Where Baseball Belongs
by Erika Verhagen
Screen capture courtesy of Erika Verhagen.
Audiences were finally given the bad news in March 2021: alongside the rest of Toronto’s performance venues, the Rogers Centre would remain closed, leaving the Toronto Blue Jays to honour the age-old tradition of Canadian snowbirds riding out the cold in the Sunshine State. The decision, guided by shifting COVID-19 guidelines on both sides of the border, would result in three home openers this year. The Blue Jays would start their spring in Dunedin, Florida, at a ballpark abutting a middle school that would see more than a few major league home runs, before moving to Sahlen Field in Buffalo and finally returning to the dually beloved and bemoaned Rogers Centre. It was a season defined by improvisation, the watchword of the arts at large since the beginning of 2020.
The popular understanding of sport and art as inherently oppositional rests on shaky foundations. In her 2009 essay “‘Art Versus Sport’: Managing Desire and the Queer Sport Spectacle,” Jennifer Doyle writes: “The very idea of the ‘American artist’ is shaped by the country’s love affair with the male athlete: what is Jackson Pollock’s ‘action painting’ if not a transposition of the athletic gesture into the artist’s studio?”[1] The athlete and the artist can easily gel into a single figure, defined by the performance of their body and the hero worship they inspire.
Still, it might seem odd that a group of forty men (alongside their support staff), all without any significant background in art, might choose this year to explore the expansive opportunity of performance. It might seem odd that they would take Major League Baseball as a venue for such a project. Artists have long taken institutions to task through subtle disruption. Call it institutional critique, perhaps. Or perhaps the Blue Jays intended their season to inhabit the more convivial context of relational aesthetics, as they explored baseball’s capacity to act as a catalyst for larger social relations. Whichever affiliation you choose, one thing is clear: the team spent the season operating within a system of rules and constraints on a scale rarely achieved by other artists.
Screen capture courtesy of Erika Verhagen.
It was a season ripe for exploration from the beginning. MLB was in the throes of contending with the dividing line between innovation and outright cheating as they began their crackdown on so-called “sticky stuff”: spider tack, pine tar, sunscreen, and other supplemental substances used by pitchers to improve their spin rate. The league jockeyed with the spectre of safety. It asked itself what it might mean to perform in empty ballparks. The pandemic’s impact on the public nature of the game would provide athletes and spectators the opportunity to take on new roles: performers and audiences.
For the Blue Jays, it was an eclectic season. They would win ninety-one games, three more than the team that wound up winning the World Series. The notoriously tight-panted pitcher Robbie Ray would win the season’s American League Cy Young Award after a career nadir in 2020. Blue Jays prospect pitcher Nate Pearson would come up from the minors, full of promise, only to be sent back down after a series of disappointing showings and a groin strain. Pearson would find himself bulldozed by Alek Manoah, who sports a tattoo of Jesus on his pitching arm that, through a mangling of perspective, substitutes his own hand for that of God’s son. Consistent displays of humanity, of humour, and of theatricality endeared the team to audiences throughout the summer. After home runs, players would don a shared blazer to celebrate à la The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. First baseman Vladimir Guerrero Jr. spent his time on the diamond mimicking pitchers’ preparations in time with them, playfully undermining the intensity of professional athleticism and crafting a joke about the rituals within baseball. This was also, in many ways, a season-long performance of the ritual of baseball itself. Baseball is much like a mantra — its power lies not in any isolated moment or game but in their repetition.
It surprises people when I tell them you can see the Blue Jays perform nearly any day of the week from spring through fall. It is a scale of performance that matches the ebbs and flows of life. In his appraisal of the Blue Jays’ 2021 season, Andrew Stoeten wrote:
It’s cruel, and yet it’s almost comforting. People naturally love to point fingers over bad outcomes, often when it doesn’t make much sense to do so, but here there just isn’t a single thing anyone can call the definitive reason this team is no longer playing baseball games while other, worse teams go on. It was what it was. A great season, a collection of great individual talents, a team that danced and inspired and felt unstoppable when they returned to Toronto in July and then again as they stormed through September, but that at other times felt ordinary. It was a rollercoaster ride like few seasons I can ever remember watching. And it won’t be easily forgotten. Not so much because of the triumphs and the individual greatness, but because of all the little negative things that, added up, meant that it had to end too soon.[2]
Screen capture courtesy of Erika Verhagen.
