The Genius of Cousin Mose.

BastardsOf

NoneVille

On the surface at least, the life of TV writer Michael Schur, who also played Dwight Schrute's ping pong playing cousin Mose in the non-Brentian version of The Office, has a life so wonderful that it combines all the best accomplishments of both George and Peter Bailey.

After getting into Harvard on what may or may not have been the legacy ticket, Schur went on to run the infamous Lampoon. After graduation in 1997, Schur was almost immediately hired by Dr. Evil to write for Saturday Night Live and was soon in charge of Weekend Update, starting with the first show after 9/11. A few years later he left SNL to write for, and occasionally act in, Greg Daniels' US version of Ricky Gervais' and Stephen Merchants' ode to those who sell paper. Then, mid-run, Schur left Dunder Mifflin and turned what was supposed to be a spin-off into an entirely new show, Parks and Recreation. After that the shows just tumbled out, from Brooklyn Nine-Nine-Nine to The Good Place to Masters of None to Rutherford Falls to Hacks, and so on.

Beneath the humour, the set pieces, and the softening of stereotypes (i.e. Rutherford Falls had an indigenous show runner and tried to mostly do the right thing but it was no Reservation Dogs) the underlying theme of most Schur projects is that there is an inherent goodness at the core of the human condition.

Apparently, at least according to a piece in Schur's old school paper, it's a philosophical thing.

Given all that, I was really looking forward to Schur's coming adaptation of W.P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe, which had gone into heavy pre-production that included the building of a yet another ball field deep in the corn rows of Iowa, when the streaming service financing the project suddenly pulled the plug last summer.

Which is a real bummer but likely says more about the current state of the streaming business than the genius and/or philosophical bent of Michael Schur.

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At this point it's important for me to note that, while I pursued lots of sports as a kid, I was crap at baseball and never played for real, not even in Little League.

But later, while still a kid, albeit in gradual school, I fell victim to all those free tickets that Stu Kehoe used to give out like candy at gas stations. As a result, often together with C., I got hooked on the local Lotuslandian, then Triple A, minor league team. The hook went in even deeper when the chief troublemaker up in the Nat Bailey's bleachers relented and let me write stuff for his monthly rag.

After that, especially after we moved to California, I went a little bit bonkers, spending hundreds of dollars a year on Baseball Weekly and America scouting prospects to draft and follow for fantasy purposes, pre-internet.

And while following all those prospects, for real, I once caught a foul ball behind home plate in San Jose while holding a then infant-sized tiny e. in my arms.

Which is just a way of explaining why, after I heard his baseball TeeVee show had been dumped, I decided to go hunting for evidence that Schur actually cared about the game.

It turns out that the evidence is everywhere.

First, there is a podcast he does with a veteran wordsmith Joe Posnanski wherein the pair of pontificators are as likely to spend two hours talking about the intricacies and/or validities of the most arcane of Sabremetric statistics as they are to start making up new wings for the Hall of Fame based on each inductee's acts of pure awesomeness, either on or off the field.

But the real gem I stumbled upon recently is, wait for it...

A blog.

Yes, a good old fashioned linear type-type blog from the dinosaur times (i.e. 2005 to 2008) wherein Schur and a couple of other TeeVee writer types spilled barrel after barrel of pixel ink making fun of any and all manner of baseball 'media' inanities*. 

Now that's entertainment!

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*And yes, the inclusion, despite what I learned from Mrs. Griffiths in grade two, of three 'types' in one sentence was purposeful!

At first I couldn't figure out why there were so few comments posted on the blog in question...And then I realized that the entire thing was written prior to the 2009 Haloscan massacre that wiped out bloggerly discourse pretty much everywhere at the time. In fact, the massacre even disappeared almost 10,000 comments at this little F-Troop listed endeavour...

Very bizarre, and yet somehow fitting, ear worm from the sub-header given that fellow Harvard alum and Master of None co-creator Alan Yang was also one the baseball blog guys?...This!

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