For the July issue of Steel Nation I asked Facebook and message boards for questions to answer in my baseball column, hoping to get 81. I ended up with a lot more, and reserved some of the less palatable questions for this blog.
Mayhem, Part II:
1. Why do men have nipples?
Gender is delineated by a single chromosome...there's bound to be unnecessary parts. 2. Why do people hate Andrew McCutchen?
The same reason you hate the saccharine and overly boisterous cashier at the grocery store: because he/she makes you feel inferior. I'm 10 minutes removed from playing Tetris with luggage and a hatchback, and have a sweat stain on my chest reminiscent of a Rorschach blot. My A/C is broken, and I'm in a generally miserable mood. Right now I hate ANYONE that's living in a comfortable 70 degree temperature, which almost certainly includes Andrew McCutchen. 3. Is it normal to cry after you masturbate?
I suppose it depends on the circumstances. It's probably more normal than jumping for joy. 4. Why do the Pirates not have a flood of prospects after Opie proclaimed himself the "Noah of modern baseball"?
"Opie" is shorthand for Neal Huntington, for those not in the know, and I'm sure his self-declaration is apocryphal, at best. But to answer the question: "floods" are relative. The Pirates may have one of the better farm systems in the league, 50 solid minor league prospects equates to maybe two or three bonafide major league ballplayers. Too much can happen after draft day to bank on just one prospect. 5. Is JaCoby Jones white?
....yes?
6. Why were there ever any concerns about Polanco succeeding? Hasn't Mr. Nutting seen how high that dude's butt is?
He does have classic gazelle butt, which is not a thing, nor is it classic. 7. What happened to the vaunted minor league system? They graduated one player in midseason, and have like 5 prospects with major league potential left.
Vautedness (not a word) is relative to the Bryan Bullington days. 8. Where the fuck have you been? Selfish prick.
I've been adrift in a sea of decadent luxury and meaningless sex. Or I've just been too busy to focus my attention on a 45 person message board. 9. Which players love cats?
All of them. Except Pedro. He's all about boa constrictors. 10. Better at their job: Jeff Branson, Ray Searage, or God? (trick question: they are all the same person).
Searage is probably a better micromanager than God, but Branson reminds me of Mickey, from the Rocky franchise (and looks obviously make a person better at their job). 11. Tim Williams of PiratesProspects.com is an asshole.
QED 12. You ever have a whiskey ice cream float?
I like my whiskey to taste like whiskey. I would consider this beverage if the ice cream was also whiskey-flavored. 13. Is it next Wednesday?
Given the few minutes we conveniently shave off each year between the calendar and the actual revolution of the Earth, ANY day could be next Wednesday. Mind. Blown. 14. I've heard it said that Jose Lind kept a switchblade in his sock, and that no one messed with him because of it. Is that true?
No. It was a butterfly knife. 15. R.J. Reynolds once spent a month crashing on my couch. Dude was FUCKED UP. Whatever happened to him?
He owns a profitable tobacco company. 16. I'm intrigued by the capacity of sports athletes to be faithful to their wives. Which Pirate over the last twenty years has remained absolutely faithful?
Oliver Onion. 17. Which was most likely to have cheated on his wife? In your opinion...allegedly...
Cheaty McDivorceson. 18. Are any of the Pirates players home brewers? Fans of craft beer?
They only drink PowerAde®, official sponsor of Major League Baseball. 19. Who was the first gay Pittsburgh Pirate?
20. What would it take for Bri to visit the Warhol Museum?
If it was scheduled for demolition she might make an appearance. 21. Is WiH a wizard?
No man that wears capri pants is a wizard. 22. Climax or Hi-Way Playground?
Both are long drives for live boobs. Whichever one has a better buffet. 23. Who's bringing the burgers?
Marty, probably. But nobody will bring a grill that works. 24. You guys playin' cards?
25. How did Tim Williams, of PiratesProspects.com, become such an asshole?
Self-help books. 26. Statistically, who was the worst player at each position for the Pirates since 1950?
1B: Drew Sutton
2B: Drew Sutton
3B: Drew Sutton
SS: Pat Meares
LF: Drew Sutton
CF: Darren Lewis
RF: Drew Sutton
C: Dan Bilardello 27. How much do theater managers make?
They're paid in garbage bags of popcorn. Consult your bank for exchange rates. 28. Can God microwave a burrito (or Hot Pocket) so hot that even he can't eat it?
A meteor impacting the earth is God spitting out a too-hot chunk of burrito. Everyone knows that.
