24 Apr 2012, by Patrick
Long ago, when I was an undergraduate, I stopped going to classes. It wasn’t that I had better things to do; I spent a month trying to learn how to play the “B” chord on a guitar. Sometimes I would skip class, stay home and read the textbook. On those days I would wake up, shower, dress, and get ready to leave. When the time came to open the door to my dorm room and walk to class, I just... wouldn’t. I'd conjure some imagined stomach pains or blame insomnia. Then the next day, I’d imagine what it would be like to come back when everyone knew I wasn’t there the previous day, and I’d stay home then, too. It became a cycle. There were some classes I signed up for and then never attended even once.
It’s embarrassing to reflect back on that part of my life, not only for my academic failures, but for the sheer egoism I displayed. I imagined vengeful TAs and snickering classmates when in fact I was just a particularly faceless young man in a school of twenty-four thousand. I felt no connection to the teachers or students around me. No one noticed I was missing, except the professors who submitted the grades at the end of each quarter. It’s easy to look back on that part of my life and realize on the fact that there was really something wrong with me. At the time, though, I couldn’t (or perhaps wouldn’t) grasp the entirety of my situation; the moment the time came, I treated it as only a moment. That’s what falling feels like; you don’t have time to think about it because you’re too busy falling.
Run a search for “Rey Quinones” and the majority of the articles you’ll find will be about departure. They’ll utter the names of Spike Owen and Dave Henderson, who left the Mariners in exchange for Quinones in 1986. Or they’ll talk about Mike Dunne and Mark Merchant, the prospects Pittsburgh gave up two years later. The stories are rarely about Quinones himself, only his price. When the Pirates tired of him three months after his latest deal, they found no one left to trade with, so they cut him mid-season. They didn’t even consider sending him to the minors; they just wanted to be rid of him.
Assembling the story of Rey Quinones is like doing a puzzle with half the pieces missing. His name appears throughout the usual sports page fare. He’s a collection of numbers, usually errors, tacked into the third line of game recaps. He’s a series of anecdotes by beat writers, each more improbable and hilarious than the last. He’s a name to be thrown out on deadline day, the trade rehash, the remember-when article. But the one familiar article you never find for Rey Qunones is the “Where Are They Now?” piece. No one asks. No one cares to know.
There was never a question as to whether the kid could play. He had range to spare, plenty of pop in his bat, enough athleticism to make scouts smile. Everyone agreed that Quinones could have been a star. Ted Williams described him as perhaps being a “Frank Robinson at shortstop”, a picture that assaults the imagination. Mariners team trainer Rick Griffin claimed that he could throw a ball from home plate into the second deck of center field.
And yet what we have now are the anecdotes. The most famous of them was the time that Quinones was unavailable to pinch hit one game because he was back in the clubhouse playing Nintendo. (To be fair, he was on World 8-4 of Super Mario Bros.) He failed to show for the start of Spring Training in 1987; when questioned, he claimed that he’d had visa problems. Team president Chuck Armstrong had to remind him that you don’t need a visa to leave Puerto Rico, a U.S. protectorate. Perhaps even deadlier to his reputation were his on-field foibles; despite his strong arm, he often lobbed his throws to first, and booted the routine plays. He showed little in the way of concentration. He left his team without notice or permission to attend his wife’s grandmother’s funeral, missing several games. He suffered from mysterious, nagging injuries that never showed up on the machines. It’s as though the simple act of being Quinones was too exhausting for Quinones.
Former teammate and fellow Puerto Rican Henry Cotto once said, simply, “Rey Quinones is hard to understand.” Three general managers, three coaching staffs, three sets of scouts glimpsed the reserve of natural talent. Three organizations found themselves unable to discern what, exactly, went on in the shortstop’s head. Nor could they find the location of his heart, but it never seemed to be with baseball. Quinones told reporters early in his career that he didn’t need baseball, because he owned a liquor store in Puerto Rico he could live off of. The following exchange, reported by Kirby Arnold in “Tales from the Mariners Dugout”, comes closest to approximating Quinones’ mindset:
[Club president Chuck] Armstrong was walking through the Mariners’ clubhouse before a game when manager Dick Williams called him into his office. Armstrong walked in and saw Quinones there with Williams and general manager Dick Balderson. “Rey, tell Chuck what you just told us,” Williams said.
