Yankee Stadium sees a variety of fans, from first time visitors to the diehard Bleacher Creatures, each with their own motives and desires for attending a game. Moreover, attendance at games often feels like a singular experience, with little connection to previous games attended. My goal was to help connect the wide range of fans to their shared role in the story of the Yankees, both at Yankee Stadium and after they’ve left.
The first step was to create an in-stadium app that allowed the fans to check in to their seats & contribute cheers, photos, and other memories, transforming the baseball game into a social object, both past and present. The second aspect created an experience outside of the individual phone screens by utilizing the large public screens of the stadium to highlight loyal attendees, feature fan photos, and even transform fans into stadium-wide info-graphics.
The third portion of the project, featured here, examines the evolution of paper tickets to the screens of our cellular phones, and what that means to the ticket stub. A ticket to Yankee Stadium serves both a utilitarian purpose in allowing a fan access to the stadium, while simultaneously acting as a nostalgic artifact of previous games attended. Not only was I interested in preserving the ticket stub, but also, adding additional elements of utility and whimsy by customizing each ticket to the unique history of the individual fan.
Part 3 of 3
For my final project in Public Interfaces, co-taught by Jake Barton and Ian Curry from Local Projects, I worked to create an engaging public interface for my imaginary client of the New York Yankees. Previous posts have looked at the app, as well as the in stadium experience. The final part of the project explores ways in which the Yankees could followup with their fans after they’ve left the stadium.
This exploration, using the BERG Little Printer, doesn’t lament the death of ticket stubs, but rather expores what a new way to capture the nostalgia that ticket stubs unlock. Imagine receiving an update the day after attending a game, thanking you for your visit and summarizing what you’ve seen. Moreover, what could a revised ticket look like that knows your history as a fan? What could the Yankees communicate to you that welcomes you back, and gets you excited for your next game?
We’re headed towards digital tickets in our iPhones….but there’s no reason we have to lose the shoebox of ticket stubs of our favorite memories.
For years, traditional sports journalism sought to tell us what happened, whether it was through our daily newspaper or a television recap. The rise of the internet brought new mediums for these messages to be delivered, but also, the rise of blogs and the democratization of sports opinions. With every trade, 1,000 blog posts were published, praising or criticizing the moves; suddenly every sports fan had an outlet for their fandom. Around that same time, ESPN began to shift a bit of its coverage off of the fields, opting to dedicate more and more of their coverage to the various contract disputes, trades, and arrests.
In my opinion there’s a new wave of sports journalism that has begun to emerge. They’re not here to inform us of the outcome of a game, criticize the latest trade, or offer an estimate how long a player will be suspended for drug charges. Rather, they’re here to do something much more simpler; they want to remind us of the beauty of sports. Guys like Free Darko (RIP, you were ahead of your time), The Classical (from the ashes) Chitwood & Hobbs and MightyFlynn aren’t sitting around complaining about the lockout, they’re taking us back to Michael Jordan’s greatest moments. They’re not inserting themselves into Albert Pujol’s free agency tour, they’re telling us the story of Kick Gibson’s infamous homerun. In the process, they’re also letting us see a small glimpse of ourselves in these moments. We’re transported back to our favorite moments, not just in sports, but in our lives. In short, they’re not here to offer sports news, they’re here to offer sports nostalgia.
I Don’t Believe What I Just Saw
Perhaps the greatest underdog story in all of World Series history. In Game 1 of the 1988 Series the Dodgers trailed the A’s 4-3 in the bottom of the 9th. Dennis Eckersley came on to close out the game and made quick work of the first two batters. Nobody could hit Eck, he had 45 saves on the year. Meanwhile Kirk Gibson sat in the training room for the entire game. Nobody thought he could play after sustaining injuries to both legs in the NLCS. He wasn’t even part of the pre game introductions.
After the last out in the top of the inning Gibson realized that the pitcher was coming up fourth. So he told the bat boy to go get Tommy Lasorda and had Orel Hershiser set up a hitting tee for him in the clubhouse. With two outs and the tying run at the plate Lasorda had Gibson sit in the dugout because he didn’t want the A’s to know he could hit.
