In this video, five-time batting champ Domingo Ayala shows you how you can bunt for average, just like the Minnesota Twins. “It’s hitting for average! You can’t throw it in my wheelhouse; I hit a bomb!”
See also: stealing bases with five-time stolen bases leader, Domingo Ayala.
When I talk about the “human element” in baseball, this is what I mean:
Joyce’s routine on game day is to be the last umpire to walk out of the tunnel. But today, he doesn’t want the focus of being last out. “I didn’t want it to appear like I was making an entrance,” he says. “I was kind of hoping I’d just blend in.”
On the way out, Joyce’s steps are a bit slower; he’s listening for the crowd reaction. He thinks he hears boos, he thinks he hears cheers. Tears are welling in his eyes. (Joyce likes to remind people that he’s Irish; he’s emotional and he can’t help it.)
He gets to home plate to exchange the lineup cards, and that’s when Galarraga appears out of the dugout. The crowd stands and applauds, and when Galarraga hands Joyce the lineup card, Joyce can’t even read it, the names a fuzzy blur through the tears. The images from that moment, captured live and broadcast across the country, will change how Galarraga and Joyce will be remembered.
…
When he arrives in Philly, he retrieves his luggage and discovers notes on the luggage tags: “We are all human — Good Luck” and “You gave your best God Bless.” They are signed: “DTW baggage.” Joyce carefully takes them off his bags and places them in his briefcase. He carries them with him for the rest of the season, careful not to check them in case his luggage gets lost.
That can’t happen with instant replay.
Bert Blyleven finally got what he deserves.
But, Deadspin is wrong. Now begins the campaign to make Harold Baines a hall of famer.
“And that is how childhood ends.”
- The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book
I stand in the aisle waiting to pay for diapers, staring at the box of card packages. My two-year-old daughter points and squeaks out the word “baseball.” I reply, “Yeah, kid. Those are baseball cards.”
Cards aren’t for kids anymore. These packages are wrapped in wax paper, with three or four color ink. No photographs, only drawings. I flip a package around in my hand. There is hard gum inside. They’re like I remembered them, but clearly packaged to exploit any nostalgia that may linger in me.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â Â *
The highway split the town I grew up in into two halves. Most of my friends lived on the south side; I lived on the north. In the summer, when I wasn’t playing baseball or riding bike or thinking about girls (or thinking about baseball or bikes), I’d bring my box and binders of meticulously organized baseball cards to my friends’ houses to trade, or to merely admire the cards.
At the time, most kids my age primarily collected basketball cards. Basketball was flashy. The photos on the cards exuded a sense of movement, that something important was happening. Hell, I didn’t even like basketball, but I had a Micheal Jordan poster hanging in my room. Baseball cards were pretty stodgy. Usually mugshots or “action” shots of a batter completing his swing.
The Gretzky T206 Honus Wagner Card was last sold for $2.8 million.
Then something happened. Wayne Gretzky bought a baseball card and sold it. The mint condition T206 Honus Wagner was one of the rarest in the world and it was shrouded in mystery. It was rare because Wagner, who chewed tobacco, didn’t want to force kids to buy it to get his card. Or he was holding out for more money from the tobacco company. It depends on who you ask. Regardless of the origin story, only about 50 of these cards survived time’s passage.
It sold for an obscene amount of money at the time: $451,000. Baseball cards hit a frenzy. You couldn’t throw a rock into a barn full of baby boomers without hearing someone say “If my mother hadn’t thrown out my shoebox of cards, I’d be rich.” But that’s the point: Their mothers had thrown out the cards. They were mass produced and only held any value because they’d become rarer. If mothers everywhere hadn’t thrown out the cards, nobody would have made ridiculous amounts of money flipping cardboard later.
Gretzky sold the card to Wal-Mart and Treat Entertainment, who went on tour around the country with the card. Some sort of baseball card revival, I guess. Some lucky person would win the card in a drawing on Larry King Live. I watched it with my parents. It was my first experience with Larry King’s Giant Head.
The effect of this hullabaloo was to turn children into hustlers. It wasn’t about the cards or the players or the sport. It was about the money. Cards were an investment that would make us all rich some day. That never came, of course, but how could anyone expect kids to understand economic supply and demand in the secondary market. Most cards lose their value, assuming they had any beyond the value of the paper they were printed on, as soon as the player stops being the flavor of the month among fans. It’s cutthroat, market timing is lightning quick and collectors are forced to wade through dozens of gimmicks.
