Sherlock Holmes of China Basin

On Friday, I found a panorama of AT&T Park on sale at Target in Emeryville, CA (distributed by Artissimo Designs, product #074-12-1907). I decided that I probably ought to buy it, but more pressingly, needed to piece together precisely when the photo had been taken. Here is the product itself:

Like my crappy reproduction, the photo itself suffers from poor detail resolution. However, even the overall view provides contextual evidence. The 6 championship flags flying above the scoreboard indicate a game subsequent to Opening Day 2011; both the amount of time necessary to produce such a product and the absence of the flag in right field, however, suggest that this game must have taken place before Opening Day 2013. This 2 year window dramatically limits the possibilities. Let's dig deeper.

We clearly have a Giant on the mound and opposing batters both at the plate and on deck. I would recognize the pitcher anywhere: staff ace and longest-tenured Giant Matt Cain. Precious little else is apparent, beyond there being a right-handed batter at bat and a leftie on deck. The dark away jerseys limit the range of possible opponents, but offer no clear identification.

The scoreboard verified Cain's identity and clearly enough demonstrated that the Pirates were in town. A quick glance at Cain's recent pitching record showed only one home game started against the Pirates at home between the Opening Days of 2011 and 2013: Friday, April 13, 2012. All subsequent details merely erased any lingering doubt.

The scoreboard shows a count of 1 ball and 2 strikes with no one out in the fifth inning. The first batter Cain faced in the fifth inning on 4/13/12 was first baseman Casey McGehee, a right-handed hitter. As expected, on deck was right fielder Garrett Jones, a left-handed hitter. (Note the two bats on opposite shoulders.) Though McGahee's name remains more difficult to read, Jones's name in the five spot in the order can be clearly identified along the right side of the scoreboard, which always lists the away team at AT&T Park.

The strikeout counter lists four strikeouts by Giants' pitching prior to this batter in the game; furthermore, the K's are all forwards, indicating that all third strikes were registered on swings and misses. (In scorekeeping shorthand, a backwards K represents a third strike called by the umpire on a batter who didn't swing.) On April 13, prior to McGahee's at bat in the fifth inning, Cain had struck out Alex Presley and Neil Walker in the first inning, followed by Jones in the second and Pedro Alvarez in the third - all swinging. The final piece of evidence came from the only other score clearly visible in the photo:

...a 12-2 victory of the Boston Red Sox over the Tampa Bay Rays that ended at 2:28pm Pacific Time on 4/13. Based on the spot in the game, I guessed that the photo had probably been taken at about 2:35pm. My accurate guess made it more palatable to have apparently forgotten that most ballparks feature large clocks that make that kind of conjecture unnecessary:

So what happened after the photo was taken? Though the next pitch to McGahee was a ball, he would strike out on the fifth pitch of the at bat, and Jones would soon follow suit - again, both swinging. Cain went on to strike out 11 en route to a 5-0 win in a complete game, 106-pitch shutout (video here, with McGahee striking out at around 1:45). He surrendered only one hit, a weak 6th inning grounder by pitcher James McDonald that found a hole on the 3rd base side. McDonald would turn out to also be the only Pirates baserunner. Cain's superlative performance was outshadowed precisely 2 months later, when he surrendered one fewer baserunner in tossing the 22nd perfect game in Major League history, and the first in the monumental history of the franchise. It's this (slightly) lesser masterpiece, though, that will proudly adorn my walls, courtesy of Target - frozen forever in plywood, formaldehyde, and glory.

Bill Evans by Tony Bennett

A brief interlude: I found this portrait of Bill Evans, as drawn by Tony Bennett, in the booklet of their justifiably revered 1975 collaborative album. I couldn't find it on the internet, so I decided to put it up. The caption reads "An on-the-spot sketch of Bill Evans by Tony Bennett." It was drawn during the June 10-13, 1975 recording session of their album at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, CA. Enjoy.

My Top 10 Albums of the 80s: (7) Thriller - Michael Jackson

[This is the fourth in a series of ten posts. The list'll be revealed as entries are written.]

Even before the trials and plastic surgeries, Michael Jackson more closely resembled a cartoon character than a human being, living through the greatest fame any individual has ever known in a private amusement park with a pet chimp named Bubbles. His greatest album endures a similar fate. The vast margin by which Thriller has outsold all other studio albums has in some ways managed to overshadow the music it contains. The issue is compounded by the skepticism often engendered by chart success, where lasting material is cheapened by association with the transient hits with which it shares airtime. Yet one doesn't move 60 million units by accident, and in fact, beyond the sheer magnitude of its success there isn't anything inexplicable - or even particularly surprising - about Thriller. When Jackson entered the studio in April 1982, he did so on the heels of Off the Wall, armed with a returning producer and the artistic freedom from Epic Records that only a critical and popular smash of that magnitude (20 million units in its own right) can provide. In many ways, the follow-up simply constituted a post-disco update: the album featured nine songs written and arranged by the best in the business, comprising ballads and up-tempo numbers expertly balanced against one another. Though Thriller does feature more unexpected additions than Off the Wall - an Eddie van Halen guest solo on "Beat It" and a repurposed African call-and-response coda to "Wanna Be Startin' Something" - the musical feel of the two albums remains much the same. Thriller was able to transcend its predecessor and became a phenomenon in part due to its stellar songwriting. Indeed, it contained enough quality material that its least interesting song was a duet with Paul McCartney; it also spawned seven Top 10 singles (one of which, the immortal "Billie Jean," nearly missed the album's final cut). The true deciding factor, though, was Jackson himself. Primed in the wake of Off the Wall to take over the music business, Jackson produced a supremely danceable album nonetheless infused with enough nervous energy to take advantage of the high-octave vocal leaps which had become his trademark. Though it's easy in retrospect to forecast Jackson's downfall in the paranoia that suffuses Thriller, taken on its own terms the music projects an air less of fear than of a yearning for respect, for success, or simply (as on the exemplary ballad "Human Nature") for love. Of course, in the final analysis, Thriller can't be seen out of context - not in the wake of 25 years of tabloid covers, and not with Jackson cuddling a Bengal tiger cub on the cover of the Special Edition reissue. Beyond the circus with which it will always be associated, though, the most remarkable aspect of Thriller will surely remain that a single listen always reveals what led it to conquer the world in the first place.