Eckersley walked Mike Davis and Kirk Gibson limped from the dugout to the plate with an injured knee and a bad hamstring. It was all or nothing. The guy could barely make it to the batters box, how can he possibly run the bases? Gibson fouled off several pitches nearly falling after each one, waiting for his pitch. Gibson took the count to 3-2 and stepped out of the batters box. He was certain he knew what was next, a backdoor slider. He was right. Kirk Gibson belted it over the right field wall and hobbled around the bases with that iconic fist pump.
“All year long, they looked to him to light the fire and all year long, he answered the demands, until he was physically unable to start tonight—with two bad legs: The bad left hamstring, and the swollen right knee. And, with two out, you talk about a roll of the dice… this is it.”
— Vin Scully
Source: chitwoodandhobbs
I had a realization :: For all this research and talk I’ve been doing about baseball scorekeeping, I’ve never kept score of a baseball game myself. Last year I had a similar realization and ordered beautiful scorecards from the Eephus League of Baseball Minutiae, but they’ve been just sitting on my shelf. So, after seeing Roger Angell’s scorecard, I decided to go back and watch Game 6 of the World Series (I only got home for the 9th inning), attempting to keep score of the game along the way. I wanted to see what it felt like to document those amazing moments - if they carried as much weight with a pen as they do watching that game live.
- Its insanely difficult to keep score. I had to pause the game several times to look up how to document simple plays in baseball that happen often. Fielder’s choices created a mess of my scorecard. Substitutions, especially double switches when a player doesn’t come in at the same position, are insane. What’s the difference between a flyout and a popout?
- I’ve never found myself more captivated by a baseball game. Not because I knew the potential outcome, but because of the level of attention it required for me to actively keep score. I wasn’t even logging balls / strikes.
- I think there’s some level of forecasting that comes through in keeping score. Logging every play, you can start to feel momentum through your pen. You feel the momentum of an inning. Of course, this can just as easily be killed by a double play or a guy watching a called 3rd strike, but I really felt like I was in touch with the swings of the game as I logged it.
- I love scanning the scorecard in hindsight. You can see when it got exciting. Homeruns jump out at you. You can watch pitchers collapse. Errors carry an all new weight when see the damage they inflict after what should have been the third out.
- There’s certain things that can’t be replicated on a scorecard. David Freese’s triple carried far more weight than any other hit in the game, yet it appears on the scorecard as just another hit.
- David Freese’s HR is beautiful in its isolation of the 11th inning column.
I love this statistical representation of Game 6. This website uses a variety of statistics to compute the odds of a team winning the game at any given moment. As David Freese game to the plate in the bottom of the 9th, the Cardinals chances of winning the game had dipped to 7% (though disappointingly, the resolution of this chart is only at a per batter level, I would love to know what the percentage was when he had dropped down to his last strike).
I think this graphic is a great representation of the narrative I am looking to convey in the moment. When people understand that their team only has a 6% chance of winning the game, suddenly the AB carries much more weight. Even looking at this in hindsight, you can deduce that this was one exciting game.
Source: fangraphs.com
Winning lets you play with the game a little, smiling at your goofs and gaffes: Furcal and Holliday messing up that routine fly ball in left field; David Freese dropping a tiny pop-up next to third, with each error producing a run, are perfectly O.K., aren’t they? Who cares, actually? Losing infects everything. If you love the Rangers, tiny errors by your first baseman Michael Young in the fourth and again in the sixth won’t ever go away, and, beating yourself up now, you become convinced that the manager Ron Washington’s decision to pinch-hit for his best reliever, Scott Feldman, in the top of the eleventh, is the worst mistake in franchise history. Freese, who hit that game-tying two-run triple off the right-field wall in the ninth, is the first Cardinals batter up in the bottom half, and he bops the sixth pitch from Mark Lowe into the green lawn behind center field. Walkoff.
Roger Angell’s scorecard from Game 6 of the World Series, being called one of the best games of baseball ever. Its simultaneously data collection and visualization, true to the form that Henry Chadwick pioneered some 150 years ago. Though, interestingly, he is using a lot of notations that I’m not familiar with, especially by not using the shape of a diamond, but rather, lines for the bases earned.
Source: newyorker.com
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.
Where as the Mets moved out of a studio apartment to an eight bedroom shore house, the Yankees moved from their house where the kids grew up to one three doors down with a remodeled kitchen….The stadium is nice. It’s fine. It doesn’t feel special. I don’t feel the ghosts and I don’t feel the history.
