The Game That Matters

On Saturday, something that had not happened in twenty one years took place during the afternoon Tigers/Yankees game. The situation was thus:

Runners on the corners, Clemens on the mound, Posada behind the plate, the count was full, there were less than two outs. Jim Leyland, Detroit's manager, called for a double steal. For the edification of the baseball-ignorant, a double steal is a play by which the man on first attempts a steal of second, with two possible positive outcomes. If the catcher throws to second, the instant the ball leaves his hand, the man at third guns it for home. Even if the man stealing second is tagged out, the man from third easily scored and you gained a run. If, fearing a double steal, the catcher does not make the throw, the man on third stays put and you very simply stole second base, not only placing another man in scoring position but taking the ground ball double play out of the equation.

The double steal is a relatively quotidian occurence, particularly when aggressive managers like Leyland are around. He called the double steal this time, and the runner at first took off. Clemens threw a fastball which struck the hitter out, and Jorge came up gunning for second. As the double steal dictates, the man at third--Brandon Inge--immediately took off for home.

What Inge did not anticipate--heck, what no one anticipated--was that Clemens would stick his glove out and intercept the ball. This, of course, left Inge stranded between home and third, and Clemens easily tagged him out. It was a beautiful, rare (the last time it happened was in 1986) scenario which reminds all watching of the pure elegance of baseball.

Baseball is a game in which nine innings can go by without an unexpected event, or which a single inning can contain three uncommon, outrageous happenings. Baseball is above all a game, however, and it maintains that distinction with a pride and dignity that other sports could never hope to attain. No other game could see itself affected by the third basemen surreptitiously taking the ball from the pitcher, only to tag the man at third out when he takes his lead. No other game can elicit such sandlot trickery without losing some of its honor and its integrity. In baseball, the fact that it is a game is its honor and integrity. A rundown between second and third is every bit as plausible in a major league game as a little league game, and that makes sense because baseball is the game that connects generations like no other.

Baseball is a game where intelligence is valued, athleticism is helpful, but more than anything, simply skill is required to win. In football, you can be the greatest mind with the greatest throwing arm of all time, but if your body is smaller than everyone else, you will get crushed into tiny little pieces and never walk again. A linebacker can't simply be good at football. He also has to be big and fast. In basketball, even the greatest shooters languish on the bench if they can't jump out of the building and run past a train. In baseball, David Eckstein is a major leaguer.

Now obviously, to pitch you need a special arm which can throw it 95 mph. But then for every Joel Zumaya there is a Jamie Moyer, craftily outwitting hitters for years by throwing stuff that wouldn't scare me. Fielding doesn't so much require outlandish, eerie athleticism but awareness of the field, the hitter, the pitcher, the wind, a good jump on the ball, a quick throw to the right base. And heck, you could even pretend to forget there were only two outs, wait for the guy on second to sprint to third, then immediately gun him down. It has been done, and only baseball could do it with a sly grin rather than a sheepish frown.

So many fail to understand baseball's majestic greatness, and from a certain perspective that is understandable. If you don't care who wins the game, the right fielder moving ten steps to the left, the guy on second stealing signs, the fastball up and in begin to lose their transcendant qualities. You start to worry less about why the pitcher has shaken the catcher off four times and more about why he won't pitch and get the inning over with already. You start to lose sight of the elegant nine-inning format where the game itself keeps time, and wonder why a buzzer wouldn't go off so you could watch your beloved OC coming up next.

But when the pitcher is your pitcher, and the hitter belongs to the most underhanded, duplicitous, dirty, abhorrent team in America, the wheel play takes on celestial significance, the hanging curveball evokes somniferous horrors, and the umpire who calls too small a strike zone is a regular Jekyll when your team is batting, a loathsome Hyde when your team is pitching.

The counter-intuitive aspects of baseball which seem so inane to college football fans are the reasons baseball lives on. Yes, the defense does have the ball, and no, the pitcher's duel is not boring. When Joba Chamberlain wipes out the heart of Detroit's order, and Edwar Ramirez follows by throwing changeups that don't seem slow until you realize you struck out and the ball hasn't even hit the catcher's mitt yet, anyone with a heart can only rage with enthusiasm as the young guns are throwing the ball right by--or way in front of--the seasoned Tigers lineup.

There is nothing wrong with watching football or basketball or any other sport (save soccer). In fact, it could be argued that playing those sports is just as enjoyable or moreso (particularly given that I have played basketball my entire life). But for the James Bond flicks that are basketball games, there are the timeless baseball Godfathers. While football creates war movie epics, baseball crafts Citizen Kane, 2001 and Field of Dreams (the latter quite literally!). Not everyone udnerstands them, not everyone gets them, not everyone cares, but in a hundred years, no one will remember who Ethan Hunt is. I'm betting they'll remember who Dave Bowman is.

Call baseball elitist, call it esoteric, call it slow, call it an old man's game, call it an old game period, but just remember: Miguel Cabrera swung at an intent ball and won the game with it. That didn't require thought or muscles or reaction times. All it required was the puerile art of a kid who had played baseball his whole life, and knew he had done the same thing when he was eight years old.

Roger Clemens stuck his glove out. He is 45 years old. He probably did the same thing when he was ten. Here's to the ageless game, in every sense of those words.

~The Sports Maunderer~

Midgets, Morons, MSNBC

In the course of this blog's outrageously awesome research department (otherwise known as a nasty addiction to MSNBC.com), I have discovered why Americans no longer win international basketball tournaments, competitions and Olympics.

We are too short.

In all sincerity, how can one help but feel sorry for America. We used to be the tallest nation in the world, now we're short and fat.