One day, I held up traffic on the highway. A gust of wind had scattered my cards across the pavement. I scrambled to pick them up, knowing that every gust would send my perfectly mint condition cards down in value. Eventually I found them all and continued on to a friend’s house.
I left them at his house. I don’t remember why exactly, but I left my cards there. Maybe we decided to ride bikes or play baseball or talk about girls. And then I went home.
A few weeks later, he and his family moved; My cards moved with them, I assume. I didn’t care. It never even crossed my mind that I’d simply moved on (to better baseball leagues, cooler bikes and, of course, girls).
*Â Â Â Â *Â Â Â Â *
Some days, like today, I wonder how rich I’d be if my friend’s mother hadn’t thrown my cards out. Most days, I don’t care, doesn’t even cross my mind.
I set the pack down in its box. $4.99 for a pack of cards and a stick of tasteless, rock hard gum? Too rich for my blood. My daughter has lost interest and so have I. It’s time to move on.
I don’t own more than a Twins baseball hat and I didn’t even pay for it. It was given to me by a friend. Baseball is about memories; flawed, fuzzy and indulgent memories. You can’t purchase those. At best, memorabilia can only bring your mind somewhere in time.
And you know what? Box scores are free.
With just a handful of games left this season, it’s time for not-so-wild-yet-somewhat-depressing speculations. First let’s look at some numbers:
AL Cy Young
Name WAR W-L ERA ERA+ OOPS K/9
CC Sabathia 5.3 20-6 3.05 142 .653 7.4
Felix Hernandez 5.3 12-11 2.35 166 .592 8.6
Jered Weaver 5.1 12-11 2.96 138 .611 9.6
Francisco Liriano 5.0 14-7 3.28 131 .644 9.5
Carl Pavano 4.7 17-11 3.60 119 .699 4.8
Jon Lester 4.7 17-8 3.17 138 .623 9.9
Clay Buchholz 4.7 16-7 2.48 176 .624 6.2
A case could be made for several players to win the American League Cy Young. Let’s look at the dumbest case:
I think it’s a joke to have that kind of debate. What Sabathia has done is be the best pitcher in the AL from opening day to this point. I don’t buy into the point that if Felix is pitching for someone else he’d have more wins. They said that about Cliff Lee when he left Seattle, but he’s lost more than he’s won since he left Seattle. The name of the game is to win and he’s won. And if you’re looking at a second guy, it has to be David Price. It’s amazing to me that we have let computers define him rather than performance. His job is to win the game, not just pitch 5-6 innings. I don’t think there should be a debate between Felix and Sabathia.
Can you guess who said that? No, it’s not a parody of Joe Morgan, complete with non-sequiturs and crippling, irrational fear of things he doesn’t understand. It’s actually a legitimate Joe Morgan quotation.
The obvious winner should be Felix Hernandez, who leads the league in laymen stats like ERA, innings pitched and strikeouts, not to mention leads the other front runners for the award in at least a half dozen or more stats. It shouldn’t matter that Seattle is set to lose 100 games this season, but we all know it weighs heavily on all the writers.
These aren’t men, you see. They’re myths. Sometimes, constructing a legend that fits into antiquated ideals of baseball writing (awesome as they were, but now destroyed by the robotic game recap prose of today’s sportswriters—ahem—sports journalists) often means more to baseball writers than baseball itself. And if your editor won’t let you spin an interesting yarn, then why not simply vote for such antiquated notions?
So, now that there are 5 spots on the Cy Young ballots this year ( because a couple of stats nerds didn’t vote for Carpenter last year), here’s how it’ll shake down, unfortunately:
NL Cy Young
Name WAR W-L ERA ERA+ OOPS K/9
Roy Halladay 6.7 19-10 2.49 165 .656 8.1
Josh Johnson 6.4 11-6 2.30 184 .607 9.1
Ubaldo Jimenez 6.4 19-6 2.84 166 .615 8.5
Adam Wainwright 5.2 18-11 2.50 158 .605 8.3
Tim Hudson 5.2 15-8 2.62 151 .623 5.4At least the NL awards won’t be so dramatically skewed toward awful decision making. Halladay wins the media darling of the year award of this group, with Ubaldo close behind. The award should go to Johnson, but it won’t, and I’m not going to lose much sleep over it going to Halladay. Such is life, but at least in this case Halladay probably deserves the award almost as much as Johnson. That perfect game is pretty hard to ignore. One might be tempted to call it legendary.