"In layman's terms" is something you append to the beginning of a sentence as a polite way of saying "I don't believe you will understand what I really want to say so I have no choice but to dumb it down."
I know you better than that, Oh Dozen Followers (hey, it's enough for a round table, hint hint). Even if I write something on here that's is overtly technical, you do have the magic of Google at your fingertips...or you could hope that there's enough context for you to get the gist (and if there isn't, well, shame on me).
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What do you do for a living? It's a common introductory question, and lately I appear to be meeting new people by the...fours. Giving my ten second career overview in between sips of vodka tonic/beer/scotch usually ends with some self-effacing comment like "it's really very boring", which is a terrible thing to say to a person you've just met, because you implant the idea in their head that you must be boring for having a job that you're quick to describe as boring.
But, it's not boring. It's a healthy mixture of hour-or-two ad hoc reports and project-based...er...projects, which means I get little ego surges throughout the day and then a big finale, like the end of a fireworks show, when I finish something more comprehensive. It's not secret agent work, nor does it really provide any significant benefit to humanity on even an arbitrary level (which is first on my list of drawbacks), but I'm getting paid to do something that caters to my skill sets, and occasionally makes me proud. It could be worse.
This post is about to grow in nerditude exponentially. You have been warned (and I will do my best to avoid confidential/proprietary information, although the former is much easier to determine).
First: what the fuck is a "retail energy provider", or REP? You've probably had a few knock on your door over the years, offering cheaper rates than Duquesne Light or Allegheny Power or wherever you might be located. REPs, primarily, purchase blocks of power at a wholesale cost off of the commodities market, and then sell slices of that block to consumers at a retail cost (i.e. including cost of general service, commission, etc.). It's best to think of a commodities market as a stock market, but where the price is almost entirely dependent on weather (and supply, especially for natural gas) instead of CEO ousters or the new line of iPads or whatever.
So REPs like the one I work for can save you money because your default provider does not buy off of the commodities market: they charge you whatever the going rate was for whatever month they're billing you for. For a residential customer (which I'm sure 100% of you are), the savings isn't significant, but it does allow for some budget certainty. For commercial and industrial customers, the savings could be in the millions each year.
So there's REPs, and there's default providers, and there's also brokers, which are dudes that basically shop around among many REPs on the customer's behalf to get the best value, at the cost of a few mills (tenths of a penny per kWh) tossed into the going rate. These brokers are why my job exists, as the REP is responsible for paying these brokers, per agreements they sign with each REP, based on the customer information. In my REPs world this is called channel operations, in which I am an analyst (a senior analyst, if we're into arrogance/geriatrics).
Besides providing retail electricity and gas to commercial, industrial, and residential customers, the #2 objective of this company appears to be "buying other companies that do the same thing", since that is a pretty slick way to increase your footprint. And they've gotten quite adept at it. The company I used to work for was, in fact, bought out by this one, and over the years a few smaller businesses were acquired, as well as at least two kind-of-gigantic ones. For the most part, the motive of these acquisitions was to increase the customer base, although in a few instances there were bonuses that came in the form of a more robust proprietary customer management system, or the chance to incorporate people that were simply better at navigating the natural gas market.
But, when they buy a company, aggregating those customers is usually the last step, if it ever actually happens. There have been mergers where the customers they've acquired are moved into existing billing and contracting systems, and there have been instances where they simply said "let's just keep everything as is" and the company inherited a new billing/contracting system...and sometimes there's a mix. In the latest M&A, customers are moving both directions (into the newly acquired systems and in from the acquired business)...which isn't confusing at all.
So, connecting the dots a bit, I'm responsible for creating commission reports (and, in some cases, setting up their payment in our accounting software) for two specific billing systems that hold 99% of our small business customer base as well as our customers in Canada. Some of the brokers that have sold to these customer types have arrangements to be paid weekly, some monthly. Some are paid "on flow" (i.e. pay based on the billed usage in a given month), others are paid "up front" (pay based on the estimated annual usage of the customer), and some have a mix. Some brokers have incentive bonuses based on net sales, or even the # of agents they have in the field. All of these nuances have to be accounted for and aggregated into a handful of databases that will handle all of the protocols and spit out the results with ease (although the "with ease" part is really of my own volition, as manual work frustrates the shit out of me).
