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M.T. Karthik

~ midcareer archive, 1977 – 2017 plus 2022

M.T. Karthik

Tag Archives: history

A Parallel History, poem by M.T. Karthik © 2019

24 Monday Oct 2022

Posted by mtk in beliefs, Commentary, conceptual art, performance, poetry, politics

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#mtkforever, 2019, history, Karthik, m.t., m.t. karthik, mtk, parallel

RPRZ Backstory: Introducing the Recharge Zone

02 Wednesday Aug 2017

Posted by mtk in landscape, RPRZ, San Antonio, TX

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antonio, aquifer, authority, background, backstory, bexar, county, edwards, greenbelt, history, intro, Introduction, Karthik, m.t., mtk, point, recharge, river, rocky, San, texas, urban, wildlife, zone

because this country, it’s not for one religion

19 Monday Nov 2012

Posted by mtk in Asia, audio, protest

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2003, Abbas, actuality, Al, Arab, audible, audio, Christian, Franz, Hadiyeh, history, intifadah, Jew, Karthik, Kraus, Mahklouf, mtk, Palestine, Palestinian, Qawis, Rimon, visit, witness, Ziad

my full interview with Ziad Abbas, quoted above, is the second interview in the clip linked to below:

If you care at all about Palestine, please listen to these stories told to me by Palestinians in Bethlehem and Nazareth, and hear people being illegally taken from their land in East Jerusalem, stopped by the presence of myself and International media, briefly … this was 2003 … what eventually happened?

 

Political Media, Messages and More

03 Saturday Mar 2012

Posted by mtk in elections, essay, journalism, press clips, reviews, social media, talks

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Bush, cable, history, internet, Jefferson, limbaugh, m.t. karthik, media, message, mtk, newspaper, orwell, pamphlet, politics, presidency, president, radio, Reagan, rush, States, talk, television, television presidency, U.S., United

( a one hour talk delivered to students at Academy of Art University in San Francisco on Friday, March 1, 2012. There was no recording. Slides appear in order here as images, and some video clips and links have been added to this online version).

Good afternoon, I am M.T. Karthik.

I’ve organized this talk chronologically, and into three general parts, starting first with historical examples of mass media used for sociopolitical language here in the US;

then second, a line between politics of the past and the present drawn by the invention and use specifically of television,

and finally politics in the Digital Age, which will conclude with some discussion of the contemporary situation.

The largest arc of this one hour talk is pluralism of mass media in sociopolitical language – from pamphlet to newspaper to radio to television to cable television to the Internet to FB to Twitter over the last 236 years.

In the last part of the talk, I will also be sharing some of my original work in the field. I have sought to report upon, document and portray through art, certain social interests primarily because I believe they are being written out of history, even covered-up by specific interests and aggregation of public opinion around a monocultural viewpoint of our nation’s political past.

No discussion of American political thought and expression can start without the Declaration of Independence –

– Thomas Jefferson’s seminal document authored against the monarchy in England, which set off an age of revolution on behalf of individuals against kings and nation-states and which, with the U.S. Constitution, created the bond between the Colonies that holds as Federalism to this day.

It’s important to read the Declaration in context, because of the scale of Jefferson and the Colonists’ reach.

Jefferson was influenced by the French and other European thinkers as a result of visits there, but really, the scale of the task was unprecedented.

How would you author a letter to all the Kings and governments of the nations of the world declaring the creation of your own new country – led collectively – with an unprecedented democratic governmental structure set up by its citizens?

It’s said Rick Perry, the Governor of Texas, has supported secession of Texas from the United States. How would his Declaration of Independence read, today? Would he address it to the UN, the Senate, the President, the Supreme Court? – none of these institutions existed for Jefferson to appeal to. He was writing to the nebulous notion of a “world at large” and against the British Monarchy.

What kind of persuasive language do you use in such a context?

“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

Epic.

But how was it possible for Thomas Jefferson to set down these words in Virginia with such confidence? The seeds had been sown by a Philadelphian, who wrote and published a pamphlet which became an instant best-seller here and abroad.

Perhaps more than any text in that nascent revolutionary period, Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense – addressed audaciously to “the inhabitants of America” – pushed the colonists toward independence. The text demanded an immediate declaration of separation from England a full year before Jefferson sat down to write the great document.

With Common Sense, began the era of the political pamphlet in the United States. The authors of the Revolution used the format in the next ten years to author the Constitution. Should we refer to the American political pamphlet as a medium?

Here’s a recent one:

The pamphlet brings with it the creation of whole industries: printing, typography, stenography, journalism, cartooning, and begins an arc of American sociopolitical language that pluralizes to include newspapers, magazines, radio, television, cable television and the Internet. This talk will discuss the use of all of these and pluralism of media over the 236 years since the Declaration of Independence was written.

The serial publication of essays, viewpoints and even texts of speeches became the normative method for political discourse in the Colonies. It birthed the centralization of thought in new-born cities and the media channel of our oldest newspapers and journals.

The Federalist Papers were a series of 85 articles or essays promoting the ratification of the United States Constitution.

77 of these were published serially in The Independent Journal and The New York Packet between October 1787 and August 1788. A compilation of the 77 and eight others were published as The Federalist or The New Constitution in two volumes in 1788.

From these documents and the discussions they generated, came our Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Promptly thereafter, colonial cities birthed the “two-paper town” as the newly minted First Amendment of the Constitution produced contrasting viewpoints in the form of newspapers, which bore, defined and built the “constitution” of American political thought for a hundred and fifty years.

The era made editors-in-chief men of great power a hundred years before Citizen Kane.

Note that the Presidents of the US at this time are mostly forgettable bureaucrats. Perhaps Van Buren stands out for his hemispheric reach, but great debate and intellectual work wasn’t being done by the President. It was occurring in the Senate, at the level of the Supreme Court and with the birth of newspapers’ Editors-in-Chief like Horace Greeley of The New York Tribune – who began to take on greater responsibility for political language.

During the period of 1840 – 1860, after years of the establishment of new civic centers and States, with their own newspapers and journals, the country faced its greatest sociopolitical unrest. Correspondingly, an era of great newspaper publishers and editors representing contrasting viewpoints emerged.

By 1858 it was common for newspaper-editors to employ stenographers to attend speeches and to publish the speeches in totem in their papers.

The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858 were a series of seven debates between Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate for Senate in Illinois and the incumbent Senator Stephen Douglas, the Democratic Party candidate. At the time, US Senators were elected by state legislatures so Lincoln and Douglas were vying for control of the  Illinois legislature.

The main issue in all seven debates was slavery and ultimately all of the issues Lincoln would face in the aftermath of his victory in the 1860 Presidential Election – issues which would lead directly to the first dissolution of the Union and the first Civil War in U.S. History.

The debates were held in seven towns in Illinois, but became so popular that they were distributed by papers elsewhere.

But editors of papers who favored Douglas would take the stenographers’ notes and clean them up, fixing errors of notation, context or even meaning only in Douglas’ words. Papers that favored Lincoln did the opposite. The power of the Editor was never before so clearly visible.

Lincoln lost the Senate election, but afterward he had all the texts cleaned, edited properly and republished as a single book – which was read broadly and helped lead him to the nomination in 1860.

The issue of Slavery was defined for vernacular discourse by the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, a remarkable moment in U.S. political history and language. Here’s the Centennial Stamp:

And so for long years newspaper men and politicians were bound in this country and great cultural and social consciousness that helped define the nation emerged through muckraking and whistle-blowing, but also, inevitably, corruption and yellow journalism.

