Jordan Ellenberg's Blog, page 7

I have heard the song “Hot To Go!” twice at Fiserv Forum this year, the first time in March played by Chappell Roan herself to a crowd of Olivia Rodrigo fans mostly (like me) unfamiliar with it, the second time tonight as part of the DJ set at a Kamala Harris rally, where 15,000 Democrats demonstrated that they knew the H-O-T-T-O-G-O dance. Fame comes at you fast.

Just about a perfect night of baseball. I’m not sure I’ve ever been to a 1-0 game before. Both starters dominant through the first three, then continuing to toss shutout innings but clearly starting to tire, allowing more hard-hit outs. The enjoyable tension of wondering which manager would pull his starter first and what would happen when they did. On the hill for the Brewers: Tobias Myers, a man I have never heard before. 26-year-old rookie on his 6th team, it turns out, never made it to the majors until this year and now is arguably the Brewers’ best starter. His first team, it turns out, was the Orioles! He was who we traded to the Rays for Tim Beckham.

But yes. Perfect night. Roof open, 6:10 start, warm but not hot, free William Contreras jerseys for everyone in attendance. Upper deck seats over left field. Myers strikes out 7 in the first four innings. Nobody gets on, nobody gets on, nobody gets on. I was excited to see Elly de la Cruz (remembering, years ago, coming to a Brewers-Reds game excited to see Billy Hamilton) and de la Cruz excitingly swung and missed a lot. AB pointed out that the Reds had two country-named players in the lineup, Jonathan India and Ty France. Myers gave up a single and then a sharp lineout and got pulled but Joel Payamps got out of the inning. The Reds starter got pulled and Tony Santillan, great stats on the year, comes in. Sal Frelick has a great at bat, fouls off pitch after pitch straight back, just what you have to do to make a short reliever throw more pitches than he wants to. (Remembering, years ago: Jesus Aguilar fouling off pitch after pitch before finally homering to beat the Marlins.) Frelick grounds to short but after that Santillan gave up a 2-out homer, an authoritative line shot into the Brewers bullpen, to Rhys Hoskins, and then it wasn’t over but it felt over. Devin Williams time, back after a long spell of injury. Elly de la Cruz led off the inning with more exciting swings and misses. Williams struck out the side. Fireworks. CJ is off to college in the fall and while this is not likely to be the last time the kids and I go to a Brewers game, it’s the last time it will be part of our ordinary life all living in Madison for CJ to say, in the middle of the afternoon, “should we go to the Brewers tonight?” and for us to just do it. I was thinking the whole game about the lastness of it, and it was a good last game, even if it wasn’t really the last game.

I was in a coffeeshop in Berkeley, CA when Joe Biden announced he wouldn’t be running for re-election. I kind of wanted to talk to somebody about it but it wasn’t clear anybody else knew it had happened. At the next table there was a young couple with a toddler in a stroller who were talking to each other in a language other than English, but at some point I heard “foreign words foreign words CONTESTED CONVENTION foreign words” so I felt authorized to strike up a conversation. They were naturalized Americans originally from Lithuania and they were one-issue anti-Trump voters — they said Putin could have tanks in Vilnius in a half an hour and that they didn’t believe Trump would raise a hand to stop it. I asked them what they thought about Harris. The mom, who did most of the talking, was somewhat concerned about Harris’s electability. She liked Gavin Newsom a lot and saw him as a prime example of what she considered an electable US politician. The dad chimed in to mention Newsom’s hair, which he saw as a plus. The mom said her real concern about Harris is that she seemed like more of a politician, lacking a real governing of philosophy of her own to offer, by contrast with the political figure she really liked and admired, Hillary Clinton.

Later that morning I talked to three women from Missouri, probably in their 60s, who were from Missouri. They all agreed that they were sad that Biden had dropped out of the race. But it wasn’t clear they thought it was the wrong decision, just that they felt sad about it. One brought up the comparison with taking an older relative’s keys away. “But we’re 100% Kamala,” one of them said, and they all nodded.