So while I'm trying to make heads or tails of that, I'm being leveraged by the rest of the department as the de facto "computer geek" to create simple methods of looking up data for their own benefit. Commission payments have to be bucketed for accounting purposes, so my first task was to create a way to automatically assign the buckets to our commercial electricity commission payment system, which handles about 70% of our total payments each month. Additionally I created tools that allow anyone in our department to find the codes they need for corrections, or ad hoc payments, simply by typing in the account number (this works for commercial electricity and commercial gas, I didn't do one for small business since I manage that anyway).
This part of my job is heavily IT-based, in the sense that someone in IT should be doing this work, but they have bigger fish to fry than turning around requests for tools that make our lives marginally easier. I'm not badmouthing that department in any way (not purposefully, at least). But they do have a lot of red tape involved, and they're handling requests for ALL departments, and assigning their own levels of urgency, and if it's something I can turn around in half a day I see no reason to put in on their plates and wait a few months for it to get finished.
The one thing I do like saying about my job is that my goal is to make myself obsolete. I believe everything I'm doing can be whittled down to a push of a button. It's improbable that I would ever completely reach that point, given the company's tendency to buy companies. And when I mention this aspiration to coworkers they take it as a personal affront to my necessity. Oh, but I'm sure you're more important around here than THAT. Prestige is irrelevant...actually I would feel MORE consequential if I was successful. I'd feel like a creator. An inventor. My impact would be measurable.
I guess that's the ten minute version (if I had to guess how long it would take a random person to read it) of what I do for a living. It's not flashy, but it's satisfying. I think that combination fits me like a well-tailored suit.
During lunch at a trendy and probably faux-environmentally-conscious restaurant (albeit with a pretty tasty salad), I grabbed the A&E section of the Times, thinking that I would only have a few minutes to browse the articles until my food arrived and my attention turned to more pressing matters. As it turns out, the person that was taking the to-go orders was also the waitress, and had to try to manage her time among the five or six tables eating food as well as the flood of people that were demanding locally sourced lunches to take back to the office. So I ended up reading the whole section. If you, like I had even earlier today, thought of Pittsburgh as a burgeoning scene for the arts...the Times A&E section was actually TWO sections, totaling 58 pages. I'd say we still have some work to do.
One of the articles was centered on the 33 1/3 series of books, where famous authors/columnists/critics write a little novella about an influential album. This particular column was about Liz Phair's "Exile in Guyville", which is a pretty okay LP...not something I would want to read about for a hundred pages, but probably influential (and I did not know it was written by Phair as a track-by-track "response" to the Rolling Stones' "Exile on Main Street") as an example of a female musician that broke through the monotony and stereotype of what it meant to be a female musician in the 90s (i.e. Madonna, or those that wanted to be Madonna).
There was one part of the article that really jumped out at me (and I'm glad I found it online):
There's plenty to mourn about this lost utopian world, when you had to see a band live, instead of Googling its YouTube clips, and when buying a record was an act of almost blind faith -- you couldn't stream the thing first.
Holy shit. Holy. Shit. That's exactly what happened back then (21 years ago, in case you weren't already feeling ancient).
In 1993 I got Pearl Jam's "Vs." for Christmas. I had no idea what was on it (except for "Daughter", which was already in pretty heavy rotation on the radio...the radio), and I'm sure there was some small part of my 13-year-old-self that hoped and prayed that it was going to be good, or at least listenable, because I probably would not get another CD for months. CDs were relatively new to me/slightly less relatively new to the rest of the world...and if Pearl Jam sucked I'd be back to listening to Bryan Adams some more. My entire auditory-enjoyment persona would have been altered forever if I hated "Vs.". Spoiler: I didn't hate it.
In 1997 I was in a band (no further questions) and we decided to cover Blur's "Song 2", because it would be fast, and loud, and loud always masks mistakes. This caused two problems for me: first was that I believe, at the time, I had heard Song 2 exactly once...actually I had seen the music video, and was paying more attention to the band slamming into walls repeatedly. I had some general idea of how the song was supposed to go ("just...kind of 'woo hoo' it and then sing some stuff, right?"), but not nearly enough information to make it a even semi-respectable cover. The second problem was the lyrics, as Damon Albarn tends to sing without ever closing his mouth, which is an action almost imperative for enunciation.
The "internet", back then, was certainly budding (although AOL was more or less the queen bee of information and socializing), but still not the kind of place you go to for niche information like song lyrics, or songs, in general. The lyrics we found relatively easily (through WebCrawler, RIP)...I think the best we could manage for the actual song was a 20 second clip on some site. Thankfully the song is only two minutes long, and that little soundbite was derivative of the entire thing, more or less. I do say "we" because I did not own my own computer, and all of this was conducted in the basement of my friend's house, probably hepped up on Sunny Delight and an onslaught of food from Pizza Outlet.
