Captain Ahab: The Story of Dave Stieb (2022)

The latest from Dorktown basically comes down to a plea to the Baseball Hall of Fame on behalf of the Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Dave Stieb. Dorktown principals Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein do it the way they have established they do it: lovingly curated anecdotes fortified by figurative reams of statistical veracity. Visually it's a bunch of graphs, news article excerpts, and clips from games. It's also four hours—and, as usual, over too soon. In my mind Dave Stieb, whose heyday was in the '80s and part of the '90s, was an inning-eating starter now confused in memory with Jack Morris and Dave Stewart. They pitched lots of games, won lots of games, and gave up lots of runs doing it. But Dorktown set me straight on that one—Stieb was miles ahead of Morris and Stewart on ERA alone, let alone WAR and all the fancy stats these guys produce. Stieb also appeals to Dorktown's notable appreciation for obsessed figures out of Moby-Dick, doomed to fail and living sports lives of quiet desperation. Dorktown's previous masterpieces (the Godfather I and II, respectively, of sports video journalism) address the Seattle Mariners and the Atlanta Falcons. In Stieb's case the core tale is how he never got over the hump of a championship, plus a bunch of unlikely blown no-hitters, which are actually traumatic just to hear about in detail. In 1988, the worst of it, he took back-to-back no-hitters all the way to 8-2/3 and in at least one case the hit scored off him at that point was extra-freaky.

The good news is Stieb finally did notch a no-hitter, in 1989, after flirting with it some eight or nine times. The bad news is that, for a little pile of circumstantial reasons herein recounted, Stieb never seriously made it into the conversation for the Hall of Fame. Dorktown is here to rectify that. And Captain Ahab is worth seeing for every minute. The last section, which addresses Stieb’s Hall of Fame status, reminded me of my own quarrels at large with the human impulse to honor, because I can think of very few that accomplish it without controversy or even with which I'm much in agreement, especially at the edges but also, often, on the major themes.

Because one of the main points of baseball, for example, is using a bat to hit a ball "where they ain't," it's impossible for me to understand how the person who did that more successfully than anyone else who ever played the game—yes, I'm talking about Pete Rose now—continues to be excluded from the Hall of Fame. You say there are character issues? The man with the next-most hits is Ty Cobb, noted degenerate, and he is in. This extends for me beyond baseball into other realms of honoring endeavor such as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Oscars, the Grammys, the Nobels, the Pulitzers, the Emmys, and whole warehouses of GOAT lists on the internet, including all the ones I assiduously work on myself. It's a maddening enterprise on both sides. Calling them involves a lot of dithering—that's how you know it's subjective. Watching them go down from the outside is often infuriating. Every time I see another Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ballot go floating by on social media, I have to think LET THEM ALL IN. This pointless gatekeeping is worse in the arts, where it is all subjective based purely on intangibles and just not subject to competition. I realize letting them all in may be the moral equivalent of participation trophies, but why not? It’s not a competition. Everything worth honor is by definition worth honoring. The flawed competitions, as in particularly for me the Oscars and Grammys, are there mostly to attract viewers for the sake of beefing up commercial appeal. Catching up on the latest Oscar-bait has become a depressing winter sport, among the emptiest I know. I participated too many years.

Sports at least has the advantage of a certain objectivity—only one team wins a championship each year (though too often spoiled by perceptions of subjectivity in the officiating), and statistics do a lot of the heavy lifting in measuring performance. Yet Pete Rose, and increasingly it looks like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens too, are effectively shut out of the honors for their various character flaws, which is comical coming from a bunch of sports journalists in fealty to money-grubbing owners who cheat off the field at least as much as these three pariahs ever did on it. Tell it to Fay Vincent. There's not even a good argument about Rose's conduct as a player. I know he's a terrible person—ending Ray Fosse's career for the sake of an exhibition game is just the start of it. But if we're talking about recognizing accomplishments, the Baseball Hall of Fame is clearly not doing the job. After getting hot for the competition of the actual awarding, the main kick of all this is probably the arguments, which are rarely clearcut on either side and basically irresolvable. So let it lay, let it lay. Trying to close this loop the long way around, I will say Dorktown mounts an impressive and even almost heartening argument for Dave Stieb belonging in the Baseball Hall of Fame. But for entertainment value (and here I go attempting to stack-rank again) it's not really up to the Mariners or Falcons odysseys. Captain Ahab, don't miss it if you can, but I would hasten to say you should maybe first get to Bois's solo 94-minute The Bob Emergency, which is about athletes named Bob.