With major league baseball spring training in full spring, writer and performer Brett Moore is bringing “Batter Up,” his solo show about baseball to Scottsdale Performing Arts Center.
The show is a kind of hybrid storytelling and gameshow. Moore weaves personal and historical narratives about baseball together with live on-stage trivia, where audience members try to stump him by quizzing him at random about various baseball facts. For example, they’ll call out a year, and Moore will reply with the two teams who played in that year’s World Series, who won, in how many games, and a few interesting facts about key players.
Brett Moore joined The Show to talk more about it, starting with, when it comes to these spontaneous trivia questions, if he has to study up on the entirety of baseball history before each run of the show, or if it is just information he's organically absorbed as a fan.
Full conversation
SAM DINGMAN: Brett, my first question would be, when it comes to these spontaneous trivia questions, do you have to study up on, you know, the entirety of baseball history before each run of the show, or do you find that this is just information you've organically absorbed as a fan and can summon on a whim?
BRETT MOORE: It's mostly in there now. There's a lot of this stuff that I, I told a joke in one show that now that I know this stuff, I just can't unknow. It's just there It's all here.
DINGMAN: Yeah, well, that's one of the reasons I'm so fascinated by your show, cause it, I mean, something that comes up for me all the time is, you know, my favorite team is the Baltimore Orioles and they it's a great franchise and we would really love to see one more starting pitcher signing this offseason, but that's that's not what we're here to talk about.
MOORE: Exactly. Everybody can always use one more.
DINGMAN: Yes, yes, although you're a Dodgers fan, if I'm not mistaken.
MOORE: You are not mistaken, and yeah, we, we, we have a slight surplus.
DINGMAN: You got them coming out your ears, man.
MOORE: We really do.
DINGMAN: But like this thing will happen where, you know, just as an example, the Orioles will call up some new prospects to make their Major League debut, and it'll be announced that they're gonna wear uniform Number 6. And my first thought will be like, woo, nobody's worn that since Melvin Mora. And then I have this thought like, why do I know that?
MOORE: That's exactly how I feel. And a lot of this kind of came out of that, wait, why do I know that? How do you know that? I don't know. I just know it. And what's really cool about baseball fans specifically is diehard baseball fans all have something like that. They just go, wait, why do I remember that? Like, oh man, the first player I remember seeing wear Number 3 was Chad Fonville for the Dodgers, who was a utility infielder back in the ‘90s. So it's stuff like that that just, and it just sticks.
DINGMAN: I feel like something else that is appealing about this conceit for your show is that in my experience and I'm, I'm sure you feel this way too, when you have that moment where you realize you remember something, it's intensely satisfying. It's like I, it's not just why do I know that it's, I like that information lives in me, or that that history is alive in me.
MOORE: That is a great way of thinking of it, and I think that is what provides us that charge, oh, cool I remembered something really unique. And it brings back, I think, in addition to that history being alivE, is it takes you back to the moment. And there's a unique connection with the moment in baseball and with baseball fans. One specific defensive play that doesn't end up meaning a whole lot in the course of the game, but sticks with you because you saw it.
DINGMAN: Yes, exactly. It's not like knowing the capital of Vermont, because you learned that in social studies, you know, it's, it's like your body wanted to hold that information.
MOORE: You know, sports at their best offer a powerful emotional connection, either, you know, sometimes in the elation, sometimes in the agony of defeat. But the other thing that they really provide is through that emotional connection. You get to grow a community and you get to share in that community with other fans.
And one of the great things about doing this show has been, I have not yet had a performance where there weren't some fan waiting at the end of it going, oh my gosh, you talked about how much you love Vin Scully. Here's a message he left for my husband when he fell ill with cancer. Vin Scully personally called and left him a message because he was also in the radio community, I believe also at NPR in Los Angeles.
DINGMAN: Wow. I mean, tell me if you agree with this, but I feel like another reason that stories like this feel so powerful to baseball fans is that there's so much baseball. Not just over the course of history, but in a given season or even on a given day, there's just a ton of baseball happening. So there's just so many different touch points. So it, it becomes so stitched into your life routine, and it makes it a little bit easier, I think, than in other sports to imagine yourself being part of that world, so that then when you get some little pinprick interaction, like the ones we've been talking about it's intensely gratifying. It's like a little dream coming true.
MOORE: I absolutely agree. It is every day. And I've learned such important lessons just from that fact. Like, literally, you could go out there tomorrow, you could strike out four times and make three errors, and the next day you might go five for five and drive in the winning run. You have no idea what each day is gonna bring, and baseball so uniquely illustrates that.
DINGMAN: 100%. I mean, I think about it. Like it, it becomes the context that I apply to challenges I'm trying to figure out. Like, case in point, you know, in a given week generally here on The Show, I'll have five pieces on the air. Sometimes that number varies, but usually it's five.
And I'm always telling myself, all right, I gotta hit five home runs, you know, yeah, but the reality is, if you go two for five, obviously you're putting your all into every at bat, but let's say you only really make solid contact two out of five times. If you do that over the course of a full season, you're hitting 400, you're a Hall of Famer, you know what I mean?
MOORE: Yeah. Exactly. It, I mean, it's a game that, more than any other sport, I think baseball is a game predicated on failure and how you handle it.
DINGMAN: Yeah. So, give us a sense of what's the flavor of the stories that you tell in between the gamier sections of the show.
MOORE: One of my favorite things to talk about is that my grandmother was a huge Cubs fan, and maybe the most optimistic Cubs fan in the world in the ‘90s cause she really thought they were in it.
But I also, you know, I was so excited this run to include a lot of information about the Negro Leagues, going back to 2020 when Major League Baseball recognized Negro League records from 1920 to 1948 as now being Major League records. And it's something that I really wanted to use the most recent one, partially as an educational tool for the Negro Leagues a little bit.
There's so much and there are so many arguments that people make both for and against their inclusion. And sometimes we just need a little more context and there's things that people don't necessarily know or realize.
DINGMAN: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And then of course there is the racial element to it also where it's forcing you to have a conversation with yourself about the discriminatory history of this sport that means so much to you, and it's of a piece with what you were talking about about the frequency of failure, is that baseball in these little ways and in these big ways like if you love baseball, you love a sport that was exclusionary towards Black people for decades and decades, baseball brings you into contact with the reality of who we are as a people, for better and for worse.
MOORE: It absolutely does. I studied history and archaeology when I was in college, and our culture reflects baseball much as baseball reflects our culture. And so, there are two sides to that and that you do have to reckon that this was a thing that was standard in the United States at the time. And baseball participated in it, but baseball was also among the first public places in American life to start to strike down those barriers.