I can't imagine, today, struggling to find either of these morsels. Hell, just a minute ago I thought I haven't heard The Cult's "She Sells Sanctuary" in forever, and now I'm listening to it. Twice, actually. I like the echo-y guitar at the beginning, I guess.
All of this weird dot-connecting, however, kind of explains my relationship with you.
Like most people in my age bracket I have, so far, straddled the internet age. I am old enough (but not too old) to retain vivid, sharp memories of a significant chunk of my childhood where the internet was unfathomable. In retrospect it was very, very much a work-in-progress in the 80s/90s, and categorically a government/higher education tool, and scarcely resembled the thing I'm using to transmit this little message to anyone on the planet that cares to read it.
I'm trying not to paint myself into a corner of badmouthing the internet, because I love the concept of having information, no matter how insignificant, largely available to me on demand. I'm glad I'm alive in the middle of this weird deluge of enlightenment. You want to know something? Well, here it is, along with a trillion other things, just in case.
But, at the same time, I am just as grateful that the first 15 or so years of my life was spent without this massive and seemingly omniscient beast. I like having a childhood where memories were almost never solo endeavors. Where my friends were my friends because they were within walking distance, and sometimes I'd go down to Matt's house and we'd listen to his brother's Monkees records on this shitty little player, and shoot pool, and his mom always made us hot dogs and mac and cheese for lunch. If it was nice out we'd run around his back yard with fake rifles and pretend we were leading armies into battle, and then take refuge in his kudzu-covered ditch in his front yard, to wait for the imaginary heat to blow over (apparently we had assumed that a lot of pretend people would be mad at us for killing so many soldiers). Or I would go over to Dave's (RIP) house and traipse around the forest that was essentially his backyard, skipping stones across the creek or working up the nerve to jump our bikes off of a makeshift cliff and across a stream to the other side. Or I would hang out with my next door neighbor who would make me listen to Bon Jovi as payback for coercing her into playing football with a few other kids.
Those are days cultivated by our parents shoving us out the door and saying "go play".
You know what else I haven't heard in forever? "Big News I", by Clutch. Poof!
A staggering amount of my time is spent "online", in the sense that I am actively doing something that requires a connection. I could pretend that work is an acceptable explanation, but it's 11:00 at night on a Friday and take a wild guess what I'm doing?
Again, I'm not admonishing the internet, but I am self-flagellating my perpetual use of it nowadays. It's not as if forests suddenly disappeared, or I'm not in possession of one little girl that is begging for entertainment 90% of the time (with the other 10% reserved for ice cream negotiations). Earlier today I rented The Lego Movie, a film both my daughter and I have seen (and enjoyed immensely). It's a pretty long film for an animated feature, but my parents, her and I all crammed into the playroom and watched it in its entirety, with no interruption. And when it finished I realized that those 100 minutes were, by far, the longest amount of time I was not a login screen away from the internet all day. A distant second was the 45 minutes or so it took to get home via the subway, where my phone doesn't really have service for most of the journey.
Didn't Guns N' Roses cover "Live and Let Die"? Oh, there it is. Guess I'm digging metal tonight.
Last night I drove to a friend's house and cooked her dinner. She lives a good 30 miles away, closer to my hometown than my home. I think the total drive time was about 90 minutes, thanks to the trifecta of terrible traffic conditions caused by a steady rain, rush hour, and the end of a Pirates' game. Her house sits near the edge of town, on a large hill, and the road I had to take to get to her driveway was noted as a two-way street, but I've no idea how two cars could ever fit on there adjacently.
I left there at 10:30...about four hours after my arrival...and the whole time we just talked. About whatever popped into our heads. Jobs, relationships, how she didn't really notice the sound of crickets until I pointed them out, the ease of cleaning up my (admittedly messy) cooking because I managed to use just one spoon to prepare three different dishes. As I was leaving she mentioned how she owes me a trip up to Dormont, seeing as I've made two excursions to the-middle-of-nowhere to spend some time with her, and I guess we need to keep our odometers even.
But she doesn't, really. In the selfish sense, I would drive 90 minutes every damn day if it made me feel connected to another person by something less tangible than an ethernet cable and a keyboard. It breathes some nostalgia into my life, which is kind of a sad revelation, because I shouldn't have to reminisce about a time in my past when I had to call someone on the phone or show up at their house to talk to them, earnestly, about life.
I suppose, above all, I wonder if those moments would be nearly as important to me had I been born just a few years later.
