Drive My Car

Today's tip of the Baseball Desert cap goes to Bristol-Myers Squibb for this gem that I found on the back of the medication that my daughters are taking right now:


The ages and dosage are carefully and clearly noted, along with the extremely helpful recommendation not to let my 7- and 9-year-old daughters drive motor vehicles or operate heavy machinery.

Thank you, B-MS, for averting a major disaster!

Crisp Day

'tis done, the dirty deed, 'tis done: Marte, Mota, Shoppach and some cash for Crisp, Riske and Bard.

There's much rejoicing here at The Baseball Desert, because although many players become favourites after joining your team, there's an added thrill when a player who is already a favourite dons the home whites. Even more so when we managed to get the deal done without giving up Manny (the other one).

So if you'll excuse me, I need to go and add a Coco Crisp T-shirt to the shopping list for May.

Some Kind Of Wonderful

There aren't enough hours in the day for me to be able to read all the non-baseball blogs I'd like to read, but there are certain blogs for which you just have to make time, and The Sheila Variations is one of them.

Sheila is in the middle of an Odyssey-esque report of her trip to L.A. Even if you don't have time to read the whole thing, you have to go and read Part 18, which is brilliant in about a hundred different ways.

This paragraph cracked me up:

Did you know that he typed 94 WORDS A MINUTE?????????? HAS ANYONE IN THE HISTORY OF THE PLANET EVER TYPED FASTER? I wanted to say to her, "I actually type 96 words a minute" - which is true - but I decided not to bust her bubble. The entire house of cards would have fallen down if she had found out that 94 wpm is fast ... but it's not like ... MIRACLE fast. If he had typed 130 wpm or something like that, then maybe I would have given the props.

Excellent, excellent stuff!

Mad World

So, the GM who left back in November is back within the fold, and his new role is, erm, GM.

(On a related note, it only really struck me today how cool it must be for a thirtysomething guy to have this:

as his "just another day at the office" picture).

And the reliever who passed a physical back in November prior to joining the Red Sox failed a physical with the Indians. Mota clearly had a hell of a holiday season!

If you were a glass-half-empty person you could see today as a "Way Down Now" kind of day:

Inside my future eye
What I see just makes me cry.
I'm way down now.
I'm way down now.
The clocks will all run backwards.
All the sheep will have two heads.
And Thursday night and Friday will be on Tuesday night instead.
And all the times will keep on changing,
And the movements will increase.
There's something about the living babe that sends me off my feet.

As ever, it will be interesting to see how this all unfolds.

We're Not Right

Since my rant about Barry Bonds was cut short, I'm feeling a little frustrated, so I'm going to go off-topic for a second and address certain members of the audience who were at the David Gray concert in Paris last night:

To whom it may concern,

As delighted as I was to be at the David Gray gig last night, my evening's entertainment was somewhat marred by your inconsiderate behaviour.

Despite what you may have thought, we were at a concert and NOT in your living-room (three things might have given you a clue to that: the huge sound system, the 1500 people around you and the fact that there were two huge guys at the door checking that you had a ticket to get in).

So, whilst it's OK to show off your funky dancing techniques and scream like a banshee in between songs, it is most definitely not OK to talk through all the songs that you don't know (i.e. pretty much anything that's not on White Ladder). The rest of us came to listen to the music, not your inane conversations with your we're-such-a-cool-bunch-of-young-urban-Parisian friends. Beyond the age of 10 you shouldn't need to be told that there are times in life when you need to shut the fuck up. Talking all the way through the concert shows a lack of respect, not just for your fellow concert-goers but also for the artist in question. If you were at the theatre, you wouldn't talk all the way through the performance, so don't do it at a concert either. You were lucky we weren't at an Oasis concert, because they would have done one (or both) of the following: 1) refused to play until you shut the fuck up; 2) jumped off the stage and kicked the shit out of you.

So, next time, if you feel like chatting with your friends all evening, then invite them round to your place and put David Gray on as background music. DON'T come and piss me off by yakking all the way through what was otherwise a fantastic concert, OK?

(No) Thanks for (not) listening.
Iain (a.k.a. Grumpy Old Man)

How Do I Say

I was going to write a post about how the World Baseball Classic just got even better, but I read through to the end of the article and was pleasantly surprised by Bonds' statement. I'm always quick to criticise Bonds' attitude, and even if the statement is an exercise in political correctness I thought it only fair to point out that this time he said the right thing regarding the right decision at the right time:

The obvious objections were about my health and whether or not I would be ready to play. In the end, I decided that I can't take any chances that might jeopardize my season. I don't want to give the impression that the WBC is not important. I know this means a lot to showcasing our sport worldwide, and the patriotism of playing for Team USA would have been a great honor. I feel what is best for me, my family, the Giants, and our fans is that I sit the WBC out.

