batting stance. Seriously, look up a video of this guy batting. It’s the widest stance I’ve ever seen. He looks like a video game character squaring up to swing a huge sword. I love it.
However, the Braves are still holding on to their racist branding, unlike the Guardians. Their name, their Tomahawk logo, and their “tomahawk chop” crowd gesture are all derived from Native American stereotyping only marginally less obvious and egregious than the Guardians’ former name and mascot. Unlike the Guardians’ branding, the Braves’ remains unchanged despite criticism from several Native American advocacy groups. Here’s an article from 2021 that goes over the whole situation in more detail.
I can understand not letting this ruin your enjoyment of the team if, for instance, you live in Atlanta, or grew up liking the team, or just watch them regularly and like the players, but as somebody with no actual horse in this particular race, this situation had more than enough power to sway my opinion. I just really don’t have any respect for an organization that won’t do even the bare minimum to address its own participation in a tradition of injustice and oppression. These players are still very cool, and the team is even fun to watch, but the organization around them sours things.
1. Seattle Mariners
2. Milwaukee Brewers
3. Arizona Diamondbacks
4. Kansas City Royals
5. Athletics
6. Chicago White Sox
7. San Diego Padres
8. Cleveland Guardians
9. Philadelphia Phillies
10. Minnesota Twins
11. New York Mets
12. Chicago Cubs
13. Baltimore Orioles
14. San Fransisco Giants
15. Atlanta Braves
16. New York Yankees
This project is more than half over, wow! I’ve gotta say, I am running out of steam a little bit, and am excited to get through with the rest of these first impressions so I can start doing something more interesting with Baseball Corner. Since I followed two of the winningest teams this week, I’m going to go the other direction next week by looking at the Los Angeles Angels and the Colorado Rockies.