So, those who know me are aware that I’m a massive map geek. There are a ton of cool maps I could link you to right now, and at some point I will, but a friend showed me this today and I have to geek out on it for a second:

http://benfry.com/allstreets

Ben Fry, who works on data visualization, put together this tremendously cool map of all the roads - and only the roads - in the lower 48 states. Sadly, there’s no way to zoom in on anywhere you like, but at the very least it provides a fantastic look at urban settlement in the US:

Along with that, he has an interactive ZIP code map that’s just way too much fun to play with. Obviously, ZIP codes are geographically based, but I’d never seen it laid out like this, and with this level of detail.

http://benfry.com/zipdecode/

The base of the ZIP code system is the first number, which lays out the US into 10 different geographical areas. When the first number is typed, one of the following areas will light up:

0: New England and New Jersey
1: New York, Pennsylvania, and Delaware
2: Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia, and the Carolinas
3: Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi
4: Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan
5: Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas, and Montana
6: Illinois, Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska
7: Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana
8: Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, Wyoming, and Idaho
9: California, Oregon, and Washington

With each successive number typed, the field of lit ZIP codes will narrow until you’ve got one dot. The zoom feature takes this to a whole new level as well, as with each successive digit the map will zoom in to encompass only those areas covered. Once you reach 4 digits, the specific post offices are numbered; for example, my ZIP starts with 0213, and once that has been typed in you can see the locations of 02130, 02131, 02132, etc. graphically.

As I said, it’s always been obvious that there was a decent enough geographical system here, but I had no idea exactly how organized it actually is - especially amazing considering that the modern ZIP code system was introduced in 1963. You can read a surprisingly interesting history of the ZIP code system here.

Anyway, I’m not really sure how useful this would be, though I can see using the road map in class at some point. But it’s still real cool, so enjoy playing with it.

Over the last two days, I’ve had a unique opportunity: sitting in on classes at my old high school, taught by my former history teacher, Mr. V. It had been 12 years since I’d seen him, and even longer since I’d sat in that room on the second floor - I was startled to note that neither had changed all that much. Mr. V still has more energy than anyone I know, despite being in his early 70’s now - it’s inspiring to see someone who still loves what he does that much after 43 years of doing it. The room itself… well, aside from seeming a bit smaller, and the fact that I was viewing from a completely different angle, it was precisely the same. The timeline on the wall might have been a bit yellower and maybe there were one or two new Time Magazine covers hanging above the chalkboard, but if I was looking at before and after photos from 1994 and today, I might not be able to tell one from the other. I can’t tell if that was cute or frightening; it was probably both.

What had changed? The students, I guess - or, more appropriately, me. My job in class observations is to pay attention to a few different things, like instructional method, classroom management, discipline styles. What I found myself coming back to in these classes, though, were the students - how young they were, how many things they had going on all at once, and most importantly how similar they were to one another.

I used to think that my old high school was a study in social delineation. The smokers hung out over here, the preppies there. The jocks, the tech-voc kids, the geeks, and on down the line - I used to know them all instinctively. They all had their areas, their territory. On Wednesday, going in for the first time since graduation, I expected to get slingshot back in time - I expected to feel an affinity with the kids near the red lockers, a mild distaste for purple. I expected to get a little shot of fearful adrenaline as I passed green and blue. What I found instead was that everywhere I looked, all I saw were kids. Not identical, but certainly less identifiable. Those groups were probably still there, I’m just too old to see them anymore. All I saw were a collection of people struggling to figure out who they were, together.

In some ways, that’s heartening. As a teacher, you don’t want those old patterns, those old ways of grouping your students. You want to be able to address each of them the same as the others, with no preconceptions. You want to base your assessment on what they do, rather than who they hang out with. You don’t want to know who they are until you know who they are, and I had no idea who these kids were. And that was a good thing.

On the other hand, I always imagined I’d be the kind of teacher/parent/adult who remembered what it was like to be there. This week was a slap in the face of that particular fantasy: as of right now, I am the enemy. I am a teacher. I am an authority figure. I am an adult. My job is not longer to survive, or to make friends. Consequently, the tools I used to have that would let me accomplish those things have faded. They’re being replaced now with the tools I’ll need to reach my students on an intellectual and, hopefully, personal level. And as happy as I am about that, I miss the high school survival handbook I used to know by heart.

I’ll end this with my favorite moment of the visits. At the start of my first class there, Mr. V introduced me. “This is Mr. Lipsett,” he said. “Mr. Lipsett used to be a student of mine.” The kids all looked at me - some mixture of boredom and curiosity, no doubt, with a drop of vague chronological puzzlement. “When?” one of them asked. “About 14 years ago,” I said, “I used to sit at that desk.” The kid I pointed to beamed, and pumped his fist. What did that mean? No idea. Maybe it was a joke. Maybe it conferred a history on him, or at least the space he temporarily inhabited. Maybe it was a subtle reminder that stuff happens after high school. Maybe he was just a suck-up. I couldn’t say. No matter what it was, though, it was my first small connection with a student - some tissue that tied me to him. I liked the feeling.