I'm not going to be joining the Barry Bonds fan club anytime soon, but this is worth a brief tip of the cap in passing.

Coco & Co

It would appear that the Red Sox could well begin next season with Mr Covelli Loyce Crisp in center field.

The deal is not yet finalised, but if it goes through as planned I'll be delighted to see Coco in a Red Sox uniform. I'm not talking numbers here - others are far better qualified to analyse the deal from that angle - but rather general outfield funkiness. Coco has long been a Baseball Desert favourite, and between Manny's bagginess in left and Trot's scruffiness in right I have a feeling that he and his jaunty cap will fit right in.

Those Sweet Words

Mid-January here in The Baseball Desert usually sees me digging out the works of Roger Angell in an effort to remind myself that baseball is not that far away. This year I've started with the wonderful Season Ticket, which begins with a meandering reflection by Angell on baseball - not just the game, but what surrounds it, what Angell calls The Life: La Vida.

Baseball opens your eyes. Each new season, it takes me four or five games before I begin to see what's really happening on the field-how the pitcher is working to this particular batter; the little shifts in the infield defense, with men on base, as the count progresses; how bold or how cautious this manager will be with his fresh assemblages of hitters and base runners. Over the winter I also seem to forget another part of baseball-the stuff away from, or off to one side of, the teams and the standings and the vivid events on the diamond, which can reward the experienced and reawakened fan. But that, too, comes back in time.

Angell then goes on to recount a number of events off the field that come to him as he remembers seasons past, before coming back to the game itself:

Events on the field qualify in The Life as well; they only have to be a little special. In September 1986, during an unmomentous Giants-Braves game out at Candlestick Park, Bob Brenly, playing third base for the San Franciscos, made an error on a routine ground ball in the top of the fourth inning. Four batters later, he kicked away another chance and then, scrambling after the ball, threw wildly past home in an attempt to nail a runner there: two errors on the same play. A few moments after that, he managed another boot, thus becoming only the fourth player since the turn of the century to rack up four errors in one inning. In the bottom of the fifth, Brenly hit a solo home run. In the seventh, he rapped out a bases-loaded single, driving in two runs and tying the game at 6-6. The score stayed that way until the bottom of the ninth, when our man came up to bat again, with two out, ran the count to 3-2, and then sailed a massive home run deep into the left-field stands. Brenly's accountbook for the day came to three hits in five at-bats, two home runs, four errors, four Atlanta runs allowed, and four Giant runs driven in, including the game winner. A neater summary was delivered by his manager, Roger Craig, who said, "This man deserves the Comeback Player of the Year Award for this game alone." I wasn't at Candlestick that day, but I don't care; I have this one by heart.

Or consider an earlier concatenation that began when Phil Garner, a stalwart Pirate outfielder, struck a grand slam home run against the Cardinals at Three Rivers Stadium one evening in 1978. Every professional player can recall each grand slam in his career, but this one was a blue-plate special, because Garner, who is not overmuscled, had never hit a bases-loaded home run before-not in Little League play; not in Legion or high-school ball; not in four years with the University of Tennessee nine; not in five years in the minors; not in six hundred and fifty-one prior major-league games, over two leagues and five summers. Never.

We must now try to envisage-perhaps in playlet form-the events at the Garner place when Phil came home that evening:

P.G. (enters left with a certain swing in his step): Hi, honey.

Mrs P.G.-or C.G. (her name is Carol): Hi. How'd it go?

P.G.: O.K. (pause) Well?

C.G.: Well, what?

P.G.: What! You mean...

C.G.: (alarmed) What what? What's going on?

P.G.: I can't believe it. You missed it!

Yes, she had missed it, although Carol was and is a baseball fan and a fan of Phil's, as well as his wife, and was in the custom of attending most of the Pirates' home games and following the others by radio or television. When he told her the news, she was delighted but appalled.

C.G.: I can't get over not seeing it. You can't imagine how bad I feel.

P.G.: (grandly) Oh, that's O.K., honey. I'll hit another one for you tomorrow.

And so he did.

Baseball: best game in the world, bar none.

Bright Side Of The Road

I began a response to the comments thread below regarding the World Baseball Classic, but it started to develop into a full-blown post, so I thought I would share my random thoughts here.