“I’m a good shortstop, right?” Quinones said.
“You’re a very good shortstop, Rey,” Armstrong told him.
“I could be the best shortstop in the American League,” Quinones said.
“Yes you could,” Armstrong replied.
“I’m so good,” Quinones continued, “that I don’t need to play every day.”
Armstrong was stunned as Quinones continued.
“I don’t need to play every day, and you have other guys who should play so they can get better,” Quinones said. “So I don’t need to play tonight.”
When we were kids, my friends and I would tear up any Rey Quinones baseball card we saw; if we found it at a shop, we’d pay the nickel for it so that we could rip it apart. He was the team villain. The ignominy of Rey Quinones is tempered only by his own obscurity. His antics were nestled within a string of ninety-loss seasons, and the well-known shortstop he replaced, Spike Owen, hit a robust .234 in his time in Seattle. In Pittsburgh his legacy is somewhat more tarnished; it’s rare for a team to lose prospects who unanimously washed out of the league, and have the trade still be seen as a loss. It played no small part in costing general manager Larry Doughty his job. The three months Quinones spent as a Pirate were that bad. When the team cut him, Jim Leyland didn’t hold back: "I thought we were getting someone who wasn't the best of guys but had talent," the Pittsburgh manager said. "We got a guy who was a good guy but didn't show talent." He added: "I can put up with errors, but not errors with no effort."
Professional baseball players are held to a different standard than the general population. They're required to play through physical pain. They can’t call in sick on their birthday. We accept these things, and we’re generally in agreement that players are compensated financially for their efforts. What’s interesting is that we’re far more accommodating as fans for a player’s physical shortcomings than their mental ones. When a player isn’t very good at their job because of the limitations of their skills, we accept it; we’ve seen our share of players like Jeff Kunkel and Rafael Ramirez. But when it comes to the psychological aspect of the job, there is no quarter. Quinones was immature, a head case; there was no help, no place for him. When the Pirates cut him, the shock brought him to tears. He had claimed he didn’t need baseball; baseball, as it turned out, didn’t need him.
The more pieces of Quinones’ puzzle I put together, the more disturbing the picture became. There’s the story of the start of his final season, in 1989. Like usual, spring training had begun and Quinones was the only Mariner yet to report. This time, however, he couldn’t be reached by telephone, and neither his close friends nor his brother could make contact. "I'm his roommate and sometimes he listens to me," Mario Diaz said. "I would like to talk to him but I know how difficult that is. We don't live that far apart in Puerto Rico, but I never saw or talked to him this winter. Nobody sees Rey during the off-season." New general manager Woody Woodward began with salary threats, but was eventually forced to send two scouts to find him. When they reached his home, his wife told the scouts that he wasn’t there. They soon spotted him anyway – hiding in a house across the street, peering through the curtains. He agreed to return to America with them, but he wasn’t gone for long.
After being cut by the Pirates, Quinones returned home to his home in the rough neighborhood of Rio Piedras. The Rangers declared interest in the young shortstop, but he turned them down. He joined the Santurce ballclub during the Winter Leagues, in hopes of impressing another club, and hit well. After a few weeks, he started showing up late for games. Soon, he wasn’t showing up at all.
I’m not sure exactly how, but I managed to turn things around in college. There was no epiphany, no magical moment of inspiration. After an endless string of false starts and disappointments, of broken resolutions, one stuck. I made it to class, and then I made it to another. I made the quarterly Dean’s list after having failed all three classes the quarter before; I hung the certificate on my fridge with ironic pride. I slipped through the giant emotionless university system with a liberal arts degree, a 2.5 GPA, and a little bit of hope. Eventually I spent four more years of college and got my teaching certificate. Now I’m the authority figure that terrified me as a student.