Prediction:
There are hundreds of baseball songs out there, here are a few of my favorites, in no particular order:
A Dying Cubs Fan’s Last Wish by Steve Goodman
Glory Days by Bruce Springstreen
Say Hey by The Treiners
Center Field by John Fogerty
Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit that Ball by Woodrow Buddy Johnson
Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio by Les Brown & his Orchestra
Cheap Seats by Alabama
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VCQDbg7jPk
Tessie by Dropkick Murphys
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jR4tTQVjHUI&ob
Talkin’ Baseball by Terry Cashman
A picture is worth a thousand words
Baseball has its traditions, but the modern traditions seem so annoying.
Take for example, the mascot race. Put a few poor souls in sausage costumes and make them run down the baseline between innings.
It may make some kids and the intellectually-challenged adults happy, but it makes me cringe, in part because I know at least half the fans in the stadium just don’t care about the outcome. A quarter of the people watching the race are just drunk people yelling racial slurs during the sausage race. In Milwaukee, the Mexican Chorizo never wins. Figures. He’s like the Jackie Robinson of mascots and the fans treat him (or her) like garbage.
Speaking of traditions and stupid things at ball parks: Consider Cincinnati mascot race. It’s not even real! They put it on the big screen for fans to ignore, despite the fact that the Reds have 900 official mascots for the team and thousands more waiting in the wings. (Last time I was at a game at Great American Ballpark, I saw several terrifying baseball heads, a Philly Fanatic knock off and some kind of McGruff dog. It was like Disney World on acid.)
Cincy, like most ballparks, does the same with their shell game, another ballpark “favorite.” Fans yell numbers at the screen to determine which bowl of chili some object is under. Why do these fans yell? It’s like playing Wheel of Fortune at home. THERE’S NO PRIZE, PEOPLE!
I don’t know who came up with these dumb traditions, but I’d wager it was Bill Veeck. If he wasn’t dead, I’d like to punch him in the mouth if he didn’t also create two of the greatest traditions in major league baseball: The ivy in the outfield at Wrigley Field and the unofficial rule that midgets are banned from professional ball.
But the Kiss Cam. The Kiss Cam trumps all fan-centric ballpark traditions. It always catches couples (the old couple, the attractive couple, the uggos, the cousins) when they’re not paying attention. The crowd yells at the couple until they finally look up to see their mugs on the big board, awkwardly clank their teeth together in front of 15,000 to 35,000 other people (7 other people, if you’re at PNC Park in Pittsburgh).
It has a dark underbelly beyond the awkward moments it always seems to bring.
In an episode of The Simpsons, Lenny says, “Hey Carl, remember when we used to kiss like that…with our respective girlfriends?” I once saw a Kiss Cam point at a nice looking couple, but from off screen, another girl came into frame and kissed the girl, while the guy shrugged it off. It was a pretty standard kiss between two women–a peck, really–but the camera went wildly out of control, presumably as the operator collapsed into shock at such an unnatural event. Quickly, the next couple was brought up on the screen and the potentially family unfriendly crisis was averted.
At first, I thought it could have been just an accident. Maybe the camera operator was a clumsy buffoon. But this seems to be standard practice at ballparks. Back in 2008, a lesbian couple was nearly escorted from Safeco for breaking code of conduct rules after they pecked each other on the Kiss Cam.
I’ve never understood the family-friendly ideology at ball games. We go to games to watch men in tights scratch their junk for 2 hours. They spit and they swear and they (used to, but probably secretly still) do steroids. Games don’t play out like battles of good and evil. These are men, not gods. These are ballparks, not churches. Such is the absurd personality of this sport.
“A hot dog at the ball park is better than steak at the Ritz.â€
First course:
With one already out, the table was set after Ace tossed a meatball to put a runner on first.
Second course:
For the next batter, Ace gave it extra mustard, gave it all the cheese he had…right over the dish to a good cut. That ball became a pea, but, alas: a can of corn. Two outs.
Dessert:
Ace uncorked a wild pitch, runner advances to second and Ace found himself in a jam. He spins to second, catches the runner napping. The table has turned. Runner’s in a pickle. Runner isn’t happy. There’s some rhubarb. Three outs.
Last night’s clutch home run from Jim Thome to win the game was a great baseball moment, the type of moment most fans live for.
With one out, one runner on first, the home team down by one run, the big gun comes to the plate. On the first pitch, he takes a strike. The fans bite their fingernails and sit on the edge of their seats, every single one of them thinking “A home run would be a nice thing right about now.” The next pitch is at the letters and down the middle of the plate for a millisecond before every person in the ballpark knows the leather has been knocked off the pill and the game is over.
