23 Oct 2010, by Ted
Neftali Feliz let loose the last pitch of the baseball game between the Rangers and the Yankees, and as the umpire rung up Alex Rodriguez, the young closer's face morphed from stern and focused to jubilant so quickly that you could only see it happen, like all the best action from Shark Week, in slow motion.
There was no self-conscious and deliberate removal of the chewing gum before diving into the fray that came quick on the heels of that last pitch, as we saw from A-Rod when the Yanks clinched the World Series last year. There was none of the stoic celebrity that Jeter carries with him like a suit, his days of doing anything you could call "unbridled" having passed. Same goes for the gray-haired Posada, and for the gaunt-looking Mariano Rivera, who I imagine would enjoy a bubbling sesh in the tub with some Epsom salts over a screaming, hooting scrum to celebrate, what, just an ALCS win?
Last year was a screening of Cocoon, as the old Yankees guard walked the red carpet one more time. This year, the young ones are in the foreground.
And "young" could refer to the franchise as much if not moreso than the players on the team. The Rangers, like the Rockies of 2007 and the Marlins of 1997 and the Dbacks of 2003, are a fresh franchise to see so late in the game. With all of its variety, you'd think that baseball would have sent every possible iteration of teams to the big dance in October, and so it always feels something of a privilege to see somebody new.
As hokey as the end-of-game celebration has become, when the cameramen start to outnumber the players on the field with their steadicams poised in front of them like burning trash cans, it's still this beautiful thing, to watch these guys whose arm health is worth a-buh-zillion to fling themselves onto a pile, risking tendons and knees and elbows. You don't see that from a franchise that's been there before.
You probably watched this yourself, but at the peak of the Ranger pile's density and madness, DLed reliever Frank Francisco found himself on the second layer up from the ground, pinioned by someone on top of him across the back of an anonymous player who was on all fours by somebody, in a sort of Dante's Inferno of tangled bodies. Francisco couldn't move, and the television audience watched as he struggled for a beat or two, realized his predicament, and grinningly gave up on trying to wriggle out, letting his arms sag in a kind of shrug of happiness. He gave himself to the pile, sacrificing himself on the altar of the poor sap trapped underneath his 250 pounds.
Isn't that what we ask of these guys: sacrifice? That's the core of it, anyway, despite the contracts and the fame. Dive, chase, fall, flop, swing, crawl, hop, trip, in the name of this game. We're asking them to hurl themselves onto a pile so that we can do the same in our minds, grinning at the legs poking out of the bottom and the clown who takes a running leap onto the top of it.
The dogpile when you were a kid was a way to nominally humiliate someone, to pile on top of them until they're gasping and groaning for air. But it was also a way to get closer, to occupy the same space as these friends, these people, who you know but don't know, who you worry might be robot clones, or just projections of your own consciousness, not independent sentient things that feel the way you feel. Digging a knuckle into a rib to get a bark of pain was a way of range-finding, and of scouting out the boundaries between yourself and somebody else.
Baseball reminds us of those fall days of our own. Dogpile, Texas Rangers, so that we, too, may dogpile.
21 Oct 2010, by Ted
In the last podcast episode, my wife expounded on the magnetic draw of the fuming intensity of Pat Burrell. His physical presence and his facial expression and his statued stance; it all typifies how I've perceived the Giants as a team for a long time: a statuesque team, low on speed, high on mediocrity.
Over time--the slow baseball time that only the most patient fans think in terms of--the team changed. They drafted a phenom, and had a few good young pitchers evolve into good pitchers period. Now they're a good team, with just a few vestiges of the old style, the Burrells and Aaron Rowand, a hero in Chicago and a forgotten toy on the shelf in San Francisco.
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When you field a team full of Pat Burrells, we all fall asleep and forget about you except to say every now and then that you've heard they play in a nice stadium.
But when you put Pat Burrell out there with a team full of otherwise exciting players, players who flash talent and charisma, then Pat Burrell becomes a venerable figure. You can almost write the Pixar movie, where Burrell emerges from the shadows, covered in cobwebs, to impart upon the colorful, energetic rabble the value of sticking to it and of finding a quiet place in the mind to fill with hate and fury.
For Burrell exudes fury. Quiet, deadly, the intense dislike for the ways of the world that kept him from becoming, say, a hall of fame hitter, or that cursed his glove to mediocrity. Each at bat is the latest and maybe the last chance to strike back at fate.
Who could play the flip side of that coin but the phenom himself, Tim Lincecum, whose success was only very lightly prophesied by anyone, and which has come in droves and droves, even to the point that the Giants are looking like a real damn team in the honest to goodness playoffs themselves. Lincy is guided by a chorus of young men singing at the top of their voices at 12:45 in the AM, at the the height of revelry before anyone starts to think about getting on home.