I was in a small seaside town in Spain and struck up a conversation with a family. It developed that they’d rented a car and the dad had driven from Barcelona, while I’d taken the bus. In my mind I remarked “I make good money, I can pay somebody to drive me there so I don’t have to do it myself.” But probably, in the other dad’s mind, he was remarking “I make good money, I don’t have to ride the bus with a bunch of strangers.” The visible signs of richness are governed by which things you want to have, but a lot of the real content of richness has to do with which things you want to avoid.

That’s it. No more to say. A bagel with cream cheese and kimchi is a great combination and I recommend it.

Last night I dreamed I found Gunnar Henderson’s apartment unlocked and started hanging out there. It was a really nice apartment. Dr. Mrs. Q was there too, we were watching TV, eating out of his fridge, etc. Suddenly I started to feel that what we were doing was really dangerous and that Henderson was likely to come back at any time. In a huge rush I packed up everything I’d left around and got myself out the door, but try as I might I couldn’t get Dr. Mrs. Q. to have the same level of urgency, and she was a little behind me. And as I was leaving, there was Gunnar Henderson coming up the stairs! I tried to distract him by asking for his autograph, but it was no use — he went into his apartment and found my wife there. I was freaking out, pretty sure we were going to arrested, but in fact Gunnar Henderson was very cool about it and invited us to a party some guys on the Orioles were having in a few months’ time.

Henderson really has been as good as I could have dreamed, not just in a “overlooking breaking and entering if the perpetrator is a true fan” kind of way but by leading the American League in home runs while playing spectacular defense. I was pretty pessimistic at the end of last season about the Orioles chances of getting close to a title again. I was both right and wrong. Wrong, in that I wrote

with an ownership willing to add expensive free agents to fill the holes, it could be a championship team. But we have an ownership that’s ecstatic that the 2023 team lucked into 101 regular season wins, and that will be perfectly happy to enjoy 90-win seasons and trips to the Wild Card game for the next few years, until the unextended players mentioned above peel off into free agency one by one.

That changed: now we do have new ownership, and a new expensive #1 starter in Corbin Burnes, and that makes a huge difference in how well set-up we are for a playoff series. You just don’t have to win many games started by anybody other than Burnes, Grayson Rodriguez, and Kyle Bradish, as long as those three stay healthy, and that’s a good position to be in.

But I was right about

But this year, both the Yankees and Red Sox were kind of bad, and content to be kind of bad, and didn’t make gigantic talent adds in a bid for the playoffs. That hasn’t been the case for years and it won’t be the case again anytime soon.

The Yankees added Juan Soto and are not the same Yankees we finished comfortably ahead of last year.

One of my main points at the end of last year was that the Orioles got really lucky in one-run games and probably weren’t really a 101-win team. This year, so far, we’re whaling the tar out of the ball and actually are playing like a 100-win team. That’s the big thing I didn’t predict — not just that Gunnar would be this good but that guys like Jordan Westburg, Colton Cowser would be raking too.

I don’t think there’s any question the Orioles have made a real change to their hitting approach. It’s much more aggressive. Adley Rutschman, who used to battle for the league lead in walks, has only 12 in 51 games. But he’s still hitting better than last year, because some of those walks have turned into homers. In fact, the Orioles are second in the AL in home runs and dead last in walks. That’s just weird! Usually teams with power get pitched around a lot; and I think the Orioles are just refusing to be pitched around, and swinging at pitches they can drive in the air, even if they might be balls. Elevation is key; the Orioles have hit into only 20 double plays in their first 54 games, a pace of 60 for a full season; the lowest team total ever is the 1945 St. Louis Cardinals with 75, and that was in a 154-game season. Only two Iteams have ever had that few GIDP in their first 54 games, both matching the Orioles’ 20 exactly: the 2019 Mariners (finished with 84) and the 2016 Rays (87).

The last time we did this it was so magnificent that I said, on the spot, “see you again in 2024,” and seven years didn’t dim my wish to see the sun wink out again. It was easier this time — the path went through Indiana, which is a lot closer to home than St. Louis. More importantly, CJ can drive now, and likes to, so the trip is fully chauffeured. We saw the totality in Zionsville, IN, in a little park at the end of a residential cul-de-sac.