The Spanish-American War may have been born from such yellow journalism, as the sinking of The Maine, falsely attributed to the enemy by papers in the U.S., pushed Americans into the war. More examples exist, and indeed as media pluralizes over the next century, this cozy corruption between politicians and journalists has been exacerbated by new media.

By the turn of the 20th century, the dominant medium was the printed word, and then, the word as heard through radio and both were being used to push political interests and social agendas.

Radio, a warm medium, a tribal medium with which President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the fireside chat, became the primary media tool for information about the wars abroad that defined the century. As Wiki points out, Every US President since Roosevelt has delivered a regular radio address.

News and official information delivered by voice over the airwaves is warm and available, lucid by the intimation of the sound of the voice, not subject to interpretation of the reader. Baseball and music and DJ’s sounded great on the radio and political communicators quickly recognized it.

Writing for broadcast began.

An excellent metaphoric example of the power of radio before television as a vernacular medium in politics can be found in the Coen Brothers musical film, O Brother, Where Art Thou?.

Set in the southern state of Mississippi before television, one narrative thread of the film follows a Governor’s race. Throughout the film, various people in the State are shown at home following the Election by listening to the radio.

Three escaped state prisoners form a musical group on the run, and anonymously record a single at a rural radio station which becomes immensely popular throughout the state through the power of radio. The men appear in disguise to perform their song live at an event which both candidates are attending.

The Governor’s opponent is insensitive to the popularity of the group, focusing instead on denigrating the men for both their fugitive status and their race. In a moment that predates television’s power in this regard, the challenger is revealed to be a racist statewide over the air. The challenger, unlike the incumbent, has no grasp of the power of the radio.

In the climactic scene, the incumbent Governor of Mississippi, seeing the immense popularity of the three escaped state prisoners, pardons the musical phenomenon the ex-convicts have become. The whole of the dialogue is shown to be carried out on radio throughout the State to the folks listening at home, who even hear the challenger run out of the hall on a rail as the Governor leads the crowd in a rousing chorus of “You Are My Sunshine.”

The entire scene is here:

[with respect to the Coen Brothers]

These scenes are remarkably faithful to the truth. In Louisiana, Jimmie Davis, a popular singer and the attributed author of the song, “You Are My Sunshine, became Governor.

The blogger LaLouisiane is eloquent on this matter:

“I remember my granddaddy saying that if Jimmy Davis would come around and sing “You Are My Sunshine”, (he wrote it you know), that everybody in the state would vote for him and never even ask him about a policy, a road, a bridge, nothing. We just really like that song down here, I guess.”

This talk, Political Media, Messages and More, is a follow-up to a talk I gave as News Director and Elections Coverage Producer for KPFK 90.7fm in LA, seven years ago at C-Level Gallery in L.A.’s Chinatown, which was subtitled, Pluralism of Media in the Age of Surveillance [mtk 2005].

Pluralism of media is evident at the addition of each new mass medium – radio doesn’t arrive at the newspaper’s exclusion or the pamphlet’s exclusion.

The pamphlet and certain newspapers remain significant modes of sociopolitical communication. They are at the heart of some, arguably all, of the United States’ greatest movements. Women’s Suffrage,

Socialism, the Labor movement’s successes in the first half of the 20th century.

So Pluralism of Media means we media-include, not media-exclude.

Where before you read pamphlets, now you read pamphlets and newspapers. Where before you read print, now you read print and listen to the radio – you add TV.

We add each medium and the media morph to fit our desires of them. Talk radio, drive-time radio, live radio, each is its own form.

This is what Marshall McCluhan meant when he said any new medium contains all previous media in it.

This is all changing now, of course, as Pluralism of Media has matured since 2005 to become the fluid, the cloud, the totality of data that we swim in today, post-TiVo, at the dawn of the streaming era of the web.

END PART ONE

Part Two: THE TELEVISION PRESIDENCY 1945 – 2008

The Television Presidency, born when Truman used it to announce the end of World War II , instantly made the Office of the President of the United States different from every presidency before TV – and television dominated until the Internet and the digital age, a period of twelve presidents.

Ike was the first President on the tube, and in his most important moment on TV, his exit speech, President General Eisenhower famously warned against the growing presence of a “Military-Industrial Complex”

… perhaps it would have worked in color.

But forever the line that defines the Television Presidency will be the Kennedy-Nixon Debates of 1960.
If you’ve seen Frost/Nixon you know that Nixon to the end of his days considered television, and the close-up, his undoing.

In the televised debates with Kennedy, Nixon’s problems with perspiration accumulating on his lip and his jitteriness in general on TV, came over as nervous and untrustworthy – on radio or via text this would never have been transmitted to the public-at-large. Nixon was ridiculed mercilessly for it by critics.

Imagine the contrast, Kennedy’s cool, youthful good looks and Nixon’s shiftiness.

Kennedy garnered the potency of the new medium, and, thanks in  part to the work of Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Baines Johnson in delivering Texas, won the election by a slim margin.

I really like the blogger J. Fred McDonald’s take on this, who states, in his excellent essay on Kennedy’s relationship with TV: “For JFK, television could turn defeat into victory.”

Kennedy addressed the people of the country often and personably, but politically used the tool at critical junctures to save himself: after the Bay of Pigs fiasco and during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy’s use of television was pitch-perfect.

So, the relationship between live color television and the Presidency began with Kennedy’s handsomeness but then, typically of all things new, was taken promptly after discovery to the other extreme, the visual abuse of his savage assassination.

TV then exposed LBJ and Nixon and Kissinger’s dirty wars and the ugly side of the USA: repression, corruption, racism.

The 1968 Olympics were the first televised live and in-color around the world. They took place at the end of one of the most tumultuous years in history, a year I refer to as The People’s Year. This image of a staged protest against race and class oppression, thanks to live television, was impossible to stop:

I participated in making a monument to this moment on the campus of San Jose State University, when in 2006, I worked intimately with others assisting the artist Rigo 23 in the creation of this:

(At this point in the talk, I describe the Tommie Smith/John Carlos statue project anecdotally and include personal, non-published images of the construction of the statues.)

The impact of the moment as seen on television is described well by this Mormon blogger, who tells of being young and white and American and watching with her father. She describes his reaction both at the time and after watching ceremonies of the courageous act on video 20 years later – his change of heart is set in universal terms.

TV was the king of the failure that was The Vietnam War. It ended the Nixon Presidency. But politicians, as they had in the past, reacted by learning to manipulate the new medium to their advantage. Predictably, it was an actor who synthesized the power of the “small screen” for political propaganda.

Ronald Reagan overcame the tool’s power to reveal – with charisma. TV’s investigative potency withered with the mic in his hands.

TV buoyed Reagan into the White House with a full eight-year script, designed just like a Hollywood movie, with a brilliant new dawn at the front and a cowboy riding into the sunset at the end.

Reagan and TV media convinced most Americans that people in Russia lived in a dreary, black-and-white reality, trudging when they walked, standing in interminable lines as black-booted officers of the Kremlin marched past with truncheons to beat them if they acted out.

Reagan asserted our freedom to shop and drive and declare vast spaces ours to tame. Trained and experienced for fifty years in delivering lines written by others, he powered through TV.

Consumer technology was represented in its farthest reach by television, broadcast into millions of homes then on four channels, perhaps a fifth. It was a medium dominated by the Networks, and owned by private corporations. The unholy alliances between corrupt newspaper men and politicians had become de rigeur for relationships with corrupt television execs.

TV was manipulated on the greatest scale by Reagan. In those days, to be broadcast all over the world on US television was as close to “global communication in real-time” as existed and, on the evening of my sixteenth birthday, the actor-president went on television and gravely told us it was imperative to invest our tax dollars in a Strategic Defense Initiative to protect us from nuclear war. Reagan described this SDI as “Star Wars” technology, in the vernacular of the pop-movie phenomenon.

