Dr. Baseball

Doogie showing more medical confidence than I could feign

My least favorite part of the Steroids Era–brought to the forefront again with the Manny news–is this call for fans to understand the medical & pharmaceutical ins and outs of all of these bizarre hormonal treatments, steroids, HGHs, &tc. I start to feel like a college kid again, who’s stumbled mistakenly into a conversation about pot paraphernalia with the water bongs and the bong bombs and the twigs and whatever.

To wit, this LATimes article, quoted in part:

The medication in question was human chorionic gonadotropin, or HCG, according to a source familiar with the situation not authorized to publicly discuss the issue.

A high-ranking sports doping authority said HCG could legitimately be prescribed for a man who does not naturally produce enough testosterone, but BALCO founder and convicted steroid dealer Victor Conte said it is often used to replenish testosterone levels at the end of a cycle of steroid treatments.

HCG is one of dozens of substances prohibited under baseball’s policy. Players can call a hotline to check the legality of any substance and can get a therapeutic-use exemption for any legitimate medical use of a banned substance.

So either Manny used to take steroids and is now taking this under-the-table med to replenish supplies of some chemical to some organ, or he naturally produces less testosterone than normal and must resupply his corpus with perfectly legal medication. That quick recap makes it sound like I now understand the situation, even just a little. I DO NOT. I don’t understand the situation at all, but I feel like I should understand it.

I don’t want to feel like I should understand this stuff. I don’t know what aspirin is or how it can treat a headache or a footache equally. I am not a doctor. Don’t make me be a doctor now. I just want to watch baseball.

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Pitch-tipping: the new old piracy

King Kelly, now- beloved base-skipper

Doug Glanville posted a New York Times column about the A-Rod pitch-tipping allegation, in which he argues that:

If in fact there was a pitch-tipping scheme, I would expect a full investigation, not just of Alex but of any player who would share information with his opponent. It is that serious.

It’s a little hard for me to view this whole tipping sidenote with the stern and worried attitude that Glanville presents in the column. In 50 years, such episodes will be remembered fondly, as signs that baseball was still a quirky game with lots of little ins and outs and rules-trifling trickery. Excepting steroids (which I consider an entirely different level of “oh shit”), Pete Rose and the Black Sox scandal, the baseball literati and fanerati look back on most of the gambling and cheating and boozing and fighting from the old days as symbols of freewheeling charm and the anti-establishment nature of the game, with the canonization of rogue leagues and managers and players who were giant assholes. Here I’m thinking of your King Kellys (drank himself to death, ran from first to third directly), and your Ty Cobbs (old X-ACTO-Spikes).

It’s notable perhaps that pitch-tipping to the other team can affect the outcome of the game, in the manner of “throwing” a game. It remains, though, that if Honus Wagner devised a secret code between he and Nap Lajoie, with a double shuffle-left hand twitch-triple-spit, it’d be a fantastic quip about the simpatico between baseball legends. The stories that survive over time are those that transgress. The only incidences of nicety that last are those involving extreme nicety (Christy “The Christian Gentleman” Mathewson comes to mind).

Not so cute when it's contemporary.

In times like these, it bears remembering that people used to really fucking hate pirates. The global outrage over this Somali pirate business, with calls for government actions and protections and whatnot, echoes the way populations used to view the pirates of yesteryear. The bastards impeded commerce and scared everybody. Now, of course, our nations most beloved hero is a pirate: Ross Ohlendorf.

All I’m saying is that, as ever, let’s be careful about the nature of our unrest. For there will come a time when we’ll laugh at ourselves and the mess we made back then.

bigPumaLinks: baseball all the time edition

– Keeper of the Kohn, on Hulu. This is a documentary about Peter Kohn, the Middlebury College lacrosse team’s retired equipment manager. Kohn’s primary passion is lacrosse, but he made his way out to the baseball fields at Middlebury every once in a while to give us a pep talk, and to manage our equipment for a day or two. I knew little of him back then, and this video goes a long way to tell the man’s story. In early season baseball, Kohn, a master ball-finder, would head out into the trees behind the outfield wall at Forbes Field and return an hour later with three or four of the skankiest, rottenest baseballs you’ve ever seen in your life.

