Covid-19 lockdowns have made me more and more obsessed with archival footage of “real human life,” scouring the internet for videos of my favorite baseball player, Pedro Martinez, in action. I looked for it. Watching him pitch seemed to access memories I had forgotten or never knew.Fortunately, the most glorious match of his career came on September 10, 1999, when his team Boston Red Sox vs Yankees New York in the middle of that year’s playoff races and now widely available online. The modern audience will be able to see that what I claim is not just a baseball game, but a masterpiece of novel, opera and lyric poetry. Watching it feels like witnessing Virginia Woolf writing “Mrs. Martin.” Dalloway” can be seen in front of you in real time.
Inevitably, my viewing habits began to influence my own work. “Writing is like this these days,” I wrote in my journal. “It’s the pitch order and sentence variation that matters. You have to move the reader within the paragraph. Fastball, curve, changeup. Ordinary sentence, long sentence, short sentence. Keep them on alert and keep throwing the ball past them.” thinking about. I love how language pops out of my head and into my fingers like a curveball arcing out of an All-Star pitcher’s hand. I studied Martinez first as a baseball player and eventually as an artist. I perused him as I would any modernist writer. It may sound wild, but I have found him to be an excellent writing instructor. His signature game is a masterclass on how to shift registers, strategize, create forms, patterns and leitmotifs. Learn from Martinez how to perform on the page.
The Yankees game begins strangely. In the bottom of the 1st inning, Martinez hit leadoff hitter Chuck Knobrauch’s uniform with an inside-angle fastball to get him to base. Many of my favorite masterpieces started with a little whimsy. For example, “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy herself flowers,” Ms. Wolfe wrote. what pitch is that? It’s a declarative and confident opening sentence, arguing that perhaps it’s the brushback fastball itself. “Because Lucy had the right job for her.” nonPrevious sentence or addendum: Curveball outside corner. After Knobrauch was out for a stolen base, Martinez dismissed the next four batters and threw a rare flat fastball to Yankee slugger Chile Davis, who hit a homer into right field, ending the second inning. made the score 1-0 for the Yankees.
Given the awkwardness of the first two frames, it’s easy to miss what’s going on. In fact, some of Martinez’s best performances appear to have been catalyzed by a constraint of his own making: raising the stakes of the showman. (game vs. Tampa Bay Devil Rays, August 2000 After attacking leadoff hitter Gerald Williams, he provoked a brawl from the bench and then pitched eight innings without a hitter. ) as if it were his pitching potential, or, as baseball scouts call it, “talent.” It’s a powerful and cumbersome beam of light that needs to be tweaked to pinpoint its exact position as the game progresses.
