Francis Gurtowski

Art as Algorithm Francis Gurtowski

This is more an "art installation" than your run-of-the-mill coffee-table tome. Buy this book, take it apart, carefully, of course, and frame the more than a hundred separate prints. The American game of baseball is living chess personified by athletes and performed on a baseball field. Classic chess and American chess are alike as managerial duels, and only their respective game pieces and settings set them apart. Chess kings, queens, rooks, bishops, knights, and pawns are inanimate commodities which execute perfectly, and the chessboard is flawlessly flat. The better chess strategy always wins or draws. Classic chess is equitable. Baseball pitchers, batters, fielders, runners, and umpires are brain and brawn, and bad hops and similar environmental anomalies also abound. The better baseball strategy is often thwarted. American chess can be unfair in the short term, but absent injuries the baseball season is long enough to offset good or bad luck. My graphical notation is rooted in a personal history of remote rooting for the New York Baseball Giants. Hearts broke in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut when the Brooklyn Dodgers skulked off to Los Angeles and the New York Giants slinked away to San Francisco. That day of infamy seems like only yesterday. Many original Giants fans and die-hard Dodgers fans still pine for their lost teams and still miss the rivalry. True believers await the repatriation of the Giants and the Dodgers to New York City as a portent of the American Renaissance. Until the expansion New York Mets came along to provide a sort of ersatz National League baseball, radio re-creations of the games played by the Giants and the Dodgers, in-studio, off a news ticker, pinch-hit as National League alternatives to the American League games of the steadfast New York Yankees. So did the textual digests, of the at-bats of the Giants and Dodgers, in New York tabloids, help to fill the void until these features were edited out of the newspapers. The Giants and the Dodgers were dumped to pump the Mets. Remote rooting for the baseball Giants taught me to appreciate a good baseball game no matter how long after the game was actually played, and despite the intrinsic difficulties of parsing, visualizing, and assimilating the dusty, old scorecard information.