– The e-book revolution reaches the Mariners dugout, as the old (Jarrod Washburn and his paper dinosaurs) and the new (Brandon Morrow and his 3-year-old e-book reader) clash over technology, and bond over content. Geoff Baker of the Seattle Times

– Virginia Heffernan looks at the manner of discourse among reader comments on journalism sites. The Medium – NYTimes

– Fun Start: A concise overview of the season and its funness thus far. David Pinto, Baseball Musings

– Several days ago marked the anniversary of the interesting Bissinger vs. Leitch debate on HBO. Deadspin

– Keith Olbermann‘s apolitical baseball blog, Baseball Nerd, is pretty great, as well-thought and meticulous as you might expect. Baseball Nerd on closers, look-alikes.

Let’s all watch somebody Twitter: Fox Sports Ohio’s Jeff Brantley and new media

Reds broadcaster and new Twitterer Jeff Brantley

I’ve watched Fox Sports Ohio for the last few days, as the Astros played a series with the Reds. The Fox broadcasters, Thom Brennaman and the former reliever “Cowboy” Jeff Brantley, have an ongoing “plot” along with the Reds broadcast crew, detailing Brantley’s unwilling entrance into the Twitterverse. Jordan Morris, of the great podcast Jordan, Jesse Go!, recently called for an end to the “Jeez, what is this Twitter thing-a-mah-jig” segments on morning talk shows. Fox Sports Ohio has yet to heed this call.

The Scene: Brennaman, the savvy play-by-play voice, baits Brantley into a Twitter convo, telling Cowboy that people are clamoring to know what he ordered on the pizza pie that will arrive, what he thinks of the latest Desperate Housewives epp, &tc. Brantley then says something like “No sir, no way. I’ll be spending time with my family. I’ve got kids at home, I don’t need to be Tweetsing or Twopping or whatever.”

Last night, the plot reached the zenith of its arc. Under pressure from every member of the Reds broadcast team, Brantley manned a Blackberry and began to Twitter on camera. I watched him Twitter. I felt like I was watching a family in the airport, with dorky dad and mom chatting away just happy to be together, while the teenaged Brantley ignored them completely in favor of his celly. You can find the results at his Twitter page, twitter.com/RedsCowboy.

Brantely did use Twitter to repeat what he was already broadcasting to far more than the 700-odd of his followers: “Nix should start!!!” (one of his pet causes of late), “Volquez is looking good…….so far,” “Berkman on deck.”

"Vote Herrera...it will be life-size haha."

On the other hand, his foray wasn’t limited to simple statements of fact. Fox Sports Ohio staged a poll on who should be the next bobblehead doll at the ballpark. One of the choices was the short lefty reliever and fan favorite Daniel Ray Herrera. On Herrera, Brantley tweeted: “Vote Herrera…it will be life-size haha.” There is wit there, and voice, and a lust for life that has escalated the Twitter role. That is not the tweet of someone who’s hating what he’s doing. With social media, there’s a special place for those who embrace a media’s humorous aspects more quickly. The rewards go to those who know how to work with context and existing knowledge to craft a great tweet. To some, it comes naturally, on Twitter as in life.

To Brantley’s credit, he finally muttered, “I figured it out.”

What’s so big about Lance Berkman

This is a new static page at the top of the page, heading in the direction of explaining the name of this blog to others, and attempting to articulate for myself the appeal of the namesake.

When it comes to baseball, our natural tendency as fans (and really, the core feature of fandom) is to cling to particular constant elements amid a universe that is in many respects constantly changing. (We surround ourselves with constants in our non-sorting lives, too, with where possible nice homes, spouses, tattered threadbare boxer shorts we can’t throw away, antiques, mementos, etc.)

