Analytics Never Tell the Whole Story
The numbers do in fact lie as a community loses its news, and a team finds its heart
In early 1999, I worked a short spell for a little community paper now no longer with us called The Montclarion. It was based in the tiny hillside enclave bearing the same name off the 13 near Lake Temescal in Oakland.
The gentrified village is most known today for having been in the footprint of the Oakland Fire, which celebrates its 30th anniversary later this month. The fire—which killed 25, injured 150, and burned 1,520 acres destroying 2,843 homes and 437 apartment and condo units—was a thing the nation and the rest of the region had moved on from but the PTSD from it still cast a constant shadow over the narrative of the remaining citizenry while I was there.
Otherwise, there wasn’t a ton of news in Montclair, but the weekly, which was purchased in 1944 by its longest-tenured owners for $100, had ties to the mothership Oakland Tribune (also gone now) and my group editor, who brought me over from a couple of suburban school board and city hall beats from the other side of the tunnel in Walnut Creek and Concord did so with the promise that I’d be able to string for the Trib on the weekends—maybe even cover a Warriors game or two. That didn’t happen.
The daily ho-hum at the paper was predictably slow. Old community newspapers used to have all types of gadflies buzzing in and out, the kind of people who annoyed you with their dish but also, if you listened closely enough, you could mine a nugget or two about pesky parking laws or the new elementary school principal.
Similarly, the staff all had their beats and, at that moment anyway, were usually entrenched on a symbiotic level that generally crossed the line over to unhealthy with those who held positions of power (or at least perceived positions of power) within the town’s infrastructure: cops, city council, local business and the like.
I was a little down on community news at that moment. The editor, who was only a few years older than me, was a poetry MFA from Tucson who now writes historical fiction centered on women’s stories under her real name and YA under a pseudonym for Penguin. She was the real deal as far as the writing went and a little better at enjoying being employed than I was.
The other reporter was a combination MBA/Journalism grad student from nearby Berkeley. She was one of those too-smart people who talked a little too fast as if they're trying to keep up with their own thoughts, spilling one on top of the other out of their head. I kind of have a thin and dim, laconic Northern California bro’y lilt which I’m not at all proud of so, it was basically tortoise and the hare when we would walk down to the Egg Shop together and discuss the day’s possible stories.
Along with school and her part-time job at the paper, she was interning at a small tech company that was spinning up in the South Bay from a couple of grad students at Stanford. You know where this is going, so I’m not going to hold back on the reveal. It was Google, she went to work with them full-time within a couple of months of knowing her, and I suppose she was probably one of the first dozen or so employees.
We didn’t use the internet much around the Montclarion office. We had a subscription to LexisNexis, an old-school data mining platform held over from the seventies that helped us sift through legal comings and goings. Our group editor, who was given a Google tutorial along with the rest of us, immediately called the search engine out as a “much lesser version” than what we were already using and “a toy.”
I guess this is where my narrative of the past twenty-something years hits that fork in the road. Previous to this, I’d say something like, “Well, guess who was proven right?” Two things happened in the wake of that day. Because of guys like him, already dinosaurs in their mid-40s, the newspaper business as a whole eschewed instead of embraced tech, and guess what? They all rendered themselves obsolete: first by ignoring what was coming around the bend and then trying to play catch-up before it was too late. But there’s a second tier to that narrative and one that has only recently begun to embrace: he was also right.
Google is a toy, just like Facebook is a toy, just like your fucking phone is a toy, just like a Tesla is a toy, and PornHub is a toy, and Amazon, Netflix, and Uber are toys. Toys toys toys. They were never meant to further the cause or provide any real useful information or even verified goods. They were meant to waste your time and zone you out, and get you putting money back in the machine. Frivolous conceits that somehow became a necessity through addiction and warping our very warpable little brains. But what they've all done, to a company, is take away from the task at hand, distract from the world that we largely ignore BECAUSE of them that's now crumbling around us.
The young grad student intern who I’m hoping now lives on her own private beach now or writes big anonymous checks to Planned Parenthood, never presented Google as anything but what it was, which was a fun, shiny, and new kind of search engine that gave rankings based on what was popular or who bought space.
“How’s it going to make money?”
“By selling ads.”
“Who’s going to buy the ads?”
“People.”
“There’s no display here; there’s no pictures. People won’t know what to do or where they are. There's no sense of place.”
Exactly. The group editor was right. Starting on September 4. 1998, Google and all the other companies to follow rewired our brains so we would know where to go in their context, but not IRL.