This guy.

My personal favorite moment:

He also told WIMS radio in Michigan City that he didn’t believe the event he attended included people necessarily of the Nazi mindset, pointing out the name isn’t Nazi, but Nationalist Socialist Workers Party.

It should also be noted that nowhere in the article does the reporter mention that the term ‘Nazi’ was shorthand for - drumroll please - Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, which when translated into English means ‘National Socialist German Workers’ Party’.

Sigh.

Chances that anyone reads this post: approximately nil.

So, here’s what’s going on with me. Several months ago, spurred on by a complete lack of interest in my current publishing career (and then further spurred on by the news that my company was sold, making my job future questionable) I began to think very seriously about My Future. This was going to be a recurring theme anyway, as I approached 30, so I sat down and gave some serious thought to what it was that I really wanted to do with my life.

The conclusion I reached was this: my life - or at least my life since about 1997 - has been primarily consumed with two things. First Thing: History. It’s my first love, and it’s what I always find myself gravitating back to. I initially got into publishing to work with history, though that got waylaid along the way. I have intensely strong opinions about the way the study of history should be approached, and I think a very clear knowledge - gathered over the years through tons of reading, debate, and internalized philosophizing - of how history works. What I’ve always been looking for is a way to translate that into action, and into some form of a career; it became pretty patently obvious to me a few years ago that I was too social, too flaky, and too impatient for a PhD, so the purity of academic history was out. I had previously tried the non-profit thing for a while, but it’s fairly hard to move forward in the non-profit world without directly relevant experience unless you’re in fundraising, to which I’m allergic. Publishing initially seemed like a good way to reconcile my love of academic history with a more structured environment, but I slowly came to realize that much of publishing is far less about the content than it is about the bottom line, and as anyone who has seen me attempt to comprehend money can attest, the bottom line is not anything I generally obsess over (to my own detriment, I might add). All of that, of course, leads me to…

The Second Thing: Education. In some fairly obvious ways, spending a boatload of time thinking about history leads naturally to spending a boatload of time thinking about education. Most of us form our opinions of history in school, for better or for worse (usually for worse). Education is also a major battlefield for my favored field in history, identity; how events or peoples or ideas are depicted in the education system is a constant tug of war. My first job out of college was for an education non-profit in Brookline that specialized in history education, focused around ideas of identity, and it’s still the best job I’ve ever had - teaching, and especially teaching high school, forces you to think about ways to make history both accessible and rigorous, the former being a primary complaint I have about most history. History should be fun - these are, at their core, stories, and their sweep is extraordinary. History is exploration too - there’s never a right answer, and investigating all the ways people have constructed and reconstructed history is the best detective job in the world. Students do not get enough of that, buried under the weight of dates, battles, dry portraits, and treaties with Dutch names. That job opened my eyes to the daily struggle of history teachers to make their material exciting, relevant, and enlightening.

So, when I finally sat down and thought about it (remember when I did that, two incredibly meandering paragraphs ago?) it became pretty obvious what I should do, and I was forced to laugh at myself for not thinking about it earlier. I should be a history teacher.

So, for the last few months, I’ve been working toward that goal. This past Friday, I got the results from my MTEL (Massachusetts Test for Educator Licensure) and passed with flying colors. I’ve been taking courses at Simmons College toward a second MA, this time in Education, and will enroll there full-time within the next month. In September, I’ll begin an in-school internship, location TBD. It has been a tremendous amount of work, but it’s also been fairly exhilarating, and I can’t wait for the next step.

So, what does that mean for this little corner of the web? For one, it means the time I can devote to massive spreadsheets has been severely curtailed. Honestly, baseball has been several rungs down the ladder for me this year; I’ve probably watched just two or three of this year’s games end to end, and have missed several entirely. I gave up my Opening Day ticket because I had class. Priorities have shifted.

That doesn’t mean I want to give up writing, and it probably doesn’t mean I want to give up writing about baseball. It just means that this site fulfilled its usefulness as a Sox blog, and now it’s time to transition it to other things. I don’t want to change sites or anything, just repurpose what I already have.

So, if by some miracle you’re still checking this space, keep doing so. I’m going to try to write semi-frequently. Maybe it will be about baseball; more likely it will be about teaching, or history. Or teaching history. Maybe it will even be interesting.

