The History of the Minnesota Vikings (2023)

I was happy as could be to see Dorktown taking on the woeful tale of the Minnesota Vikings. Woeful, that is, as perceived by most, including me, and as debunked by Dorktown with their usual veracity and mind-numbing statistical detail. The Vikings are the football team tarred for going on 50 years with the label of “can’t win the big one.” (Later joined by the Buffalo Bills. Both teams have made four trips to the Super Bowl only to be turned away in defeat. The Bills did it in four consecutive years. The Vikings did it in four of the first 11 Super Bowls. It’s the reason I have been hoping last year and this for a Bills-Vikings matchup—someone would have to win.) But wait, Dorktown principals Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein are here to set the record straight as only they can. They say early it would take them seven hours to tell all the Vikings stories—in the end, it’s closer to 10 spread across seven episodes going decade by decade (the team’s glorious ‘70s get two). And they probably didn’t tell all the stories. Perhaps Dorktown’s most salient point about the Vikings is that their winning percentage across the Super Bowl era is stellar, one of the best, bettered only by the Dallas Cowboys and Pittsburgh Steelers, with the New England Patriots starting to nip at their heels. It’s a record of remarkable consistency and high level of play, not able to win the big one notwithstanding. Full disclosure, though I grew up with them—the first episode covering the ‘60s brought back some memories of home so intensely it made me cry—I was never much of a fan. In my hippie years, and still, to some extent (if indeed my hippie years are over), I was opposed to organized sports generally and football specifically. I can’t claim to be a Vikings fan but at least I can tell you, in case you didn’t know, that Prince’s obsession with the color purple is because of this football team.

Bois declares, in a summary statement, “Only one team can call themselves the Minnesota Vikings, the carvers of the runes, the great American storytellers.” I’m not sure exactly what he means by that but there are hours and hours of great stories here, some of which fans may have gratefully forgotten. I guarantee you’ll be surprised by how many there are, and while many are quite painful, even vicariously, they are often inspirational in some way too. Defensive tackle Alan Page, for example, played for the Vikings 11 years, finished law school, became an attorney, became a judge, and, in 1993, became a justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court. Quarterback Fran Tarkenton saw into the future and created a style of quarterback play that ultimately caught on, even if decades later. He’s also, by happenstance and grit determination, now one of the richest men who ever played the game. Two postseason victories—one in 1980, the other in 2018—are certifiable miracles, the moments we are looking for when we look at sports. I love how much Jon Bois loves Bud Grant, who made an argument shortly before his death earlier this year about what makes football unique. The ball is not round and not always easy to handle—drop it, and no one knows what it’s going to do. It’s all luck. I’d say, with The History of the Minnesota Vikings, Dorktown has knocked another one out of the park, but that’s the wrong sports metaphor. Say they put it through the uprights (unlike, in the most unexpected ways imaginable, two Vikings kickers covered here). (Note to Dorktown: now do the Mets, please.)

The People You're Paying to Be in Shorts (2022)

