A Primate’s Thoughts on John Brattain

The last thing I ever said to John Brattain was something making fun of his terrible jokes and Canadian heritage.  I would feel terrible about that, but the second to last thing I said to him was also something making fun of his terrible jokes.  And I’m pretty sure so was the last thing I said to him that I know he read.  John made terrible, terrible jokes all the time.  For someone like me, who can’t stand bad puns, the mere existence of someone like John Brattain ought to have been anathema (now is the point where he’d chime in with something like “Don’t hate the punner, hate the pun.”), but it wasn’t.  In fact, however you chose to carve up the list of people that come here often, whether it be “Favorite to read” or “Makes you think” or whatever, John would have been near the top of my list for that category.

I remember being unable to tell the difference, for the longest time, between Lance Linden and John.  I couldn’t figure out why until I realized they were the only two people who had valedictions at the end of their posts.  I remember when I heard the first of The Hardball Times, thinking “The guy with the wordplay?  Okay, I guess.”  Noticing, as some small time passed and I read a few of his articles, just how many of the posts here that I enjoyed were his.  Not that they hadn’t been all along, I just hadn’t paid attention.  Somehow, in his own way and entirely through his writing (I never had the pleasure of meeting him, to my loss), John became something more than the guy with the jokes, to me.  He became the guy I really enjoyed reading.

I always thought of John as the epitome of “my kind of baseball writer.”  Primer, THT, both sites are littered with people who write about baseball.  There’s your mgls, tangotigers, Chris Dials, who write very straightforward statistical treatises.  Anaheim Rallymonkey, Colin Wyers, Aaron Gleeman, they’re naturally inquisitive people who use stats to answer their questions.  GGC writes about historical events and people.  Chris Jaffe writes about historical events and people in a new way.  Each of these guys and all the others have their personal style.  But if there was a guy who wrote what I wanted to read in the way I wanted to read it, it was John.  To me, baseball is a fun, interesting thing to think about and discuss, and I never got that same sense more clearly from any other person than John.  If mgl is the Bill James, if Gleeman is the Rob Neyer, if GGC is the David Halberstam, then John was the Tom Boswell.  His love of what I loved was crystal clear. 

People say the internet makes us anonymous, that it shows that no one is special and unique.  I say it shows the opposite in some cases, like John or Doug Pappas.  With all the people out there writing about baseball, nobody has ever come 1/10th the way to filling Doug’s shoes.  I don’t think that 10 years from now, anyone will have filled John’s, either.

John had the gentlest soul I can imagine from someone I’ve never met.  When the topic was relevant, he was one of the very best at letting you know his religious beliefs (and see how strongly they were held) without once, ever making you feel like he was either judging or witnessing to you.  As a lapsed Catholic troubled with merging what seems true and right with what doesn’t, John was one of those people that I wish I had around just to talk to about those sorts of things.  That isn’t to say that he wasn’t capable of getting his hair up and going after someone.  If internet words could hurt, Jeffrey Loria would be in a very great deal of pain.  But just like you’d imagine if you didn’t know, he only went after people who really deserved it. 

So as the time went by and John and I interacted in thread after thread on topic after topic, he became one of those people that I just liked.  I’m sure that’s not true of everyone, but for me, that word describes him perfectly: likeable.  It’s not like we interacted on a daily basis or that I’d go looking for his posts or anything; if someone asked him to name 50 Primates, I wouldn’t have been in the least surprised if I didn’t make the list.  In general, I’d make fun of him, he’d poke fun at me, and we’d all move on with our lives, certain it’d pop again at some point, usually right after one of those puns.  Until this morning. 

Having battled computer problems for the last few days, I logged into Primer for the first time in a bit, mostly just checking to see if my browser was still crashing.  When I scrolled down and down, the headline of a post caught my eye.  Honestly, and I very much wouldn’t have believed you if you told me this a week ago, after reading the first line, my vision went entirely gray for a few moments.  At work today, I spent most of what was very little free time looking back on this, and examining where it came from.  This here, these words, are the result of that.  It’s not all about John, I’m sure, it’s about all sorts of things: the suddenness, the similarities with my dad’s passing, probably 20 others.  But there’s one thing that I know for sure, and that’s that this world lost a very good man the other day.  Not just that, though.

I lost the chance to trade another couple of remarks with him.  All of us who never had the pleasure lost the chance to meet him.  The internet lost the chance to read him.  The rest of the world’s sports fans lost the chance to see his column in wherever he was headed.  And I lost someone I considered a friend, the fact that I never met him in person being wholly immaterial to anything at all. Someone who apparently meant more to me, even if it’s just the idea that there are people in the world like John, than I really knew.  I didn’t know what this would be when I started writing it, but it seems like it’s a farewell. 

So: Goodbye, John.  If I end up deserving it in my time, I know for a fact that Heaven will have waiting in store one very good person with one very large collection of terrible jokes.  And that’s more than good enough, my friend. 

Yours,
Jeff K.