No. 185 – Optimistic / In Limbo

Performer: Radiohead

Songwriters: Colin Greenwood, Jonny Greenwood, Ed O’Brien, Phil Selway, Thom Yorke

Original Release: Kid A

Year: 2001

Definitive Version: None.

Kid A was one of the big albums, along with Tool’s Lateralus, that made up the soundtrack for my Summer of Bummer in 2001. I was pretty depressed after my life was derailed in April, but things started to change in August. In fact, I have a clear vision of being in my bedroom with the In Limbo portion of this song suite on my bedroom stereo and the sun streaming through the massive locust trees in front and feeling … things were going to be OK.

It was the first time I’d felt optimistic in months, because I had a bunch of things in the works. I had a big trip to Los Angeles to see Jin and then my maiden voyage to Las Vegas coming up. You know, it might just be the time to think about moving West …

Another thing that contributed to my improved outlook was the excitement I felt about a new project upon which I was about to embark. The idea came to me while I worked on an article for BaseballTruth.com.

Baseball was celebrating the 100th anniversary of minor-league baseball in 2001. Of course, what they were celebrating wasn’t the birth of the minor leagues, because they would have had to move the sticks back 18 years, and who wants to celebrate a 118th anniversary?

What baseball was celebrating was the birth of the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues, which was the formal body that (sort of) oversaw the many minor leagues of baseball. (I’d say the birth of the administration of the minor leagues, except that wasn’t really true either.)

Faulty history aside, this celebration was a good excuse for a story for the website. A cool idea that no one else had done as far as I knew was an All-Century Minor League Baseball team. You might recall Major League Baseball made a HUGE deal out of selecting its All-Century team in 1999, and I thought a minor-league version would be a fun article to research and write.

It wasn’t the first time I was interested in the greats of the minor leagues. Their numbers fascinated me after I joined SABR in 1986 and bought a few books that published collected lifetimes stats: How does a guy rack up, say, 3,000 career hits in the minor leagues? Well, simply stated, it was a different game back then, so it not only was possible, but it also was fairly common.

My fascination got to the point where Jim and I used to argue during down time at the News-Dispatch in Michigan City about how good these guys—the Buzz Arletts, Smead Jolleys and Ike Boones of the world—really were. (Later, Jim, down about his career, dubbed himself the Smead Jolley of journalism—a moniker that has stuck in my mind ever since.)

So, going back into my old SABR books and trying to figure out who were the best among these mostly forgotten players would be fun. What I had was a good place to start, but I needed more information. A big part of player evaluation is league and team context, and I didn’t have any reference materials that helped me determine that. So it was off to the Columbus Metropolitan Library. Unfortunately, it didn’t have much either.

I found a great book called The Minor League Register. It had career records for hundreds of minor-league greats—far more than my SABR books—plus, it was about a decade more current, which was important with regard to a few guys playing in Mexico.

But more than anything, the library was an exercise in frustration, because I couldn’t find what I needed. All they had were a few annual guides with the rawest of raw data. If I were doing something similar for Major League players, I could go to any of several reference books to find what I needed right away to build a proper All-Century team.

As I sat in the reference department of the Columbus library in July 2001, I voiced my frustration in my head: You know, someone needs to do something like that for the minor leagues, so schlubs like me … And the obviousness of the idea made me bolt upright.

I had been told for years that given my love of baseball, I should write a book. I always demurred, because I didn’t know what I would write about that hasn’t been done and would be interesting enough for me to do. Now I had that idea: I’ll be that someone. I’ll write a minor-league encyclopedia.

Good idea, but first things first. I tucked the book idea in my back pocket, finished my research and wrote my article, which I published in August. The article was so much fun that I decided to take the work I’d done a step further. Now that I had an All-Century Team, I could make that a jump-off point to a minor-league-baseball Hall of Fame. No one else had done anything like that, either, and I can set it up through BBT.

In one fell swoop, I had a genius book idea and website concept. I suddenly was excited about the future. I had a lot happening, and I didn’t have time any longer to feel sorry for myself. Things are going to be OK after all.