#sports are fascinating because they are so socially entangled! i care about what happens on the field it's fun

[girderednerve]

i went to the baseball hall of fame! here's a very long post about it!

it's not a very good museum, but i found it sort of hypnotically compelling. there are many extremely interesting objects in the baseball hall of fame, alongside some junk, but mostly there's very little effort to actually propose or illustrate any particular baseball narrative and the whole curatorial perspective is deeply conservative (small c, but nevertheless).

the galleries are nominally sorted into exhibits, but in practice only a few areas were actually findable & delineated; most of the space is given to cases of baseball objects, which are not particularly sorted or contextualized, through which one sort of meanders until one stumbles across a dedicated exhibit. we managed to just catch the tail end of their exhibition about the history of black baseball, which was i thought very well-done. if you have been to museums since 2020 you will have noticed that several of them made rather frantic efforts to be more inclusive & aware, with sometimes obvious disagreement among whoever was putting together the exhibit; for example, this exhibit used "black," "African-American," and, on just one placard which implicated inaugural baseball commissioner kenesaw mountain landis in the segregation of baseball, "Black." i am always fascinated by choices like these, especially given that the baseball hall of fame relies heavily on corporate donors and strong, friendly relationships with MLB teams to exist. outside of this exhibit, any time racist discrimination was acknowledged, the conventional formulation that someone was excluded "because of the color of his skin" was employed, which was of course infuriatingly lazy & obscurantist.

other highlights included a fun exhibit about women in baseball, which kept things pretty light, although it did also point out that the gender segregation of sports has always been an aggressively enforced choice (a woman signed to a minor league contract had her employment terminated by the baseball commissioner after a single game, for example). also there was a little bit about effa manley, which was cool because she's my favorite hall of famer (i'm gay & she's the only woman in there). they also have a creepy-looking set of statues of famous fans right at the top of the stairs, and a timeline of changes in baseball stadiums, which was characteristically light on the incredibly fraught urban politics surrounding large sports arenas & blithely asserted that these arenas bring in many measurable benefits, although this claim is, um, contested at best. i was absolutely sure that there'd be like, plans of the stadiums, because baseball is unique in that each baseball field is different & has different dimensions, which is so strange & silly, but they didn't do that. instead there was a big sign about how the stadium is "holy ground" for baseball fans, whatever that means.

the baseball hall of fame is self-consciously the keeper of the story of baseball, but it's very light on any baseball that happens outside of the united states; there was an exhibit about the latino experience in baseball (the only exhibit, btw, with spanish translations of the text) which documented some caribbean leagues, including, very briefly, the mexican league, but it was weirdly squished in a corner & didn't have enough space to go into detail. the records hall also included a few more or less random items for record-holders from the japanese NPB, but there was nothing for other leagues, even the KBO. this was a strange choice to me because the international history of baseball is very interesting & as you might imagine very fraught & openly tied to a history of american military occupation. (the baseball hall of fame plaques have rosettes under the plaques for veterans of WWII, but that's almost it for talking about the army, although the museum offers veteran and active-duty discounts.)

the actual hall of fame was kind of astonishingly horrible (very bright, pretty crowded, limited seating, unfortunate statues of babe ruth & ted williams). my experience was not improved by the multiple dudes in jerseys who elbowed past me to take pictures of plaques for guys they like, although i can't be too mean about it because now i have a selfie in front of old hoss radbourn's plaque. the hall of fame is stodgy & annoying, mostly because the members of the baseball writers' association, who do all the selection voting, are so stingy & convinced that almost no one now is as good as the greats of the past (obvious nonsense). there are a bunch of self-aggrandizing quotes up on the wall of the museum about how the hall of fame is a mecca for baseball fans & players, really leans into the idea that these are the beatified few, which is always such a strange way to me to think about athletes & what they do, although it does at least hold some weight with ballplayers themselves, many of whom care deeply about hall of fame inclusion. i will note that there's a display right outside in the lobby which claims that the HoF inductees are not just baseball icons but role models, and pull out lou gehrig, jack robinson, and roberto clemente as particularly impressive in this regard, and while i don't dispute the legends of any of those three particular people, it does seem like an egregious claim to make when, say, bobby cox is in. but it's a great excuse for leaving barry bonds out!

there's a central wall in the plaques hall for the original five inductees from 1936, but other than that the hall of fame is not very interested in telling you about its own history, perhaps because it's not very flattering. there's a very obvious cutoff where plaques honoring players in the negro leagues appear, and it's right after ted williams' 1966 HoF induction because he famously took advantage of his induction speech to point out that it was a travesty that some of baseball's best players were not included; MLB itself only recognized the negro leagues as "major leagues" for statistical & records purposes in 2020. while marvin miller's plaque credits him with the advent of free agency, curt flood is still not in the hall of fame. & so on.

