Bryan Joiner

From Grantland:

“I’ll tell you what you call a team without fans: the Florida Marlins. AND THEY STILL EXIST. They’re still watched over by their evil, small-footed owners, and they still put on their terrible, freshly laundered uniforms, and they’re still managed and coached, sort of, and they still go out on their nicely kept field to play every last one of their scheduled, mostly meaningless games. None of their day-to-day functioning actually requires fans. Sure, they might require your money somewhere down the road — if they can’t siphon enough from the New York Yankees, that is — but they don’t actually require you.”

For a more fundamental misunderstanding of how sports work, see Memphis Grizzlies vs. The Trade Deadline.

R. (Yankees fan) and I, watching Tigers/Rangers when Jose Valverde emerged:

R.: Man, screw all relievers who aren’t Mariano.
Me: That’s not really a fair comparison.
R.: Sure it is.

Wall Street and Yankee Stadium are separated by 10 miles, but they’re effectively neighbors in a Park Avenue Co-Op. The New York Yankees do not exist without Wall Street. They are its embodiment in sports. After the frantic, implausible Red Sox collapse, a friend made one of the best observations I’ve ever heard about baseball: You know nothing about what is going to happen, but you know the Yankees will be good. We know nothing about what is going to happen to America, but Wall Street will make money.

Now,some people have mustered the temerity to sit in upon Wall Street. They’ve been praised and marginalized, mostly the latter, but as they’ve stuck to their (verbal) guns, it’s been quite a bit of the former as well. They’re still criticized by some for not having a “coherent” message, but others are actually trying to tease out their motivations, and coming away impressed. They came to find the children and instead found the babysitters.

You don’t get a lot of thinking at Yankee Stadium. This is to the credit and detriment of Yankee fans, who treat every game like winning it is their birthright and expect, even in the darkest moments, something called “Yankee magic” but is really just a simple equation of dollars and talent and balls flying around the Bronx. Still, it’s extraordinary. I’ve been to about 20 major league baseball stadiums, and the closest analog I’ve found to Yankee Stadium is in Foxboro, Massachusetts. The difference is that the new-money Patriots have a Belichick/Brady-dependent expiration date. The Yankees will stop being good approximately when the Earth crashes into the sun.

What is the expiration date of Occupy Wall Street? Nobody knows, but we’re well past what I—and I suspect most—thought it would be in the first place. Instead of opening a milk carton every day and expecting it to have gone sour the protest is actually maturing, getting stronger, growing a culture. There’s even a library down there. It helps that the owner of the park which is being occupied has thus far refused to kick the kids out, and it helps that the weather has been, at least in the last few days, beyond cooperative. If there’s a nicer place than the northeast in the early fall, I’m not sure it has been invented yet.

Major League Baseball has locked the Yankees out. They own the park, but there will be no games. There will be no $1,200 seats sold, no more $9.50 beers consumed. Reality has set in for Yankees fans, if only for a day. They know they are baseball’s ruling class, its unstoppable force. They have their birthright, and they are unapologetic about it. The house always wins, and they’re rooting for it.

Many in the media, Bill O’Reilly included, think the Occupy Wall Street-ers are silly for trying to take on the house. That’s the long and short of it. But at least in theory, they are the house. Their house, their rules; that’s supposed to be how the country works. Anyone who calls them idealists is a fool. They’re pragmatists, doing the only thing they think will actually get attention. They’re watching, and now people are watching them, for as long as the show lasts.

Two weeks ago, I went shopping for a new phone. My old carrier had abysmal service (take a wild guess which one) and I was ready to trade my first-generation iPhone, which I had used for nine months. There are many things I loved about it, including the seamless ability to play a daily quiz and beat my brother senseless in Words with Friends. The iPhone 4 would allow me to do these things faster and in more places, and, with my new wireless carrier, I’d be able to talk on the phone as well.

I chose the Droid Incredible 2.

