The Third Baseman’s Gambit

The Third Baseman’s Gambit

Manny Machado of the San Diego Padres is the hottest hitter in baseball, and he is coming for your Queen.

Manny Machado frequently takes on teammates and coaches on a pair of chess sets at Petco Park in San Diego.Credit…Matt Thomas/San Diego Padres

By Scott Miller
May 13, 2022

SAN DIEGO — The pawns are lined up and the gleaming white knight stands ready to attack. The game will resume, again, as soon as the hitters’ meeting is finished and sometime before the star third baseman lights up a box score.

Given Manny Machado’s torrid start for the San Diego Padres this season, it would be predictable to joke that the five-time All-Star is playing chess while his peers are playing checkers. But in Machado’s case, it is also true: When he’s not battering opposing pitchers and stealing hits with acrobatic defensive plays, Machado can be found keeping his mind sharp with quiet contemplation at a chess board.

“Chess is interesting,” said Machado, who learned the game from Brady Anderson, the former player and Orioles executive, in Baltimore in 2017. “It’s something you can’t just go play. You’ve got to think ahead to what your opponent is thinking, what he’s trying to do to you, how he’s trying to attack you.”

The game intrigued Machado from the beginning. He keeps a board on a small table between his locker and his clubhouse neighbor, Fernando Tatis Jr., has another board in the nearby players’ lounge; and plays at home during the winter with his father-in-law, Luis Alonso, who is the father of the former major leaguer Yonder Alonso.

When Tatis Jr. revealed last season that he occasionally plays chess, Machado began bringing a board to the park for matches in his downtime, just like the ones he had played in Baltimore.

“If you play every day, you’re in a battle with him,” said Wayne Kirby, the Mets’ first-base coach and a regular opponent of Machado’s, both in Baltimore and again last summer in San Diego.

So many Orioles would play chess in Machado’s time there that players would wait in line and call “I got next” as if at a court for a pickup basketball game, Kirby said, and eventually the team kept three chess boards in the clubhouse and a traveling board for road trips. Machado said he is still recruiting new opponents in San Diego, having thus far matched wits with outfielders Wil Myers and Trayce Thompson, who this week was designated for assignment (in baseball, not in chess). Machado has also played a little with Tatis Jr.

His regular opponent, though, is Michael Brdar, San Diego’s first-year hitting coach.

“It’s been fun,” Brdar said. “He’s good. He’s very good.”

Machado vividly remembers the first time he and his main Orioles nemesis, Jonathan Schoop, played a game. It was in Seattle in 2017, Machado said. Both were beginners then, so raw that Machado said their first game lasted only about three minutes.

“We both sucked,” Machado said. “It was interesting to pick up and learn from it.”

Machado and Schoop had ascended together through Baltimore’s farm system and were competitive in everything, including who had the strongest throwing arm. They continued improving as chess players until their matches became something close to an addiction, complete with trash talking that still echoes today.

Who won more?

“Come on, that’s not even a question,” said Schoop, who now plays second base (and plenty of chess) for the Detroit Tigers. “I let him beat me a couple of times just to make him feel good. If we played 100 times, he’d beat me maybe 10 times.”

Machado laughs when this is relayed to him — and corrects Schoop’s math.

“Honestly, in the beginning it was a little rough because he knew a little more than I did when I started,” Machado said. “But once I learned how to do a couple of moves, he had no chance against me. Now, it’s probably 70/30 — I’m 70, he’s 30.”

Machado then upped the ante: “I don’t think he could win a game against me now. He won’t even get his Queen out of the way. He’d be done.”

Schoop, though, claims to know “all of Manny’s moves,” especially one tendency in particular. “If you take the horse away from him,” he said, referring to the knight, “he’s done.”

Kirby concurred. “The horse is huge for Manny,” he said. “He likes that horsey.”

Kirby and Schoop said games between the players would sometimes devolve into arguments because both were so competitive. Sometimes, Schoop said, Machado would accuse him of cheating.

