Pitching Into the Crazy Calgary Wind
Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (2003)
As this is a book about baseball — or perhaps I should say a book about exploiting inefficiencies in the market that takes place in the world of baseball — there are a number of passing references to Canada, and particularly to the Toronto Blue Jays, that aren’t of much interest. But this passage, about the pitcher Chad Bradford, seems worth noting, at least for the way it ties in to other ideas about Canada we’ve come across:
In late June, the Chicago White Sox promoted Chad from Double-A to its Triple-A team in Calgary. When he arrived, he found out why: his new home field was high in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies, wind blowing out. The place was famously hellish on pitching careers: the guy he’d come to replace had simply quit and skipped town…. What should have been ordinary fly balls rocketed through the thin mountain air every which way out of the park. (230)
The way the thin air and wild mountain wind turn ordinary fly balls into home runs suggests the natural elements of Canada have a power unexpected by the American author and the American pitcher he’s writing about. Again we glimpse the (typically American) notion that Canada is a wilderness nation, where civilization has done less to tame the natural world than it has in the U.S.
(Fact break: Calgary is actually the third-largest city in Canada, though you wouldn’t think so from reading this; it sounds like a collection of shacks precariously perched on the edge of a mountain, trembling at every gust and waiting to be swept away by the next strong wind.)
There are sports fields in the U.S. where wind and thinner air are factors that can influence the outcome of plays, and occasionally even the outcome of games (the Denver Broncos stadium is maybe the most obvious example). But when these conditions arise in the U.S., they tend to be treated as something players have to deal with; in the case of this Calgary ballpark, the natural elements are made to seem like forces too powerful to be overcome. There is a sense that in Canada, human agency is too weak to counteract nature (though Bradford does figure out a way to pitch successfully in Calgary). We could almost see a kind of geographical or climatic determinism at work here: cities in the U.S. are what people have made them, but cities in Canada remain at the mercy of nature, which surrounds them and impinges upon them basically at will.
On the plus side, it’s sort of flattering to think that Chicago’s Triple-A club is based in Canada.
Wow - Canada! 