Singles Hitter
Ichiro Suzuki recorded 4,367 hits over a 28-year career split between Japan and the United States. If you consider both hemispheres of his career together, Ichiro had more hits than anyone else in history (Pete Rose slapped, clawed, and hustled his way to 4,256 hits between 1963 and 1986).
Only 235 of these were home runs.
It’s an appropriate time to set intentions, not only because it’s the first day of 2025, but because in about a week, I’ll drive to Savannah to install a solo show—“You’re the Man Now Dog”, natch.
2024 was a deeply productive calendar year, in fits and starts, through teeth gritted by angst and rejection and a genuine joy and excitement for making. By a wide margin, I made more in the last 12 months than I have in a long time, probably since I hit my stride in graduate school. Research is coming easy (even if articulating my thoughts can still be a slog), sketches are productive, and I’m writing more and more consistently than at any point in the past. My studio is organized and things are humming.
I had a conversation with my friend Robby recently, comparing notes about our semesters and the fine points of teaching Graphic Design after coming from a firmly studio art background and training. We’re in similar boats: neither of us were particularly interested in Photography as a craft, finding it often the most direct path from idea to execution. Frankly, neither of us really focused that much on taking photographs, instead pivoting to lens-based and time-based video and installation work. I had more professional experience in design after graduating, but for the most part I think we both identify largely as self-trained designers that are now self-trained designers teaching design.
I’m relieved to hear he’s experienced a lot of the same anxieties I still work through in the classroom—clumsy with terms, learning the heavy hitters of design history on the fly, finally having to take typography seriously—while also finding interesting opportunities in discovering what we do and don’t know. On bad days, the impostor syndrome is deep and present. On good days, design is liberating and dynamic in a way that was difficult to cultivate as students. That begs the question: what are the differences between how we were trained and how we are now operating in the classroom?
Robby may disagree with me here, but I consider the key difference between studio art as I tended to work and a graphic design studio is the emphasis on process. Put another way: I’ve been showing students the importance of iteration, careful consideration and attention to craft, and the importance of frequent revisions in a way I never embraced for myself before. I’m thinking more in terms of grids and forms than the nuclear-grade critical theory I leveraged in the past. This shift in making has me reconsidering the proper role of process in my own practice.
Admittedly, this focus on process and craft is typical for many (most?) artists, but was not really of any interest to me. I don’t know if this is a generality, or maybe specific to the programs I was trained in, but the idea of process in my practice has always been filtered through the exhibition: considering creative output only insofar as it is oriented toward an artifact or installation to be experienced in-person, in an art space. Everything I make tends to have the glare of the white cube projected onto it, which puts a lot of pressure on each specific thing to hold its weight visually and conceptually in a space. This can be a frustrating way to work, and more often than not, prevents any momentum beyond thinking of an idea. Execution has always been a shortcoming of how I make and think.
The extremely smart metaphor Robby offered was that we were coached to hit home runs: every “piece” (even using this term for what we make frames it in terms of preciousness and fetish, probably) needs to be a self-contained and successfully rendered idea. It needs to make sense according to its own internal logic, and live up to the discourse of contemporary art at the same time. When it works, it works! But when it doesn’t, it’s discouraging to the point of harming anything else in-progress in the studio.
Instead of swinging for the fences on every pitch, embracing a design-oriented idea of process means I need to shift to being a singles hitter.
Chicks who dig home runs aren’t the ones who appeal to me. I think there’s sexiness in infield hits because they require technique. I’d rather impress the chicks with my technique than with my brute strength. Then, every now and then, just to show I can do that, too, I might flirt a little by hitting one out.
-Ichiro, 2009
I’ll make an effort to be concise and get this idea out without overworking it, in the spirit of the thing.
A singles hitter waits for his pitch, but is able to do damage with whatever he is given.
A singles hitter uses all fields.
A singles hitter could hit 30 home runs if it meant striking out 3 times more, but he chooses to get on base more often. This means he tends to score more often, too.
A singles hitter, beyond all else, puts the ball in play.
There was nothing conventional about Ichiro. He had special breathing techniques he used to stay calm in the batter’s box. He moved his feet all about so that it seemed he was halfway up the first-base line by the time he made contact. And he hit singles. That was his thing. Nobody has ever hit singles like him. He led the league in singles 10 years in a row. Two players in the history of the game have had 200 singles in a season. One is Ichiro Suzuki in 2004 (when he had an almost unbelievable 225 singles). The other is Ichiro Suzuki in 2007.
-Joe Posnanski, The Baseball 100
Ultimately, being a singles hitter means embracing process over result, of focusing on what I can do with every individual idea, sketch, or iteration, and not letting theory or meaning get in the way. This is revolutionary for me!
The problem with swinging for home runs, so to speak, is not when I get one into the bleachers, but when it becomes prohibitively distracting or paralyzing more generally. Making ambitious work is still the goal, in every way: concept, craft, and communication. But focusing on process and slapping the ball around takes the pressure off of my practice in a way that hopefully allows the home runs to come more naturally. And if they don’t? I’m still standing on first base more often than not.
My goal is to be less precious about the things that I make, not in terms of craft—I still want it to be well-made—but I shouldn’t care as much about pre-loading my work with ideas and theory. Get on base, let someone get up behind me and get me back home.
It’s early, but results are starting to be made public for this year’s Baseball Hall of Fame election. Carlos Beltrán is tracking well so far, as is Billy Wagner and CC Sabathia in his first year of eligibility. Alex Rodriguez and Manny Ramirez, fifth and fifteenth on the all-time home run leaderboard, look cooked as nominees this year. There’s a single player on this year’s ballot, however, who might reasonably be the second unanimous selection to the Hall. And all he did was hit a lot of singles.