The Innovators (One Sixty-Two: Day 144)

Writer’s note: One Sixty-Two is a season-long series of blog posts connecting baseball’s major-league players to life’s universal themes. Just as there are 162 games in a season, so there will be 162 posts in this series. Let’s play some ball.

Day One Hundred Forty-Four: Gio Gonzalez, Oakland Athletics

It is a landmark of ingenuity, nestled in the Berkshires inside a maze of brick mill buildings. The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, known as MASS MoCA, has been around for more than a decade now. However, it is growing in scope, ambition and popularity with every year. This weekend, my wife and I had the chance to pay a visit.

The museum, located in North Adams, Mass., takes your breath away from the moment you see it. The 13-acre complex features 26 buildings along with numerous courtyards, passageways and tall windows, to go with a giant metal sign atop the roof featuring the museum’s name. Inside, the visitor encounters a stunning array of contemporary art, including a three-floor retrospective of Sol Lewitt’s wall drawings, a vast exhibit featuring everyday material items inside giant rooms, and a collection of ambitious sculptures by Petah Coyne. Oh, and did I mention Leonard Nimoy’s photos of individuals showing off their “secret selves”? Or Natalie Jeremijenko’s outdoor sculpture featuring telephone poles and upside-down trees? And we haven’t even gotten to the museum’s concerts (including a recent summer festival starring Wilco), nor have we discussed its theater, dance, films, kids events and dance parties.

Sometimes, when you think different, you create amazing things. As MASS MoCA continues to grow, the other old mill buildings in North Adams have become home to artists’ lofts and galleries. The downtown features dozens of galleries and very few empty storefronts. A walk through the street on a Friday night found busy restaurants and a live musical performance in a gallery. This is a town to which Amy and I both plan on returning, sooner rather than later.

Think different. The Oakland Athletics have been following this motto for years now, using their data-driven philosophy, immortalized in Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball, to change the way baseball players are valued and scouted. In the past few years, though, the A’s have fallen under the radar, as their offense has dissipated and they have traded away several veteran players.

Of course, the team’s front-office, led by general manager Billy Beane, was up to something clever all along. As baseball steps forward into the post-steroid era, Beane was re-making his team around pitching. And so, as the A’s stand solidly in second place in the American League West this year, they do so behind the arms of some very exciting young pitchers. Some of these starters, such as Trevor Cahill and Dallas Braden, are homegrown A’s who were drafted by the team itself. Others, however, such as lefties Brett Anderson and Gio Gonzalez, were craftily acquired via trade.

Gonzalez, for instance, was obtained from the Chicago White Sox a couple of years ago in exchange for outfielder Nick Swisher. It turns out that the Sox moved Swisher along to the Yankees after one year, while Gonzalez has quietly become one of the American League’s best left-handed pitchers. This year, he has 14 wins, a 3.16 earned-run average and 153 strikeouts in 179 innings. A few days shy of his 25th birthday, Gonzalez is at the heart of the new-look A’s – a team that’s not afraid to beat you 1-0 if that’s what it takes.

When we try bold new innovations, we often surprise people. And before they know it, those people are waiting in line for playoff tickets in Oakland – which, by the way, could happen as soon as next year. Or maybe they’re letting their GPS or Mapquest lead them up to North Adams, Mass., to walk through some old mill buildings and experience art as they’ve never seen it. Take some creativity, a dash of forethought, and a whole lot of guts, and you might get something that surprises the world. Like a museum in the mountains that feels cooler than cool.

The Long Run (One Sixty-Two: Day 22)

Writer’s note: One Sixty-Two is a season-long series of blog posts connecting baseball’s major-league players to life’s universal themes. Just as there are 162 games in a season, so there will be 162 posts in this series. Let’s play some ball.

Day Twenty-Two: Dallas Braden, Oakland Athletics

I always thought The Long Run was a pretty good album. It had some neat songs, from “I Can’t Tell You Why” to the title track to my favorite, “Heartache Tonight.” However, I’ve read in an interview with the Eagles that they had viewed the album as a disappointment after its release in 1979.

Their reason: The LP just wasn’t as strong as the band’s previous album, Hotel California. The Eagles felt as though they’d lost something, simply because The Long Run was deemed a very good album rather than a classic.

It’s hard to follow up on greatness. Tonight, Dallas Braden faces the same dilemma. The last time he pitched, Braden threw the 19th perfect game in Major League history. After his 109th and final pitch against the Tampa Bay Rays, Braden had thrown the best baseball game he will ever throw in his life.

So what does he do next? What if he goes six strong innings tonight, en route to a 5-2 win? Is that a failure in comparison? How do you measure everything else up against the moment when all your skills came together to produce the finest work you’ve ever delivered at the office?

As Braden takes the hill against the Los Angeles Angels, he’ll have a game plan in mind. But he also knows that there are simply too many variables to this game to allow for much perfection. A walk, an error, a stolen base, a bloop hit. Suddenly, you’re two runs behind. It doesn’t take much to soil that feeling of perfection you might have coming into the game.

Braden got his Hotel California last weekend, and that’s more than most pitchers ever find in one career. His teammates, I’m sure, are not expecting the same again. They just want a strong lefty pitcher who can help them compete for 162 games. It is, after all, a long run to October.