Every legitimate scientist in the world knew SDI was a ploy of language, a technical and political impossibility to deliver, and indeed, it was later revealed that Reagan’s own speechwriters had advised against his including it in public presentation – he’d made the decision on his own that day to do it. Generals, scientists, politicians and writers protested; others were put on the spot, but somehow the language was never exposed.

A naïve public wowed by Reagan, Star Wars, computers and technology in general – and without the Internet to look up the reaction of scientists and writers – ate it up.

Conservatives have used the phrase to justify defense spending for offensive weapons for decades – even now in Europe. Years later we live with these  TV-generated myths, like the “dirty bomb”. (cf. The Power of Nightmares by Adam Curtis)

It was 1984, and the United States was described by most as being a free society, totally unlike the one in George Orwell’s prophetic novel named for that year.

That image – of totalitarian fascism that produced false-flags and enslaved citizens to a national narrative – was projected by the U.S. President onto the Soviet Union, a country he called “The Evil Empire”. It was a term taken directly from popular movies and, wielded by a movie actor through the ubiquity of the medium of television, it became successful political propaganda.

Reagan used his charisma on the small screen to push corporate, private, and even illegal agendas, until the veneer finally broke in the Iran/Contra hearings. But even then, his “I can’t remembers,” delivered pitch-perfect on national television, got him off the hook.

The Dawn of “Pluralism of Mass Media”

By my senior year of high school in 1985, say 10% of students were writing papers with word processors and printing them dot-matrix to take to our teachers. The movement started with stand-alone word processor devices, which were typewriter-like machines that had single-line or paragraph-wide monitors at the top of the keyboard, allowing writers the ability to read what they were typing without printing it first, for the first time ever.

Looking back it seems both obvious and amazing how quickly we made the transition to using the word processor and eventually software on a pc to write. It was a natural step that changed writing forever. Cursive and the typewriter are all but dead. Content began its high-speed ascent. USA Today and CNN were born.

But though the computer was on the verge of changing writing, publishing, and expressing with text and image forever, the single most dominant force of mass media technology wasn’t yet the computer. It was still television, which had expanded through digital technology that created cables delivering far more visual information directly into American homes.

George Herbert Walker Bush, the former head of the CIA, wasn’t close in the primaries when he ran for President in 1980, but was appointed to the bottom half of Reagan’s ticket and became Vice President. Now the actor was termed out.

The Republican Party seized the lessons of the small screen, and having had eight years of method  training by a great actor, extended that training to a former serviceman. George H. W. Bush’s team was precise and almost militaristic at staying on message.

Bush repeated phrases without giving policy details, promised Americans more of what Reagan gave them and then repeated the same two or three positive phrases again.

Democratic Presidential Candidate Michael Dukakis’ imagery was by contrast horribly clunky – footage of him in a tank with an ill-fitting helmet had the opposite effect of projecting the desired image of a strong leader.

Bush had the immense advantage of the Office of the Vice President for air-time, but used it sparingly, with few details. When Bush’s campaign did use TV ads, it was to attack – the Willie Horton ad ran ad nauseum and painted Dukakis as a bad judge of character.

This was the beginning of catchphrase culture.

A culture manifest most strongly on television by ads, and in political communication as satire of the timeliest manner on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, featuring Dana Carvey as a repetitive robotic message man George H.W. Bush against John Lovitz as an exasperated Michael Dukakis, who finally shrugs, and delivers the punchline:

“I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy”

[click that link above to see the bit … Chevy Chase birthed portraying the President on SNL, but Dana Carvey nailed it before Phil Hartman or Will Ferrell]

Though we have been pluralizing mass media from the pamphlet to the television, this era is the dawn of the Pluralism of Mass Media that delivers us to the Internet Era of sociopolitical propaganda – not only because of the birth of word processing and cable television, but because radio returns for what it’s good at.

RADIO and TV in concert

Radio broadcasting shifted from AM to FM in the late 1970s because of the opportunity to broadcast music in stereo with better fidelity.

Rush Limbaugh’s talk radio show was first nationally syndicated in August 1988, in a later stage of AM’s decline. “Limbaugh’s popularity paved the way for other conservative talk radio programming to become commonplace on the AM radio,” states his Wikipedia entry.

Radio became the drumbeat for the President’s made-for-TV messages. The cool medium was used sparingly for headings and rubrics and catchphrases, while radio was used for tribal intercommunication of long, warm discussion of the message.

Limbaugh had an immense following and Bush made sure he got as much access as he needed. My father remembers seeing footage on network news of President George H.W. Bush welcoming Rush Limbaugh, shaking his hand and then picking up his bag for him before turning to walk into a personal meeting.

This potent image deliverable only by television (wordless communication in background footage, not a press conference with the President) was transmitted for the conservative President and his media agent on ABC, NBC, CBS, and perhaps PBS and the TV message – short, cool, specific – conjoined with the radio message, long, rangy, warm – to create a uniform statement.

The 1988 Election was the last Network News Election. The four-channel era of television was over.

Cable News Network, CNN, began and had its watershed moment by being the first embedded network live during wartime. At last, TV had provided war,itself, live and in-color.

George H.W. Bush and his Gulf War versus Saddam Hussein over Kuwait gave CNN more than a billion viewers worldwide, birthed CNN International and pushed Cable News past Network News in terms of relevance.

Television production became tighter, faster, snappier, with jump-cuts and camera motion. Technology was on the cusp of the fluidity of digital. The TV talk show incorporated radio stylings.

The cable news era, which is only just winding down, began with The Gulf War, and the 1990’s are littered with what cable TV invented: Newstainment, and, critically because it signals the demise of the Academy, the creation of star faculty and pundits.

These define cable TV in the 90’s, composing formats used today by Rachel Maddow, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly and so many more pseudo-intellectual, corporate-financed, opinion-making cable TV “shows,” designed by marketing and legal teams, by groovy execs and demographers more than journalists.

Whole channels have emerged – and here the Daily Show/Colbert are uniquely successful – from what was drawn so poorly in the 1990’s. The medium’s highly refined message delivery system operates full-tilt, 24/7, and millions call it real-time.

[END PART TWO]

PART THREE:

The21st Century : The Internet Meets the Television Presidency

Part Three notes are much less formal as the latter part of the talk is filled with anecdotal descriptions of several projects I have engaged in. However, I am writing it up cohesively and will add it here when finished.

This section starts with the 2000 Election that ended in the Florida Fiasco and into Howard Dean’s successes with the Internet, then moves through the Kerry-Bush Election, the first-ever Congressionally-contested election and then the Obama-McCain election, ending finally with the unique situation of politicians in SF running for Mayor and using Twitter for the first time even as they granted Twitter a huge tax-break to stay in the City. I reference works of my own that parallel these circumstances.

Eleven to Eleven in the Bottom of the Eleventh

09 Monday Aug 2010

Posted by mtk in full games

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2010, Barry, Bumgarner, Casilla, Cincinnatti, comeback, Francisco, Freddy, giants, Gomes, greatest, history, home, homers, Joey, Jonny, loss, Madison, mlb, Pandahats, pitch, Reds, runs, San, sanchez, sf, Stubbs, Torres, Votto, wild, Zito

[this was the 2010 season, August, amidst Lincecum’s first crash]

First Pitch 1:06pm – Indian Summer began with a heat wave and the warm weather seems to correlate directly with baseballs sailing out of AT&T Park.

The Giants, a great pitching team that struggled to produce three or four runs a game in San Francisco‘s foggy, cool summers, had, with the heat, flipped the script, smashing the ball against the surging, Central Division-leading Reds – scoring 27 runs in the first two night games to win 16-5 and 11-2. It was the beginning of a home-run fiesta that would carry the Giants to the playoffs.