I know, it’s been a while since I’ve posted. I’m working on something and wills tart again soon, though in a bit of a different way. In the meantime, I wanted to pop in and congratulate Dustin Pedroia on his richly deserved Rookie of the Year Award - the first Red Sox player to win one since Nomar Garciaparra exactly ten years ago. Congrats, Dustin. You earned it.

Here’s a link to my Flickr set from the parade - yes, I know it took me a while. Click on the picture below for the slideshow.

Walking down Boylston Street today around 5:45, you would have been hard pressed to notice any signs that there’d been a parade there today. The barriers were gone, as were the throngs of fans. Street sweepers and the Back Bay’s prodigious winds had already carried away most of the confetti, and traffic had resumed. I work on Boylston about half a block from Copley, and that section of the street - one of the most crowded of the route - looked like it does almost every evening. The trappings of victory are ephemeral; crowds disperse, lights go out, and all we’re left with are the memories.

Today’s parade - attended by over a million, stretching from the cultural epicenter of the city to the political one - was the last moment of the 2007 World Champion Red Sox. It was less catharsis than pure and simple joy. The comparisons to 2004’s outpouring are predictable and understandable, but this was different: it felt more natural, more expected, far less cataclysmic. We’ve had time to get used to the Red Sox as champions of baseball, and now, in the midst of reams of articles declaring this organization the crown jewel of the sport, we find ourselves expecting to be here again in a year’s time. And maybe we will be: the core of players that has been acquired through trades, drafting and development, and targeted free agent signings is young, talented, and likable. They were the best team in baseball this season, despite untested rookies at second base, in the starting rotation, and in the bullpen; despite surprising off years by our free agent signings and our Hall of Fame left fielder; despite key injuries, disastrous trades, and fatigue. Yet though all that, this team trailed anyone in anything for only 16 of the 209 days of the regular season, from April 2nd to October 28th. 12 days in early April as the AL East took early shape, and 4 days in late October, as the Sox fell into and climbed out of a 3-1 hole in the ALCS. They outscored their opponents by 210 runs - more than any team since the 2001 Seattle Mariners. They went 11-3 in October, sweeping the AL West champs and the National League champs at opposite ends of the playoffs, and set World Series record after World Series record over five days between Fenway and Coors Field. They were the best team in baseball, and today they had a parade.

Now, with two and five red banners bookending decades of white and blue ones on Yawkey Way, we can finally look back on this season and realize how lucky we were. There was a lot of angst this year, much of it misplaced. We’re all still getting used to this; we’re not long removed from expecting failure despite victory, and the crushing weight of history instead of recent success. This new ownership has only been in place for five seasons, and they’ve already brought home two more trophies than we had in virtually anyone’s memory. They’ve vanquished whatever ghosts we thought we had, turned around decades of neglect to the team, the stadium, and the community, and brought us some of the most memorable events in Red Sox history. It’s sometimes too much of a whirlwind. But this season, our team didn’t give up a lead. They didn’t fold at the most crucial moment. They didn’t suffer tragedy or lose focus when it was needed most. They barely even needed heroics; they simply dominated, beginning to end. Somehow, the lack of stress was stressful; we spent much of the second half waiting for the other shoe to drop, and part of the playoffs envisioning nightmare scenarios. We focused on the rare instances when players didn’t get it done, and ignored many of the quiet, indiscreet times they did. But today they rolled down Boylston just the same.

This is a new era for Red Sox baseball. It’s an era where we - not the Yankees, not anyone else - are the team to beat. It’s not a position we’ve ever found ourselves in before. We’re caught in the transition between lovable losers and hated frontrunners. We have the payroll, the farm system, the front office that we need. We have a devoted, frequently psychotic fanbase. We are the envy of baseball, in all the good and bad ways that can entail. And we are the champions of baseball for the second time this decade, something no other team can say.

We won’t do this every year. We may not do it again for a long time. But we now have a team that could, and that’s what this year has proven. There’s no more urgency to win; our older players may fade, but there’s faith that younger ones can pick up the slack. The desire is still there, but the pressure is off. Our last parade was a celebration. This one was a coronation. I plan on enjoying every minute until it ends, and I don’t plan on being sad when it does; teams go decades without seeing something like what we’re in store for. We are, finally, lucky. The glow from that will last a long time.

I’ll have much much more later, but for now… congratulations to the 2007 Boston Red Sox, champions of baseball. It was a long season, occasionally a difficult season, and in the end a remarkable season. They’ve earned every measure of this, and every single player - from Josh Beckett to Mike Lowell to Bobby Kielty - has played a role. They’ve been the best team in baseball all season long, and now they are the last team standing. I’m sad we’ve seen them play their last game. And I’m looking forward to the parade.