The team is the most obviously steadfast mental framework by which to organize a baseball Super-ego. It’s easy to attach yourself to a team in your hometown, or to a team that your parents follow from one of their old hometowns. It’s a natural feeling,  this long-term relationship of baseball fandom, and the requisite ups and downs, disappointments and jubilations that come with it. The locality, the typeface and logo, the uniforms, the roster that turns over at pace just slower than the arc of a player’s career: the baseball team is like the larger and more powerful gear on a three speed bike, spinning at a productive but comfortably measured pace.

The smaller gears of that bike are the players. They spin and jerk and make your heart race as you climb the hills, downshifting into the daily minutiae of fandom. Switching metaphors abruptly because I thought of a good one: if you think of a baseball fan’s attentions as a clock, the team is the hour hand, changing but slower, with a gradation that is less jarring than the second-hand jerk of a blown elbow tendon. The players are the minute hand. They spin, not too fast to manage, but you can see the movement with your naked eye as said tendons pop, young hot players get sent down to the minors and young hot players grow into old reliable players. The second hand is, let’s say, the schedule of games for the day, moving so quickly that each tick is defined not on its own terms, but on the unsettling fact that it has already passed.

All of this is to say that Lance Berkman is the player that I track along the courses of all of these complicated metaphorical mechanisms. He’s the player about whom I would say, for example, “I can’t believe he’s been in the league for ten fuckin’ years already,” because I’ve bound my own development as a sentient baseball fan to his game, to his baseball career. It’s worth delving into, this binding clause, if only for my own continued development, my own continued sentience:

Berkman at Rice, c/o the official Rice web site

I watched Berkman play ball at Rice University (my parents are alums and I lived two blocks from the campus). I was in high school, it was 1997. I wasn’t particularly aware of him as a singular entity, as a distinct player per se, and I didn’t follow the Rice Owls with much care. It was nice for an evening to go out to Reckling Park and catch some high-level college ball when there wasn’t a high school game for me to sit on the bench for. On one such evening, I watched the switch-hitting Berkman send a pitch high into the purple night sky from the right side of the plate, one of his preposterous 41 that year, leaving him third on the single-season college list to this day (this was, I think, before aluminum bat restrictions were tightened down and the numbers levelled out).

Fellow Rice player Matt Anderson, of the 100 m.p.h. fastball, was picked first in the 1997 draft (he would fail utterly in the league and was done by age 26). Picks 2 through 15 included some pretty good players, among them Vernon Wells, J.D. Drew (who would hold out for more money and give Phillies fans yet another reason to huck D batteries), Troy Glaus, Michael Cuddyer, and Jon Garland. None of these players, however, have thus far matched the individual accomplishments of the 16th player taken, drafted by the Astros out of Houston, my team, the hometown team.

If my attention wasn’t focussed squarely on Berkman yet, the Astros pick sealed it. I was in, and I immediately and foolishly hoped for a fast rise through the minors and the big league success that all of us hope for out of our team’s first round picks. More often than not, this is an easy ticket to madness. But in this case, in a short two years Berkman drank his cup of coffee, and in 2000 he hit 21 homers in 353 at bats. In ’01 it was 34 homers and 126 RBI, and &tc. to the present day. It still feels improbable, that one of the few players I truly wanted to quickly succeed from the first day he was drafted actually did, and for more than just the token appearance in the big leagues. Berkman, in fact, rose just as quickly to the top tier of hitters in the league.

The count as of today is 293 home runs, .300 career batting average, .412 career on base percentage, a career OPS of .969, two top-three votes for MVP (some schlub named Pujols appears above him in each of those years, and numerous others), 5 All Star games. He led the league in doubles in 2001 and 2009, RBI in 2002. Anyway, I could go on.