just in general the hall of fame is weirdly cagey about a bunch of current shifts in baseball, for all that it had annoying touchscreens with fan polls. it has one little case of stuff about labor stoppages in baseball (the quiz is about seeing whether you could "save the season" by agreeing equally with players & ownership on a few contested issues like a salary cap, which is a horrible framing); one of the things in it is a political cartoon about greedy players, and another is a fan-made shirt that says "i survived the baseball strike." nowhere in it is an explanation of what players were actually fighting for; it just seems strange to me that a sports museum is so profoundly uninterested in the actual labor of sports, the opinions & workplace needs of the people who make the game. also just an L, obviously. there's no timeline of equipment or rules changes (designated hitter went universal after the covid-shortened season! let's talk about it! or not?) less loaded but still interesting: the hall of fame doesn't really talk about 'moneyball' or the statistical turn more broadly, even though sports stats were invented by baseball nerds & advanced stats ("sabermetrics") are increasingly important in front offices. lots of people find them confusing or complain about them. the single acknowledgement is a little placard about the 2012 american league MVP selection, which some people argued [correctly] should have gone to the angels' mike trout, primarily on the basis of his 10+ WAR that season. but it doesn't explain what the stats are or who was arguing or if there was a broader context for the argument, because of. some reason.

also. also. i got jumpscared. because in the middle of a random display case they have a helmet that steve dahl wore to conduct the infamous disco demolition. and that's basically all it says - "steve dahl wore this for the disco demolition at the white sox's comiskey park in 1979" - and there's absolutely no other context for what happened; it just says that the white sox had to concede the game, not that there was a whole fuckin riot. as a side note to this completely decontextualized commemoration of a homophobic, racist event, glenn burke appears in the hall of fame only in the sense that the out-of-the-way bookstore sells copies of roger maraniss' YA biography of him. so fuck that. as far as the HoF knows, gay people & baseball have nothing to do with one another.

my experience walking around in the baseball hall of fame was like, "wow, this place is not laid out very well," and then like "wow, this place doesn't want to be a museum so much as it wants to have a lot of objects in it which could be explained to me by my hypothetical grandpa," and then "wow, this museum does not want me to ask any of the questions i came here to ask."

anyway we're going to go back & i'm sure there will be interesting things to look at. but it's bizarre to go to a museum which is so famous & such a destination & so important to the thing it documents & see it bend over backwards to find no narrative in its holdings, no social meaning in its collections. cowardly & kind of sad.

[frizzyanya]

Gayest show Wang Yibo has ever been in.....

After watching 10? 12? idk? episodes of The Untamed, I went to take a five minute break and surfaced three days later having watched all 35 episodes of Gank Your Heart. (both shows ft. Wang Yibo, of course)

At the time I said, and I quote, “the gayest show Wang Yibo has ever been in is NOT The Untamed, it’s Gank Your Heart. I don’t care what The Untamed’s source material is.”

Having now watched every episode of both shows......I STILL FEEL LIKE THAT WAS RIGHT. To explain my theory, I’m considering the “love interest” (LWJ/PX) rather than the main character (WWX/JXK).

Consider: The Untamed’s Lan Wangji has a brother, and an uncle, and a group of kids he cares about. He goes Places and does Things that have nothing to do with Wei Wuxian, because he’s a Person with Responsibilities. Lots, perhaps most, of his plot lines entangle with WWX’s. Many of LWJ’s plot lines are directly related to his love for WWX. He definitely gets in a lot of messes because of WWX. But there are moments, particularly in the beginning, where LWJ is just interacting with his brother or trying to Save The Day or something, that genuinely are unrelated to WWX.

On the other hand, there’s Gank Your Heart’s Pei Xi. Those moments unrelated to the main character? There are virtually NONE of them. Some of the earliest scenes we see Pei Xi playing for one e-sports team, but already scheming his way onto JXK’s team. From the jump, he’s already fascinated, transfixed, and obsessed with this guy. There’s no getting-to-know-you arc. From the first moments he appears on screen, he’s already ready to jump JXK’s bones, and I think that’s beautiful.

loljk. 

He’s already ready to get to know JXK. To drop everything and follow him. Yes, LWJ does the same thing. Both Pei Xi and LWJ risk losing their family, friends, career, social standing, etc etc. The difference? a) it starts so much earlier for Pei Xi than LWJ. b) Pei Xi has absolutely no unrelated plot lines. He only interacts with other characters for reasons that related to JXK. (Summer? talking about JXK, asking for money to buy out his contract to go play for JXK, etc) (Legends team members? He’s only there because he wants to be on JXK’s team!)

LWJ cares about other characters; he cares how they feel, what happens to them, how his actions impact them, etc. Pei Xi literally does not care about anyone other than JXK. He’s willing to roll his eyes at anyone and everyone else. Nobody matters to him - nobody - except JXK.

And that’s a hill I’ll die on.