Although I love the concept of the WBC, there are several key problems:

• It is not a recognised, established worldwide sporting event. I know this seems like stating the blindingly obvious, since this is the inaugural competition, but what it means in real terms is that the desire to compete in the tournament is minimal. The football World Cup not only concerns a far greater number of countries - both in absolute terms (i.e. the number of countries in which football is played professionally) and in concrete terms (the number of teams that play in the final tournament) - but it has also been around for much longer and has become the best and most fascinating football tournament in the world.


• It will be played just prior to the season, when players (particularly pitchers) are very careful about all-out participation in games. Players and their clubs are so wary of getting injured that no-one is going to be playing as hard as they would for their respective clubs. In fact some clubs have simply refused to let certain players compete in the Classic. There are only two things which may change the way the clubs see the WBC: time and growing repute. What the World Baseball Classic needs is time, enough time to be so established that clubs wouldn't dream of not allowing their players to participate. I'm not saying that this never happens in the football World Cup, but I'm betting that it's a rare occurrence. The football World Cup is no further removed from many professional clubs' seasons than the WBC is from the regular baseball season, yet it still brings together the best players from around the world. Worries about injury are there, but players still participate.
  
  The biggest obstacle here is that major league clubs have nothing to gain from the WBC. Even if the tournament is an unqualified success, it's unlikely to bring new people to the ballpark. Outside the U.S. it's a golden opportunity to promote what is, in some countries, a minority sport. However, inside the U.S. the novelty value of the tournament is limited. The lukewarm reaction can partly be attributed to a competition which is basically going to put on show players that fans already see all season long. Nobody is going to catch a glimpse of the WBC on TV and say, "Hey - this is good stuff! Maybe I'll go check out some real baseball in my local ballpark one of these days." Major league clubs have little or no interest in promoting the sport in Italy or Chinese Taipei, so for them, outside of concerns of national pride, there is almost no upside to the tournament.


• Speaking of national pride, the rules governing who plays for what country are flexible to the point of being ridiculous. We seem to have reached the point where drinking a pint of Amstel back in 1997 will probably qualify you to play as a third baseman for the Netherlands. I fully understand why this is the case, and whilst it is important to try to involve as many well-known players as possible and get maximum exposure for the tournament, there will also need to be, at some point in time, stricter rules regarding the countries players can represent. If not, then nobody is ever going to take it seriously.
  

There's an interesting mini-debate up at ESPN on the subject of the WBC, and for most of the points mentioned above, I would tend to agree with what Jim Caple says:

No one said this modest little tournament will prove which country has the best team or which system of government is best or which country gets the tax revenue from A-Rod's salary. But it will be an interesting competition that will provide some heat and spark some interest. And maybe, just maybe, it grows to the point where fans would be excited enough to justify shutting down the season for a couple weeks.

For that to happen, MLB needs to promote the hell out of this inaugural tournament. Make it as exciting and representative as possible without risking players' seasons. Find a way to get Cuba to take part (and it looks like that has been done). Sell the merchandising cheap (and locally - I'd love to have a Dominican Republic cap, but no way am I paying $43 shipping for a $30 cap). Do what you have to do to make it work this time around and then make it better next time. There's no miracle recipe for something like this - it's trial and error on a global basis - but if it's done properly, it can truly become a 'Classic'.

I Get A Kick Out Of You

From what I hear, the World Baseball Classic is not creating as much excitement in some quarters as Major League Baseball may have hoped. Even so, I think you'd have to be pretty jaded not to want to see this particular lineup in action. I know there are other strong teams out there, but I can't help imagining the other managers taking a look at the potential lineup for the Dominican Republic and having a mild heart attack: "Tejada, Ramirez, Ortiz, Pujols, Guerrero. How in God's name are we gonna pitch around these guys?"

Despite Gary Sheffield informing us that this is all some phony, crappy, made-up tournament, I'm looking forward to seeing these teams play. And it doesn't take a genuis to work out which nation I've adopted for the month of March. Just sign me up for one of these.

Love Me Do

If you've been reading The Baseball Desert for any length of time, you'll know that if I never see Barry Bonds play baseball ever again, it will be too soon. It will therefore come as no surprise that Jim Caple's latest article got a rise out of me quicker than you can say "steroid allegations".

The content of the article itself is a no-brainer for me. Athough it will be hard to ignore the media circus that it going to surround Bonds' pursuit of Hank Aaron's record, that is exactly what I will be trying to do over the coming season. And since I'm a fan of an American League team on the East Coast, it shouldn't actually be that hard to ignore a player playing for a National League team on the other side of the country.

