the dorktown youtube documentary about the Blue Jays pitcher Dave Stieb really is one of the better pieces of storytelling i've ever seen. excellent control over what information to reveal or withhold or reveal only to return to later with different context. (almost like pitching!)
i was going to say "and that's with the self-imposed disadvantage of leaning on stats and quotes instead of game footage" but why do i assume that's a disadvantage? Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein love stats and they know there's something deeper here to untangle with them. there's footage when it counts.
people tend to recommend the doc unprompted under baseball videos, and since i liked 17776 i gave it a shot, and they were right. it really is the kind of piece that you recommend to strangers unprompted. it made me a Dave Stieb fan like they said it would, but i've also been finding myself rethinking storytelling arcs i've taken for granted for my whole life. oh, so that's how this kind of story plays out in real life. this is the reality being gestured to. and this is how it differs, and this, etc.
there's something wonderful about seeing a story this good spun out of a real person's career. all of this actually happened, and it happened before i was born, and the fact of it was written and readable, but the documentary still made me ugly cry out of suspense.
it made me think about suspense, and tension, and the way the human mind can resurrect a "now" and all of its crushing pressure even when the moment has long since passed. dave stieb's career would be a great story even told in linear fashion, i'm sure, but the bouncing around of the graph city they're constructing feels more natural to human memory and concept and comparison. underlying it all is the real person of Dave Stieb, who, as a real thinking human being, predicts and pre-empts and looks back and forward all throughout his own career. he visualizes his retirement when he's still young; he re-evaluates his strategy years later. he is aware of graph city, somehow.
it made me think about the nature of sports, about how a series of rules is constructed to widely disperse outcomes, to showcase the improbable, and how sports stats become this language of analysis by which you can dig out the meaning from the ritual. they're physics but for an arbitrary and repetitive universe constructed out of baseball games, enacted over and over again over time. and they're also mythmaking for that universe, where you pull out the arcs and patterns from the noise, and set them apart.
Dave Stieb has some recurring traits, and his own journey of personal growth, and of all things, baseball stats make it so that you can see: even the big things that are out of his control are stamped by his personality in the small things left up to him. that's so cool. it's so cool.
i want to go on about all the beautiful ironies and writing, but it is not worth spoiling the doc for anyone. it's too good for that. "this is how the sport of baseball moves..."