But the reality is, we DON'T get anything from them in return; there IS no sense of place. It was a grift from the get-go. And it was never pitched as anything but.
And it's now to the point where now we’ve gone so far in the wrong direction people are so used to sourcing their own information with these toys that society is crumbling; people are dying, scammers are trying to get over with every last gasp by selling lines of code dropped in some stranger's database and taking that and running after convincing others to join in. Nobody is feeling healthy, happy, or secure, or—better. It all, at this point, could go away tomorrow, and we’d be better off on Sunday.
The group editor said while wishing my reporter counterpart good luck down in the South Bay over sheet cake that someone had brought over from the Lucky supermarket next door that there would always be a place for her at The Montclarion. A few days after she was gone, he remarked that she’d be back. But that, as we know, didn’t happen either.
Dodgers vs. Giants Game 1
I don’t see how it makes sense to say that the Giants can win the first game at home against storied bi-coastal rival Dodgers in what (surprisingly?) is the first-ever postseason matchup between the in-state frenemies.
San Francisco and LA also happen to be the two best teams in baseball this season, the prior which notched a franchise-record 107 wins, and the latter coming up just one short with a franchise record-tying 106.
The pandemic-era reigning champion Dodgers did it with front-line talent and key midseason acquisitions of ace Max Sherzer and All-Star middle infielder Trea Turner. They featured baseball’s biggest payroll and had just this winter committed nine figures to big righty Trevor Bauer who went ahead and sexually assaulted a woman within inches of her life in the most harrowing and nightmarish way imaginable and continues to be a blight on the Dodgers’ otherwise carefully cultivated reputation as being functionally the best at every position and every spot in the order and the good guys in blue to boot.
On paper, the Giants shouldn’t even be here. Anchored by veterans Brandon Crawford and Buster Posey, who own a quintet of World Series rings between them, SF is a patchwork of analytics-based situational hitters and so many defensive shifts you’d think you’re watching late-season SEC football.
They’re truly the best manifestation of the post-Moneyball/Sabermetrics era where manager Gabe Kapler is given the numbers and left to trust his own baseball instinct and infuse those decisions with humanity.
Kapler is a big believer, almost to corny extremes, in how teams work chemistry-wise. He throws out tech bro CEO platitudes about “vision” and “grit” but in all that blah blah blah his players also know exactly where they stand—that anyone can be called off the bench at any time to contribute.
Pitchers understand they can get pulled in the first, or second, or third. Relievers know they’re a walk away from hitting the showers. And everyday players know that their at-bats may be limited as well, depending on who’s throwing and who’s on.
It’s a complicated patchwork thrown together rather seamlessly by the president of baseball operations, Fahran Zaidi, who read Moneyball and beat out 1,000 applicants to go learn at the knee of Billy Beane in the early 2010s after graduating Cal. After Oakland, he became the Dodgers GM in 2014, helping create the team that takes the field tonight. The Dodgers inexplicably let him slip, and he was brought back up to the Bay in 2018 to reboot a Giants franchise that had lost its mojo in the hangover wars since their last championship (2014) during their three World Series dynastic run of the first half of the last decade.
Both teams were built by the same set of hands, though very different in payroll and execution. The Dodgers have the big names, but the Giants have a cagey combination of role players, vets who’ve been there/done that, and young and eager talent. It’s a series that five games is doing a disservice to.
San Francisco, which clinched on Sunday, had their longest break of this interminable full season played out amidst a country still in crisis over a pandemic. While the end box score is historic, they certainly looked like they were on fumes, especially in the pen toward the end.
The Dodgers, meanwhile, fighting through fatigue, demons, and injuries of their own, got a fresh shot of adrenaline in the form of utility infielder Chris Taylor’s dramatic walk-off home run Wednesday vs. the St. Louis Cardinals. Giants starter Logan Webb needs to attempt to make it through the Dodgers 1-8 murders row three times before Kapler can visit the mound. If he does, the Giants have a chance to take game one at home.
Both teams score in bundles in late innings, so it'll be close till the final out. I like the Giants (+130) to win the series in less than five, the Dodgers, with the head of steam and a little bit more to prove, will be tough to handle in SF during tonight’s opener, but the Giants should do what they do best and barely clear the bar of low expectations to take game one too.
Take the Giants (+105) vs. the Dodgers at 6:30 p.m. Friday, October 8 from China Basin at 6:35 p.m. on TBS