Caple, however, raises a far more interesting general point, one that has been running through my brain ever since:

Fans always root for the hometown player. As long as the player continues to produce on the field, no one cares what he does off the field.

My initial reaction on reading that particular line was that he's right, but the fact that he wrote the line in a piece on Bonds got me thinking. When the Red Sox make a signing that is not what I would like or expect, I'm prepared to go with the flow, knowing that I will end up 'rooting for the laundry'. But what would happen if one day, in some bizarre parallel universe, the Red Sox and the Giants traded, say, enigmatic left fielders and Bonds came to play in Fenway Park? When push comes to shove - i.e. when a guy you detest ends up wearing the home whites - can you put all the rest aside and cheer him on in the name of the team?

I know that this is a hypothetical question, since there is no scenario on earth that would bring Barry Bonds to the Boston Red Sox, but it's nonetheless an interesting philospohical exercise, baseball's equivalent of Plato's dialogues. The more I think about the question, the more I move away from the notion of just rooting for a team and the more I question the reasons why I love the game of baseball. If the most obnoxious player in baseball comes to play for your team, can you abandon the team on 'moral' grounds? And if so, what kind of fan would that make you?

I haven't yet been confronted with this kind of situation, but it's interesting to think about where you draw the line. How important is the team, not only in your own day-to-day existence, but in relation to the game of baseball itself. On other occasions I've argued that it's all about what happens between the foul lines. If I maintain that position, then surely I should be able to ignore what Bonds says and does off the field and appreciate what he does on it?

Well, yes and no. My love-affair with baseball began with the visual thrill - it was a sport quite unlike anything I'd ever seen before. But no sport, not even baseball, exists in an aesthetic vacuum, and it is impossible to separate the sport from the people who play it. On the whole, I'm quite happy to be accidentally or wilfully ignorant of players' lives outside the baseball diamond. It really is none of my business what the players think, say or do when they are not wearing the uniform - all I ask is that they give 100% when they are on the field. But in Bonds' case, there is just something about him that would prevent me from ever rooting for him. My all-time baseball hero is Cal Ripken, Jr., who in many ways is the anti-Bonds, the ultimate blue-collar baseball player, who will forever be remembered for a feat that was both unbelievable and ordinary at the same time - all he did was turn up for work every day. he just happened to do it for 16 years, without ever missing a game. And despite that, he had this to say in 2001: "I've been asked this question a lot, "How do you want to be remembered?" and my response to that question has been, "To be remembered at all is pretty special.""

There is an old cliché which says that what is important is not whether you win or lose, but how you played the game, and as cheesy as that may sound, it is something I believe in profoundly. I want to root for a team, to feel that I belong, but what I am rooting for needs to be worth my time and effort. I'm not talking about individual athletic ability or team success, I'm talking about the way those individuals and teams go about their business. If I'm going to spend an unreasonable portion of my life following the fortunes of a sports team, I want to feel that I am getting the genuine article. With Bonds, I don't know where the natural ability ends and the enhanced performance begins, and off the field, the boundaries between public persona and private personality are so blurred or complicated that I end up believing that he really is as big an asshole as he is made out to be.

The legendary Bill Shankly once said: "Some people believe that football is a matter of life and death. I am very disappointed with that attitude, it is much, much more important than that!" It's a great sound bite, from a man who was a master of the killer quote, and although it comes across as ridiculously over-the-top, there is a sense in which it is true. As someone who comes from a region that has been hard-hit by unemployment over the years I have come across people for whom Saturday afternoon football matches were literally the only thing they had going for them. With no job and no real prospects of getting one, it is easy to see how life can revolve around the local sports team, and in that context, Bill Shankly's quote suddenly seems less ridiculous.

However, I can't claim to be in such a situation, and for all my talk of living and dying with the Red Sox, baseball is still just a game. There is a huge hole in my life when it's not around, but it's still just a game. There have been times when baseball - and prior to that, football - has indeed seemed more important than life or death, but even in the most uplifting or soul-destroying moments it will never be anything more than a diversion. At the end of the day it is not important, in the greater scheme of things, whether the Boston Red Sox win the World Series. But it is important, if we are going to allow the fortunes of a bunch of millionaires we've never met actually mean something in our lives, to feel that we're getting the real deal. If I can look my team in the eyes - figuratively - and know that I wasn't cheated, that they played the game right, both on and off the field, then I will be happy with whatever the result is.

