2023 Baseball Wrapped

I have one more newsletter coming your way this year, about two Mariners-Red Sox games in 1981 and 1990. Look for that in a day or two or more, but this week for sure! While I’ve been working on that, I’ve been thinking about my year of baseball. ‘Tis the season for best-of lists and years-in-review after all. So allow me some self-indulgence as I take a look back at my baseball year.

The World Baseball Classic and the Mrazek Plow

Last March, Czechia (more commonly known as the Czech Republic but from what I can tell they want to go by Czechia) made their first ever appearance in the World Baseball Classic. They ultimately lost in the first round, after a really fun and entertaining run as the underdogs. The success of the team spurred me to investigate some family history.

My great-great-grandparents emigrated from Moravian, in what I grew up calling Czechoslovakia (still the best name for a country, it’s so fun to say, Czechoslovakia), but was then part the Habsburg Empire. They settled in Texas, which was a landing spot for a lot of Moravian people. Sometime after they initially immigrated to Texas, they moved to the newly established town of Robstown. The land was difficult to farm, but my great-great-grandfather, Tom Mrazek, was a smart guy and invented a special plow that allowed the Moravian community there to make a living.

It turns out, this plow was a really big deal! It’s called the Mrazek Plow, but Tom never got a patent for it so there is no family fortune from the invention. In 2016, a monument to the plow was dedicated at the fairgrounds in Robstown. Here’s an article about the dedication that goes into some of the history of it.

I could go on and on about the things I uncovered. It was a fun dive into my family history, all inspired by an underdog baseball team.

The Beauty of T-Ball

One of the wishes I had for my kids is that they wouldn’t be good at sports. Youth sports has become this juggernaut that totally dominates your life/every spare second of the your evenings and weekends and it all seems to get really intense really fast. Naturally, I had kids who did not inherit my (lack of) athleticism. My youngest has a real knack for the ball sports. The parks department here doesn’t have t-ball available until kindergarten, so we opened the portal into the Youth Sports Industrial Complex and signed up for t-ball through Little League.

You know what? I loved it so much. It was so chaotic and wild. Those kids were all over the place. Over the course of the season, they slowly got a little better and it was really awesome to watch. My kid? At the end of the first game he was nearly in tears because he wanted to keep playing. He loved everything about it; getting into his uniform, hitting, playing in the field, joking around with his teammates.

We’re about to sign him up again, this time for coach-pitch. I’m sure it’ll be awesome too, but there was just something about t-ball. It was so cute and so pure and so adorably chaotic. One of the best baseball (baseball-adjacent?) experiences of my life.

Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here

We hadn’t planned to take the kids to any Mariners games with year. It’s such a production to get there and deal with everything. With Cheney Stadium just a few minutes away, we can inculcate them with baseball without the Mariners. Then we got an email for discounted tickets for one of the Mariners Little League Days and I think I lost my mind because I decided it sounded like fun.

We did the pre-game parade on the field and we sat in the 300-level surrounded by sugared-up hyper Little Leaguers in their uniforms. The shrieking, the excessive enthusiasm, the perpetual motion. It was a LOT. I was ready to go home about halfway through the game. The kids though? They enjoyed every second. They were into the game, they had fun dancing and playing the scoreboard games between innings, they loved the whole experience, and they want to go back again soon.

Tiger Stadium

In May I went to Detroit for my cousin’s wedding. I got some time for sight-seeing the day I flew home, so I stopped by the site of the former Tiger Stadium. I always wanted to go to a game there; it was such a cool ballpark. After it was torn down, a youth baseball field was built in the same location, with the diamond on the exact footprint it had been at Tiger Stadium

I will likely write about that here sometime this winter because it was such a cool, serendipitous visit and I can’t do it justice here.

The All-Star Experience

Seattle hosted the MLB All-Star Game this year. It was the first time I’ve cared about an All-Star Game since 2001, the last time it was here. My parents went to the first Seattle All-Star Game in 1979 and I worked at Safeco Field in 2001 so I was there that year. This year, the family streak was broken because I did not go to the game itself. I did take advantage of the festivities though.

The Futures Game

I’m not all that into prospects and drafts, but one of the aspects of both college and minor league baseball that I enjoy is looking through my scorebooks years after the fact and going, “Hey cool, I saw him play before he was famous!”

The Futures Game ended up being a fun twist on that for me. When I wrote for Lookout Landing, we were tasked with picking a guy we wanted the Mariners to draft in 2019. I chose Nasim Nuñez (he’s the last player, at the very bottom of the article, because everyone was all Amanda, they’re not going to pick a shortstop who can’t hit you silly goose). Low and behold, he’s not only in the Futures Game, but he won the MVP! It was a fun moment for me. Him too, probably.

During the Futures Game they were using the automatic strike zone and it was awesome. They had the setup where the players could appeal a call and they only had so many appeals they could use. It was really fast, there was strategy involved, the way it was presented on the big screen was fun, and it led to some joking between the umpires and players. I want this in the major leagues immediately.