Because I am an idiot, I managed to turn off the site for a few hours this afternoon while screwing around with coding. Thanks to not being a completely hopeless idiot, however, I’ve managed to un-break it. No need to thank me.

Hey look, a baseball game.

Let’s get one thing straight before I dive in: emotionally, I want the Sox to win tonight. I want then to crush this Rockies team like no team has been crushed before. I want this team to be known as the best in baseball, with a huge freakin’ exclamation point after it. I want a parade as soon as humanly possible, and a new hat tomorrow morning. I want to be a fan of the champions of baseball when I wake up.

Now that that’s out of the way… intellectually, it’s a different story, for a number of reasons. The biggest of these is this: baseball is broken, and this year there was a legitimate chance to start fixing it. Of the four teams that survived into the LCS, three had payolls that ranked in baseball’s bottom ten; the other was us. The Phillies, Cubs and Yankees - who ranked 13th, 8th, and 1st in total payroll - lost to teams that were vastly outnumbered by dollar signs. Overall in baseball this season, 6 teams in the bottom half of the payroll spread won more games than they lost; 3 of them made the postseason, and the Padres played 163 games. This was a good year for poor teams, and it was good for baseball. The Rockies, with a previously moribund fanbase that hadn’t risen above the bottom third in NL attendance for three years and a payroll of just under $54.5 million (25th in the majors), are now in the World Series; a team that was built the way a small-market club needs to be built - with 16 homegrown players, many of them the most key contributors - were proving that it was possible to win it all on a shoestring budget if you had the smarts and the vision to do it. Solid drafts and international amateur signings, a few key veterans and hole fillers, and some time, and they are the champions of the National League. Though I’ve heard some scoffing about the franchise’s age - at just 14 years, the Pirates have had more losing seasons in a row than the Rockies have had seasons total - I don’t see any reason to scoff; expansion teams winning and expanding this game’s fanbase are a very good thing for baseball. If only the Marlins and Devil Rays could follow suit.

Read this article by Rick Reilly at SI.com. He does a beautiful job of explaining how hard it is to be a baseball fan in a market that’s hundreds of miles from the nearest big league franchise. He shows how the Rockies energized the city, revitalized parts of it, and really mattered. Of all the recent expansion teams, the Rockies have been the biggest part of their respective communities, have the most devoted fanbase (admittedly not hard), and should be respected for it. They deserve to win, and they have.

But, in the end, this season will end with the rich kids throwing a party. I’m not complaining, of course; in the end, if you get to this part of the season payroll stops mattering in any kind of tangible way. If you’ve won enough to be playing ball during the last week of October, then your team is good regardless of how much it cost, and you can’t use it as an excuse. Still, it would be good for baseball if it could happen. The last time a team in the bottom third of the payroll spectrum won the World Series was 2003, when the Marlins came out of nowhere to defeat the Yankees in six games, and then dramatically failed to capitalize on their success. Before that, you’d have to go back to 1990, when the Cincinnati Reds stunned the Oakland A’s with a four game sweep. That’s twice in 16 years; in most of those seasons the title was won by a team in the top third. It’s impossible to argue that payroll doesn’t make a difference, at least when it comes to getting a chance to play in October.

Baseball is broken. We don’t notice it because we’re not Pittsburgh fans awaiting the start of what will likely be their record-tying 15th consecutive losing season, or Royals fans putting their hope in an exciting but small group of younger players to deliver them from decades of mediocrity. We don’t notice it because we have the money to make the playoffs almost every season; only once since 2003 have we sat home for the postseason, and we’ve played October baseball in seven seasons since the strike (third most in baseball, behind the Yankees and Braves). The Rockies? The Rockies are here for the first time, aside from a brief and uneventful 1995 LDS trip. Their fans are rediscovering the team - we can mock the towels and the “bandwagon”, but we only notice their new fans because we’ve integrated our own. The Rockies are good for baseball, and intellectually I’d love to see them win this series, or at least make it interesting. It would send a message to the owners that have handicapped their own franchises: this is possible. You can do this. The Rockies would be the poorest team in at least twenty years to win the World Series; as it stands, they are right now the only team in at least the last 20 years to make it here ranking as low as they do in total player salary. If the Rockies can do this, so can everyone else - a World Series title, or at least a good, hard-fought series, might have driven that home more than what has transpired.

This series and this season aren’t over; October’s given us the magic of a previously-impossible comeback, and it could do so again for the Colorado Rockies. But, chances are it won’t, and once again the deep pockets will win. I’ll be cheering for them when they do, as will we all - but we should remember that in this case, what’s good for the Red Sox is likely bad for baseball as a whole. Like society in general, we can only be judged by the success of our least fortunate members, and right now baseball has a failing grade. It’s getting better, but there’s still a long long way to go.