Tea And Sympathy

It's not often I can get inside the head of a major league ballplayer, but I know exactly how Jacque Jones feels. This offseason I reached the point where my poor old knees couldn't take any more baseball on synthetic turf - a rare case of the mind being willing but the body being weak.

Unfortunately, in my case, the Cubs haven't come calling with an offer to play in the outfield at Wrigley, so I am resigned to giving up the game I love. I could change clubs, find a club that plays on grass, but I don't want to get embroiled in all those base financial negotiations, so I've taken the "I'm a one-club guy" high road and decided to take an early retirement.

It's only been a couple of months since I last played, so full-blown withdrawal symptoms haven't hit me yet. I expect that they will sometime around the month of March, when baseball - in all shapes and sizes - is with us on a regular basis once again. When they do, I have decided that I will not get depressed, but instead live out the rest of my baseball career vicariously through the Cubs' new right fielder. I wish him nothing but healthy knees and a steady diet of fly balls framed against a clear, blue sky.

You Had Me From Hello

If I weren't already an unconditional fan of Paul Auster, the opening paragraph from his latest book would have instantly converted me:

I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn, and so the next morning I traveled down there from Westchester to scope out the terrain. I hadn't been back in fifty-six years, and I remembered nothing. My parents had moved out of the city when I was three, but I instinctively found myself returning to the neighbourhood where we had lived, crawling home like some wounded dog to the place of my birth. A local real estate agent ushered me around to six or seven brownstone flats, and by the end of the afternoon I had rented a two-bedroom garden apartment on First Street, just half a block away from Prospect Park. I had no idea who my neighbours were, and I didn't care. They all worked at nine-to-five jobs, none of them had any children, and therefore the building would be relatively silent. More than anything else, that was what I craved. A silent end to my sad and ridiculous life.

Would it be OK to just switch off my laptop and start reading the book right now?

Listen To What The Man Said

Dear Red Sox Management,

Papi wants to stay in Boston, long-term. Don't fuck it up.

Thanks a lot.
Iain

One Time Too Manny

I've finally reached the point where I don't care how much of this is true, where the story comes from or what Massarotti's agenda is: I am now officially SATOM™ (Sick And Tired Of Manny). Seriously - if I wanted to watch a soap opera, I'd turn on CBS.

If Manny doesn't get traded, fine - I'll cheer long and loud for him next season; if he does get traded, fine - I'll live with it. All I ask is that I get spared the drama between now and April.

We deperately need some real baseball around here, and we need it now.

Warm Your Heart

Feeling jaded? All Johnny-d out? Acute Manny fatigue?

The Baseball Desert has the perfect antidote to those mid-winter blues:

Boston Red Sox star David Ortiz watches the ball during the game with his local team Escogido against Tigres del Licey, in Santo Domingo,Dominican Republic, Monday Jan. 2, 2006. (AP)

Don't Look Back In Anger

One of the beauties of baseball is that - like chess - it has a very rigid framework within which there exists an almost infinite number of possible situations. That old cliché about coming to the ballpark and possibly seeing something you've never seen before is a cliché because it's true. This is due in part to baseball's obsession with statistics - once you reach a certain level of detail, almost every statistic is new and exciting ("in a May 24 game against Chicago, Bartolo Colon became the first ever 250-pound Dominican right-hander to strike out 6 or more White Sox on his birthday") - but it is also due in part to there being some really weird stuff going on in ballparks around America. I can think of no other sport where the chances of seeing something new over the course of one game are so high.

I couldn't begin to round up the weirdness that was 2005, so I'll leave you in the very capable hands of ESPN's Jayson Stark and his Strange but true feats of 2005. My favourite was this gem from the Chicago Cubs:

Don't Try This At Home Dept.: The Phillies scored two runs on a line drive back to the pitcher in their May 6 visit to Wrigley Field. Here's how that happened: LaTroy Hawkins caught it and tried to double the runner off first base (Jose Offerman) -- but hit him in the helmet. Next stop for that baseball? A trip into the stands. That allowed the tying and winning runs to score in the most unusual blown save of the year.

My own personal favourite play of the year happened in a Red Sox / Twins game on July 29: with runners on first and second, Johnny Damon hit a single to right which, thanks to a series of Minnesota errors, scored three runs, including the final one scored by Damon when a throw to the plate hit him in the head.

What a great game - you couldn't make a play like that up even if you tried. May the 2006 season prove to be just as fascinating and inventive.