I’ve been thinking a lot about the narrative within baseball games lately. The first sketch at the top represents the obvious comparison of a baseball game to an iceberg. Entry level fans often complain of baseball games being incredibly boring, with random moments of excitement added on in the form of HRs, triples, and sometimes, strikeouts. Its the equivalent of me watching NASCAR in hopes of seeing a crash - the rest is just cars going around in an endless circle on the track. But beneath that is an entire world of strategy, mental battles, statistics, and deep histories. How can I surface these?

Frank had suggested to me a few weeks ago that in a baseball game, there are 3 narratives at play. 1) The context of the game right now, ie the count 2) The context of the history of the batter, ie season performance, performance in this park 3) The context of pitcher / batter history. I think these are interesting, but they’re definitely very batter centric.

I took another pass at it and came up with 4 different simultaneous narratives that I feel encompass more of the complete picture. 1) The narrative on a pitch by pitch, situational level 2) The narrative how these moments within the complete game 3) The narrative of that game within the season 4) The narrative of the larger history

Finally, I also have quickly sketched out what Frank and I have been discussing around negative space in baseball. Whether its between pitches, batters, innings, games, or season, there’s a great deal of negative space within baseball, usually occupied by the talking heads of ESPN, etc. That’s my opportunity space.