Playing baseball and making art both involve constant, hours-long attempts to solve the same recurrent problems — a parallelism that makes the sport seem well-suited to the Blue Jays’ artistic reappraisal. Baseball is tedious. In a model of an artwork fused to slowness and repetition, it’s difficult to get at what the heart of the work could even be. It rejects the notion of wholeness, the artwork’s ability to be understood as a discrete thing. Is the artwork shaped like the season Stoeten sums up? Is it a game? Is it in the performance of a single inning? Of a single at-bat? Is it within the social entity produced through each of these performances that the work exists?
The Blue Jays perform by a score, of sorts, much like Allan Kaprow’s anti-narrative Happenings, though their score comes to them as a readymade in the form of the rules of the game they are playing. It is difficult, at times impossible, to discern the edge between life and art here. The Blue Jays even go so far as to make the role of the audience indistinct from that of the performer. Other teams, understanding themselves to be playing just another game of baseball, become unwitting supporting actors, and their fans find themselves similarly recast without warning. Individual players, traded back and forth between teams throughout the season, seem to gain and lose their statuses as artists just as easily.
Fans’ fanatical online recapitulations of performances created a secondary life for each meticulously reproduced act. Such devoted documentation rivaled that of Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno in their 2006 film Zidane: a 21st century portrait, for which the pair used seventeen cameras to track French footballer Zinédine Zidane through the course of a single match. At times, the film feels like a ninety-minute fancam of Zidane, alienated from context and offered up for dissection as a stand-in for the idea of the footballer. Baseball culture’s commitment to statistics undertakes a similar operation, portraying the pitcher as a data set. An artist in this role can embody two, difficult to reconcile positions. First, he can act as a performer exploring the role of a pitcher. Second, he can act as a body exploring bodyness.
A useful example here comes in the form of Adam Cimber, the gangly right-handed pitcher who entered the performance through a June 29 trade to the Blue Jays. On paper, he’s a mess of contradictions. According to Baseball Savant, the online dumping ground for MLB’s statistical data, Cimber ended the 2021 season with one of the worst strikeout rates in the league. His average fastball speed was only 87 mph, compared to the league average of 95 mph. He fails to live up to the image of what a dominating pitcher might look like in many respects. But, per Baseball Reference, he also had an impressive ERA of 2.26 (the league average is 4.26) and a WHIP of 1.07 (the league average in 2021 was 1.29; anything below 1 is truly formidable). [3] He is dominant in a way that defies the expectation of what it means to be good, and he upends an understanding of spectatorship through a deliberate refusal to be knowable on the sport’s terms. If Gordon and Parenno’s Zidane positions the footballer as a demigod to be consumed by viewers, Cimber offers an aesthetic opposite: he is inextricable from context, inextricable from life itself.
On the field, Cimber continues to destabilize the image of a pitcher. Standing six foot three in distinctive knee-high socks, he is unabashedly all limbs. Cimber’s is a nostalgic style, with his cropped pants truncating his body into something untethered to traditional human proportionality. And what’s more, he throws sidearm. Anyone who has seen a pitcher throw will likely have a sense of the way it’s done. You throw over your shoulder, keeping your arm in tight, releasing the baseball above your head. Cimber, though, begins every pitch resting back on a bent right leg, squatting into it as he drives his left knee up. He spreads his arms wide and sets up like he is about to throw a bowling ball. He whips his right arm around, parallel to the ground, with a force that brings his back knee along for the ride, reeling up into his body nearly one hundred eighty degrees from where it started. It’s a uniquely dynamic pitch delivery. He begins with an immense height, releases the pitch as low as he can, and then finds his way back up again, his body taking on a sort of shapeshifting quality. It also looks completely goofy. It is a pitching style that undermines the sanctity of the role with levity. Cimber pitches in order to question the fundamental stature of his role as a pitcher. Rather than allow pitching its star-studded nobility, Cimber makes it into something deliberately comedic — something that returns the oft-vaunted act to the realm of the performative body in space.