I’m a compulsive Mac user. Since I entered college, the amount of time I’ve spent not using a Mac, personally or professionally, is about nine months. I bought an iMac in June. I find PCs unwieldy and confusing. I’m one of those people.

The iPhone’s creature comforts are profound—and, to be perfectly honest, I feel comfortable ditching them because I still have access to them on my old phone, which is now effectively an iPod Touch. But that’s only part of it. A company long exhorted us to “Think Different,” and many of us, myself included, literally repaid them for that piece of advice, while not particularly following it. If the hundreds of thousands of people draped over their computers for the iPhone 4S rollout taught us anything, it’s that many people see Apple as the One True Company, having given up on the competition.

That’s fair, but it’s not necessarily thinking different. I wanted to see what else was out there. That’s why I got the Droid. I love Apple, but I think for myself. I learned it from Steve. Rest in peace.

I’m not a baseball traditionalist. I’m for instant replay. If they ever get around to inventing a floating invisible automatic strike zone, I’ll be for that as well. Without my team involved, though, I find it hard to get excited about the Division Series, because there’s almost no time to build a narrative.

The majority of Division Series come and go like a blur, even those that go to five games. This year’s Yankees/Tigers series will conclude tomorrow night, and while the fans of the two teams have likely been on the edges of their seats, not much has happened in a playoff baseball sense. The teams have played four pretty much average baseball games and they’ve split them.

The statistical revolution has taught us that there’s little difference between picking the winner of a five-game series to move on and the winner of a seven-game series; the seven-game series gives a better chance for the “better” team to win, but the 162-game season is a much better way of determining that. To that end, statisticians accuse writers of making stuff up about the postseason by calling postseason performances “clutch,” and exalting the players who perform in the “clutch” as having some sort of supernatural ability to do so. I’ve written about this tension before. I believe it’s perfectly acceptable to say someone who performs well in a big playoff game has performed well in the “clutch,” because it otherwise trivializes the postseason, which I think trivializes the game itself. Players play, on the emotional side, both for the love of it and for the idea that they might win the World Series one day. Until we can separate out those discrete elements, I’m okay with creating narratives based on postseason performance—or, to put it a better way, using postseason performance as a jumping-off point for narratives about the people who play the game. Many stathead writers are not journalists, and journalists are taught that anyone’s story is interesting if told well. The postseason just hands journalists the stories. The journalists should not be reckless in telling the stories, but they are legitimate.

My problem is that with rare exceptions, the Division Series seems less like a round of any consequence and more like a bridge from the regular season to the playoffs. It feels incredibly arbitrary in a way the five-game NBA first-round series didn’t used to feel. It doesn’t feel like the playoffs. It creates winners without creating stories. Rather than expand the playoffs to five games, I wish they’d expand the Division Series to best-of-seven.

I don’t have much to add about 9/11 to what I wrote last year around this time. The first year after 9/11 I had to excuse myself and go home from work, but I think we’re into the recovery phase.

Jim Thome’s 600th home run is a great excuse to post this essay about him, which I really like.

My college had, and may still have, a university-provided late-night van service that was known to everyone as the “Drunk Van,” for self-evident reasons. There were people  studying physics at the library until 3 a.m. who used the service and legitimately needed a ride home, but that didn’t sober up the van’s nickname or reputation one bit.

You know what happens when a bunch of drunk adolescents call a van service they don’t have to pay for and then have to wait? Complaining. A lot of it. Much of it directed at the driver of said van, who, because this is a college campus, is almost always a student him or herself.

One of my fellow editors on the college newspaper moonlighted as a Drunk Van driver on non-newspaper production nights, which helped him fulfill his life goal of never being awake when it was light out.* He had strong opinions about the people he drove around, most of the them negative, and he had a visible forum in which he was eagerly invited to share them—the newspaper’s Op-Ed page. We didn’t have content aggregation. We had a blank tabloid-size piece of paper that had to be filled with the words of someone nearby who was fed up with something.

