At this point, a lot of the appeal of the classics is lost. This includes what we still have. As an area of study, it’s most often featured as a dead weight plopped on student desks in a secondary setting. Cracked open to release the distinct smell of old books from a poorly ventilated room and paired with fresh clock-watching despair, their dusty nature is conflated with the essence of an outdated curriculum. It’s easier to track the crass notes in the margins made by years of glazed eyes and idle hands than it is to remember who Beowulf’s uncle is (Hygelac) or the name of the Geats’ booze hall (Herot), let alone how those things matter because they speak to a line of aspirations and a place of enthusiastic divinity.
Appeal creates value, the same way you have to believe the lady in the box has really been cut in half to enjoy the trick. It’s not magic but dissipation, your ego suspended for the sake of something bigger, even if you only get to be a part of it instead of being the whole thing. Without appeal, all that’s left to go for is a merciful grade. Guided away from mystique and the curtain it hides behind, there’s nothing to do but pray for the next story.
There is a point during every season in which analyzing performance feels this way. The numbers up until now will point us to a certain valuation. The data that a player creates, especially after they’re acquired by a new team or assigned to a new level, will let us say our numbers were right or ask what went wrong or, worse yet, feel certain in saying what did. In the blink of an eye an investigative desire becomes a rote process, but we can count on the endpoint.
Every once in a while, we’re graced with something more. Yes, I’m talking about Trea Turner again. The last time I did was a couple of weeks ago, mostly as a footnote to how everything’s coming up Phillies. From that article:
[An] uncommon embrace [was] given to Turner…on August 4. He was hitting .235/.290/.368, a point to which not even fellow shortstop Freddy Galvis sank when he was a figurehead of the last run of terrible Phillies teams. Turner was given an unironic standing ovation. Since then he’s hitting .356/.394/.690, including two home runs last night, with two hitting streaks that have each been at least 9 games long.
I’d like to say he’s kept it up, but that would be underselling it. Since August 4 and through September 10, Turner slashed .376/.423/.800. His slugging percentage made for an enviable OPS and was tops in the majors by 43 points, and 143 points higher than his own OPS before the standing ovation. It was double what some players had while having a perfectly respectable run. In a doubleheader yesterday against Atlanta, he popped another homer, making it 10 in his last 11 games. The only other player to do that in franchise history is Mike Schmidt, and that was nearly 50 years ago. Turner’s up to 25 on the year, just three off his career-best that he set in 2021, which also happens to be the season in which he registered his career-best WARP.
The data is like a spectacle. Dan Szymborski ran it down at FanGraphs before this past weekend. Turner is swinging at better pitches more often and letting worse ones go, and doing it all with the exactitude only elite players are capable of. This is emphasized by the group of players who round out the top five in slugging since the night Turner received the ovation of kindness in early August: Julio Rodriguez, Kyle Schwarber, Mookie Betts, and Corey Seager.
Turner was pretty much a lock to be better in 2024, as the imagination necessary to think he could be worse is more grand than even the one necessary to measure Gilgamesh’s feeble quest for eternity in spoiled bread that reflected a cutting-edge system of equality. That he’s better now, ahead of schedule, after nearly 500 abysmal plate appearances that would have shunted him out of the starting lineup if he were most anyone else—that he’s manufactured one of the most epic turnarounds from a struggling superstar in recent history—is that much more shocking.
What Turner has accomplished in the last five weeks is remarkable, and that is why we’re talking about it, why Phillies broadcasts can’t stop talking about it. Doing so would be malpractice. Dressing his last five weeks in glory like this is still closest to fastidious academia, though. One of the throughlines in most all the classics is the need for assistance. Beowulf had Wiglaf, who was the only one who waited for him as he fought Grendel in a swampy underground and was thought to be dead. Gilgamesh had Enkidu, who fought Humbaba and the bull of Heaven with him. Even Odysseus had the aid of Eumaeus against the suitors at the end of The Odyssey.
The point of any of the classics is not that being brave or royal or strong enough is what leads to success, or that unflinching and pigheaded determination is the peak of humanity. It’s that in every story there is a chance for help, that each protagonist becomes what they are with others because they were always going to be less than that by themselves. This is how they became guides for living, why they became the reasons people hung around to tell their stories in the first place without the goal of becoming embedded in compulsory curriculum in a year they didn’t know would exist.
Trea Turner was having the worst season of his career immediately after free agency granted him his most high-profile moment. After months of straining, fans dropped the pretense of needing their respect to be earned and accepted him exactly where he was with no expectation that it would translate to production on the field. His results since the ovation he received in early August aren’t the result of some cosmic alchemy. However, writing off its impact is dismissing the opportunity to embrace what you have in lieu of what you wanted, and how doing so can get you where you need to go, anyway.
Thank you for reading
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