Robert Johnson and the Reissue

The history of the record industry is one of reissues: some artists are plucked from out-of-print limbo, while others have anniversary editions of famous albums released with previous editions still being sold new in the marketplace. Predictably, recording technology has advanced in quantum leaps since the 1925 advent of electrical recording; it is further not surprising that each new incarnation of musical medium has inspired reissues of every label's most profitable material. Even the most forward-thinking executives, though, would have had a hard time even 20 years ago foreseeing the emergence of the remastering process. Advances in technology have made it possible not only digitally to excise noise once assumed totally inextricable from the source material, but even to extract detail from the grooves of weathered shellac 78s that went heretofore largely unnoticed. And perhaps most unthinkably of all to Executives of Labels Past, the process can be carried out without the investment of unworkable expense.

Robert Johnson is the unchallenged king of the reissue. His records sold well regionally during his own lifetime, and he was a much hoped-for participant in John Hammond's legendary "From Spirituals to Swing" concerts, the first to showcase black artists at Carnegie Hall. Johnson died four months before the first concert, however, and his memory languished, popularly forgotten, until the 1961 release of the Columbia compilation King of the Delta Blues Singers. The album and its 1970 companion volume deified Johnson with the folkie crowd (and by extension with rock stars, as well). Johnson posthumously shared the benefits of the blues revival - including a much-delayed, if incomplete, shedding of the "race records" label that had followed blues recordings since their inception - with many other artists, but he would come to exceed all of them in renown, due in equal parts to his remarkable talent and to the dubious Faustian myth that accompanies him to this day. The commercial success of the first CD reissue of his discography was nonetheless staggering. In 1990's Complete Recordings, Columbia had a set of 40+ songs more than half a century old that peaked at #80 on the Billboard charts and was eventually certified platinum.

Accordingly, the centenary of Johnson's birth in 2011 provided not only an ideal opportunity to show off the advances in remastering since the dawn of the millennium, but also a rare opportunity to provide a cash cow for a record label and a useful album for fans simultaneously. The Centennial Collection doesn't disappoint. The dual efforts of Steven Lasker (digital transfer) and Seth Winner (remastering) yielded results that save for minor background hiss sound ten - sometimes fifteen - years younger than they actually are. Columbia also provided much improved packaging and tracklisting over the previous release, this time placing every alternate take at the end of the CD, instead of immediately following the master. The astounding improvement in sound quality, together with these other considerations, raises hope for better reissues of other worthy contemporary discographies. Of course, few (if any) old-time jazz and blues masters share Johnson's all-consuming pull, and the likelihood of any such reissue making substantial money again seems slim. With any luck, though, as the technology continues to improve commercial risks will be undertaken in reviving Skip James, Jelly Roll Morton, Kid Ory, and others. The standard established by The Centennial Recordings is a worthy one in ensuring that these records continue to be esteemed for what they are: landmarks of American culture and history.

My Top 10 Albums of the 80s: (8) The Queen Is Dead - The Smiths

[This is the third in a series of ten posts. The list'll be revealed as entries are written.]

Internal tensions have often been known to push bands to unprecedented peaks, yet rarely has a group's musical identity rested so squarely upon the contrast between its most visible members as it did with the Smiths. Lead guitarist Johnny Marr was one of England's most accomplished studio masters, an expert at weaving dense layers of guitars into music of striking depth; frontman Morrissey was a militant vegetarian whose outspoken politics were upstaged only by his dubious (purportedly nonexistent) sexuality and endlessly dour outlook on the value of life. Over a span of five prolific years, the Smiths released four studio albums and a bevy of non-album singles. Though the latter group includes an impressive number of the best songs of the decade, the band never produced a work of more consistent quality than its third studio LP, The Queen Is Dead. By the time of its 1986 release, Marr had come to control a range as diverse as that of Jimmy Page, and was as adept at conjuring sunny pastoral scenes ("Cemetery Gates") as crafting the brooding soundscapes that had become the band's signature (with the epic title track rivaling even "How Soon Is Now" in bombastic sweep). Morrissey, too, had refined every aspect of his persona, and they're all on display: never again would he be as morose as on "I Know It's Over," as defensive as on "Bigmouth Strikes Again," or as genuinely funny as on "Frankly, Mr. Shankly" (which presumably holds the distinction of being the only lyric ever to rhyme the phrase "flatulent pain in the ass"). Despite the apparent jockeying for position of the two leads, more than anything, The Queen Is Dead marks the high water mark of collaboration between them. The Smiths had always been at their best when using the beauty of Marr's compositions as counterpoint to Morrissey's melodrama, and they employed the contrast to perfection on both the aforementioned "Cemetery Gates" and "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out," the best song of their career. The group ultimately would disband when long-standing differences between Morrissey and Marr - personal and musical - could no longer be reconciled. In retrospect, The Queen Is Dead is a remarkable document of a group that may well have understood it did not have much time left: it speaks to a period in which they were likely, if only so briefly, the greatest band in the world.