Headed into the city on BART that morning after the long-ball fest of the two previous nights, we met lots of Giants fans looking for a sweep.

We all talked about how the day game would be even warmer, and hoped Giants bats would stay hot. More than once we heard the refrain: “I wish they’d save some of those runs and scatter them across a few games.”

We were excited to see Madison Bumgarner, the newest member of the starting rotation, a tall, strong 21-year old with big-time game. It would also be my first time seeing the Reds’ Joey Votto live. He didn’t disappoint.

In the first, with two men down, Votto blasted a two-run homer. Worse, his was followed by back-to-back solo shots by Jonny Gomes and Ryan Hanigan that got out of the park in a hurry. The Reds shelled Bumgarner mercilessly before that last out. Reds 4, Giants 0.

Though the Giants were down big before they’d even had a chance to bat, my son, the woman to my right, her son (wearing a floppy-eared Panda hat) and I all agreed not to let it bother us. Giants batters were coming off 27 runs in two nights! Pandahat favored Aubrey Huff.

Yes, game we were, in the face of four runs, and, as if to prove us and the whole universe true, Bumgarner settled down in the second, and in the bottom half Jose Guillen singled to left, was advanced to second by a Sandoval base hit (much to Pandahat’s excitement) and to third by an Uribe sac-fly. The Giants chiseled him across the plate from third on a Freddy Sanchez single. Reds 4, Giants 1.

But in the top of the third, the 21-year-old Bumgarner lost it with two outs again. Rolen doubled, Gomes singled, Hanigan walked on a full count and Drew Stubbs tripled to clear the bases. Just like that it was seven to nothing. Ugh.

Then, just when we thought it couldn’t possibly get worse, the poor kid blew it like I haven’t seen since Little League.

With two outs, three men in, and Stubbs standing on third, Righetti and Bochy decided to intentionally walk Paul Janish to set up the force out at second, first or home.

So picture it: runner on third. catcher Buster Posey standing up, glove-arm extended. The ump’s got his hands on his hips. Janish at the plate is barely even in his stance – holding the bat in a  relaxed posture awaiting his walk.

And then suddenly, Madison Bumgarner throws a wild pitch on an intentional ball! Missed Buster entirely! And Stubbs scores from third on an E1. Reds 8, Giants 1.

I had no idea what to say. Talk about brain freeze. I looked at my son between the top and bottom of the inning, speechless. I ran through the list of clichés out loud:

“Hey you know, there’s no clock in baseball, it’s the most changeable sport, anything could happen. A coupla runs here, a solid inning in relief there and a couple-few more runs, and we’re right back in this thing.”

It was weak, but the woman to my left chimed in appropriately and together, we showed strength in the face of adversity to the boys – but not before she leaned over and whispered “I wish they’d saved some of those runs from yesterday to scatter across a few games.”

Then again, torturously, with two outs in the fourth, in his first at-bat against our new right-hander Ramon Ramirez, Joey Votto homered for the second time. It was impressive. He worked the count against the second pitcher he’d face that day and calmly jacked a solo shot to left. Votto already had two big flies and three batted in. Reds 9, Giants 1.

When the Giants failed to score in the bottom of the fourth, a lot of people left, but the woman to my right and her son stayed. They minded our stuff as we took a quick walk down to concessions to see if it might change our luck. My son flipped his hat round, the first of many rally caps I’d see that day. We never leave games, but this one just got worse.

In the fifth, with two outs, Ramirez walked Stubbs, then issued a back-to-back, full count walk to Janish and finally capped his performance by yielding a single to the pitcher, Homer Bailey, scoring Stubbs.

Santiago Casilla came in to get the last out and stood on the mound facing people’s backs as they climbed the steps to scramble out, and a frustrated remaining crowd. In a tension-relieving moment akin to broken glass Casilla then beaned Reds second baseman Brandon Phillips.

It was inadvertent, but took Philips out of the game, clearly bothered, in the sixth. Casilla then just took a strikeout, so his box reads: one beaning and one strikeout in a third of an inning’s work! That was enough for our seatmates, who bolted up the steps – Panda ears a-flappin’.

And that was how the Giants got down ten to one in the first five innings of a game we now refer to as one of the greatest comeback performances in SF Giants history.

When the Giants came up to bat in the fifth down ten to one, there were maybe 20,000 of us left, enjoying a rare, hot day at the park. It was a gorgeous Wednesday afternoon and there really wasn’t a better place to be in SF. Oh, the waning light in Indian Summer, then, like a consolation gift to us for staying.

Giants recent acquisition Mike Fontenot drew a lead-off walk and Andres Torres singled and then – what, what? – Aubrey Huff advanced both to scoring position with a grounder. When Pat Burrell singled to right to bring in two runs, we made noise. Reds 10, Giants 3.

All year, our expensive left-handed reliever Jeremy Affeldt – whom we’d signed last year to a two-year, nine million dollar deal – has struggled in relief. He seemed as likely to throw a wild pitch as a strike.

When he entered the game in the sixth, I felt Manager Bruce Bochy and Pitching Coach Dave Righetti had given up on this one. I assumed they were happy taking two of three from the Reds over the week and had decided to use this opportunity to help some guys who’ve been struggling work out kinks. I had resigned myself to watching Affeldt fail before he even threw a pitch and even prepared my son for it.

Affeldt had recently absorbed browbeating in the press for being shown up significantly by left-handed acquisition Javier Lopez, a specialist, whom the Giants pay one tenth of Affeldt’s salary. Affeldt watched Lopez enter games in pressure situations just days before – in San Diego and at home – and end them with less than ten pitches. It must have been a blow to his ego.

Affeldt stepped up and closed out the sixth without giving up a hit. Three up, three down. An electricity passed through us. Not one of our guys wants to be the one not carrying his weight. Anybody who loves effort and was at AT&T Park that day fell in love with this team.

In the sixth, Juan Uribe hit a one-out single to short, just beating the tag. Nate Schierholtz – pinch hitting for Affeldt who’d done his job – smashed a double to right, sending Uribe to third. After five and two-thirds, the Reds pulled Bailey with a seven-run lead and brought Bill Bray in relief.

It was Bray’s wild pitch that made everybody sit up. It was a parallel to Bumgarner’s run-scoring wild pitch in the first – karma. This one brought Uribe home and sent Schierholtz to third. Fontenot then stepped up with one down and grounded out to second, allowing Schierholtz to cross the plate. Reds 10, Giants 5.

Now, the vibe in the building was palpably “no-hitterish“. It was ten to five. Nobody wanted to talk about a comeback for fear of jinxing it. But there was an excitement after that wild pitch – like maybe the Reds were more vulnerable in relief.

We were all two days full of recent memories of towering homers by Posey and Uribe and Burrell – could the Giants come back? I wondered what Kruk, Kuip and Jon were talking about. [still haven’t heard what I’m told is an epic broadcast].

In the seventh, the Reds brought Logan Ondrusek in relief of Bray, Sergio Romo pitched for the Giants, and both pitchers held.

Still down five now in the top of the eighth, the Giants brought closer Brian Wilson in early to keep the Giants within reach. Wilson, who would go on to end the season with a major-league leading 48 saves is our nutty backstop – crazy as a loon, but who knows how to finish.

Again. In Wilson, we felt the fight in this team. The unwillingness to just rollover and call it a day because you’re down.

We went to the bottom of the eighth inning trailing by five runs, but having crept back to within striking distance against the Reds bullpen. Has there ever been a more exciting inning played by an SF team than the Giants eighth that day? That’s for historians to decide, but it was the craziest Giant inning I’ve ever seen live, hands down.