Berkman at the Home Run Derby, 2008

The fact of his big league success would not alone warrant something as prestigious as name-dropping him into blog titledom. Indeed, since I first watched him play for the Astros, I’ve also been a huge fan of his style. Berkman is the type of player who seems destined only for baseball: jogging slowly, for example, his gait suggests a middle-aged accountant trotting barefoot over hot beach sand. He’s a big, built guy, but he gives the impression that he’s the chubby John Kruk-type. “Beer league softball player” is a term often employed to describe him by those who like the idea, and who still cling to the old stereotype about baseball players and physical fitness (the retirement of David Wells seems to have let the matter rest for now). That type of miscalculation creates a certain amount of pleasure for the closer fan, who knows better than all of that. Berkman doesn’t have the Golden Boy stat-monster crazy-good stature of a Pujols, a Bonds, a Frank Thomas, a Teixeira, a Griffey, &tc. He’s in the class of the under-discussed, about whom commentators opine only when he’s in the home ballpark for a weekend series. When LB leaves town, the talk returns to the machine-like deities of the day. Berkman is too human to linger in consciousness for too long, like the UPS man.

Berkman is a switch hitter, but his lefty swing is to his righty swing as Matthew Broderick’s movie career is to his theater work: you wouldn’t complain about either, but it’s obvious which one pays the bills. He lets the bat drop to his shoulder a few times as the pitcher delivers. His hands are loose at the plate, and if there is a trait in a great hitter that I value, it is loose hands. Berkman waves the bat around his shins a few times, taps the front of home plate and brings the bat calmly up to his shoulder. Some great hitters coil themselves into a state of high tension with the pitch, like for example Gary Sheffield’s manic preparatory bat-wrenching. Berkman, however, lets the tension go: a state of readied relaxation that recalls a judo combatant eyeing his opponent’s next attack.

When he swings, you can feel the apparatus that is Berkman’s swing spring into production mode. The bat hovers into place, then bolts across the plate on a level plane. It may seem a stretch, but the levelness of the bat’s track, and the sureness of his wrists from the left side, remind me of footage of Ted Williams’ swing. When Berkman hits a sure homer, he brings the bat back around and sets it gingerly–pleasantly–down onto the plate.

Lance Berkman is my favorite player. The other night, in the middle of an early season slump, he did not tap his shoulder with the bat. I felt something was wrong, that he was making a small adjustment, looking for a slump-breaker. It was just that irksome to me that a tic in his batting stance made me nervous, as though a favorite scene had been deleted from a favorite movie: the plotline was still there but the chronology was almost imperceptibly altered. The chronology of Berkman’s swing, the chronology of his career, and of his team: these are the timelines of my baseball fandom, and the mirror into which I gaze as a fan. Berkman hits a ton, does his work, and has fun, which is all I can hope for from a player, and from myself.

On baseball fields, and space, and grass

Many writers cite the green expanse of a baseball field that pops into view upon emerging from the sub-grandstand walkways of the nation’s ballparks. The field–and the idea of a field–is integral to our historical and cultural image of baseball, from Elysian Fields on. Even then, in New York in the mid 19th century, green space was hard to come by. The New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club crossed the river to New Jersey, inaugurating baseball’s version of the escape from the crowded masses of the city to a bit of open land and leisure.

“A Baseball Match at the Elysian Fields, Hoboken” fr. 19th Century baseball (click image for link)

Inverting the initial formula, ballparks were soon plunked into middle of the city, setting the fabled field on the outskirts into the mire as a stand-alone sanctuary. And even still, the ballpark in the center of the teeming city is still a novelty. Cities capitalize on every square of property, apportioning commercial value to each hash on the grid. In that context, a large, roofless structure committing acres to emptiness can shimmer like a mirage threatening to fade into pawn shops, convenience stores and financial centers with the next glance.

bigPumaLinks: Easter edition

If you’re not following the baseball yatra (yatra: n. [Hindi] journey; travel) of Rinku and Dinesh as they train as pitchers in the Pirates system, you’re missing two kids learning baseball from the ground up, in a most unusual manner. The Million Dollar Arm Blog

Eric Nusbaum wrote an essay on baseball and literature at The Baseball Chronicle, and he’s got a new (I think) blog, Pitchers & Poets, that asks some interesting questions.