I see kids that act like Rey Quinones all the time. They get sucked into the culture of failure that surrounds their socioeconomic status, and lower their expectations to meet their pessimism. Like Quinones, they struggle with language barriers that prevent them from expressing themselves the way they wish they could be heard. They turn to defense mechanisms, irreverence or sullenness, or they just stop showing up. It’s my job to catch these kids, to make sure they understand the opportunities they have, and to keep them from going through what I did. I haven’t always succeeded; I’m not that good a teacher yet. But my peak years are still ahead.
I don’t know Rey Quinones. Few people have, I think. None of the articles I read ever seem to share much of his side of the story. But I wonder if he ever had the support he needed to be the Frank Robinson of shortstops. Mental illness in sports has come a long way since 1989, but the stigma of being a “head case” still rests on the player, and the team is still seen as being helpless in dealing with the player’s antics. How much responsibility lies where is impossible and irresponsible for me to claim. I don’t know what could have been done. All I know is that in the end, I came away feeling something that I never expected to feel about a lazy, lackluster baseball player: pity.
There’s one last piece of the puzzle. Quinones’ name shows up in one final strange, sad story. Last month the 20th Annual Cabin Fever Auction was held in Bristol, Connecticut. Among the items for bid: a 1996 New York Yankees World Series ring. The ring was given to a member of the Yankees’ administrators by the name of Rey Quinones. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there’s little information about how Quinones joined or left the Yankees, or how the ring made its way to auction (where it sold for $14,153.00). We’re left to wonder whether that ring helped cover the operation costs of a little liquor store in Rio Piedras.
19 Apr 2012, by Patrick
Originally from Kentucky, Joshua Lars Weill lives and writes out of Washington, D.C. Follow his take on sports and culture on Twitter at @AgonicaBoss.
For things to work out right on a given night, Bronson Arroyo needs the ball to flutter, fade and drop when it’s supposed to. Never much of a power pitcher, time and toil have made Arroyo even more calculating. When the ball cooperates, the Reds right-hander can still get even the best hitters out with regularity. When it does not cooperate, as it did not almost all of last season, Arroyo is merely a 35-year-old right-hander with a ho-hum fastball pitching half his games in a bandbox stadium.
Which is why despite raised preseason expectations, Cincinnati’s 2012 season won’t come down to how many runs the team scores, how any of its offseason acquisitions perform or whether manager Dusty Baker can avoid his penchant to over-manage. Instead it will come down to Arroyo’s ability to rediscover the form that helped the 2010 Reds win the National League Central. That the sometime-cornrowed wanna-be frown-core rocker is so vital to his team’s success should be more surprising than it is. We’ve just come to accept that it’s how Arroyo operates.
A year ago, with no extra power to reach back for, and hampered by mononucleosis and a balky back, Arroyo’s rubber arm kept flinging the ball to the plate with a fastball around 86-87 miles an hour. Way too many of those pitches came careening right back and over the outfield fences – a club- and nearly NL single-season-record 46, to be exact.
“Last year, I was humping it up there at 86 [mph] a lot of times with everything I had,” Arroyo said in Spring Training this year.
For a guy like Arroyo, who has never shied from being outspoken and who enjoys cultivating a rough-hewn persona, humility comes hard. This is a guy, after all, who in 2009 admitted openly to ingesting a cocktail of over-the-counter supplements that pushed the edge of credulity.
"I do what I want to do and say what I want to say," Arroyo said then. ”I've always been honest. I'm not going to stop now."
No, the Floridian with the flowing golden locks won’t stop. But he can’t out-tough time, and he’s well aware. Never a hard-thrower, Arroyo has instead relied on guile, an array of pitches – including a big curve and a flat slider – funky arm angles and impressive resilience to craft a better-than-he-should-have baseball career in which he’s won 112 games over 13 Major League seasons. And he’s done it all with a likeable Redneck panache.