The latest from Dorktown focuses on the 2011-2012 season of the Charlotte Bobcats, the worst season in NBA basketball history, registering a 7-59 record in a lockout-shortened season for a winning percentage of .106. The story and the telling are complicated by the fact that the Bobcats were owned by superstar Michael Jordan, author of ridiculously high winning percentages and other feats. The Bobcats are now the Hornets—not the original Charlotte Hornets, but that whole story is covered here. Jordan still owns them, and they are still undistinguished, with no championships (or even conference-level play). More often than not they miss the playoffs altogether. It’s a perfect project for Dorktown in many ways, whose principals Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein may not yet have met an outrageous loser they don’t love (Seattle Mariners, Atlanta Falcons, Dave Stieb, etc.). They are joined by Seth Rosenthal and Kofie Yeboah as the stories unwind. It’s a very rich irony, of course, that this feat of mediocrity happened to Michael Jordan. Anyone who fell victim to Jordan’s domination of NBA basketball in the 1990s is sure to find some gratification and portions of good old schadenfreude here (for example, the best Seattle SuperSonics team I ever knew was entirely overshadowed by him, with one shot at the annual role of patsy for the Bulls). However, Bois is maybe not as good about hiding his gloating here as he could be. He addresses a recurring photo of Jordan as “Mike” and frequently asks mocking questions and takes a few jabs for good measure, which gets distracting in its unseemliness. Given Jordan’s dimming star as the greatest basketball player of all time—LeBron reminding us of Kareem suddenly starts making MJ look more like #3 GOAT around here—along with his embarrassing lack of graciousness about it, it’s an understandable impulse. Jordan may be petty and vindictive and too preoccupied with burnishing his own legend, but that’s on him. And he’s not doing himself any good. That’s obvious now. This longish documentary—two and a half hours, relatively short by Dorktown standards—lands on one of the best examples of Jordan’s various comeuppances since the glory. If they need to pile on further, maybe the next project could be about Jordan’s baseball career. The People You’re Paying really only needs to lay out the humiliations that ownership has brought to Jordan, whose retirement is not a happy one because the only thing that still appears to matter is that 7th championship even 25 years later. As a passion play of futility it is otherwise nearly flawless in the Dorktown mode, with scads of charts, graphs, and statistically based argument. The verdict is in. For losing, I’m not sure those Bobcats can ever be beat.

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.

The History of the Atlanta Falcons (2021)

The Dorktown follow-up to their massive Seattle Mariners documentary is an even longer Atlanta Falcons documentary—twice as long, in fact, closing in on seven hours. I found it just as easy and fast to watch, but it did put to the test some of my thoughts about the Mariners doc. First, yes, you probably can give this treatment to any sports franchise that's been around long enough, especially the hapless ones (and if we can vote, I'd like to see it done for the Minnesota Vikings and the New York Mets). As it happens, I have zero attachment to and little knowledge of the Falcons, thus a lot of the emotional investment I could bring with the Mariners was not here. So The History of the Atlanta Falcons is a more abstracted exercise for me. I had some interest in the degree of haplessness—frustration does tend to lead to the best sports stories. But the main point remains Dorktown's absolutely masterful deep research and, equally important, creative data presentation. They go year by year, studying management and coaching developments as well as team and player performances, and it's ultimately the statistical breakdowns that make it so riveting, along with all the familiar cliches of sports stories, which are cliches because they happen so much. They never lose sight of the stories even in the welter of statistics. Strange stuff is going on all the time in sports. Dorktown has another piece (much shorter) about how many times in baseball the ball count has been in error. They found dozens of examples—on video!—of batters who got a base on three balls or were denied it on four or struck out on two strikes. Still, as much as I look forward to Vikings and Mets histories, or whatever they're going to do next (they tease the Vikings possibility in their report of the 1999 Falcons playoff game), another important caveat here is that they should be put together by people who care a lot and have their own baggage history with the franchise. Or, I mean, maybe. I assumed Dorktown principals Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein have some long-term tie to the Pacific Northwest when I was looking at the Mariners doc. I still do, but I'm not as sure, because now I know for a fact that Bois lived a significant part of his life in Atlanta. I also noticed Bois has a version of my own problem with the Mariners. He claims to be a Kansas City Chiefs fan but he loves and hates the Falcons in obvious cringing, irrational ways. In the Mariners doc, they chided people like me who can't accept that the Mariners have still never been in a World Series (in practical terms, that means I have considered it a shitty organization for decades now). But you can feel exactly that angst coming from Bois on the issue of the Falcons winning the Super Bowl. As you likely recall, that 2017 Super Bowl was the third act in the four ominous 2016-2017 Apocalyptic-Like Bizarre Events (with the World Series, US presidential election, and Oscars ceremony). Part 7 is focused primarily on that Super Bowl, a sickening spectacle even presented mostly as graphs and charts, and it's the longest part of all, over an hour and a half. I don't feel that Super Bowl that much myself, but I can really feel Bois feeling it. I love Dorktown's stuff and can't wait for the next big one.