“They wouldn’t get to 100 games, they’d be arguing too much,” Kirby said. “They’d get into it because once you touch your queen or something, and then take your hand off of it, you’re done. Both of them would be claiming they didn’t take their hand off a piece.”

Brdar, who started playing chess after watching “The Queen’s Gambit” two winters ago, suggested there can be a link between chess and hitting.

“You’re going to make a bad move in chess, and a lot of times it’s how you recover from that instead of letting it leak into two, three, four bad moves in a row,” Brdar said. “That’s similar to hitting.

“You’re going to chase a pitch here and there, you’re going to miss a mistake here and there. But more often than not it’s about what you do the next two, three, four pitches after that, or the next two, three, four at-bats after that. I think there are definite parallels.”

Machado agreed, noting that “you’re training your brain to do something right. People read, people do little puzzles to activate their mind.”

For Machado, chess fills that role.

He and Brdar play “slow” games on the board in front of Machado’s locker — if the hitting coach walks through the clubhouse and sees Manny has made a move, for example, Brdar will stop and make his own, and vice versa. Then, after the hitters’ meeting or batting practice, they’ll play longer games on the board in the players’ lounge.

“Right now he plays a fianchetto with his bishop,” Brdar said of Machado’s opening strategy in many games. “So he likes to have his bishop have the whole visual diagonally of the whole board.”

“That’s my move,” Machado said. “When I saw ‘The Queen’s Gambit,’ I didn’t really know the names at the time. I still don’t that much. I know a few. But it’s all about openings. If you put yourself in a good position and start attacking in a certain way and you stick to it, you can do it. That’s one of the moves I use the most.”

Brdar proudly reports that he has learned to shut down that move. Machado ruefully admits that in their games so far this season, the hitting coach has won three times and Machado only once, with one tie.

“But it’s a long year,” Machado said. “Things change. It’s just like baseball. You go on a hot streak, you go on a cold streak. I’m on my cold streak right now.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/13/sports/baseball/manny-machado-chess.html

Powerball and Chess

I recently finished reading, Power Ball: Anatomy of a Modern Baseball Game,

by Rob Neyer,

and decided to write about the book because of a couple of references to Chess.

“Baseball IS statistics!” – Former Georgia Chess Champion and head writer for the College Bowl Michael Decker, aka, “Lousiville Lefty” (Not from the book)

“I never keep a scorecard or the batting averages. I hate statistics. What I got to know, I keep in my head.” – Former Major League baseball player and announcer Dizzy Dean (1910-1974) (From the book)

Many years ago a fellow Chess player and I were at the Atlanta Public Library, located in downtown Atlanta, on one of the upper floors containing books about Baseball. We were discussing some of them when he asked, “How many Baseball books have you read?” I began pulling out the ones previously read while he watched. When finished I stood back to survey the racks and noticed a stunned look on his mug. “Bacon, if you had read that many Chess books you would have become a Master!” he said. “Probably not,” I replied. “To become a Master one must want to become a Master player, and I could have cared less. What I wanted was to become a Major League Baseball player.” He smiled knowingly.

Although continuing to read Baseball books they were becoming infrequent as my interest in Baseball waned this century. While in a bookstore I noticed the title, and the name of the author, a writer with whom I was familiar. Taking the book from the shelf I began reading the preface. For some time I had wanted to read a book concerning the recent changes made to MLB that has caused the game to become a boring version of home run derby.

“Inspired by Hano’s A Day in the Bleachers

and Okrent’s Nine Innings,

we’re going to explore today’s Baseball through the lens of a single game: Athletics vs. Astros in Oakland, September 8, 2017.” The next paragraph begins, “In many ways, this was a meaningless game.”

I knew at that moment the book would be read. This was because of having previously, somewhere, sometime, read about a dying man who had been asked what he would miss after departing. One of the things he mentioned was “Being able to watch a meaningless regular season Baseball game.”

