Archive for the ‘Baseball’ tag
First Glove
My first baseball glove sits on a bookshelf in my home office. I left it at my parents’ house when I went to college (I had been through a couple more gloves by then), but I reclaimed it when I moved out for good and left for Chicago. It’s dry and brittle, and the fingers are curved around the old ball I keep stuffed in pocket with the name of my Little League team—Poseyville I—written on it in Sharpie. The glove is a MacGregor G19T, branded all around with slogans like “Flex Action,” “Adjusta-wrist,” “Lattice Weave,” and “The Athlete’s Choice.” The lining inside is shredded from years of sweat and dirt and wear, and it’s a little small for my hand now, but it’s still serviceable. Baseball gloves are like that. The basic design and build is no different from one you could buy today, and with a little glove oil and a tug on the strings, even a 30-year-old model could be ready for a game.
Albert Pujols, Jack Clark, and Our Loyalty to Clothes
The Albert Pujols will-he-won’t-he sign deadline passed last week, and now the best baseball player on the planet stands to become a free agent after the season. Rumor has it he was asking the Cardinals for $300 million, the richest contract ever, and the baseball stat wonks say he’d be worth every penny. He’s put together perhaps the best first 10 seasons of any player, and one would expect he can produce at the same level for at least another five (and the next five probably better than most hitters).
As a Cardinals fan, I obviously have a rooting interest in seeing the best player in the game stay with my team. Albert has said repeatedly that he wants to finish his career in St. Louis, and the Cardinals clearly have it in their best interests to sign him. It’s good for baseball for its marquee player to stick with one of its proudest franchises, and if ever a player was destined to show some loyalty, it was this player and this team. But so was LeBron James to Cleveland. Ask a Cavs fan how he feels about loyalty now.
Found Memories
Winter finally released its grip from Chicago this week, giving me the occassion to peel the fleece lining out of my heavy coat to convert it into a spring jacket. This uncovered a hidden pocket inside the lapel of the outer shell, inside which I found the remains of the ticket stub from a Chicago Cubs game against the Milwaukee Brewers at Wrigley Field on April 29, 2006. It was torn in four places: one, along the perforated line that the ushers rip when you enter the ballpark, and three less exact gashes through the top half that looked like they were caused by absent-minded handling or the trauma of several spin cycles.
The Tragedy of Donnie Baseball
This piece originally appeared in Elysian Fields Quarterly, Fall 2008
MATTINGLY’S 23, DON MATTINGLY’S EPONYMOUS RESTAURANT in his hometown of Evansville, Indiana, is closed now. The legendary New York Yankees first baseman closed it in 1996, the summer after he retired, officially citing escalating expenses and increased competition from chain restaurants. “People were not coming in anymore,” a spokeswoman told The New York Times. It was a sports bar and grill filled with memorabilia, naturally, though mostly from athletes Mattingly himself idolized, not from his own career. A full-size basketball hoop and free throw lane stood near the bar, flanked by a locker holding a Larry Bird uniform. Oversized pictures adorned the walls, monuments to his hitting idols Rod Carew and Ted Williams, plus Yankee greats who go by last name only: Ruth, Gehrig, and DiMaggio. The restaurant’s most popular tables sat inside a boxing ring, and nearby a scoreboard displayed baseball and college basketball standings. The restaurant was located next to a movie theater just off Morgan Avenue on Evansville’s burgeoning east side, so it’s likely that it did suffer from the dozens of Chili’s, Applebee’s, and TGI Friday’s clones popping up along Morgan and the intersecting Green River Road, which formed the main retail drag for the old river town, the third largest city in the state. But it’s depressing to think that Evansville’s residents could so easily abandon their hometown hero, who, at the height of his career in the mid-1980’s, was the most dominant hitter in the game.
Familiar Rivalry
This piece was originally published at the Lovable Losers Literary Revue.
