Category Archives: Baseball

Baseball

Peter Gammons, The Red Sox, and Their Wonderful Machine

gammons.jpgNow that Jason Bay has signed with the Mets, I can report that the Red Sox were never really interested in him. You see, Boston gave him an MRI midway through last season and discovered he had some knee issues, thus rendering him useless as a cog in the Sox’s grand scheme.

Why didn’t the Mets’ doctors see the same issues when they examined him? Because they couldn’t have, and neither could any other team. You see, the Red Sox are at the cutting edge of all aspects of the game: scouting, sabremetrics, proper allocation of resources, and medical equipment. They have a state-of-the-art MRI machine that can not only diagnose ligament and deep-tissue injuries in split seconds, but can also cause them!

But this machine doesn’t cause injuries immediately. It implants a special subcutaneous chip that resonates to a very special frequency that only the Sox’s MRI machine can emit. If the Sox sign a player after examining him, they remove the chip. If not, they emit the frequency and cause maximum damage.

In the case of Jason Bay, the Sox plan to be as benevolent as possible. They will not evoke their right to destroy his knees by mysterious remote waves before the first 18 months of his current contract. After that, all bets are off. The Sox also won’t say whether they will simply cause Bay’s ACL and MCL to deteriorate slowly, or if they will make all three knee ligaments blow out simultaneously and catastrophically.

As for other players the Sox have examined but not signed, they would not say how or when they would be crippled. However, it is highly suspected that if Jon Lackey hadn’t gone with Boston, they would have given him a torn labrum, and possibly mad cow disease.

Baseball, Politics Schmolitics

Red Sox Nation Dooms Us to Idiocracy

scottbrown.jpgRepublican Scott Brown has triumphed in the Massachusetts Senate race, and Democrat Martha Coakley has failed. Among many factors in Coakley’s defeat was her Red Sox-related gaffe last week, when she erroneously identified Curt Schilling as a Yankees fan. In the Bay State, where the Sawx are held much more sacred than any other institution, that was a huge mistake.

I don’t know if anyone’s choice of candidate was actually influenced by this specific misstep. By all accounts, she ran a spectacularly inept campaign. The Schilling goof was simply indicative of the laziness she exhibited throughout her Senate run, which was actually more of a sleepwalk.

But if anyone, in all seriousness, did not vote for her because she didn’t know enough about the Red Sox, go get hit by garbage truck. And then catch on fire. And then get hit by a garbage truck on fire. I hate you so god damn much right now.

What’s more important, folks: the fact that your Senator knows all about The Bloody Sock, or the fact that your Senator will send a death knell to any hope of reform and change for at least the next two years?

I love the Mets. I think about them and write about them and worry about them way beyond the point I should for something that has no direct bearing on my happiness and well being. One of the big reasons I’ve never liked Rudy Giuliani is because he’s the epitome of the obnoxious, blowhard Yankee fan (being a crypto-fascist made it easy to hate him, too).

However, if there was a candidate who was exactly the same as Rudy in his fandom but the exact opposite politically, versus a guy who was a diehard Mets fan but Giuliani-esque in his world view, I’d vote for the Yankee fan in a second. BECAUSE SPORTS ARE DUMB GAMES AND POLITICS CAN FUCK YOUR LIFE UP FOR DECADES.

If nothing else, hopefully this incident wakes lefties out of the torpor that’s set on them in record time. Yes, Obama hasn’t done everything we wanted. Yes, he has been slow to act in certain respects (most infuriatingly, on gay rights). Yes, even before Brown’s election, the health care reform bill was less than ideal. Yes, there are still mounds of problems in this country that have yet to even plateau.

But if I may return to baseball for a minute, you almost have to think of Obama in 2010 as Jackie Robinson in 1947. There are too many people for whom the mere idea of a black man being in the national spotlight is too much to bear. Obama can’t be as aggressive or fiery as some people would like, because there’s too many people waiting for him to lose his temper, do something rash, and fail his way out of the Oval Office.