There’s a movement online that I was until recently completely oblivious to: customized, original, decentralized baseball card production. A great place to start is at Goose Joak, which will enable you to fan out to the vast networks of Photoshop wizards putting these very nice-looking cards together. Aside: don’t miss the Lebowski cards, here, here, here, &tc. In fact, it’s such a fun idea, I did one myself:

The first Waiting For Berkman baseball card

Man alive, what is this? Hand Spits Burks on the Humbug Journal

Bill “Spaceman” Lee knows a hitter when he sees one, and he sees Manny

Lee still plays a whole ton of baseball, in whatever form he can get it

My philosophy about Manny Ramirez is in total accord with Bill “Spaceman” Lee’s in this recent interview with ESPN: the hitting trumps. It really is hard to imagine his presence becoming so negative in Boston that it outweighed his prodigious stick (I didn’t follow it all that closely, admittedly, so I’m not making an argument one way or the other, and I’m sure the Dodgers were happy to have Boston jettison him).

On the matter, Lee says:

I hear these statements, Papelbon, excitable boy and stuff and he goes “He’s a cancer.” Well, cancer is in everybody and you have to learn how to live with it. You can’t cut cancer out. You have to learn to live with it. Ya know, some cancers are worse than others. Life is tough like that. I mean, Schilling and (Manny) are opposites and because they were opposites, the Sox won in 2004. It’s ironic. You have to learn to tolerate people. I’m just sad the Red Sox didn’t do that.

Seems sensible.

My favorite part of the interview, though, is Lee’s description of Manny’s hitting style, which couldn’t be more perfect or more interesting. The Great Eccentric himself manages to cut through the bullshit and describe Manny as a professional hitter, and one of the best:

Wow, I’ll tell ya, it’s hard to put your finger on exactly what it is, but he’s so unpredictable. It’s like you can’t get into his mind because he’s not there either. It’s funny. I’ve watched him in spring training since I first came over to the Red Sox, and he did something that Reggie Smith always did. He would always hit the ball the other way all the time right at the beginning of spring training. And what it did, it forced him to stay on the ball all the time. He’s got this unbelievable habit of driving the ball the other way. And to get him out, you have to throw 90 inside corner. And people can’t do that all day long on him.

Lou Piniella always had a saying, ‘You can come into my kitchen for a bite, but don’t sit down for dinner.’ And that’s what Manny does. If you try to bury him in, he’ll make an adjustment and he’ll bite ya again. And he’s just a great breaking ball hitter, he always keeps his hands back, he’s not afraid to get jammed. He is devastating and that’s why I stuck up for him. Basically what I said in the (Red Sox) Hall of Fame dinner is I guess the Red Sox got tired of winning. Because without him I told them they were going nowhere. And told people they’re going to be in fourth place this year without him.

~

I spent the day with the Spacemen once, when he was leading a pretty raggedy baseball camp on my college campus and I was helping out. He is a serious chatterer, going on and on about not the space-cadet, pothead meandering that many might assume, but about baseball and politics and memory and socio-economics and sociology. There weren’t any unfathomable logical leaps, any stoner conversational joyrides. Just good old-fashioned master class conversation. It was all very enjoyable, seemingly by all parties.

The Spaceman's nemesis: Munson! as seen on CardboardGods.net

The one thing that I got hung up on was that standers by continually peppered Lee with questions, and I’m sure it happens to him constantly. The most tired of the questions was “Who was your least favorite hitter to pitch to?” The asker typically leaned in a little, with a slight smile, like the cat was about to be out of the bag. “Thurman Munson,” then Lee would go on for a few predetermined paragraphs about Thurman the grouch, etc. This isn’t some remarkable insight, just an observation, and it seems like everything I read somehow kicks back to this irk of mine, including the ESPN interview. Irks aside, Lee does always seem to conjur some insight, and he surely brings it on himself and doesn’t actually dislike answering the same questions over and over:

The Mag: Who was the toughest right-handed pitcher you had to face in your day?