The History of the Seattle Mariners (2020)

I will have some baggage to address involving this most peculiar and wonderful documentary, which I will get to as soon as I figure out how to describe what it is. It is over three and a half hours long and available on YouTube in six separate episodes or with all pasted together in one (recommended). It is closer to a 3D animated powerpoint presentation than what we think of as a documentary, with the visuals dominated by a calendar-page style chart of the years 1977 to 2019, which is filled in and cluttered up as we go with exciting photos, news headlines, and, most importantly, statistics. The statistics are there to be discovered. They are what make the hours of this documentary worth sitting for. They make the hours seem short. I suspect a job like this could be done with any team—that any professional sports franchise 25 years or older will have statistical freaks and jaw-dropping weirdness. But director/writers Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein have 100% made the case for the Mariners, who even statistically appear to be what they appear to be: a most peculiar study in unrelenting futility. Bois and Rubenstein, collectively known as Dorktown, work under the banner of SB Nation, a sports blogging network owned by Vox. As advertised, The History of the Seattle Mariners is a very thorough history, starting in 1932 and continuing with the Seattle Pilots episode, before literally charting Mariners history from 1977 on. I moved to Seattle in 1985 as an eager baseball fan ready to switch lifetime allegiances for the sake of witnessing a Gorman Thomas dinger in the Kingdome. As the years 1977 to 1988 are generally regarded as the tedious overture to the Mariners opera, I arrived just in time.

So to the baggage proper: 1) I have been actively turned off all professional sports by the response to the pandemic (start with hogging up too much of an already meager testing supply for the sake of meaningless exhibition games and continue a year and a half later with Aaron Rodgers). Don't even talk to me about college sports, which is a crime in progress on multiple levels, not just covid. 2) I have been actively turned off baseball since 1995, when players crossed the picket lines of others after their own strike was resolved even as owners turned to homerun derbies and other circus-like changes to the game to get butts back in seats, whistling and playing dumb about the complicated issue of PEDs. And 3) the Seattle Mariners. Where do you even start with this team? I can now say, thanks to this meticulously researched documentary, that the answer to that question is 1932. And I know better that the team has delivered more pleasure to me than I have generally been willing to admit. My favorite period is probably many people's, 1989 to 1995 (even if the last year was deeply soured by stadium politics). It was the coming of Ken Griffey Jr. and a bunch of Yankee-killers, which climaxed in a best-of-5 postseason series down two games to beat the Yankees in a freaking storybook finish.

I cried then and I cried again, watching the 1995 episode here, even though with mixed feelings still because of the stadium issue, a whole other story. Sticking to the main point, the underachieving powerhouse that was the Mariners for the rest of the '90s—with Griffey, DH Edgar Martinez, pitcher Randy Johnson (my favorite), and shortstop A-Rod—is well detailed here. They address disgruntled people like me at one point, with a weak argument that if all you want is a championship you're missing the point, but what I have learned about myself is I don't have such sisyphean levels of appetite for meaningless labor. The weakest part of this documentary is the portion devoted to the 21st century, starting with 2002. Yes, Ichiro Suzuki and Felix Martinez continue the amazing statistical march to pointlessness (and Adrian Beltre, and Robinson Cano), and in many interesting and dramatic ways. But what plays as tragedy first inevitably plays as farce in redux, and much of the last hour here is unnecessary, though still interesting in chatty distracted ways, for example, say, with the Jack Wilson story. Above all, on a personal level, The History of the Seattle Mariners renewed my appreciation for Griffey—I'd had a grudge against him since he left for Cincinnati, having always treated the Mariners as his quadruple-A steppingstone there. It wasn't really like that, I see here, and it reminded me of what it felt like to be a fan in 1989. Anyway, if a sports / baseball / Mariners curmudgeon such as myself can not just like this documentary but positively love it, there's hope for anyone with more moderated views. In short, don't miss it.