Why Tommy Bennett Writes

Last week, I introduced to the wide readership a line of inquiry down which the very famous Jonah Keri had gotten me started. The line of inquiry concerns those bloggers who, despite almost no promise of financial compensation or notoriety, have persisted in their craft.

The question I posed — after having considered Will Leitch’s suggestion from his Costas Now episode that blogging is a really hard work — the question I posed goes like this:

Why do it? If, as Leitch suggests, it’s hard work, why do it? If, as I can tell you personally, it provides very little in the way of fame and/or cash money, why do it?

I’ve posed this same series of questions — or at least ones very similar to them — to some of the interweb’s more thoughtful baseball writers. This (and maybe next) week, I’ll be sharing their responses in these electronic pages.

Today’s willing participant is Mr. Tommy Bennett. Because you’re the sort of reader who demands quality in his baseballing analysis, you’re undoubtedly aware that, after having risen to the top of the charts with Beyond the Boxscore, Bennett currently wrecks the mic right for Baseball Prospectus.

Please note that this installment of the series is packaged in two unsullied parts: Bennett’s initial response and then his answers to my follow-up questions.

___ ___ ___

Part One: Bennett’s Initial Volley

I write because I consider it to be the noblest of daily habits, because writing stimulates critical and literary thinking in a way that no other activity can. Just as writing that is ungirded by structured thought tends to be uninteresting, I find it hard to construct my thoughts without writing them down. Because baseball is such an emotional pursuit, even for spectators, this is doubly so when I try to think about baseball. When I go to write an essay, I am forced to give justifications, reasons, and evidence for my arguments. Certainly, non-written arguments can be structured and not all writing is well-constructed, but at least when I write I am most conscious of those requirements.

Let me give you an example. I grew up rooting for the Phillies, and the single most severe emotional response baseball has elicited from me came in 1993, when Joe Carter hit a walk-off home run in Game Six of the World Series. It happened, that evening, to be my ninth birthday party, and all my friends were there. I was crushed. For years, I hated Joe Carter in a way that led me to drastically overstate how good he really was. Like many commentators, I focused too much on home runs and RBI, and not enough on other aspects of offensive production. By the time I read Jonah Keri’s essay on RBI in Baseball Between the Numbers (“What’s the Matter With RBI?”), I had completed my transformation from young boy whose baseball enemies took on outsized greatness to thinking baseball fan who realized Carter was a beneficiary of a friendly batting order position that was essentially as valuable as Dave Kingman.

(A brief side note about the most brief of writing mediums — Twitter — seems appropriate here. After relating the story to the same Mr. Keri via Twitter, none other than Joe Carter himself offered his sincere, if belated, wishes for my happy ninth birthday. The world has become both brief and intimate.)

Part of the reason why I enjoy writing about baseball on the internet in particular is the interactivity. I have made connections with a lot of people who are much smarter than I am when it comes to baseball statistics because of the internet, and my knowledge is vastly better as a result. The giving of, and asking for, reasons and justifications has made my own writing about baseball that much better.

Relatedly, I have come to take an attitude of skepticism about my own knowledge as my most important ally in the writing process. Particularly now with the prevalence of easy-to-access online databases, which allow a seeming finality to all questions of value in baseball, I find it increasingly important to be mindful of the limitations of our knowledge, even if the effect of that ignorance is only marginal. I take this mindfulness to be the very thing that makes the writing about baseball interesting; after all, if your numbers of choice told the whole story there would be no need for writing, whether analytic or descriptive. That isn’t to say numbers ought not to be an essential part of any story we tell about baseball, but rather to say that we have to ask questions of our numbers rather than taking them always as answers.

Part Two: Questions Round

Cistulli: “Noblest of daily habits” is one of the most exciting phrases I’ve heard in a while — especially as it relates to writing. Please explain why I’m so excited about it.

Bennett: Consider how grateful we are for the letters of politicians, novelists, and artists. Now consider that those figures couldn’t possibly have been motivated by a selfless desire to be remembered by later generations, at least not all of them. Now, I got to wondering, what did they know that I didn’t?

I’m not a dinosaur, so I generally don’t hand-write letters, but I think the spirit of daily writing, whether or not intended for public consumption, goes hand in hand with intellectual curiosity and virtue of character. Far be it from me to conflate correlation with causation, but at some point the data piles up in an overwhelming fashion.