It wasn’t clear Cincinnati was getting the better of the trade that originally brought Arroyo to the Queen City. At the time, the Dominican prospect he was traded for, Wily Mo Pena, looked like a Manny-in-the-making while Arroyo looked more or less like the guy the Reds got: a pitcher who strummed guitar in the offseason, would eat some innings and keep games relatively close. At the time he was 28 and a recent World Series champion with the Red Sox. That was seven years ago.
Cincinnati has embraced the offbeat Arroyo, more than tolerating his dude-rock forays.Pena is now long gone, another in a long string of mighty mashers who missed. But Arroyo is still throwing in red-and-white, accumulating innings – he surpassed 200 in each of his first five years in Cincinnati and missed that mark by just one inning last season – and still strumming Pearl Jam covers on that tinny, black acoustic guitar. Arroyo has endeared himself to the locals off the field. The smaller and less cosmopolitan Cincinnati has embraced the offbeat Arroyo, more than tolerating his dude-rock forays and growing to love the goofjock persona he shows off in endorsement ads for various JTM meat products. Fans sense that Arroyo is genuine and true to himself, and that has made him likeable even when his fastball is flying out of the park.
That the Reds chose to re-sign the righty for three years and $35 million in 2010 quantified his value as an affordable, reliable option and as a guy the Reds can trust on and off the field. Forever cash strapped, Cincinnati simply cannot afford to pay Arroyo (or anyone else) $12 million a season to underperform. But when healthy and dialed in, Arroyo is much better than affordable and reliable, as he was two seasons ago.
Arroyo won 17 games for those playoff-bound 2010 Reds, leading the club in wins, starts and innings pitched. That team got timely hitting, strong starting pitching from a mostly young staff and caught the kind of breaks you need to catch to win 91 games in a small market, but it also relied heavily on Arroyo’s leadership and pitching consistency. Last season, with a better on-paper offense than the year before and nearly the same rotation, Arroyo’s home run troubles were a big part of the team’s disappointing sub-.500 finish. Instead of the de facto staff anchor, Arroyo was just an expensive mediocre right-hander on a team lacking a rudder.
So far this season, Arroyo has been even craftier. While he hasn’t seen a major boost in velocity, he has been mixing his pitches even more liberally than usual. He’s relying on his fastball less and his cutter and looping curve much more, just the kind of adjustment a veteran struggling to keep up with rocket-armed youngsters would make. And truth be told, it’s the kind of adjustment Arroyo has to make.
In his second start, at Washington, Arroyo was highly effective in his own way, slotting his arm down and spotting his pitches well. He allowed just three hits and a walk in seven-plus innings, and exited with a 1-0 lead. While his fastball never topped 90, pitches flopped and sank and moved the way he wanted them to. They danced the way Arroyo needs them to to be successful.
Everyone knows and Arroyo knows there isn’t that much left in his tank. His current deal expires after 2013, at which point he’ll be approaching 37 years old. This spring he told reporters, “I feel as good as I'm going to feel … if I'm throwing 85-88 consistently this year, then Bronson Arroyo is going to pitch that [way] the rest of his career.”
So long as the ball cooperates and dances and swoons, maybe that will be enough for a Reds team banking the confident veteran right-hander to stabilize a team with young arms, self-doubt and very little room for error.
18 Apr 2012, by Patrick
Continuing the Chatauqua I began a few weeks ago with the examination of the now-rejuvenated Chone Figgins, I’d like to ride along with Phaedrus, the protagonist of Robert Pirsig’s novel, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The first part of the novel devotes its attention to the seeming schism between the romantic view of life and the scientific, the sensory and the logical world. Though very much a scientific person himself, the narrator continues down the road of scientific absolutism to its inevitable endpoint: an emotionless, insubstantial realm of Platonic forms. Everything becomes categorized and understood, but no longer felt. Everything is a number.