The pitchers best friend
But personally, I live for more mundane things in the game. While I was happy to see the Twins win, I get a certain pleasure out of things nobody will remember. Thome’s walk-off will be remembered as the first walk-off home run at Target Field. But it could just as easily have ended in the ballet of baseball: The double play; And nobody would remember the game after a few days. Not even White Sox fans.
The double play is baseball’s sad lexicon, a poem by Franklin Pierce:
These are the saddest of possible words:
“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,
Tinker and Evers and Chance.
Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,
Making a Giant hit into a double –
Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:
“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
There’s a dark beauty in the saddest aspects of the game, even when they have names like ham and eggs.
Putting a 6-4-3 into the scorecard carries a weight that a routine fly doesn’t. In the hieroglyphics of scorecards, the double play denotes ballet, it denotes the poetry of the play. Think of 5-4-3 and imagine the ball whipping around the bags. 4-6-3 brings to mind flips of the wrist and leaping throws to first. The rare and brilliant DP-4U captures a moment of dread on the baserunner’s face as he misjudged a line drive and barreled into his own doom. Imagine the athleticism of an F7-2 double play or the humor of a surprise L1-5.
The Double Play, by Robert Wallace:
In his sea-lit
distance, the pitcher winding
like a clock about to chime comes down withthe ball, hit
sharply, under the artificial
bank of lights, bounds like a vanishing stringover the green
to the shortstop magically
scoops to his right whirling above his invisibleshadows
in the dust redirects
its flight to the running poised second basemanpirouettes
leaping, above the slide, to throw
from mid-air, across the colored tightened interval,to the leaning-
out first baseman ends the dance
drawing it disappearing into his long brown glovestretches. What
is too swift for deception
is final, lost, among the loosened figuresjogging off the field
(the pitcher walks), casual
in the space where the poem has happened.
Of course, anti-depression medication might piss off the depressant manufacturers like Budweiser.
There’s something to be said of this classic American imagery: A father sitting in the kitchen late into the evening, listening to the local nine under a single, swaying light. A bottle of Jack Daniels, nearly empty, rests next to his elbow with his face buried in his hands. He’s pretty drunk and still can’t believe that call in the 6th, but what’s he going to do? The color announcer couldn’t believe that call either and only fueled the father’s rage in the moment. His wife and kids left the father and his Jack long ago. It was probably cute at the time when he named his sons Jack and Daniel. He played catch with them in the yard and maybe took them to the park a few times a year. But then he lost his job at the factory and, well, that’s life sometimes. At least he still has America’s pastime. Baseball always prevails. The static noise of the crowd fills the air of the kitchen, lingering, hanging on the drapery, until he reaches for the off button and then he reaches for the bottle.
That’s why I listen to baseball on the radio. The romance. It’s a sport designed for the medium. In a television world where every mundane call is scrutinized by endless replays, every pitch put into a stupid arbitrary box and every fatso ballplayer splayed out across a 52-inch television screen in high definition horror, radio still stands.
Even the advertising works. Everything is sponsored by the team or the players or the league. Everything. Get your carb fix on the official potato chips of your favorite team, purchased at a grocer sponsored by your favorite player and wash it down with the official sugar water drink of the Major Leagues.
The ads all feature great cheesy references to the sport, too. “Hey fans, This is Such and Such, catcher for some team here to unenthusiastically and awkwardly tell you about a product and/or service I am paid to love. Don’t strike out with your girlfriend this season. Buy her diamonds from Jim’s Pawn and Wholesale Diamonds Store and walk off with a home run. As the official Pawn and Wholesale Diamonds retailer of the team, we make sure you’ll be a hit! When you’re thinking of baseball diamonds, think of Jim’s Pawn and Wholesale Diamond Store, your local leader in pawn and wholesale diamonds!”
They always tend to sell similar products. You know what I’m talking about: greasy food, cars, sporting goods, farm equipment, ways to rekindle your marriage that don’t involve giving up your obsession with baseball and paying attention to your own health and your wife in the slightest (just buy her something shiny!). But why not expand to the obvious: Anti-depression medication?
Think about it. Baseball, it’s been said by former National League commissioner A. Bart Giamatti:
It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.
If Zoloft were the official pick-me-up for 30 teams, by the end of the season, fans of 29 of those teams wouldn’t need to head into a long, cold winter with a deep, painful depression alone. Hell, Pirates, Nationals and Royals fans have chronic conditions. The hot stove league just doesn’t work as well as Zoloft. I’ve discovered a gold mine, here.
And, if not Zoloft, then why not Viagra? Same thing, right?