Guillen leads off with a single to left, and then Sandoval, to center – runners in the corners for Juan “One-Swing-of-the-Bat” Uribe. <BLAM> three run homer. Nobody out. Ondrusek done. Reds 10, Giants 8.

The Reds, suddenly only up two, scramble. Massive substitutions. Helsey in at left, Bruce at right and Arthur Rhodes on the mound to set up Cordero, the closer. It was crunch time and we, long-suffering Giant fans – desperately searching for situational hitting and run support – watched five of our guys make it happen.

Ross and Fontenot hit back to back singles to left and Torres jumped on a Rhodes change-up, smacking a stand-up double to the same part of the park, scoring both. Reds 10, Giants 10. And then in two quick at-bats against Rhodes, Posey and Huff earned sac-flies to bring Torres home, sliding to the plate to beat the throw. The Giants lead 11 to 10.

Wow. The place went crazy. My seven-year old was high-fiving seventy-year olds! It may have been the smallest standing ovation the Giants will ever receive, but it was unequaled in sincerity.

When I looked around it was apparent that since the fifth some fans had returned, or maybe had come in from a downtown bar to catch what they were seeing on TV or hearing about in the streets or on the radio – The Greatest Comeback in Giants History.

Now, there is some dispute about what constitutes a Great Comeback. To me, it isn’t a comeback unless you win. There are many who share this opinion. This definition dominates the view presented by the mainstream sports press. But for some, a comeback is defined by effort, as measured by the difference in the lead you make: if you were down by a hundred but lost by only two, it must have been a really amazing game, and you must have made superhuman effort though you took the loss.

I find this definition of a comeback without victory to be suspect in sports with only two opponents. Because, where in a foot race, it applies to the difference between second’s finish versus third’s in relation to first (and more importantly fourths distance from third), it makes no real sense where only two are competing against each other.

That said, the ten runs made up by the Giants to take the lead was the greatest deficit overcome in Giants history. We were exhilarated. The relief of tension was palpable. We all felt special. It was incredible. We were going to sweep the Reds, scoring almost 40 runs in three days. The elders behind us and my son were just glowing in the late afternoon light.

It’s a shame home games don’t last just eight innings.

There’s those last three pesky outs to get. Even after a huge comeback achieved as a team, you have to stay focused … and seize the win. To me, that’s what makes it a comeback.

Now, here a word must be inserted about Pablo Sandoval. I was at a local pub the other night watching the game when Sandoval made the throwing error by sending the ball home with a force out at every bag without stepping on third, preventing a double play from ending the inning – a mental slip that allowed a run to score later and lose the game for the Giants- when a patron beside me said he blamed the marketing department for Pablo’s problems.

That was when I put it together. The Marketing department, desperate to replace Barry Bonds with a ‘batting persona’ forced the 23-year old Sandoval to become The Panda. And went nuts making Panda suits, hats, bobblies, glasses, mats, key chains, stuffies and everything else. Did anyone in marketing notice that our strength is pitching and that we need team play and contact hitters? It was undue pressure to put on Pablo Sandoval.

I enjoy shouting out to the players in encouragement when I am sitting low enough to be heard. We were just up the first base line behind the Reds dugout for this one and in the third I can remember shouting to Freddy Sanchez as he awaited a pitch with Panda on first, “Hey, Freddy, You got ‘em, man! They can’t touch you!”

Pablo, standing on first, turned, pointed at me from first with two black-gloved fingers and shouted, “That’s Right!” My son was thrilled. Freddy hit into a double play. It felt like poor Pablo was cursed.

With one out in the top of the ninth and the Giants up 11 to 10 after coming back from being down 10 to 1, the greatest comeback in Giants history, Brian Wilson delivered and the Reds’ Drew Stubbs hit a routine grounder to Sandoval. I was sitting right behind first base. I looked right at him. He scooped it up and had plenty of time.

For a second, I thought I saw his eyes looking right at us. And then I watched his right arm just go screwy and his face turn. The ball flew way wide of Huff at first and into the grass in front of the dugout. Stubbs, thinking it was going to be a routine out, hadn’t really come close to first, so he turned the corner and turned on the speed, arriving standing at second.

It was a two-base throwing error on Pablo Sandoval that put the tying run in scoring position and the fifth Giant error of the game. Moments later, Wilson gave up the single to Janish that scored Stubbs. He then got the final out. Reds 11, Giants 11.

The Reds had turned to Nick Masset to finish their debacle of an eighth, which the right-hander ended with a strikeout. Now, he manhandled the Giants in the ninth, striking out three. The aforementioned Javier Lopez, la specialista for the Giants, entered in the tenth and true to form made quick work of the Reds. Again, it felt like Lopez didn’t want to be responsible for failing when called upon.

I mean this in a good way.

Not like guys competing for jobs, but like comrades in struggle. In the eleventh, Bochy leaned on Lopez to extend and the specialist held the meat of the Reds lineup to just one hit. Meanwhile, Manager Dusty Baker and the Reds turned the ball over to their excellent closer Francisco Cordero.

The Giants wouldn‘t score in the tenth or eleventh, but we got the thrill of seeing a scoreboard I don’t think I’ll ever see live again – Eleven to Eleven in the Bottom of the Eleventh.

Arriving at the top of the twelfth, exhausted of left-handed relievers, I looked down to see Barry Zito trotting out to the mound. Bochy probably thought he had no other choice. Maybe he thought it would help the slumping Zito get back some lost confidence. But there was starter Barry Zito on short rest, entering a tied game in the 12th inning in relief.

Janish singled to left, then Matt Cairo doubled to center sending Janish to third. With two on, nobody out in the twelfth inning of a midweek day-game, the last of a series in August, against the Central Division leader, and a failing Zito on the mound, these Giants refused to die.

The next batter, Chris Helsey, hit a sharp grounder to Uribe hoping to at last get the winning RBI. Janish sprinted for home, but the hard-charging Uribe scooped it up and threw a bullet to Posey at the plate, in time to get the sliding Janish. We roared.

It was still 11 to 11. But now it was one away with runners in the corners for Zito facing league MVP-candidate Joey Votto. We knew the battle between Barry Zito and Joey Votto would decide this game. As Votto fought off pitch after pitch on the strikes and Zito missed the box by millimeters on the balls, the sinking feeling that we were losing this one crept into us all.

In a way I was resigned to it when Barry ran out there, but somehow it didn’t matter. We had seen superhuman effort by our Giants. Grit, toughness and an unwillingness to rollover and die.

Finally though, one guy was tougher than them all and in an epic display of game-winning force, Joey Votto hit a ball so hard into shallow right field that nobody could’ve handled it – a smokin’ dribbler. Sanchez stopped it and tried to get the ball home.

Cairo, who had taken a huge lead from third arrived at the plate almost simultaneously with the ball. Posey blocked the plate. The two collided hard as Cairo stretched for the plate, but Posey held on! The umpire, Hirschbeck, signaled vigorously and initially shouted, “Out!” … then in microseconds that felt like minutes, the ball popped up into the air out of the scrum, slipping out of Buster’s hand … and the call was reversed. Cairo was safe.

Reds 12, Giants 11.

Cordero retired the side in order and stole a win as the Cincinnati Reds beat the San Francisco Giants 12 to 11 in 12 crazy innings. Zito took the loss to fall to 8-9 (he didn’t win again in 2010, but this lousy inning in the toughest of situations was the one that made him an under .500 pitcher and helped keep him off the roster for our first World Series Championship).

