#60. Starkville (Tuesday, November 3, 2020)
What was your best day…of achieving something small that was important to you?
If there’s one thing the whole saga of 2020 and 2021 gave people, it was time. Lots of it. And for me, it was time to ask some deeper questions about myself and what I wanted in this world.
Midway through 2020, I came across this book, Elephant in the Brain. In short, the authors take a very cynical (but well-communicated and scientifically-supported) view that everything we do as humans is driven by how it makes us look to the people around us, yet we trick ourselves that that’s not the case1.
My first reaction was, “So what? That’s just how people are – and I hate it.” Then I realized that the very fact that everything in this (supposedly provocative) book was obvious to me confirmed my longstanding hypothesis that my way of thinking was fundamentally different from everybody else. I was weird, but in a weird way – and it could all be boiled down to one thing.
I don’t care about proving myself to the people around me (family, friends, co-workers, immediate peers), but I care immensely about proving myself to the anonymous society at large.2
This would explain a lot of things. Like why I’ve never maintained any close long-term friends (#91), or why I created this site to share this original concept with the entire world of people who don’t know me, with no intended personal benefit.
The challenge with this way of thinking, of course, is that standing out in a larger society – as one out of several thousand/million/billion (depending on which society) – is hard. So you have to treasure any small achievement, any small instance of being heard on that wider scale, that life gives you.
And this particular achievement was as small as they come. But it still meant the world to me.
First off, The Athletic is a high-quality sports journalism site that was established only a few years ago but has rapidly grown to arguably supplant ESPN (and various others) as the go-to source for the serious sports fan. They run several podcasts, one of which is a weekly baseball show Starkville – hosted by famed sportswriter Jayson Stark and former Cubs/Phillies slick-fielding outfielder Doug Glanville (hence the name).
Now, for those who don’t follow The Athletic, Jayson Stark is the undisputed master of weird, arcane baseball trivia. His Weird and Wacky columns have been a favorite of mine dating back to his ESPN days circa 2006. So, naturally, as part of Starkville, they have a trivia segment at the end of each show where a listener gets to go on air and ask their (extremely esoteric) question to try and stump Jayson and Doug.
As a lifelong fan of both trivia (#109) and baseball, I really wanted to go on the show and do that just once. But I knew it would be difficult. They probably got a hundred potential questions each week, plus I wanted to do it right. I didn’t want to just ask some meaningless counting question (e.g. Who were the only three players to hit 500 home runs and steal 300 bases?) that any random person could look on Baseball Reference and come up with. I was only going on if I had a question that was truly unique – that required both creativity and effort to come up with.
In the weeks prior, I had sent a few (well though-out) questions via Twitter, but those didn’t materialize. Then, a few days after Julio Urias got the last three outs to win the 2020 World Series for the Los Angeles Dodgers, Jayson posted his call for trivia on Twitter, and I was ready.
I tweeted to Starkville: “This year, Julio Urias became the 5th pitcher in the Wild Card era (since 1995) to get the last out of the World Series as well as start a game in that same World Series. Who were the other 4 pitchers?”
A few days go by, and I forget all about it. Then, on Tuesday, Tim McMaster, the producer of the show, DMs me on Twitter asking if I’m available to join Starkville to ask that question. I go absolutely numb. Holy shit! Am I about to go on a freaking national baseball podcast asking the specially-crafted trivia question I created to one of my favorite baseball writers and a legit former Major Leaguer?
I’ve calmed down by the time the recording rolls around. We do some short chit-chat – Tim, Jayson, and Doug are all super-cool (as expected) – then it comes time for the segment.
Here it is in all its glory (go to one-hour mark).
What I loved the most is that Jayson, probably finding my Twitter profile interesting, seemed to linger more on the pre-amble with me than with the usual trivia asker.
(Jayson mentions how I’m an economist and part-time science fiction novelist, and we banter on about my [still-unpublished] novel.)
Jayson: So shouldn’t you be writing a novel right now or saving the economy instead of talking to us?
Jeff: Uh, probably. Probably. (Jayson and Doug laugh.) But I figure, World Series just ended, so uh, yeah, I’m not gonna get any baseball for the next four months, so uh, yeah, gotta get my fix in there while I can.
Jayson: Well this podcast will continue, so we’ll do our best to keep your baseball fix fixed.
My other favorite part was them asking me clarifying questions (“Would Randy Johnson getting the last out in the Top of 9th before the Diamondbacks walked off the Yankees in the 2001 World Series count?”), and me giving kind-of-sarcastic answers that were carefully worded so as to not give anything away (“I mean literally the last out. As in, the out happened and the World Series ended.”)
Ultimately, I was not able to stump them3. But that didn’t matter. Especially because, a few days later when the episode got released, I saw that the first hour was a discussion with some guy named Orel Hershiser.
(Orel Hershiser was a pitcher who played 18 years, was the Cy Young Award winner and World Series MVP when the Dodgers last won in 1988, holds the record of 59 consecutive scoreless innings pitched, and should probably be in the Hall of Fame.)
Sharing a podcast with Orel Hershiser, I’m counting that as a win. (Even if it’s only under my own convoluted, not-a-normal-person criteria of success.)
- That’s the “elephant in the brain”, if you will.
- A good example of this would be Magic and LIBOR & Taxes (#78, #66). Instead of playing a top-tier deck and winning tournaments with it for fleeting money and recognition among immediate peers (like 99% of players), I’d rather sink thousands of dollars and hours into creating a new strategy to possibly change the way everyone in the Magic community thought about the game.
- Though, in fairness, this was right after a cold streak for Jayson and Doug, and so they’d started giving themselves a bunch of free guesses – in this instance, three extra guesses to stumble upon the fact that Josh Beckett had pitched a complete game shutout in the clinching Game 6 of the 2003 World Series.