BL: Oh, wow, Bill Madlock. Bill Madlock was a great hitter. (Thurman) Munson was a good two-strike hitter. If you went 3-1 on Munson, Munson would try and jack you, and you’d just turn it over and he’d hit a ground ball to short. But you get two strikes on Pete Rose, you get two strikes on good hitters, they become different types of hitters. And to pitch, you have to recognize when that is, and that’s what pitching’s all about.

Loosely related:

MLB.com: Manny’s first RBIs lead Dodgers
Dreamcricket: Manny Ramirez tries his luck with cricket
Rosterized: my own reflections on Manny Ramirez from blogs past

The style remains the same

Ken Griffey, Jr., is a little thicker in the legs and the waist, but the swing remains the same. I saw him in a Spring Training game on TV; he with the same relaxed stance with his hands close in, near his neck. Legs pretty straight, a little rockety rock through the hips, head cocked towards the pitcher. With the swing, his hands move in that protractor-grade arc and the bat moves on such an assured plane that it suggests the pitch was thrown to the path of the bat, that the swing is the constant element in the equation, and that the pitch just meets it where it always is. His front leg stays straight, his back leg gives a little. The swing is over in an instant.

It’s the same swing that I saw when I saw Griffey as a kid, when the Kid was a kid, proving in one sense that as age and ability evolve–increasing in the case of the former and diminishing in the case of the latter–style will kick it around for a while. Style is what stirs the embers of sense memory and emotion. Griffey’s swing stirs the embers, while his home run count does not.

I watch baseball through this style lens. A result, probably, of all the time I spent on the bench. My baseball career spanned a couple of decades–a run that took me through D-3 college ball–the last six or seven years of which I spent backing up better catchers than I. In other words, I did a lot of watching, a lot of ruminating about the games progressing on the other side of the chain link fence. When you aren’t in the game, making quick decisions and throwing yourself around, the currency that you rely on most for entertainment and for insight is style. The stances and swings of my college teammates are as familiar to me as those of Bagwell, Biggio and Berkman (my hometown heroes) and as characteristic as a smile.

Devo, an outfielder with a puckish grin whom I once met up with on his home island of St. John, USVI (he was floating in blue water up to his neck, with his sunglasses on): he held his hands by his waist so that the top of the bat made it maybe up to the top of his head, and he swiveled his hips Griffey-like before improbably cranking the ball. Ethan, a senior who looked to my freshman eyes like a 35-year-old: from a deep crouch he jerked the bat up and down again in the box, unloading from the left side of the plate and letting his front toe fly in the follow through; firmly in the Barry Bonds school. Danny Dynamite, my friend and roommate and an academic masochist: he held his arms straight out behind him as if they were pinned in place.

You can tell a really good friend from 200 yards just by the way he walks, or takes a walk.

Baseball observers swim in deep, still waters, the slow, satisfying current of which is familiarity. Griffey, Jr., is that current for now, and though he’ll be gone from the big game sometime soon, I’ll bet that his swing will be the same when he’s eighty.

The flash and the slow burn: the oceans and tide pools of fantasy baseball

Stare long enough at the fantasy baseball draft window on your widescreen monitor and it starts to look like a roster of high school crushes; people that you used to know or should’ve known better but were quickly forgotten in favor of the latest. The names scroll by, picked by others, gathered up as quickly as you could think of them and the only way to think of them is “ah well, he’s probably not what I was looking for anyhow,” or “it wouldn’t have worked out anyhow,” or  “all the better that he’s gone before I could go and screw it up.”