“Once you train yourself to see it,” Ben Lindbergh

wrote a few years ago in Grantland, “it’s almost impossible to stop seeing it. Baseball is often described as a chess match between batter and pitcher. But it’s more like a chess match between batter and pitcher in which, once in a while, the catcher grabs the board and moves someone’s piece.” – pg 210

“With Marisnick aboard in a tie game, we’re treated to a small chess game that you can follow even from the cheap seats. ‘I’ve come up against him a lot,’ Hendriks will later say of Marisnick. ‘I know that he runs well, and he runs a lot off me.”
“Before throwing a pitch to Maybin, Hendricks pivots for a pickoff throw to first base. Once, twice, three times. Marisnick dives back safely once, twice, three times. But is that enough?” -pg 223

All the world is a stage…upon which a Chess game is played.

This book concerns Baseball but is about so much more than Baseball. It is about change, and not just about how Baseball has changed. For example, Mr. Neyer writes: “In Oliver Sack’s last book,

he wrote, “Nothing is more crucial to the survival and independence of organisms – be they elephants or protozoa – than the maintenance of a constant internal environment.” This constancy is called homeostasis.

“Further, Sacks writes, “It is especially when things are going wrong internally – when homeostasis is not being maintained, when the autonomic balance starts listing heavily to one side or the other – that this core consciousness, the feeling of how one is, takes on an intrusive, unpleasant quality, and now one will say, ‘I feel ill – something is amiss.’ At such time, one no longer looks well either.”

“Justin Verlander

might not feel ill, but something is amiss; Baseball no longer looks well. When a team can go through an entire season and hit only five triples – as the Blue Jays did in 2017, setting a record low – it doesn’t look well. John Thorn,

MLB’s official historian, who loves baseball as much as anyone I’ve ever known, says of Two True Outcomes baseball, “We love surprises, since we were children. But this is a game I don’t like.” Because surprises – they’re disappearing.”

A month or so after the World Series, Steven Goldleaf wrote a long essay for Bill Jame’s website, titled “How Sabermetrics Has Ruined Baseball.”
That headline’s just a grabber, but Goldleaf’s central point is a good one: “Sabermetrics could ruin baseball, in that its goal is to create a type of game that optimizes winning, while fans want to see a type of game that is entertaining to watch.” (https://www.billjamesonline.com/how_sabermetrics_has_ruined_baseball/)

Having devoted so much time to playing, and writing about, Chess, it was simply impossible for me to not think about the current state of the Royal game while reading this wonderful book. For example, substitute the word “chess, and Chess” for “baseball, and Baseball” in the following sentence: “There would still be baseball without these millions of fans, but there would not be Baseball. And it’s worth mentioning that in the first half of the 2018 season, attendance is down significantly: something like 6 or 7 percent.” This was written in the very last part of the book, Extras: Future Ball, and was written in July of 2018. I will add that the ratings for the 2018 World Series tanked. See: Why World Series Ratings Took a Nose Dive in 2018 (https://www.si.com/mlb/video/2018/10/31/world-series-ratings-took-nose-dive-2018)

It was not just the World Series: Baseball Playoff Ratings Are Down (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/baseball-playoff-ratings-are-down-blame-yankees-cubs-1153938)

Rob writes, “Media types tend to forget something, though: the baseball business is not a two-sided coin, with the players on one side and the owners on the other. They forget about the millions of baseball fans who pay for all these nice things. The business does not exist without the fans, just as Kellogg’s doesn’t exist without hungry kids and Southwest Airlines doesn’t exist without thrifty travelers. There would still be baseball without these millions of fans, but there would not be Baseball.”

The World Human Chess Championship is the Showcase Event of the Chess World. The recently finished 2018 WHCC, culminating with all the real games drawn, turned off many fans and left a sickening taste in the minds of many others, especially the “Media types.” This is not good because potential fans read what the “Media types” write. I have no idea how long, or even if, Chess will have any interest whatsoever in the minds of people. It is possible in the future chess will be played, but not Chess, as has been the fate of checkers.