To compare this phenomenon to Moneyball is as unfortunate as it is necessary, and so I’ll be as brief as possible. At the core of its well-worn story, Moneyball hides a contradiction: it is the heartwarming tale of a small-market team that succeeds, in part, due to its dehumanizing corporate ideologies. Devalued are the flawed aesthetic input of the scouts, the human but inefficient loyalties to the washed-up veterans. Billy Beane serves as Aristotle, creating and honing systems of thought, cataloging, categorizing. His ability to do this is beyond reproach. His methods bring success, and are thus modeled and reinvented. Those who reject the process are branded as luddites.
Meanwhile, 2,400 years after Aristotle and 20 before Beane, Phaedrus lives and teaches as a professor at the University of Montana. He’s asked one day whether he is teaching “quality” to his students by a passing administrator. He quickly becomes consumed with the notion of quality, what it means and why it matters. Quality is often misconstrued as beauty, the field of aesthetics, but the idea of studying quality itself in some way its own contradiction: to analyze beauty, even to define it, is in some way to bastardize it. Phaedrus continues this line of thinking and decides that Quality not only should not be defined, it cannot be defined. This leads us dangerously close to the precipice of relativism, where everyone’s concept of beauty is internalized and incomparable, meaningless to anyone but ourselves. But quality, whatever it is, avoids the plunge; we all still recognize it in some fashion. We see it by comparing C.C. Sabathia to Sidney Ponson.
It turns out that we have it somewhat easier than Pirsig, in a way. He’s searching for quality in the messy, expansive world of real life; ours is neatly confined to a small diamond. And we have another advantage: we have a shared goal. We all agree on the rules, for the most part. Certainly, there are a few discrepancies: the catcher blocking the plate, the phantom tag at second, or the whimsy of the official scorer. Ask the romantic baseball fan and the scientific baseball fan alike what the ultimate goal of baseball is, and you get the exact same answer: to win. Only the method changes. For the romantics, you win by playing the “right way”. For the scientists, you win by playing the optimal way.
However, quality is not bound to winning as a direct result. The sharp liner caught by a diving first baseman is of greater quality, we would likely agree, than the weak grounder muffed by the shortstop. The result of the play, however, still meets with dissatisfaction (assuming one is rooting for the batting team). The aestheticians and the statisticians both have methods for accounting for this; the former revels in the beauty of the swing, the latter recalculates the batter’s line drive rate. Both are essentially making the same argument: current results may not be indicative of future results. We must reject our initial inclination and think of the long-term.
And yet the divide continues, and will continue. We still argue over the measure of quality. The fault lies in the sport itself; rather, in winning. Take the winning away from baseball and you’d be left with abstract self-expression; there would no longer be constraints on whether to shade your outfielders toward the corners or steal when up by five. Essentially, what you’d have remaining would be bar-league softball, where there’s a score but everyone is too busy playing to remember it. It’s a game where people are walked to set up the triple play. It’s fun.
Baseball can be fun, even for the players whose livelihoods and legacies depend on it, but it’s not meant to be fun. The game is designed to be won or lost, and won at all costs. Phaedrus would have rejected it as a false dichotomy, no real expression of life at all. After all, there are plenty of franchises that are forced to define themselves in some manner other than victory. Excellence, in this case, is the destruction of style and individuality, the reinforcement of conforming to the right and the optimum. This is, of course, what happens to every person in real life, though the forces and the teams are myriad and subtle.
In Pirsig’s novel, Phaedrus rejected both Aristotle and surface emotions. His idea of quality was bound in neither subject nor object, line drive out or ground ball error. Instead, he divorces himself from both and, at the same time, the rules of the game. Quality, he states, is found in the ancient Greek concept of arête, translated loosely in English as excellence. It encompasses respect for the game, and caring about doing well, but leaves the interpretation of greatness to the individual.
Arête is self-excellence, self-reliance; it is not beholding to the world in obedience, nor trying to enslave it through analysis. It is to be part of that world, as well as to be yourself within it. It is Jose Valverde’s celebrations, David Ortiz’s bat flip, and Stan Musial’s somersault. It’s what keeps us (and, really, baseball itself) in business. And it's what makes it matter.