Like when Joe Wilson yelled LIAR at him during a Congressional address. Why did Wilson do that–because he’s a nut? Yes, but also because he hoped Obama would fly off the handle and yell at him, thus alienating half the country ready to think of him as a Scary Black Man. So even though Wilson thoroughly deserved to be punched in the mouth, Obama kept his cool because that was ultimately more important than the immediate desire for retribution.

Obama needs to weather the storm of his first few years and prove to The Haters that he knows what he’s doing and that him being in power isn’t the nightmare they think it is (or want it to be). It’s totally unfair, but it wouldn’t be the first time a black man had to work harder than his white counterparts just gain some respect. And after this “trial period”, like Robinson, he can start fighting back against the Ben Chapmans of the world and slide in spikes up.

Ask yourself this: Looking at the Sarah Palins and the Glenn Becks and the Bill O’Reillys (a fascist Mets fan) of the world–who are clearly at the vanguard of the Republican party–do you really think there’s no difference between Dems and the GOP? I’m not the biggest fan of the two-party system. But for right now, today, what’s our best hope for rising out of the shit eight years of Bush dumped us in–Obama’s slower-than-you’d-like agenda, or the Republicans’ obstructionist paleoconservative nihilistic non-agenda?

Thumbnail image for 99_ventura_schilling.pngOh, and Curt Schilling? Go get fucked sideways with rusty rake.

Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter

Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter: “The New York Mets: Ethnography, Myth, and Subtext”

I found The New York Mets: Ethnography, Myth, and Subtext completely at random last winter, on the shelves of a Borders in Queens of all places. I’d never heard of it before, or its author, Richard Grossinger, or even the small imprint that published it (Frog Ltd.).

But the title grabbed me, as it was aggressively anti-dumb jockery, reminiscent more of a college textbook than a work on baseball. And the back cover didn’t have the typical sports book blurbs. Sure, it had some praise from NY Post scribe Mike Vaccaro. But it also contained blurbs from Jonathan Lethem and Paul Auster, two of my favorite novelists. That should give you some idea of the audience this aims to reach.

This is a book written by a fan that does not fit into the typical Fan Writing Mold. Most fan writing these days falls into one of two categories. It’s either the chest-thumping, dick-swinging style of comment sections, as if the only point of sports is so you can talk shit to anonymous people. Then there’s the Woe Is Us style, which says that because your team hasn’t won a championship in X amount of years, you and your fellow Fill in the Blank Fans have known a suffering that no one else can appreciate and thus your fandom is spiritually superior to all others.

Grossinger, an ethnographer by trade, looks at his favorite team differently. The book is made up of a series of essays, most of which try to focus on one specific era. But really, he sees the Mets’ history as one long continuum, and each piece touches on every other period in one way or another, as if it was all one long game. Witness the first essay in the book, “Endy’s Catch”, in which the titular play in the 2006 NLCS sends Grossinger on a mental tour through all the Mets players he loved over the years who, for one reason or another, were traded or let go and never seen again.

He seems to have a soft spot for players whom the Mets never gave a chance. The book’s centerpiece, “Playing Catch with Terry Leach”, discusses his obsession with the once-promising sidearmer who had a hard time catching on in the majors. Leach’s funky delivery and cerebral nature made him the odd man out of the Mets’ rotation for much of the 80s, until a rash of injuries forced him into the spotlight in the troubled summer of 1987. Grossinger referred to Leach’s saga as “a bit of Jean Valjean, Jude the Obscure, Billy Budd.”

Will everyone enjoy this book? Not unless everyone enjoys detailed studies of obscure Mets of yesteryear like Hubie Brooks and George Theodore. Its audience is probably limited to Mets fans, and a very small subset thereof. Rather than a baseball book proper, it’s more of a rambling ethnography whose subject happens to be baseball. This book is not meant to please anyone. It seems unconcerned with pleasing anyone but itself, which is probably why I like it so much.