In the quiet moments, if there are any, do Burrell and Lincy talk to each other? Can an aging slugger offer anything of value to a double Cy Young winner with a rubber arm? Is he the old cop and Lincy the young buck? Big brother, little brother? Older cousin, the one that taught you how to pack a dip?
The teams that invite conjecture like this are the great teams, the teams where you can't help but wonder how they get on. There are those teams. Then there are those other teams that play like a single organism, like the team that got Rowand his big old contract not so long ago, or Big Papi's teams. What good is a team if you don't have questions about how it gets on?
And what good is a player if you can't think about how he makes conversation when the cheers die down?
18 Oct 2010, by Eric
Ted: Eric, I realize we're in the middle of an exciting playoffs, and we'll get to that. But right now I have a confession to make: I support the designated hitter.
There, it's out. It's on the table. It hurts me to admit it. I have always, until these playoffs, believed in the old ideas: that every man should hit for himself, that tradition should bear out, that a pitcher hitting pushes managers to rely on strategy. I was wrong. It took this season for me to realize it.
This year I watched way more AL baseball than NL, which is a first for me. At first I was startled when the lineup turned over without a flailing twirp in the lineup. Then I got used to it. Where AL teams had in the past seemed bloated and excessive, like a genetically modified factory turkey, as the season carried on these lineups took on the feel of normalcy. All these good hitters, all in a row! Maybe this is how it should be.
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Also, someone quoted somewhere the startling yet reasonable fact that the NL is the only league in existence in which pitchers are required to hit. As that point hit home, I started to feel like such singularity smacked of petulance rather than tradition.
So there I was, on the brink, not sure where I stood, watching very little NL ball. Then the playoffs, the NL games. The pitchers hitting, to my AL-ized eyes, was something of an abomination. The flailing, the absence of skill or style. This is how AL fans must see the NL! I realized. I was horrified. My mind was made up.
But these pitchers sure can pitch! We called the no-hitter in our last conversation (close enough, anyway). So what's our next on-point prediction for these 2010 playoffs, Eric?
Eric: I see your point; the Ranger and Yankee lineups strike me not as bloated turkeys but as sleek killing machines -- no inefficiency to be found in the mechanisms of their run-scoring. It's as if the American League is played stereo and the National League in mono. But I find myself itching to defend the NL, in all its nostalgic, idiosyncratic glory. The Senior Circuit. The Double Switch.
In other words, I appreciate the inefficiency of the NL; I appreciate the intricacy, the moving parts, and yes the strategy. I've been playing a lot of MLB 2k8 lately (don't judge me; it's convenient and the franchise mode is surprisingly tough), and I've found playing in the NL a much more dynamic experience. There is something lost with the DH -- something gained, but also something lost. That said, it's all just a game anyway, right? So if the NL took the plunge, I'd merely moan for thirty seconds and then start to wonder if the Dodgers could sign Adam Dunn this offseason.
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As for these playoffs, how about Elvis Andrus stealing home? Oh wait -- that already happened. I predict the Rangers beat the Yankees. How about that? Bold, right? I've always found the prediction game a silly one with teams because all I am totally unable to separate the emotional and the intellectual. In other words, I just pick the team I want to win. Go Rangers.
We return to this topic all the time but it seems a valid one. The exciting postseason pastime of deciding which team to get behind --- only to watch the games and realize that sometimes your instinct decides these things for you for you. Example: Despite my Dodgers fandom, I was pondering not hating the Giants for this series. The Phillies have caused me a lot of strife lately. The Giants are fun fun fun. Tim Lincecum (maybe still) knows who I am from the many times I interviewed him when we were both at the University of Washington. And there's the underdog factor.
But as I watched the Phillies come to the plate down at the end of Game One, all I could do was root for Jimmy Rollins to hit a double and devastate Brian Wilson (a total goon, at least in my rendering of the playoff narrative), thereby lifting the people of Los Angeles to collective joy.
Oh these playoffs are surprising times. And for the first time all year, I'm starting to realize how sad it is that baseball's almost over. Has the specter of looming offseason doldrums hit you yet? Did it just happen right now? Sorry about that...
Ted: No, the looming specter of the offseason has not hit me, and I consider it a tad sacrilegious (can sacrilege come in "tad" form, or is it an all-or-nothing prospect?) that you would bring up such a prospect in the heat of the pennant battle. That reminds me: during a broadcast, Ron Darling and John Smoltz started to talk about spring training, and some drive from one Florida town to another. I could have punched them. This is no time for such talk. This is the time when spring don't mean shit. So I will now commence ignoring the concept that time exists past Halloween.