I've hesitated to write about this particular topic for a few months now. In my mind I come off like an over-privileged child, upset at the fact that I've been lumped in with the hoi polloi. But, I suppose tonight's as good of a night as any.
Two years ago I was asked to write about the Pirates for an online magazine. If you clicked on that link, you'll get a pretty good idea of how often I've kept up my end of the bargain this year. This job came with zero pay (not that I had asked or even anticipated any) but the significant benefit of near-unlimited press access, which I utilized as a means to take some (hopefully decent) pictures, and occasionally send inane tweets from the press box, if the weather wasn't cooperating.
I was given carte blanche from the editor in terms of what to write about, with a few very rare exceptions: asking me to write a season preview, talking about the playoffs near the end of the season, etc. From my perspective, I made the executive decision that the online magazine was never going to be any person's primary source for news, in the objective/informative sense. I do think Steel Nation has some tremendous coverage on the Pittsburgh Power, MMA, and other sports that aren't traditionally the "big ticket" items, and I'm sure fans of those sports are comfortable heading to Steel Nation to get updates, reports, and columns that they may not get elsewhere.
But, major league baseball is saturated, news-wise. There's no national or regional outlet that DOESN'T cover baseball. So I decided to try to steer my articles toward the op-ed end of the spectrum, with some analysis thrown in there (because I jump at the chance to make math happen, obviously). My article writing is, for all intents, a long-form blog, gussied up with pictures and eye-popping font (Rich does an especially fantastic job at page design). I'm comfortable in that role. I won't even think of myself as a beat reporter, or even parallel to the Dejan Kovacevis or Ron Cooks of the world: guys that can write highly-charged articles that promote a specific opinion, to either solicit an agreement or an argument. I think I'm more like an arbitrator, but I'm battling out two opposing thoughts in my head, and working them out on paper.
Long story longer, near the end of last season...you know...the one where the Pirates eclipsed 81 wins and reached the playoffs for the first time in two decades, and hosted a celebration playoff game where the entire city screamed and cheered all the anger and frustration out of their bodies until Johnny Cueto dropped the ball (and then it somehow got LOUDER), my editor told me that we were effectively cut off from press access, as the major media outlets were starting to storm the stadium and there was simply no room for The Little Ezine That Could.
It was upsetting, to be part of the coverage for 74 games (not including ones where I attended as a fan) over two seasons, only to be told that ESPN wants to have a dozen people in the press box because hey, the Pirates are good and we're paying attention finally! It felt like a slight, because it was, but I understood it. It's a relatively obvious PR decision to leave us on the outside and make sure the giants stay happy.
And then this season rolls around, and I was told by the editor that we would not have press access at all.
The reason for this is because the PR manager determined that I was a blogger. Which is true. I mean. My contributor page is a Blogger page. I rarely wrote recaps, instead focusing on a particular player or play of the game that stood out, for better or worse. My tweets were more entertaining (in my eyes, at least) than insightful.
But what I did do...and what I probably love doing more than writing...was take pictures. Hundreds of them. Some of them made it to the Steel Nation Facebook page, others were used in the magazine or on the web site.
THAT is fucking coverage. Isn't it? A picture tells a thousand words? When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs (that was Ansel Adams, by the way...don't credit me with profundity)? A picture is a secret about a secret (Diane Arbus)?
This is way, way better than anything I've ever written about the Pirates:
I'm not Getty worthy, I'm sure. A/P hasn't called me in ever to ask for the rights to a picture. But to be so entirely dismissive of that facet of coverage was, and is, fucking insane. If the Pirates had said "we don't want you in the press box, but you can spend the entire day in the photo booths" I'd probably reply with something like "that's pretty much what I do anyway." I don't feel like I can cover a game any other way than being right next to a dugout. The press box gives me a fantastic view reminiscent of Tony LaRussa Baseball on the Sega Genesis: nondescript players running around a field, virtually two-dimensional.
And that's sort of where I'm at now. The whole situation soured me to baseball, which puts me in a relatively precarious situation. If I "write recaps" and provide the banal coverage that everyone else in the fucking world is doing, then they might reconsider. As my Steel Nation blog would indicate, I'm lukewarm to that idea, at best. Not because I'm not willing to do so (although I haven't really tried, either), but because that would be the expectation for the rest of my "career" for the magazine, in the Pirates' eyes. It's like selling out, except with no money involved.
Anyway, if the six or so folks that read this blog and my Steel Nation stuff wondered what happened to the latter, I guess that's your answer.