Epilogue

Amazingly, the story of this game and its internal question of whether or not you can lose a great comeback was buried by baseball itself, which, in its statistical perfection provided a definitive comeback game on the very same day, by the exact same margin of difference.

In a staggering coincidence only possible in the mathematical infinity of baseball’s continuity, the Atlanta Braves were ahead by the exact same score of 10 to 1 over the Colorado Rockies and allowed Colorado to come back and win 11-10.

On the same day! So guys were like, “Now, that’s a comeback.”

Thinking about it now, you could say it was the last game the Giants lost that season because of a collection of their own mistakes rather than by a single player’s lapse or by being outplayed by the better performance of their opponent. But despite the lop-sided opening and all the crazy errors made by so many Giants, this against-the-odds contest was also the grittiest expression of this team’s fight that I‘d yet witnessed.

I’ve never been happier after a loss in my life. I was just so proud of our guys for trying that hard. You could feel that pride among all the fans as we shuffled toward the exits, smiling.

The whole team had an unwillingness to lose, yet lose they did, and in a sad but poetic way, that loss came at the hands of our own beloved, expensive, Prince of Inability, Barry Zito.

Yes, we were proud of our Giants, despite, and now I understand what people mean when they say a great comeback can end in a loss.

Eleven to Eleven in the Bottom of the Eleventh, 2010

09 Monday Aug 2010

Posted by mtk in baseball, essay

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2010, AT&T Park, back, behind, Cincinnati, come, comeback, extra, from, giants, greatest, history, innings, Karthik, loss, m.t. karthik, mtk, Reds, run, san francisco, Sandoval, sf, ten, Votto, Zito

[this was the Championship Season, August, amidst Lincecum’s first crash]

First Pitch 1:06pm – Indian Summer began with a heat wave and the warm weather seems to correlate directly with baseballs sailing out of AT&T Park.

The Giants, a great pitching team that struggled to produce three or four runs a game in San Francisco‘s foggy, cool summers, had, with the heat, flipped the script, smashing the ball against the surging, Central Division-leading Reds – scoring 27 runs in the first two night games to win 16-5 and 11-2. It was the beginning of a home-run fiesta that would carry the Giants to the playoffs.

Headed into the city on BART that morning after the long-ball fest of the two previous nights, we met lots of Giants fans looking for a sweep.

We all talked about how the day game would be even warmer, and hoped Giants bats would stay hot. More than once we heard the refrain: “I wish they’d save some of those runs and scatter them across a few games.”

We were excited to see Madison Bumgarner, the newest member of the starting rotation, a tall, strong 21-year old with big-time game. It would also be my first time seeing the Reds’ Joey Votto live. He didn’t disappoint.

In the first, with two men down, Votto blasted a two-run homer. Worse, his was followed by back-to-back solo shots by Jonny Gomes and Ryan Hanigan that got out of the park in a hurry. The Reds shelled Bumgarner mercilessly before that last out. Reds 4, Giants 0.

Though the Giants were down big before they’d even had a chance to bat, my son, the woman to my right, her son (wearing a floppy-eared Panda hat) and I all agreed not to let it bother us. Giants batters were coming off 27 runs in two nights! Pandahat favored Aubrey Huff.

Yes, game we were, in the face of four runs, and, as if to prove us and the whole universe true, Bumgarner settled down in the second, and in the bottom half Jose Guillen singled to left, was advanced to second by a Sandoval base hit (much to Pandahat’s excitement) and to third by an Uribe sac-fly. The Giants chiseled him across the plate from third on a Freddy Sanchez single. Reds 4, Giants 1.

But in the top of the third, the 21-year-old Bumgarner lost it with two outs again. Rolen doubled, Gomes singled, Hanigan walked on a full count and Drew Stubbs tripled to clear the bases. Just like that it was seven to nothing. Ugh.

Then, just when we thought it couldn’t possibly get worse, the poor kid blew it like I haven’t seen since Little League.

With two outs, three men in, and Stubbs standing on third, Righetti and Bochy decided to intentionally walk Paul Janish to set up the force out at second, first or home.

So picture it: runner on third. catcher Buster Posey standing up, glove-arm extended. The ump’s got his hands on his hips. Janish at the plate is barely even in his stance – holding the bat in a  relaxed posture awaiting his walk.

And then suddenly, Madison Bumgarner throws a wild pitch on an intentional ball! Missed Buster entirely! And Stubbs scores from third on an E1. Reds 8, Giants 1.

I had no idea what to say. Talk about brain freeze. I looked at my son between the top and bottom of the inning, speechless. I ran through the list of clichés out loud:

“Hey you know, there’s no clock in baseball, it’s the most changeable sport, anything could happen. A coupla runs here, a solid inning in relief there and a couple-few more runs, and we’re right back in this thing.”

It was weak, but the woman to my left chimed in appropriately and together, we showed strength in the face of adversity to the boys – but not before she leaned over and whispered “I wish they’d saved some of those runs from yesterday to scatter across a few games.”

Then again, torturously, with two outs in the fourth, in his first at-bat against our new right-hander Ramon Ramirez, Joey Votto homered for the second time. It was impressive. He worked the count against the second pitcher he’d face that day and calmly jacked a solo shot to left. Votto already had two big flies and three batted in. Reds 9, Giants 1.

When the Giants failed to score in the bottom of the fourth, a lot of people left, but the woman to my right and her son stayed. They minded our stuff as we took a quick walk down to concessions to see if it might change our luck. My son flipped his hat round, the first of many rally caps I’d see that day. We never leave games, but this one just got worse.

In the fifth, with two outs, Ramirez walked Stubbs, then issued a back-to-back, full count walk to Janish and finally capped his performance by yielding a single to the pitcher, Homer Bailey, scoring Stubbs.

Santiago Casilla came in to get the last out and stood on the mound facing people’s backs as they climbed the steps to scramble out, and a frustrated remaining crowd. In a tension-relieving moment akin to broken glass Casilla then beaned Reds second baseman Brandon Phillips.

It was inadvertent, but took Philips out of the game, clearly bothered, in the sixth. Casilla then just took a strikeout, so his box reads: one beaning and one strikeout in a third of an inning’s work! That was enough for our seatmates, who bolted up the steps – Panda ears a-flappin’.

And that was how the Giants got down ten to one in the first five innings of a game we now refer to as one of the greatest comeback performances in SF Giants history.

When the Giants came up to bat in the fifth down ten to one, there were maybe 20,000 of us left, enjoying a rare, hot day at the park. It was a gorgeous Wednesday afternoon and there really wasn’t a better place to be in SF. Oh, the waning light in Indian Summer, then, like a consolation gift to us for staying.

Giants recent acquisition Mike Fontenot drew a lead-off walk and Andres Torres singled and then – what, what? – Aubrey Huff advanced both to scoring position with a grounder. When Pat Burrell singled to right to bring in two runs, we made noise. Reds 10, Giants 3.

All year, our expensive left-handed reliever Jeremy Affeldt – whom we’d signed last year to a two-year, nine million dollar deal – has struggled in relief. He seemed as likely to throw a wild pitch as a strike. When he entered the game in the sixth, I felt Manager Bruce Bochy and Pitching Coach Dave Righetti had given up on this one.

I assumed they were happy taking two of three from the Reds over the week and had decided to use this opportunity to help some guys who’ve been struggling work out kinks. I had resigned myself to watching Affeldt fail before he even threw a pitch and even prepared my son for it.

Affeldt had taken a beating in the press and been shown up significantly by left-handed acquisition Javier Lopez, a specialist, whom the Giants pay one tenth of his salary. Affeldt watched Lopez enter games in pressure situations just days before – in San Diego and at home – and end them with less than ten pitches. It must have been a blow to his ego.