* This could have just seemed like a goal. I don’t know.

My friend published an article that was as self-evidently true as the fact that the Drunk Van’s drunkest occupants had been drinking alcohol. It was headlined, “It’s not the Drunk Van, it’s you.”

About a month ago, the Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece by Neil Strauss, “The Insidious Evils of ‘Like’ Culture,” which basically said the Facebook “Like” button was a blow to originality and contrarians everywhere. The money graf:

So let’s rise up against the tyranny of the “like” button. Share what makes you different from everyone else, not what makes you exactly the same. Write about what’s important to you, not what you think everyone else wants to hear.

In deference to my friend… if you’re writing to get “Like” clicks, it’s not the “Like” button, it’s you.

Another friend of mine, named Peter, writes a daily blog on Cleveland Sports and oh boy, a lot more, at Cleveland Frowns. As a rule, I like everything Peter writes, and not because he’s my friend. If you are my friend and write like crap I won’t read or like your stuff, and I expect the same treatment. (Is anybody there?)

At the end of every Frowns post, there is, rather conspicuously, a Facebook “Like” button. I like all his articles. Do I click the button every day? No, I do not. Why not? Because I realize what it is asking me. It is asking me to grade on a curve. It is asking everybody to grade on the curve that we use to grade everything in our lives, online or offline. You want to talk about insidious “Like” culture? Tell your co-worker, when she asks, that you don’t like the look of that girlfriend in her son’s graduation picture. I dare you.

Okay, you might do this. But you probably won’t. That’s because we’re able to use tools like saying we like something to an end everybody understands. It’s just what we do. If you’re one of those people who run around in real life just begging to be liked, explicitly or implicitly, people will tune you out pretty quickly. They might just be polite in doing it.

Likewise, if you’re a writer or artist trolling for “Likes,” ur doin it rong. It might work for awhile, but you’ll likely find that conformity is boring. You might be tempted to blame the “Like” button. But it didn’t do anything wrong. You did.

Your average person does not understand how American economy works. Nor does your average American politician, including the president. Most economists don’t even know it, or know it but keep their mouths shut. Linguists know it, but they probably gave up the fight long ago in a bow to common usage.

But I think there’s a strong argument that a little linguistic game we play has serious consequences for how we think about our country and our politics. I think there’s one little word that’s standing between us and our ability to properly conceptualize the problem in which we find ourselves.

That word? “The.”

Go to any article you can find or pull up any press conference video and you’ll see or hear countless references to “the economy.” “The economy,” however, doesn’t exist. Economy exists, or it doesn’t. Our processes are either efficient or are not. Our economy is good or our economy is bad.

The problem with calling it “the economy” is that it creates something tangible out of something invisible, and politicizes it and dumbs it down at once. Why can’t President Obama just fix “the economy?” Can’t he get in there with a screwdriver and get the thing running again? Obama, for his part, can blame Congress for not doing the same thing. Calling it “the economy” makes our discussions reductive and dumb by removing them from the real world. It becomes a twisted take on Kenan Thompson’s Saturday Night Live character, yelling “Fix it!” over and over and expecting results. Which is pretty much what our political system has become.

A fair question would be whether I think a simple linguistic trick really has the power to make us all reductive and silly. The answer is: Yes! I just don’t think it’s intentional, most of the time—commodifying economy into “the economy” prevents us from thinking about it too much, by design. Economy is, by definition, everyone’s problem. “The economy” is President Obama’s problem. Fixing it is his job.

To a degree, that’s true, obviously. He has more power to affect American economy than anyone else. It is my job to write about licensed products, and it is his job to deal with 1,000 different problems of American inefficiency at once. In the right hands, conflating these problems into something called “the economy” wouldn’t matter, but bankers have already showed us what happened when very smart people use deliberately oversimplified terms to describe mind-bendingly complex problems.