12 Apr 2012, by Patrick
The setting: it's spring, and the growl of the lawn mower echoes over the quaint suburban horizon. You've finished checking the gutters, the game is on in an hour, and the breeze is decidedly pleasant. You find yourself in need of a glass of lemonade, a shady spot under the cherry tree you climbed a thousand times in your childhood, and a nice book. This post is designed to supply you with one of these things.
Certainly, in this chrome-gilded age you could go to Amazon or ride your Vespa to the local Barnes & Noble to procure your literature, but I present an inexpensive, somewhat circuitous alternative. That choice is Bookmooch, a six year-old book exchange community that allows users to trade books online, free of charge (postage extra). This charming little Ponzi scheme allows each user to upload a list of books that they agree to mail to those who want them, and request the books of others in their place. This is noble! The only trouble is that every book is treated equally in the eyes of Bookmooch, contrary to the wisdom of Dorothy Parker. Thus, six years later, the website is swollen with the decaying remains of Dan Brown novels and dog-eared Louis L’Amour westerns. There was also one Roger Angell anthology, but I already claimed it.
But enough exposition. The purpose of this article is to provide you with a selection of Bookmooch’s current library of baseball literature, for your perusal and (perhaps) procurement. Today, we'll focus on the young adult genre. Among your choices:
Honus & Me (Dan Gutman): 2 copies available
Amazon Price: $0.01 used, $1.73 new
Tagline: "The first time I touched a baseball card, I felt a strange tingling sensation all over my body."
As one reviewer puts it: “This is a nice fiction story not as good but up in the ranks with ‘Field of Dreams’”. This is true in the sense that my writing is not as good but up in the ranks with Joe Posnanski. The story: an impoverished boy finds a way to travel through baseball cards into history, meets Honus Wagner, magically ages fifteen years and plays in the 1909 World Series. Probably, he learns a life lesson somehow. A perfect read for fans of baseball history and minor plot holes.
How Spider Saved the Baseball Game (Robert Kraus): 1 copy available
Amazon price: $0.01 used, $10.00 new
There is absolutely no record on the internet of how exactly Spider saved the baseball game, though our best guess is that he came in at the bottom of the ninth up by three. Meanwhile, there’s a lot going on in that picture: beyond using four legs to hold the bat, and sitting in the box, Spider is stunned by the admittedly heavy movement and poor location on that pitch. Even the catcher seems to be fooled.
Tartabull's Throw (Henry Garfield): 2 copies available
Amazon price: $0.08 used, $16.00 new
I assume that there is a certain subset of the American population who reads a book about baseball and thinks to themselves, "Sure, that was good, but there weren't nearly enough werewolves in it." Those who perhaps enjoyed Sparky Lyle's "Bronx Zoo" but felt it would have been improved if Billy Martin had eviscerated George Steinbrenner with his fangs, and then fell passionately in love with Marilyn Peterson. Reviews on Amazon are generally positive, and to Garfield's credit, when I scanned cursorily through the book on Amazon, I couldn't find a laughably bad line to quote.
The Kid Who Only Hit Homers (Matthew Christopher): 1 copy available
Amazon Price: $0.01 used, $4.99 new
Otherwise known as: The Adam Dunn story.
10 Apr 2012, by Eric
When Jose Canseco was just a little infant, he supported himself and his twin brother Ozzie Canseco by driving Canadian tourists around Havana in a red and white 1952 DeSoto. This was the early 1980s, when body-building was just coming into fashion. Even as a toddler, Jose Canseco had vision. When he arrived at his destinations, say the Hotel Nacional, Jose Canseco would crawl underneath the DeSoto and bench press it five times, with his passengers still inside. Thusly, he collected a small fortune in tips -- not just from his passengers but from awed passers by. After all, who wouldn't spare a few pesos for a toddler who could bench-press a 1952 DeSoto with such marvelous ease?