Summer Catch

For the 2001 All-Star festivities, the cast of Summer Catch was in town. I remembered this and because I never saw the movie decided to watch it. It came out near the end of the elder millennial era of teen movies and featured that distinct late 90s/early 2000s blend of fatphobia, misogyny, homophobia, and Matthew Lillard. Truly a movie of its time. The baseball parts of it were…look, this isn’t going to make anyone’s list of best baseball movies.

(Disclaimer: I don’t really like any movies, including some beloved baseball movies, so take my opinion with that in mind, however, I’m pretty sure no one liked this one.)

Home Run Derby

My husband got a last minute invite to go to the Home Run Derby, just him, not me (it’s FINE and I was totally not mad about it). He was lucky enough to catch (retrieve) a home run ball! It’s a pretty cool souvenir, and I’m claiming it as a highlight of my year because it’s in my (our) house:

The All-Star Play Ball Park

I hadn’t intended to do this. Crowds, people, traffic, difficult/expensive parking, all things I hate. But I’d heard great things about it and had two bored kids on my hands, so we journeyed to Seattle to take it all in.

It was such an amazing time. The kids absolutely loved it. There were so many baseball things to do. They hung out in a giant mitt, did the speed pitch, batting cages, took pictures next to cardboard cutouts of baseball players, jumped on a giant home plate, ate cotton candy, and only minimally fought with each other. There was a baseball game going on for kids, and my youngest was so excited to play. He got a hit and ran the bases and =make a defensive play. The whole thing was so much fun and I’m happy I endured the crowds and traffic for it.

New Scorebook

This is probably the most monumental baseball thing of the year. For the first time ever, in my entire whole life, I got a new style of scorebook.

I learned to keep score with the scorebooks my dad had, the ones you got at Big 5. What I like about those is that in the boxes there is designated space write in the RBI, the outs, the play itself, and mostly, to track pitches. When I first heard that the number of first-pitch strikes or balls can indicate how well a pitcher is doing, I began making my first-pitch slash a different direction. As much as I like all that detail, I’ve found it’s difficult to keep up when I’m at a game with the kids, and the games move noticeably quicker with the pitch clock too.

I’ve been using that same style scorebook my entire life. I’ve been frustrated with constantly running out of space for pitchers (3 spaces for relievers? What is this? 1960?) and there’s too much real estate on the page for compiling stats. I’m not interested in doing math at a baseball game.

So, I did some searching and settled on the 7-2 Double Play scorebook. I really like this scorebook! It’s a little smaller than my previous books, which is easier to maneuver at games with phones and drinks and everything else. The only problem is that without tracking the pitches, I’ve found that I lose focus on the game and miss the outcome of many at bats! Turns out implementing lots of details in my scorekeeping was a hack to keep my ADHD brain focused on games.

I really like this scorebook so I hope I’ll get used to it or my brain will magically learn to focus.

Félix’s Mariners Hall of Fame Induction

The only other Mariners game I attended, after Little League Day, was the game when Félix was inducted into the Mariners Hall of Fame. His induction was so beautiful and so cathartic. It was joyful. He cried unabashedly. Adrián Beltré was there. I don’t know that a fan base and a player have ever loved each other as much as Seattle loves Félix. Even though the last few years of his career were sad, his induction was perfect. Félix will always be ours.

What I Read

I read a ton of books this year, but oddly, only a few baseball books. Among them was Winning Fixes Everything by Evan Drellich, which was really delicious if you want to revel in the Astros sucking. The thing about it though is my expectations for how baseball teams are run is incredibly low already. I felt like the things described in the book probably happen in all front offices. Whether that’s true or not, I’m not in a position to know. But I want someone to write a tell-all from the Jack Z and Jerry Dipoto Eras in Mariners history. Honestly, any of the eras, but mostly those.

What I Made

I made a lot of cakes this year. Including this cake and these cupcakes for Opening Day:

Writing

Other than this newsletter, I didn’t publish anything this year. My Grit City story on the 1915 South Tacoma Tigers came out at the very end of last year. Early this year, I did get to see it on display at Hi-Voltage Records & Books, which was really cool. The first thing I’ve written that’s been available for people to buy in a retail store! And in my own neighborhood too!

I’ve been working on longer-term things. A couple that will not come to fruition for a few years. Another that I’ve been researching for a while. It’s a fun, entertaining story, but I was struggling with how I was going to write it and tie everything together. Then a random Instagram post from MOHAI set off a lightbulb and I’ve got that part figured out. It has a tentative home, so fingers crossed that publishes next spring. I’ve got other things in the idea hopper for next year, so we’ll see if I feel like pitching them.

I have more ideas than I know what to do with for this newsletter and I’ll continue to send them out as I get them written.

Thank you all so much for reading this, and for reading all my posts this year!