People are not stupid. They can understand complex problems. It does not help anyone to dumb these problems down, because when people work off of incomplete information, they make the problem worse. For all the talk about how badly our media outlets go to misinform us a la the full-court press at Fox News, the solution might be a “broken window theory” of information providing—get the little thing right, and the big things will follow.

Peter Luger’s has changed. Where there used to not be a third large dining room there is now a third large dining room. This is odd because Peter Luger’s is not supposed to change. You are. And you do.

•••

When I moved to the city almost 10 years ago, I didn’t know much about it that I didn’t learn on TV. As a 23-year-old moving in with a 30-year-old girlfriend, I was in for a series of introductory classes to New York and adulthood, none of which were easy. It was kind of like the first year of Law School, when they make everything hard to weed out the losers. I was determined not to be a loser.

I had very little money, however, but like a lot of new New Yorkers I had identified the place I wanted to spend large amounts of what little money I had: Peter Luger Steakhouse in Williamsburg. It wasn’t like I walked around thinking about this all the time like a 17-year-old saving for her first car, but I considered the deliberately rough-edged Luger’s as some sort of paragon of New Yorkism, the way some people would eye eating at Cipriani or sitting front row at Lincoln Center.

That was me—it was who I was. There was an everyman mystique to Peter Luger’s, which deliberately looked down at Manhattan’s raised noses, something that appealed to me. I spent more than 95 percent of my life in Queens, and the idea of going into Manhattan to be another loser dropping money he didn’t really have did not appeal to me. Luger’s famously takes one credit card—the Peter Luger credit card, a de facto corporate-only card with the balance due at the end of each month—so when you’re rolling in, you’re rolling in with cash. Translated to young me: You were coming in as a baller, or you weren’t coming in at all.

I broke that image in two last week when I went to Luger’s for the first time in five years and paid with the paper money I acquired by cashing in a year’s worth of change at the TD Bank Penny Arcade earlier in the day. One year, $216 worth of change, more than half of it converted into steak. Free steak, basically.

I don’t know if the free steak aspect of it is what has my stomach churning, even now, thinking about the meal. I don’t know if, freed from my post-adolescent view of Luger’s as a New York status symbol, I was able to focus more closely on the food than I had before. I don’t know if I just pretended to like the food before and have lost interest in pretending. I don’t know if I finally noticed that Luger’s’s scrupulous lack of pretension is itself an overwhelming pretension, or whether it has just stopped appealing to me. I don’t know if I’m just as at age and place in my life where a homemade steak, three minutes to each side, then into the oven, is far more appealing than the pretentious restaurant experience. I don’t know if this is just a phase for me, and in 10 years I’ll want to go back, and hating on Peter Luger will provoke the same type of nostalgia that loving it has churned up in the service of writing this article.

All I know is that I was unimpressed and I don’t want to go back.

•••

I’m not a vegetarian. I’d sure like to be one, though. I think I’d save a bunch of money and animals and I’d have more energy and the only consequence would be getting laughed at by people who think that it’s funny to laugh at vegetarians. Plus I’d still eat seafood, because fish are stupid and delicious.

I’ve had a few periods of vegetarianism that last a few days at a time, but there’s always an equal and opposite reaction. I’m weak. I am a weak human, and I will come back to burgers like the guy smoking a cigarette filter hoping for just a trace of nicotine. Only I’m worse because a cow gets it in the end and I feel like a catatonic slug—which means I am like a slug compared to other slugs.

This is not a treatise on how you shouldn’t eat meat because Bessie was such a sweetheart. This is me saying I feel better when I don’t eat meat. Much like some people are soccer fans for the fashion, I’m a veggies fan for the pep in my step.

Of course, I’m writing this in another veggies binge, albeit a longer one than normal. Outside of the steak dinner, eight whole days! And there was much rejoicing. I am keenly aware a backslide might be forthcoming, however. Until then, I fight the good fight.

Hence all these words. My words are saying that, largely for the reasons I used to love it, Peter Luger’s is an overvalued commodity.