Affeldt stepped up and closed out the sixth without giving up a hit. Three up, three down. An electricity passed through us. None of our guys want to be the one not carrying his weight. Anybody who loves effort and was at AT&T Park that day fell in love with this team.

In the sixth, Juan Uribe hit a one-out single to short, just beating the tag. Nate Schierholtz – pinch hitting for Affeldt who’d done his job – smashed a double to right, sending Uribe to third. After five and two-thirds, the Reds pulled Bailey with a seven-run lead and brought Bill Bray in relief.

It was Bray’s wild pitch that made everybody sit up. It was a parallel to Bumgarner’s run-scoring wild pitch in the first – karma. This one brought Uribe home and sent Schierholtz to third. Fontenot then stepped up with one down and grounded out to second, allowing Schierholtz to cross the plate. Reds 10, Giants 5.

Now, the vibe in the building was palpably “no-hitterish“. It was ten to five. Nobody wanted to talk about a comeback for fear of jinxing it. But there was an excitement after that wild pitch – like maybe the Reds were more vulnerable in relief.

We were all two days full of recent memories of towering homers by Posey and Uribe and Burrell – could the Giants come back? I wondered what Kruk, Kuip and Jon were talking about. [still haven’t heard what I’m told is an epic broadcast].

In the seventh, the Reds brought Logan Ondrusek in relief of Bray, Sergio Romo pitched for the Giants, and both pitchers held.

Still down five now in the top of the eighth, the Giants brought closer Brian Wilson in early to keep the Giants within reach. Wilson, who would go on to end the season with a major-league leading 48 saves is our nutty backstop – crazy as a loon, but who knows how to finish.

Again. In Wilson, we felt the fight in this team. The unwillingness to just rollover and call it a day because you’re down.

We went to the bottom of the eighth inning trailing by five runs, but having crept back to within striking distance against the Reds bullpen. Has there ever been a more exciting inning played by an SF team than the Giants eighth that day? That’s for historians to decide, but it was the craziest Giant inning I’ve ever seen live, hands down.

Guillen leads off with a single to left, and then Sandoval, to center – runners in the corners for Juan “One-Swing-of-the-Bat” Uribe. <BLAM> three run homer. Nobody out. Ondrusek done. Reds 10, Giants 8.

The Reds, suddenly only up two, scramble. Massive substitutions. Helsey in at left, Bruce at right and Arthur Rhodes on the mound to set up Cordero, the closer. It was crunch time and we, long-suffering Giant fans – desperately searching for situational hitting and run support – watched five of our guys make it happen.

Ross and Fontenot hit back to back singles to left and Torres jumped on a Rhodes change-up, smacking a stand-up double to the same part of the park, scoring both. Reds 10, Giants 10. And then in two quick at-bats against Rhodes, Posey and Huff earned sac-flies to bring Torres home, sliding to the plate to beat the throw. The Giants lead 11 to 10.

Wow. The place went crazy. My seven-year old was high-fiving seventy-year olds! It may have been the smallest standing ovation the Giants will ever receive, but it was unequaled in sincerity.

When I looked around it was apparent that since the fifth some fans had returned, or maybe had come in from a downtown bar to catch what they were seeing on TV or hearing about in the streets or on the radio – The Greatest Comeback in Giants History.

Now, there is some dispute about what constitutes a Great Comeback. To me, it isn’t a comeback unless you win. There are many who share this opinion. This definition dominates the view presented by the mainstream sports press. But for some, a comeback is defined by effort, as measured by the difference in the lead you make: if you were down by a hundred but lost by only two, it must have been a really amazing game, and you must have made superhuman effort though you took the loss.

I find this definition of a comeback without victory to be suspect in sports with only two opponents. Because, where in a foot race, it applies to the difference between second’s finish versus third’s in relation to first (and more importantly fourths distance from third), it makes no real sense where only two are competing against each other.

That said, the ten runs made up by the Giants to take the lead was the greatest deficit overcome in Giants history. We were exhilarated. The relief of tension was palpable. We all felt special. It was incredible. We were going to sweep the Reds, scoring almost 40 runs in three days. The elders behind us and my son were just glowing in the late afternoon light . . .

It’s a shame home games don’t last just eight innings. There’s those last three pesky outs to get. Even after a huge comeback achieved as a team, you have to stay focused … and seize the win. To me, that’s what makes it a comeback.

Now, here a word must be inserted about Pablo Sandoval. I was at a local pub the other night watching the game when Sandoval made the throwing error by sending the ball home with a force out at every bag without stepping on third, preventing a double play from ending the inning – a mental slip that allowed a run to score later and lose the game for the Giants- when a patron beside me said he blamed the marketing department for Pablo’s problems.

That was when I put it together. The Marketing department, desperate to replace Barry Bonds with a ‘batting persona’ forced the 23-year old Sandoval to become The Panda. And went nuts making Panda suits, hats, bobblies, glasses, mats, key chains, stuffies and everything else. Did anyone in marketing notice that our strength is pitching and that we need team play and contact hitters? It was undue pressure to put on Pablo Sandoval.

I enjoy shouting out to the players in encouragement when I am sitting low enough to be heard. We were just up the first base line behind the Reds dugout for this one and in the third I can remember shouting to Freddy Sanchez as he awaited a pitch with Panda on first, “Hey, Freddy, You got ‘em, man! They can’t touch you!”

Pablo, standing on first, turned, pointed at me from first with two black-gloved fingers and shouted, “That’s Right!” My son was thrilled. Freddy hit into a double play. It felt like poor Pablo was cursed.

With one out in the top of the ninth and the Giants up 11 to 10 after coming back from being down 10 to 1, the greatest comeback in Giants history, Brian Wilson delivered and the Reds’ Drew Stubbs hit a routine grounder to Sandoval. I was sitting right behind first base. I looked right at him. He scooped it up and had plenty of time.

For a second, I thought I saw his eyes looking right at us. And then I watched his right arm just go screwy and his face turn. The ball flew way wide of Huff at first and into the grass in front of the dugout. Stubbs, thinking it was going to be a routine out, hadn’t really come close to first, so he turned the corner and turned on the speed, arriving standing at second.

It was a two-base throwing error on Pablo Sandoval that put the tying run in scoring position and the fifth Giant error of the game. Moments later, Wilson gave up the single to Janish that scored Stubbs. He then got the final out. Reds 11, Giants 11.

The Reds had turned to Nick Masset to finish their debacle of an eighth, which the right-hander ended with a strikeout. Now, he manhandled the Giants in the ninth, striking out three. The Giants’ Javier Lopez, la specialista, entered in the tenth and true to form made quick work of the Reds. Again, it felt like Lopez didn’t want to be shown up by Affeldt, didn’t want to be responsible for failing when called upon.

I mean this in a good way.

Not like guys competing for jobs, but like comrades in struggle. In the eleventh, Bochy leaned on Lopez to extend and the specialist held the meat of the Reds lineup to just one hit. Meanwhile, Manager Dusty Baker and the Reds turned the ball over to their excellent closer Francisco Cordero.

The Giants wouldn‘t score in the tenth or eleventh, but we got the thrill of seeing a scoreboard I don’t think I’ll ever see live again – Eleven to Eleven in the Bottom of the Eleventh.

Arriving at the top of the twelfth, exhausted of left-handed relievers, I looked down to see Barry Zito trotting out to the mound. Bochy probably thought he had no other choice. Maybe he thought it would help the slumping Zito get back some lost confidence. But there was starter Barry Zito on short rest, entering a tied game in the 12th inning in relief.

Janish singled to left, then Matt Cairo doubled to center sending Janish to third. With two on, nobody out in the twelfth inning of a midweek day-game, the last of a series in August, against the Central Division leader, and a failing Zito on the mound, these Giants refused to die.