As notable as any other individual moment in the work is the Jays’ September 3 appearance at the Rogers Centre against the Oakland Athletics. The As have been in a comfortable position, ahead 8–2 by the bottom of the seventh inning. With Oakland pitcher Yusmeiro Petit on the mound in the eighth, up to the plate steps Lourdes Gurriel Jr., known affectionately as La Piña for the towering mop of hair that miraculously fits underneath his hat during play time. The Jays have managed two runs early in the inning, and Petit, with two outs on the board, stands surrounded by Blue Jays: a runner on first, a runner on second, and a runner on third. His first pitch to Gurriel, an 84-mph ball right into the barrel of the bat, becomes the batter’s fifteenth home run of the season and takes the Jays from a four-run deficit to a tie game, 8–8. At the top of the ninth, Oakland’s Matt Olson hits a ball past Jays pitcher Jordan Romano and into the glove of Breyvic Valera who tries (and fails) to power it to first baseman Vladimir Guerrero Jr. It’s the catcher who attempts to pick up the slack, running to grab the ball and making a toss to Guerrero that is inadvertently cut off by the back of Oakland’s first base coach Mike Aldrete. Suffice it to say Olson is safe at first. Two outs later, Oakland’s Mark Canha smacks it hard to left field. As Romano watches on, desperately attempting with body English to make the ball foul, it’s clear that Oakland has taken back their lead: 10–8. After finally getting the third out, the Jays have their last opportunity to set things straight. Thirty-eight-year-old, bleached-tipped Sergio Romo throws a pitch to Valera and, perhaps in penitence for his earlier error, he hits a nice little single into left field. George Springer, uncharacteristically uninjured, hits next: a double that moves Valera up to third and brings Springer into scoring position at second. Then stepping up to plate is Toronto’s second baseman Marcus Semien. He takes two balls and two strikes. He fouls off another pitch and then sees what he wanted all along: a fastball in the strike zone. He swings, and the ball goes deep for a walk-off home run, earning the ballpark’s celebratory foghorn blare.
It is a game that, watching on my laptop screen from my bedroom, reminds me of Miguel Calderón’s 2004 video of a fictional football match between Mexico and Brazil conjured from snippets of old broadcasts. Screened surreptitiously at a São Paulo bar, México Vs. Brasil puts Mexico ahead early, and they maintain that lead for the duration, resulting in an improbable 17–0 win. Calderón replicates the essential rhythm of a football game as a means of cultivating the attention of an audience largely unaware that the object of their attention is actually an artwork. This could be said, too, of the audience watching the Blue Jays’ one-run win over the Athletics. The Blue Jays, however, were not interested in representing a sports game for artistic ends. Rather, they took genuine participation in the game as a medium.
Screen capture courtesy of Erika Verhagen.
It is, after all, a game that they’re playing. Sure, each performance exists within a context receptive to commentary. There are easy points to grasp about masculinity, about underlying conservatism in North American sports culture, about national identity, but it is not lost on me that each performance exists within the material conditions of a game. In his book Games: Agency as Art, C. Thi Nguyen identities games as potential artworks not because they are a sort of fiction but because they possess a medium that is theirs alone: “Painting lets us record sights, music lets us record sounds, stories let us record narratives, and games let us record agencies.[4]” The specific agencies created by the rules and mechanics of a game can provide an aesthetic experience, and it is clear that the Blue Jays experience this aesthetic fulfillment through their participation in baseball games. They are not merely creating a theatrical simulacrum of the sport but investing in the reality of the game itself. What they are able to do, through the larger context of professional sports and by leveraging their role as artists, is to visualize for audiences the potential of games in familiar aesthetic terms: a team’s harmony, a player’s grace.
Screen capture courtesy of Erika Verhagen.
The many faces of this work make it hard to define. It rejects neatness and order. It rejects all attempts at clarity, and in that rejection it offers us the ability to reacquaint ourselves with the world; it reintroduces a hand as a hand and impresses on us the fundamental joy of yelling among a crowd. On April 10, 1968, the poet Marianne Moore threw the first ball at a game at Yankee Stadium. The eighty-one-year-old had been an avid sports fan much of her life and went so far as to make baseball the subject of her 1961 poem “Baseball and Writing.” But I think it is in a 1919 poem that Moore captures what the Toronto Blue Jays strove for this season: the aesthetic possibilities of baseball. The poem, “Poetry,” begins:
I too, dislike it: there are things that are important
beyond all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it,
one discovers that there is in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but
because they are
useful
Were I to rewrite it, the poem would begin: Baseball — I, too, dislike it.
Erika Verhagen is a writer and artist living in Toronto.
[1] Jennifer Doyle, “‘Art Versus Sport’: Managing Desire and the Queer Sport Spectacle,” X-TRA 11, no. 4 (Summer 2009), https://www.x-traonline.org/article/art-versus-sport-managing-desire-and-the-queer-sport-spectacle.
[2] Andrew Stoeten, “Three up, three down: The 2021 Toronto Blue Jays,” The Batflip, October 6, 2021, https://stoeten.substack.com/p/three-up-three-down-the-2021-toronto.
[3] ERA (Earned Run Average) represents the number of runs allowed by a pitcher over nine innings and is a standard, if flawed, way of assessing the success of a pitcher. Lower ERAs are better. WHIP (Walks and Hits Per Inning Pitched) uses data on hitters reaching a base and is one of the most commonly used statistics to measure the relative performance of a pitcher. Again, the lower, the better.
[4] C. Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency As Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 1–2.