But we still have our fallacious moralists.

Yes. Obviously. Indubitably. This guy is %100 correct. Clearly, declaring anything wrong while not being perfect yourself is hypocritical and pointless. Indeed, Bond's blatant cheating is acceptable, because, after all, other people have, at some point in time, cheated. Yes. The logic is irrefutable.

I know I normally leave the cantankerous, rambling soliloquys regarding the deprevation of morality to Mr. H.R. Williams, but really, this article is simply too inane to pass up. And sadly, it is rather reflective of America's general ideas about these things.

A) You can't ever claim someone else is doing something wrong because you aren't perfect either. Yes, that is a complete non sequitor, but what do you care?

B) Everybody is doing it, so you can't get upset by it. Yes, because obviously the more prevalent, quotidian and ubiquitous immorality becomes, the less disturbing it is.

C) It is instinctual; you would do it also. Quite so, because after all, the odds of someone having self-control in thie day and age are so low, that we believe simply because something comes naturally, that it is somehow ethical. Sure, that makes sense. Like when I just "naturally" want to kick Mike Celizic in the nuts, no one can complain because it was "instinctual".

Barry Bonds--knowingly or unknowingly, though we all know that such a control freak would not unknowingly do something like this (wow. I fit almost as many "knows" in there as Donald Rumsfeld)--cheated. He said so to a grand jury. This is reprehensible behavior, and one should not succumb to the puerile logic of any Mike Celizic in the world regarding his illicit overtaking of the home run record.

Of course, none of it really matters anyway. If Babe Ruth played in today's game (and hadn't spent his first several years as a pitcher), he would have hit 1,200 home runs.

And he did it all with a career .342 average. In case you were wondering, Bonds' is below .300.

And yes, the fact that Babe Ruth was a womanizer and drunk is reprehensible. I say this despite, having at some point in my life (I know, it is hard to believe) done something wrong. Oh aren't *I* a hypocrite. *wags finger at self*

~The Sports Maunderer~

P.S. In Bill Simmon's latest mailbag, a reader emailed him with the knowledge that he had recently bought the 1987 world series on DVD. Tim McCarver (Joe Buck's baseball buddy) at one point (I kiddeth not) uttered this sensational piece of insight:

"If you are a contact hitter, you've got to make contact to play in this league"

I feel like your life would be incomplete without this knowledge.

Well my bracket is in shreds

Gotta say, ESPN's "Who's Now" competition really surprised me. My bracket is in total shreds. I mean, goodness, only three of the four #1 seeds made the final four, and the other one was Shaq of all people. And Federer losing to Tony Parker? Who saw that coming. I mean it isn't like Tony Parker is a vastly overrated, ESPN created personality. But it could be worse, Tony could have beaten the greatest tennis player alive in the first round. Err



But really, I am just shocked that Tiger Woods got to the finals of this thing. I mean seriously, an ESPN moderated popularity contest where TIGER WOODS finished strong? What is this, verisimilitude land? I mean seriously, I could never have predicted any of these match-ups to go the way they did. Well, except for all of them. If I really had made a bracket, I would be undefeated right now.



Anyway, the time is for talking about baseball. Why? Because Aaron hasn't read my blog in a while, and the excuse he gives is fallacious. So in order to avoid making a liar out of Aaron "so hot it" Burns (no, I didn't make that up), I need to talk baseball for the first time in a while, so that his excuse ("You only write about baseball") makes some semblance of sense.



What to talk about? How about those wonderful Bronx Bombers. Yeah, them. The ones who have hit 21, 17 and 16 runs in individual games, but still managed to get shut out by the freaking Orioles. Paaaaaaathetic. Nevertheless, they are only 3 games out of the wildcard, because, well, the Indians have scored two runs or fewer in six of their last eight games. Funny how teams tend to go as their offenses go, even those with supposed great pitching.



Of course, the Yankees made a move at the trade deadline. A reliever was involved, because obviously the Yankees need bullpen help--their arms are worn out and even if they hadn't been mismanaged to a gruesome early death by the visage of vampire that is Joe Torre, they were never that good in the first place, so clearly trading for another bullpen arm was--



Wait, what? They traded AWAY Scott Procter?! They now have LESS arms in the bullpen than before? Yes, I officially quit on understanding this team. They make moves so boneheaded that one has to believe Brian Cashman is just sitting in a room with Torre somewhere, having this conversation:



Cashman: Joe, wake up, the game's over!



Torre: Hunh? What? Oh, right. Calm down, we need to tak this one game at a time, don't get too high or too low, stop worrying about whether or not you are playing well at the moment, just --



Cashman: Would you shut up? We're not having a team meeting after a seven game losing streak, we're talking trades.



Torre: Oh, right. Well, we need bullpen help and lots of it. Maybe a fifth starter also. But really, was just need to avoid doing anything dumb.



Cashman: I agree. So what do you say we trade part of our bullpen for a completely unnecessary infielder (we already have six of them) batting .231?



Torre: What? .231? Doesn't that mean that he gets hits every once in a while?



Of course, I'm not sure if that conversation could ever actually happen because Torre might not even know what "batting average" is. Really, I wonder if he has ever said anything other than "warm Proctor/Farnsworth/Viscaino up" in the fourth inning of a perfect game where Wang has only thrown 28 pitches.



A-Rod, meanwhile, needs to hit 500 quickly. He hasn't a hit since 499. Then again, I would have been a bit screwed up by the whole "going back in time for a suspended game thing" also, but seriously, he has done this 499 times before, you wouldn't think he'd find it so difficult.



Until the next boneheaded Yankees move (that won't be long...)



~The Sports Maunderer~