It was a smaller crowd than the one at Festus, MO in 2017; and unlike last time there weren’t a lot of travelers. These were just people who happened to live in Zionsville, IN and who were home in the middle of the day to see the eclipse. There were clouds, and a lot of worries about the clouds, but in the end it was just thin cirrus strips that blocked the sun, and then the non-sun, not at all.

To me it was a little less dramatic this time — because the crowd was more casual, because the temperature drop was less stark in April than it was in August, and of course because it was never again going to be the first time. But CJ and AB thought this one was better. We had very good corona. You could see a tiny red dot on the edge of the sun which was in fact a plasma prominence much bigger than the Earth.

Some notes:

We learned our lesson last time when we got caught in a massive traffic jam in the middle of a cornfield. We chose Zionsville because it was in the northern half of the totality, right on the highway, so we could be in the car zipping north on I-65 before the massive wave of northbound traffic out of Indianapolis caught up with us. And we were! Very satisfying, to watch on Google Maps as the traffic jam got longer and longer behind us, but was never quite where we were, as if we were depositing it behind us.We had lunch in downtown Indianapolis where there is a giant Kurt Vonnegut Jr. painted on a wall. CJ is reading Slaughterhouse Five for school — in fact, to my annoyance, it’s the only full novel they’ve read in their American Lit elective. But it’s a pretty good choice for high school assigned reading. In the car I tried to explain Vonnegut’s theory of the granfaloon as it applied to “Hoosier” but neither kid was really interested. We’ve done a fair number of road trips in the Mach-E and this was the first time charging created any annoyance. The Electrify America station we wanted on the way down had two chargers in use and the other two broken, so we had to detour quite a ways into downtown Lafayette to charge at a Cadillac dealership. On the way back, the station we planned on was full with one person waiting in line, so we had to change course and charge at the Whole Foods parking lot, and even there we got lucky as one person was leaving just as we arrived. The charging process probably added an hour to our trip each way.While we charged at the Whole Foods in Schaumburg we hung out at the Woodfield Mall. Nostalgic feelings, for this suburban kid, to be in a thriving, functioning mall, with groups of kids just hanging out and vaguely shopping, the way we used to. The malls in Madison don’t really work like this any more. Is it a Chicago thing?CJ is off to college next year. Sad to think there may not be any more roadtrips, or at least any more roadtrips where all of us are starting from home.I was wondering whether total eclipses in the long run are equidistributed on the Earth’s surface and the answer is no: Ernie Wright at NASA made an image of the last 5000 years of eclipse paths superimposed:

There are more in the northern hemisphere than the southern because there are more eclipses in the summer (sun’s up longer!) and the sun is a little farther (whence visually a little smaller and more eclipsible) during northern hemisphere summer than southern hemisphere summer.

See you again in 2045!

I had the great privilege to be present at Camden Yards last weekend for what I believe to be the severest ass-whupping I have ever personally seen the Orioles administer. The Orioles went into the 6th winning 3-1 but the game felt like they were winning by more than that. Then suddenly they actually were — nine batters, nine runs, no outs (though in the middle of it all there was an easy double-play ball by Ramon Urias that the Angels’ shortstop Zach Neto just inexplicably dropped — it was that kind of day.) We had pitching (Grayson Rodriguez almost unhittable for six innings but for one mistake pitch), defense (Urias snagging a line drive at third almost before I saw it leave the bat) and of course a three-run homer, by Anthony Santander, to plate the 7th, 8th, and 9th of those nine runs.

Is being an Angels fan the saddest kind of fan to be right now? The Mets and the Padres, you have more of a “we spent all the money and built what should have been a superteam and didn’t win.” The A’s, you have the embarrassment of the on-field performance and the fact that your owner screwed your city and moved the team out of town. But the Angels? Somehow they just put together the two generational talents of this era of baseball and — didn’t do anything with them. There’s a certain heaviness to the sadness.