There is no argument that the quality of meat at Luger’s is quite good. It was my understanding that Luger’s staff would buy meat, hang it up in the basement, allow mold to grow on it, and at the time of cooking, effectively cook off the mold, leaving as much as the meat as possible cooked but uncharred. Kinda brilliant, if you think about it, at least to someone who doesn’t think much about cooking.

Except for also kinda not, which I’ll leave just like that as a deliberate tease.

My stomach is hurting again.

The bill came to $130 per person for the three of us, not counting the beer I got while we waited. We got steak for four instead of three, so it could have been cheaper. Also might explain the stomachache. I ran seven miles that afternoon. Leave me alone. But keep reading.

•••

To those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of going to Luger’s, I’ll present the menu to you more or less in its entirety:

Mains

• Steak (porterhouse) for X number of people

• There are other cuts/food items on the menu but I’ll believe they exist when I see them

Sides

• Bacon

• Creamed Spinach

• Tomatoes and Onions

• Potatoes

• Shrimp

Of course, Devil+details=BFF, so let’s tackle these in reverse order with more colorful nomenclature:

• Shrimp the size of infant forearms

Did I do a bad job of making that sound appetizing? My bad. Solid “buy” rating here.

• Potatoes they will try to push on you by being like, “Potatoes?” and expecting you to say yes without thinking, which, let’s face it, you might

They’re fucking hash browns. Avoid until the next morning’s breakfast.*

• Tomatoes and Onions

It’s a plate with giant rings of tomatoes and onions. To eat with a fork. It’s quite German. It’s kind of hilarious. Avoid.

• Creamed Spinach

Order more than you think you need. This is your baseline. Add as necessary.

• “Bacon” that will change your life

Transcript-like-thing-with-hints-of-internal-monologue-thrown-in from a diner at our table on Saturday who we’ll call “Bryan J.” to protect his or her anonymity:

“If we’re going to get steak for four instead of three why should we bother with the ‘bacon?’ Yeah it’s a huge, thick and wide but we’re eating plenty of red meat later. Okay yes I know this is white meat but still. I say get the shrimp and skip the bacon. Fine, you guys get the bacon. Hey let me have some of that bacaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhh oh my god.”

Get the bacon.

• Other cuts/food items are to be ignored, excluding burger

Yes, yes, the mythical Peter Luger burger, the one that’s only available at lunch and which the waiters scowl at you for ordering. I’ve had it, and it’s glorious. But there’s no glory to be gained from saying you’ve been to Luger’s and not had the steak—a burger can be pretty good, and an entire accessible food craze has been built upon this platform, but it still can only be as good as a burger can be, which is not as good as a steak. QED.

• Steak for X

About that “we cook the mold off” thing: It means you’re not really jazzing up the steak.

I’m sure this is how steak purists like it. I don’t know if they also like enough butter to fill a swimming cap with, too, but that’s how you get the steak, wading it in. The butter, not the swimming cap. There is no swimming cap. The butter doesn’t do much to flavor the meat—it actually masks the flavor. In my opinion. To the degree that eating the twix-bar sized wedges of meat ends up feeling more like a bird choking down a large fish than enjoying the process of chewing, tasting, talking way too much. You need to eat fast enough that you don’t fall asleep, because you WILL fall asleep.

It is basically an old-time feeding frenzy that I have grown out of enjoying. You pay for the brusque-ness. I get enough of that as it is.

But wait, there’s schlag

Oh yeah for dessert, and they give this to everyone, is a giant bowl of whip-cream like stuff called schlag that you scoop with milk chocolate medallions and basically if I killed someone and got the death sentence and had to have a last meal this is pretty much precisely what I would choose to please the PETA people who wouldn’t want me taking the life of another sentient being, but mostly to please myself, despite the gnarly stomachache, which obviously comes with a shelf-life, unless the governor is feeling nice.

* Except that you are clearly not eating breakfast the next day. Maybe a pear or something.