Rizzo
The Cubs produce a video segment with players that’s sort of loosely based on the Newlywed Game: One player answers questions about himself, and two other teammates compete to guess what the original player’s answers are, i.e. compete to show who knows their teammate best. (It is confusingly called Bae vs. Ballplayer, because the “show” originally pitted the player’s significant other against a teammate.) This show… whatever. It’s fine. It has moments.
But there was one episode—in which then-Cub Anthony Rizzo competed with Jessica Bryant to answer questions about then-Cub Kris Bryant—that I love. Rizzo and Bryant are best friends. (Bryant and Bryant are spouses.) And Rizzo, you can tell, really believes in the institution of best friendship. You can watch the whole thing if you really want—it’s just Jumbotron-video type stuff, though it does have a pleasant mumblecore sweetness to it—
but I at least want to highlight three moments that came during the lightning round, which starts at the 5:50 mark in the video above:
Lightning Question 1.
Bryant: Do I like big spoon or little spoon?
Rizzo: You like to be the big spoon.
Rizzo, given a question that most people would treat as a silly gag or something aimed at embarrassing him, takes it completely seriously. He pauses briefly, answers in a full sentence, solemnly and confidently. I believe that he actually knew this answer about Kris Bryant. I believe that he and his friend have spoken about this, and that furthermore Rizzo bothered to remember what his friend had said. The correct answer earned a bell. Neither friend paused to call Rizzo “weird” for knowing, or to laugh at the question, or to distance themselves from it with an exaggerated ironic celebration. The friends respect the quiet importance of spoons.
Lightning Question 6
Bryant: Do I like hip hop… or country?
Rizzo: Country
[WRONG ANSWER BUZZER]
There’s simply no way you don’t know this sort of thing about your best friend. So Rizzo looked at Bryant as though Bryant had just claimed to be 5-foot-6. Like he felt betrayed by Bryant being obviously wrong about his own taste in music.
And, guess what: Rizzo was right. A minute later, Jessica Bryant also said the answer is country, and the wrong-answer buzzer buzzed again. Nope. No way the person you live with doesn’t know what style of music you prefer. Kris Bryant obviously got this one wrong. He’s deluding himself, telling himself a common fiction (“I’m cool”) that others close to him see right through. That’s why Rizzo looked at him the way friends sometimes do, when they know the friend better than the friend knows himself. Sometimes in that situation you roll your eyes; sometimes you smirk; sometimes you go whaaaaat are you even taaaaaalking about?
Lightning Question 9
Bryant: Is my birthday in December or January?
Rizzo: January 4, 1992.
Bryant: Oh my God that’s creepy.
It’s not creepy to know your best friend’s birthday! It’s not an automatic that you’ll know it, especially if you’re adulthood best friends. But it’s actually a lovely thing to know about somebody, and Rizzo looked wistful when he got the chance to demonstrate how close he is to Bryant. Bryant first shot Rizzo a look of surprise, then, as dudes do, he put a big protective barrier between himself and that intimacy. But Rizzo turned and looked seriously at him. He didn’t let Bryant’s “that’s creepy” comment slide. He wanted Bryant to know that he meant it.
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The Red Sox
Ten years ago, I wrote a magazine article about applying analytics to the question of team chemistry. That idea was in the air at the time. Lots of people—academics, sabermetricians, and stat-savvy players—were talking about how to identify, measure or engineer vibes. I picked up rumors of teams studying the question. “I heard the Red Sox were doing some things with it,” an executive for a different club told me.
That year, the Red Sox won the World Series with a team that wasn’t obviously very good—they famously outperformed their own front office’s projections by a ton, in a season that was sandwiched between 69- and 71-win campaigns—but that had a lot of beards. Lots and lots of beards, and those beards, you might even recall, had names:
Ten years later, I’m less impressed by those Red Sox as trailblazers of analytically derived chemistry—a concept that as far as I can tell hasn’t progressed much farther—than as trailblazers of enthusiastically performed adult friendship. This feels significant for three reasons:
Friendship is like the nuclear core of games-playing, so it makes sense to put “developing friendships” into our conversation of how games are played well.
We are, many smart people say, in something of a friendship recession as a culture. It’s a good thing to see models of friendly intimacy on screens.
Famous peoples’ friendships have always felt to me to be strangely unrecognized. We know the romantic partners of practically every famous person but we rarely know their best friends. This is even true for sports stars. Joe DiMaggio was only married to Marilyn Monroe for nine months, but that coupling was infinitely more attended to than his 50-year best friendship with a San Francisco restaurateur named Reno Barsocchini, who by the way made the Monroe/DiMaggio wedding arrangements at San Francisco city hall, because that’s what friends do.
The 2013 Red Sox and their beards weren’t the first demonstrative ballplayer friends of the era. But around that time, we were just coming out of a period—I’d put it from the mid-1980s through 2009—that I now think of as The Professionalism Era. Ballplayers were boooooring, they generally policed each other into non-expressivity, and they covered up any evidence they actually loved each other. There were some exceptions (e.g. the 2003-2004 Cowboy Up & Idiots Red Sox). But the paradigmatic ballplayer friendship of the Professionalism Era was the Braves’ Big Three starting pitchers, Maddux & Glavine & Smoltz, golfing.
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