Monthly Archives: May 2009

Baseball

Zen and the Art of Hating Chipper Jones

chipper2.jpgI cannot possibly express to you the depths of my hatred for Chipper Jones. I’m not even going to try. The English language doesn’t have the right words. Not even the German language does.

But I can provide some reasons for why he should go eat several bags of dicks. Like him bitching about the umpires in last night’s game:

Let’s just say the baseball gods owe us one… The game came down to one play, and the umpire got it wrong.  Why he got it wrong, I don’t know… I never had a guy slide into my glove and be safe… That’s the whole game… We played a perfect game and got it taken away from us… It was a well-played game on both sides… That was top-notch baseball, and it was decided by a blown call.

Odd that Chipper would invoke the baseball gods, since I also mentioned them in a pair of tweets last night. I mentioned them because the Mets got a bad call to their detriment in the bottom of the 8th, when Jose Reyes tried to stretch his 1-out 2-RBI double into a triple. The throw beat Reyes, but a replay showed that Chipper didn’t apply a tag in time.

It was the kind of bang-bang play that only instant replay could definitively resolve. But since baseball thinks easily fixable human error is charming, the incorrect ruling stood.

Chipper didn’t say anything about that play, even though he was the man who fielded the ball. The play Chipper chose to whine about, though it was a stolen base attempt instead of an extra base hit, involved an essentially identical set of circumstances: a very close play on a runner who represented the tying run trying to reach third with less than two out.

I don’t think it was the umps’ intent to give the Mets a break after screwing them earlier. In the absence of available replay, I doubt the umps knew they blew either call. But in essence, that’s what they did. I even said at the time, “That’s totally a make-up call for the last inning.” (The Wife will bear witness that I actually said this out loud in full Baseball Nerd mode.)

This year and last, the Mets seem to get an enormous amount of blown calls in their games–most of which go against them. I know that sounds like Total Homer-ism, but my totally unscientific mental survey will bear me out.

It’s hard to prove, since neither MLB nor Retrosheet keep Blown Calls as a stat. But I recall at least four homers hit by Mets that were ruled ground-rule doubles or fouls last year, and at least two balls hit against the Mets that should have been ruled doubles/fouls that were called home runs. My point is, I think the baseball gods owe the Mets some good karma. (I’m not referring to the collapses of the two previous seasons, which are almost entirely bad karma of their own design.)

Not to mention that historically, when the Mets play the Braves, they never get any kind of break whatsoever. Granted, that’s because for many years the Braves were just flat-out better. But there were plenty of games that turned on worse blown calls than the ones Chipper was involved in.

Chipper said the game was “decided by a blown call,” but it was actually decided by two blown calls. One took a runner that should have been on third and called him out. The other took a runner that should have been called out and put him on third. Both men represented the tying run. One was erased, another took his place. The run scored, even after a delay in his arrival

You wanted a balancing of accounts from the baseball gods, Chipper? You got it. Yin and yang. Go in peace, my son.

And as you go in peace, please fall into an open manhole.

NYC

Two Unrelated Morning Idiocies

Walking up Gold Street this morning, passing through the projects, I saw a backhoe slowly chugging up the street alongside me. This is not an unusual sight in the neighborhood, since there’s an insane amount of road work going on.

Except for two things: It was brand new, nearly pristine John Deere backhoe, the kind you’d see on a farm. And it was laden down with junk.

The “hoe” part of the backhoe was filled with an old TV, broken kids’ toys, and a smashed-up sub-IKEA particle board furniture. The junk was arranged carefully, trying to make the best use of the space available in the hoe. But this still struck me as an extremely inefficient use of top-notch construction equipment.

It was also an extremely inefficient use of the roadways. Gold Street is all torn up from road work, leaving only one lane in either direction. So there’s no hope of getting around a backhoe traveling 12 miles an hour.

The backhoe made a left on York Street just as I did, and I decided that I had to see where this thing was going. It stopped halfway down the block, again blocking traffic, and waited for cars in the opposite lane to clear. Then it hopped the curb and drove into a project building’s trash lot, where all the dumpsters are kept.

So whoever runs this particular project decided two things:

(1) A backhoe makes a better trash hauler than a pickup truck, or a van, or any other regular vehicle.
(2) The dumpsters at this particular building are insufficient for the needs of this particular junk. I must truck it two blocks away, as slowly as possible, to another identical set of dumpsters.

Your tax dollars at work, ladies and gentlemen.

* * *

Shortly after this incident, I passed into the ritzier confines of Dumbo. I saw a gleaming red BMW with MD plates parked right underneath the Manhattan Bridge. I’ve driven to work many times, and I can tell you that you’ll see open parking spots like that about as often as you’ll see leprechauns. In fact, between the roadwork and the ridiculous alt-side restrictions, I usually wind up parking so far away from my office I may as well have walked from home. (This is how much I hate relying on the bus.)

So basically, this guy’s got everything in life working out just fine for him. Except that someone placed a banana peel on the car’s trunk.

This placement was not accidental, like someone was eating a banana and just tossed the peel casually, maybe hoping to start a silent film comedy cavalcade. The peel was at the exact center of the trunk, with the two halves splayed symmetrically.

I’m guessing someone saw the exact same thing I saw–brand new car, doctor’s plates, perfect free parking spot–and decided to throw some misfortune into his otherwise spotless life. Thank you, stranger, for making me smile.

NYC, Tuneage

Unfortunate Juxtoposition Theatre Presents…

While stuck in traffic, “Accidents Will Happen” popped up on my iPod via shuffle. I’m sure I’ve heard this song several thousand times, but not in quite a while. By rule, I am never in a good mood in the morning, but this immediately brightened my commute.

I got that warm feeling you get when you listen to something again for the first time since forever, and you remember how great it is. I thought about how it is exactly the right length. How haunting the outro is. How fantastic the lyrics are; not as overtly clever as in some of Mr. Costello’s songs, but simple and subtle in the best possible way. Lines like It’s damage that we do and never know/It’s the words that we don’t say that scare me so.

And I thought about how there was a period when I listened to Armed Forces on a nigh-daily basis. When it was so much a part of my being that, like Jonathem Lethem once said about Talking Heads’ Fear of Music, “I might have wished to wear the album…in place of my head”. I thought about listening to the whole album start to finish, something I never do anymore with any album in this iPod age.

And as Elvis sang Accidents will happen…, an ambulance came screeching alongside my bus, sirens blaring, lights flashing. It hopped a curb in front of an auto parts store, then squeezed in between a phalanx of parked cars and a truck that completely ignored its pleas to get through.

Real accidents always overshadow metaphorical ones. I hit pause until the drama passed. But when I unpaused the song, it just didn’t feel the same. Sigh.