Geddy Lee of the American League Central

You could make the argument right now not just that no team actually wants to win the Central, but that no team really deserves to. Just for a second, let’s forget how the supposed pennant race has involved two alleged divisional powerhouses losing in rather clumsy fashion to the likes of the Mariners and Indians. Let’s forget how neither the Sox nor Twins can win on the road, and let’s imagine a world where the team from Minnesota can’t drop eight of its last ten games and still be in a tie for first place.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to visualize such a world when leadoff walks are only useful when it’s the Sox giving them out and the pitching staff regresses to the five-and-dive model made famous in 2003, 2004, and 2006. . . and we all remember how those seasons turned out.

Anyway, maybe normal baseball is no longer the answer. Maybe what the Sox need to do is to elevate their game – not necessarily to a higher level, just a different one. Conventional playing has yet to result in actual wins, so perhaps the Sox need to adopt a more progressive approach. How progressive?

Ladies and gentlemen, behold: Concept Baseball.

What is Concept Baseball? Concept Baseball is similar in form to the concept album, long held in esteem by art rock snobs and progressive rock nerds alike. Concept albums unfold a story over their running time, with each song acting as a chapter or a scene; concept baseball would transfer the idea to the diamond. Rather than punctuate a game with a series of moments the way most bands pepper an album with killer singles, what may be necessary is to use the wider arc of nine innings of baseball as a canvas. Each pitch would be a step forward in an increasingly complicated narrative, and each at-bat would be like a wild instrumental interlude.

Compare, for a second, a band like Rush, Yes or Dream Theater to a band like Duran Duran, Fall Out Boy or Van Halen. The first three are all strange and misunderstood by the larger consumer community, yet all three instill some level of musical fear into those other three. And why? The latter has commercial success, but they can never achieve anything near the level of execution or singular artistic vision shown by the former (although Van Halen still rocks pretty hard).

Duran Duran made it big on well-executed, consumer-friendly tunes, yet they dissolved when those ran out; Rush has been together for 30 years on the strength of weirdly structured, impossible-to-replicate epics about space kings and Ayn Rand. Plenty of people have out-popped “Rio,” but few have out-progged 2112.

So what does this mean for the future of White Sox baseball? Simple: stop performing and start playing. Is there an on-field equivalent of a free-form, jazz-tinged, odd-meter jam session? Can Javier Vazquez pitch in 5/4? Would Jim Thome’s swing be described as Lydian or Septatonic?

More importantly, we need the actual larger idea to White Sox baseball. What does it all mean, and how does it all tie together? Twisted instrumental sections usually pop up first at the beginning of a concept album (often entitled something fittingly pretentious, and sometimes with the word “Overture” in it), and then again towards the end, followed by a somewhat dramatic, tension-filled penultimate chaper and finally the over-the-top resolution.

Perhaps then (and just perhaps) what we’ve been seeing all along is Ozzie Guillen and Kenny Williams’ version of Concept Baseball, but they’ve been so aggressively conceptual we just haven’t been able to grasp their vision. Is trading for Ken Griffey Jr. the moment of realization from Scenes From a Memory? Will Nick Swisher kill Paul Konerko in the third act? When Alexei Ramirez and Orlando Cabrera turn a wild double play, is that really just the sporting answer to a ridiculous dual-instrument passage? Is Carlos Quentin today’s Tom Sawyer?

The problem with Concept Baseball is that things usually only work out so well for progressive rock bands once they realize they’re terrible at doing anything with what few singles they have; the only way for most acts to find any kind of success has traditionally been to capitalize on what singles they were able to muster, which is probably why most of practitioners of concept albums toil in anonymity and earn relative fame and prosperity only among a small but inexplicably devoted fanbase.

And if you think about it, this line of thinking also paints a rather grim picture, suggesting that Concept Baseball might not be the way to put the nail in the Twins’ coffin. Which is a shame, because Regular Baseball doesn’t seem to be working either.

2 thoughts on “Geddy Lee of the American League Central”

  1. “Concept baseball”? Guess you weren’t kidding about the pretensiousness in your site header.

    Carlos Quentin, he gets high on you!

  2. 70’s rock? no way, c’mon on man the ChiSox are a hip-hop team through and through. cq busting his wrist smashing a bat – that’s straight-up GANGSTA!

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