You ever see a Ring Lardner anthology? Those bruisers can only be described as tomes. You ever read a Roger Angell essay? Dude was past practiced. So I, too, write about baseball as often as I can spare, and sometimes more even than that.

Cistulli: Apropos interactivity, it seems as though a number of sabermetrically oriented types have turned to the internet — and sites like BP, FanGraphs, or any of the better team-specific blogs — not just for the information that’s available there, but because they’ve needed a place to go after being “converted” to sabermetrics.

Was this your experience? Where did you write your first words in re baseball, and about what?

Bennett: That’s similar to my experience, but back when I was drugged, blindfolded, and put into a re-education theater by the Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract and various BP annuals, there weren’t nearly as many great internet baseball resources as there are now. So at first, it was just late nights with spreadsheets and Baseball-Reference or BP, without much writing to accompany the statistics. I did, however, write a back-page sports (mostly baseball, really) column for my college newspaper, and the editors were kind enough not to edit out my occasional expletives or awful puns. I slipped in an occasional column trying to conscientize the countryside about quantitative analysis, and discovered there were more fellow travelers than I had previously estimated.

A few years ago, a buddy and I started a now defunct generalist stat-soaked baseball blog, and that’s where I got my start on the web. For a while and while it lasted, the three upstanding proprietors of the excellent Yankee blog River Ave. Blues (including FanGraphs writers Joe Pawlikowski and Mike Axisa) were kind enough to host it. After a hiatus from writing, I returned to write for Beyond the Box Score, whose alumni I am convinced will take over the world (especially R.J. Anderson, whom I believe is the first computing machine capable of passing the Turing Test). I have been writing consistently about baseball since.

Cistulli: It seems an overriding theme in your response is the degree to which writing about baseball has humbled you — both because of the intelligence of your colleagues and the limits of knowledge generally. In fact, humility is a trait I find rather common among a lot of the sabermetric writers. Even in preparing the present series, the immediate reaction from anyone I’ve contacted is almost absurdly positive and helpful.

Have you noticed the same? Would you care to speculate as to why it’s the case?

Bennett: There is of course the phenomenon of One-Downsmanship, with which I suspect you may have more than a passing familiarity. The idea there is that people who have experienced some success as baseball writers spend a lot of time being impressed by their up-and-coming colleagues. Of course, I am not nearly successful or talented enough to qualify as a One-Downsman. Nevertheless, it is absolutely humbling when a 15-year-old sitting in math class with a TI-83 (do they even use those any more?) can drag me up and down a spreadsheet for 48 minutes. Then there are people like Jeff Zimmerman and Dave Allen who, armed with what I can only assume is magic, create incredible visualizations of baseball data in complex statistical packages like R. I’m left wishing only that one of them would have a hot dog with me.

My BP colleague and mustachioed menace Jay Jaffe likes to refer to himself as a member of the Liberal Arts Wing of Baseball Prospectus. That’s how I think of myself, too, if only because down at the other end of the hall Colin Wyers keeps the thermostat turned down to, like, freezing. But there’s an incredible pluralism of talent in the online baseball writing world, and I think that helps foster an atmosphere of mutual respect.

Finally, I wasn’t a member of the first wave of people writing about baseball on the internet (by a long shot), and those people are still going strong. I remember going to a ballgame in Seattle with a big group of people including Derek Zumsteg (in a custom-made Chris Snelling jersey, if I recall correctly) and Dave Cameron when I was still a teenager. They had no idea who I was, I just happened to buy a ticket. Others, like Christina Kahrl and Clay Davenport, have been around longer still, dating back to the days of rec.sport.baseball, when I was still playing in MUDs on my 14400 baud modem. So for me it’s hard not to be a little bit humble the presence of these folks. Besides, as I say, I think if used properly it can be a real asset.





Carson Cistulli has published a book of aphorisms called Spirited Ejaculations of a New Enthusiast.

15 Comments
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frits
13 years ago

Oh wonderful, another self-referential waste of time. Let me not read this.

don
13 years ago
Reply to  frits

I always wonder what inspires people to make comments like this.

Everett
13 years ago
Reply to  frits

I’ll post the same thing I said in response to another similar comment:

Boy, sure is rough when the free site you frequent isn’t giving you enough significant research. Better cancel your subscription.