I’VE LIVED IN CHICAGO FOR NINE YEARS, but I’m a lifelong Cardinals fan. I grew up in southwestern Indiana, just a two-hour drive on I-64 across the flat, oil rig-dotted wastelands of southern Illinois to St. Louis. On summer nights, Jack Buck and Mike Shannon lulled me to sleep with their baritone calls of Cardinals games on the local radio affiliate. My town was split about 70-30, Cardinals to Cubs fans, and my best friend across the street was a Cubbie diehard. We spent muggy July afternoons playing out the rivalry in his backyard: Ozzie Smith and Willie McGee versus Ryne Sandberg and Jody Davis. Grown ups told us that Cardinals and Cubs fans weren’t supposed to like each other, but that was hard to believe. For us, it was more like a matter of taste: Coke versus Pepsi or grape versus orange, just a convenient way to divvy up the teams for pickup games.
When I went to college at Indiana University in Bloomington, I was in the minority for the first time. I met kids from the Chicago suburbs, northwest Indiana, Indianapolis, South Bend, Fort Wayne, and they all liked the Cubs. Cardinal fans popped up here and there, but for the most part, I spent my time with the Cubs diaspora, created by the universal reach of WGN.
First Base of Last Resort
This piece was originally published in Anatomy of Baseball, edited by Andrew Blauner and Lee Gutkind.
IN THE STILL-SWELTERING HEAT of an early July evening, before the sun went down and the hard, brown June beetles started pelting the infield dust around my feet, I crouched into my position at first base as the pitcher made his move toward home plate. I had just finished my junior year of high school and was playing for the Owen Dunn American Legion team, Indiana Post #5 in Mt. Vernon. To be picked to play was an honor of sorts; the post had just reformed the team after a long absence, and the manager was a former college coach who drew players from three high schools in the area.
The right-handed batter hit a ground ball in my direction. It wasn’t hit particularly hard, but as it left the bat it had a tight clockwise spin that caused it to slice across the grass toward the baseline. I charged the ball, lowered my glove, and came up empty. The ball trickled through my legs, and the runner reached base safely.
“Nice one Buckner,” I heard from the dugout. I glowered at my teammate Eric, who was sitting near the end of the bench with a smug look on his face. He was referring, of course, to Bill Buckner of the Red Sox, who let a weak grounder by the Mets’ Mookie Wilson dribble through his legs in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, allowing the winning run to score and ultimately costing the Sox their first Series win in 68 years. It’s still the most infamous play ever made by a first baseman, ruining Buckner’s legacy and the defensive expectations of first basemen everywhere. The nickname stuck.
Bo Knew
This week, an article about Bo Jackson by Joe Posnanski from the Kansas City Star has been making the rounds on the sports blogs. He notes that it’s been 20 years (20 years!) since Bo was a rookie, which makes me feel both incredibly old and gives me a nostalgic lump in my throat. Like every other 10-year-old baseball fan of that era, I worshipped Bo, putting him on a pedestal right next to my other favorites, Don Mattingly and Ozzie Smith. My love for Donnie Baseball and Ozzie was based on logic. Mattingly was from my hometown, a left-handed first baseman who was the one baseball player I always tried to emulate. Ozzie was the most popular player on my favorite team, the Cardinals, and I doubt that any kid who grew up listening to Jack Buck and Mike Shannon call Cards games on the radio would have picked anyone else. But for Bo Jackson, it was different. I didn’t give a whit for the Royals; in fact, they provided my first taste of true sports agony when the beat the Cardinals in the 1985 World Series. I had never followed Bo’s Heisman-winning football exploits at Auburn. I had probably never heard of him until I saw his first baseball card in the 1986 Topps Traded/Rookies set. But once I started to see and hear about the things he could do on the baseball field, I didn’t have any choice but to want to see more.
The Physics of Corking a Bat
On June 3, 2003, Chicago Cubs slugger Sammy Sosa stepped to the plate in the first inning of a game against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. With runners on second and third, Sosa chopped a grounder to second, shattering his bat in the process. Umpire Tim McClelland examined the pieces of the broken bat, and to the surprise of the sports world, discovered that it was corked. Sosa was ejected, and thus began a most embarrassing episode in his career.
Corking a bat, or illegally doctoring it by drilling a hole in the barrel and filling it with cork or pieces of rubber, is believed to help players hit the ball farther. Baseball lore says that hollowing out the wooden barrel and replacing it with lighter material allows the player to swing it faster and hit the ball harder. This alteration also supposedly makes the bat springier, catapulting the ball off the bat and sending it an extra 10-20 feet. In a game often decided by a fraction of an inch, this could mean the difference between a sacrifice fly and a three-run homer.