The next batter, Chris Helsey, hit a sharp grounder to Uribe hoping to at last get the winning RBI. Janish sprinted for home, but the hard-charging Uribe scooped it up and threw a bullet to Posey at the plate, in time to get the sliding Janish. We roared.

It was still 11 to 11. But now it was one away with runners in the corners for Zito facing league MVP-candidate Joey Votto. We knew the battle between Barry Zito and Joey Votto would decide this game. As Votto fought off pitch after pitch on the strikes and Zito missed the box by millimeters on the balls, the sinking feeling that we were losing this one crept into us all.

In a way I was resigned to it when Barry ran out there, but somehow it didn’t matter. We had seen superhuman effort by our Giants. Grit, toughness and an unwillingness to rollover and die.

Finally though, one guy was tougher than them all and in an epic display of game-winning force, Joey Votto hit a ball so hard into shallow right field that nobody could’ve handled it – a smokin’ dribbler. Sanchez stopped it and tried to get the ball home.

Cairo, who had taken a huge lead from third arrived at the plate almost simultaneously with the ball, but Posey had blocked the plate. The two collided hard as Cairo outstretched for the plate, but Posey held on! The umpire, Hirschbeck, signaled vigorously and shouted, “Out!” … then the ball flew up in the air, slipping out of Buster’s hand … and the call was reversed. He was safe.

Reds 12, Giants 11.

Cordero retired the side in order and stole a win as the Cincinnati Reds beat the San Francisco Giants 12 to 11 in 12 crazy innings. Zito took the loss to fall to 8-9 (he didn’t win again this year and this was the one that made him a losing pitcher for the 2010 season).

Epilogue

Amazingly, the story of this game and its internal question of whether or not you can lose a Great Comeback was buried by baseball itself, which, in its statistical perfection provided a definitive Comeback Game on the very same day, by the very same margin of difference as ours.

In a staggering coincidence only possible in the mathematical infinity of baseball’s continuity, the Atlanta Braves were ahead by the exact same score of 10 to 1 over the Colorado Rockies and allowed Colorado to come back and win 11-10. On the same day! So guys were like, “Now, that’s a comeback.”

Thinking about it now, you could say it was the last game the Giants lost because of a collection of their own mistakes rather than by a single player’s lapse or by being outplayed by the better performance of their opponent. But despite the lop-sided opening and all the crazy errors made by so many Giants, this against-the-odds contest was also the grittiest expression of this team’s fight that I‘ve yet witnessed.

I’ve never been happier after a loss in my life. I was just so proud of our guys for trying that hard. You could feel that pride among all the fans as we shuffled toward the exits, smiling.

The whole team had an unwillingness to lose, yet lose they did, and in a sad but poetic way, that loss came at the hands of our own beloved, expensive, Prince of Inability, Barry Zito. Yes, we were proud of our Giants, despite, and now I understand what people mean when they say a Great Comeback can end in a loss.

Concerning the Author’s Previous Attempts at Fiction

05 Tuesday May 2009

Posted by mtk in Berkeley, Commentary, essay, journal entries, Letter From MTK, novel, self portrait, thoughts

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Between 1995 and 1997 I wrote my first novel, Mood. Because digital printing and imaging were nascent technologies, and because I was growing increasingly interested in doing art myself, in making visual art myself, Mood was conceived and designed specifically, with a graphic element that drove the creative engine of the work: the passage of an image of the changing moon moving through the margins, and the presence of the night sky on the pages by making the pages dark and the letters light, with the slightest alteration of color and contrast of the pages and letters as the book progresses to correspond to the light provided by the moon as it passed through a fortnight of phases during the course of the narrative of the novel. The pages were to be the night sky and the letters the stars – paragraphs were constellations.

The timing of the narrative takes place during the fortnight represented by the physical pages and artwork, and as a conceit, the main character’s name changes with each phase of the moon. Set in San Francisco, I employed many contemporary businesses – bars, restaurants – that were popular among scenesters then. I punnishly changed names, or not, on a whimsical basis. Anyone who went out to hear live music or DJs or art in The Mission, North Beach, SOMA or elsewhere in the mid 1990’s would recognize many locations by their descriptions in the novel, Mood.

I physically took Mood to New York City in August of 1997, and attempted to have it published. I hand delivered copies to Sonny Mehta at Random House and at all the major houses. This was the exact moment when many of NYCs oldest and most famous publishers were being bought out by large German corporations.

Response to Mood was almost negligible. Only one agent wrote back at all, a handwritten note to say he liked the style but that the work was too experimental. The book was never produced as imagined and for a dozen years has existed as only a single, 187-page hardcopy, bound in 1997 (which may be lost in India), and as files stored on floppy disk. In January 2000, one chapter of Mood was published as a short story by the Conde Nast women’s monthly, Jane magazine. That story, Shanti, was roughly 1500 words long and represents my first published work of fiction that had a national audience. More than 50 readers wrote to an e-mail established to receive feedback. All the feedback was good.

I stayed in New York to attempt to write more and address the publishing industry, but grew increasingly disappointed in the changing face of the industry and writing in general. The New Yorker rejected seven of my submissions between 1997 and 2009, though once they wrote by hand that I was on the right track, “this one is more like what we might run,” the unsigned note read.

In 2001, my short story, Close the Piano, was published in an anthology of South Asian writers out of Toronto, Canada, under the pseudonym Raj Balas. I did a public performance as Raj Balas reading a part of that story aloud to a group gathered at the Asian American Writers Workshop in Manhattan, in April of that year – four months before the September 11th attacks which changed my career trajectory, somewhat, as I began and have been doing much more art, performance, news and journalism rather than fiction writing, ever since.

After 9/11, I nearly stopped writing fiction altogether. This has been an intense period in my life that includes the birth of my son and years of writing hard news and politics for Pacifica Radio, as well as anti-war essays and e-mails for a half decade. I was very politically active during the Bush/Cheney era. I also completed a lot of art, performance and installation work that was politically motivated in response to our changing world.

My explorations into visual art – which began in 1996 with Rigo 23 in San Francisco – began to fruit in New York in part as a result of collaboration with Christopher Wilde, Marshall Weber, Mark Wagner, Sara Parkel, Amy Ferrara and others at Booklyn Artists Alliance, and also because, on an irregular but intense level, I began assisting Rigo 23 with large scale art and installation projects all around the world. I became a working artist somewhere between the year 2000 and 2003 – when most of my placed work found its home in educational and arts institutions in the U.S.A. This is also when I founded Fifty Foot Pine Tree Press (Los Angeles, April 25, 2002) to begin producing limited editions, artist’s books, prints and digital art, now on the web at www.ffptp.org

In the 21st century, I began to make artists books and to do collage, drawing and painting more than to write fiction, however, I did write one more novel and five more short stories while in New York City. None of this work was published, though the novel was posted page by page, online, in its entirety, by a now defunct website. That novel remained online for a full year, December 1999 to January 2001.

I have only finished one story since 9/11, as raising my son has made it nearly impossible to find the mental space and time to write what I want to write. The only fiction I have finished in the last 3 years is Before You Came, the opening chapter of a novel with the working title, The Outsider Inside.

M.T. Karthik

Berkeley, California

May 2009

M.T. Karthik

This blog archives early work of M.T. Karthik, who took every photograph and shot all the video here unless otherwise credited.

Performances and installations are posted by date of execution.

Writing appears in whatever form it was originally or, as in the case of poems or journal entries, retyped faithfully from print.

all of it is © M.T. Karthik

a minute of rain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYLHNRS8ik4

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