As good as the Orioles have been so far, taking three out of their first four and massively outscoring the opposition, I still think they weren’t really a 101-win team last year, and everything will have to go right again for them to be as good this year as they were last year. Our Felix Bautista replacement, Craig Kimbrel, has already blown his first and only save opportunity, which is to say he’s not really a Felix Bautista replacement. But it’s a hell of a team to watch.

The only downside — Gunnar Henderson, with a single, a triple and a home run already, is set to lead off the ninth but Hyde brings in Tony Kemp to pinch hit. Why? The fans want to see Gunnar on second for the cycle, let the fans see Gunnar on second for the cycle.

Enough of this. Enough. Equivocal or vague principles, as a rule, will make your life an uninspired, undirected, and meaningless act.

This is taken from Alphabetical Diaries, a remarkable book I am reading by Sheila Heti, composed of many thousands of sentences drawn from her decades of diaries and presented in alphabetical order. It starts like this:

A book about how difficult it is to change, why we don’t want to, and what is going on in our brain. A book can be about more than one thing, like a kaleidoscope, it can have man things that coalesce into one thing, different strands of a story, the attempt to do several, many, more than one thing at a time, since a book is kept together by the binding. A book like a shopping mart, all the selections. A book that does only one thing, one thing at a time. A book that even the hardest of men would read. A book that is a game. A budget will help you know where to go.

How does a simple, one might even say cheap, technique, one might even say gimmick, work so well? I thrill to the aphorisms even when I don’t believe them, as with the aphorism above: principles must be equivocal or at least vague to work as principles; without the necessary vagueness they are axioms, which are not good for making one’s life a meaningful act, only good for arguing on the Internet. I was reading Alphabetical Diaries while I walked home along the southwest bike path. I stopped for a minute and went up a muddy slope into the cemetery where there was a gap in the fence, and it turned out this gap opened on the area of infant graves, graves about the size of a book, graves overlaying people who were born and then did what they did for a week and then died — enough of this.

I haven’t done a show report in a long time because I barely go to shows anymore! Actually, though, this fall I went to three. First, The Beths, opening for The National, but I didn’t stay for The National because I don’t know or care about them; I just wanted to see the latest geniuses of New Zealand play “Expert in a Dying Field”

Next was the Violent Femmes, playing their self-titled debut in order. They used to tour a lot and I used to see them a lot, four or five times in college and grad school I think. They never really grow old and Gordon Gano never stops sounding exactly like Gordon Gano. A lot of times I go to reunion shows and there are a lot of young people who must have come to the band through their back catalogue. Not Violent Femmes! 2000 people filling the Sylvee and I’d say 95% were between 50 and 55. One of the most demographically narrowcast shows I’ve ever been to. Maybe beaten out by the time I saw Black Francis at High Noon and not only was everybody exactly my age they were also all men. (Actually, it was interesting to me there were a lot of women at this show! I think of Violent Femmes as a band for the boys.)

But I came in to write about the show I saw this weekend, four Wisconsin acts playing the High Noon. I really came to see Disq, whose single “Daily Routine” I loved when it came out and I still haven’t gotten tired of. Those chords! Sevenths? They’re something:

Dusk was an Appleton band that played funky/stompy/indie, Bug Moment had an energetic frontwoman named Rosenblatt and were one of those bands where no two members looked like they were in the same band. But the real discovery of the night, for me, was Graham Hunt, who has apparently been a Wisconsin scene fixture forever. Never heard of the guy. But wow! Indie power-pop of the highest order. When Hunt’s voice cracks and scrapes the high notes he reminds me a lot of the other great Madison noisy-indie genius, Graham Smith, aka Kleenex Girl Wonder, who recorded the last great album of the 1990s in his UW-Madison dorm room. Graham Hunt’s new album, Try Not To Laugh, is out this week. ”Emergenct Contact” us about as pretty and urgent as this kind of music gets. 

And from his last record, If You Knew Would You Believe it, “How Is That Different,” which rhymes blanket, eye slit, left it, and orbit. Love it! Reader, I bought a T-shirt.