I get your argument for the pleasant familiarity of a broken system, ie the DH. After all, we here at Pitchers and Poets often praise the inefficient, or the pleasantly unaware, the pleasures of intuition and flagging data input. I guess I'm just following my gut, though. I think the older I get, the more I'm willing to set aside matters of principle and embrace the mechanism of entertainment. The DH is entertaining, and that's maybe the only argument I can make for it.
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Intuition and rooting, yes, it's a complicated tango. I want to root for the Giants, myself, but can't help but enjoy Roy-O pitching for the Phils, and enjoy that he and Brad Lidge are bookending the game once more. But I still can't root for the whole team. I'm a fragmentary supporter right now. I dig Lincecum (I'm totally sure he remembers you, just like I'm sure Jose Cruz remembers when he coached me in 14-year-old Babe Ruth), I like that Pat Burrell (who I've just in my head nicknamed Despicable P -- ha!) has been reborn anew, and I like Kung Fu Panda a lot, but I can't put it all together. For the Phils, I can't like their all-too-familiar postseason lineup that much, though they've got some remarkable players on their team.
AL-wise, once again, I don't want the Yanks to win, but they've got Lance Berkman driving in runs. And I don't really like the Rangers. Josh Hamilton creeps me out with his combo of junkie vulnerability and religious zealotry, and they still haven't shaken the band box, popcorn, all-hit old reputation in my reptile brain. Yet I love Cliff Lee, and I double-love Elvis Andrus, and I like Vlad Guerrero.
In short, I'm torn. So in a way I sort of lose, but I also sort of win, in that whatever teams go the distance I can find something to enjoy. I've got some kind of baseball version of diplomatic immunity. It's kind of cool.
Here's a random question: can a team win the World Series with Mike Fontenot playing third base?
Eric: Yes, technically it is possible. But my instinct is that this team can't. The reason? By playing Mike Fontenot at third base, Bruce Bochy is denying America the joy that is Pablo Sandoval. This is typical of Bochy, who in recent years has also elected to deny America the joy that was his well-defined Padres era mustache. For a team like this year's Giants to win the World Series, it would take some sort of rising. Not The Rising, like Springsteen's The Rising, but a regular rising -- as in to form an identity that is greater than the sum of its crazy parts.
The Giants have so much weirdness. Taken as individuals, Despicable P and Aubrey Huff and Big Panda and Timmy and the Ghost of Barry Zito, and even god forsaken Brian Wilson are all delights. Misfits. Characters. Inglourious Basterds,the lot of them. Yet the Giants, for all the unlikely winning, have yet to become the full-on, fun-timing band of gypsies that they are capable of. This team should sing like the Pirates of the 1970s. They should be the kind of team America wants to get behind. But they remain -- to reuse an appropriate metaphor from earlier -- a team that projects itself in mono.
This is partly because of Bochy's management -- of which Fontenot's unlikely presence is a direct result. Ron Washington would never be so stodgy as to play a utility guy instead of a slugger, struggling or not. (Then again, Washington has the DH at his disposal...your point about entertainment value is starting to make sense.) And the Rangers, even with a slightly less magnificent set of kooks on their roster -- an ex-junkie Jesus-freak, a shortstop named Elvis, an unlikely Nelson Cruz, a Japan reclamation project, etc. -- manage to capture the imagination and at least for me, play in stereo.
13 Oct 2010, by Eric
One of my day jobs involves blogging for a Jewish themed website called Jew-ish.com. In that capacity, I wrote a post today inspired by Roger Angell about Getting off the Schneid.
The crux:
The Rangers’ victory, Angell wrote, “took them off the schneid.” I’ve never understood this phrase. I like it. As a child, I liked hearing (Jewish) sportscaster Chris Berman draw it out like schneeeeiiiid on ESPN. And soon, I figured out its meaning by context. But I never knew where it came from. To a non-sports fan, to somebody who did not as a child watch hours upon hours SportsCenter, what the hell could a schneid possibly be? And how would one get off a schneid?
The term, it turns out, like many of our great expressions, has Yiddish roots. It came to baseball by way of gin rummy, a card game once popular amongst my grandparents. In Yiddish a “schneider” is a tailor. And in gin rummy slang, to be eliminated from a game is to “schneidered”—as in cut out from contention, the way a tailor cuts cloth.
Hence “the schneid” in baseball as a losing or winless streak. No word on which early 20th century sportswriter or p.r. man first used the term in the baseball sense, but our crack research staff is on it.
