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April 29, 2012

Holland and an imperfect game

I got my first chance to watch my nine-year-old nephew Holland play baseball on Friday. His game was, unsurprisingly, a very different experience from watching the big leaguers. I won't give all the gory details, but a short example from the third inning will show what made an impression on me.

Holland reached base on a 5-4 force-out. On the next pitch, the opposing catcher let strike one roll a couple feet away, and Holland swiped second. The next pitch, ball one, went in the dirt too, and Holland took third. Then, after a walk, the pitcher turned his back for a moment, and not only did Holland steal home, but in the confusion the runner on first got all the way to third.

From my rough scoring of the game (yes, I was scoring it), four and a half innings produced 18 instances of what in professional baseball would be judged wild pitches or passed balls. Nothing more need be said to illustrate the chasm between these kids and "real" ballplayers, right? The professional game, the true game, is on a plane of effective perfection, right?

Jump-cut to the bottom of the ninth at Yankee Stadium that night. Game knotted at six, with Derek Jeter on first and Brayan Villarreal pitching to Curtis Granderson. The payoff pitch goes wild, and Jeter makes it all the way to third. Three pitches later, a slider goes off the end of catcher Alex Avila's glove, and Jeter beats the throw back to the plate to score the winning run.

This was a highly dramatic example, but not an isolated one. On that busy Friday night in major league baseball, there were four passed balls and 12 wild pitches (including two "dropped" third strikes) that led to 20 runners gaining extra bases. Ten of the 15 games on the schedule had at least one wild pitch or passed ball—and all five that didn't had at least one hit-by-pitch.

Maybe most interesting, one of those wild pitches led to that bizarre rarity: a four-strikeout inning. In the top of the eighth at Camden Yards, Oakland's Ryan Cook got the first two Orioles hacking, but strike nine to Adam Jones was a wild one that let Jones reach. Cook regrouped and threw strike 12 past Matt Wieters' bat to end the inning.

It was, according to MLB.com, the 59th four-K inning in history. (And the second one in four days. Who knew?)

So on a pretty ordinary day in baseball, arguably the two most interesting and memorable moments are defined by their imperfection, by someone goofing up. Kinda brings those multi-millionaire celebrities down to the level of nine-year-old boys playing for fun, right?

Well, no. Let's not get carried away. The pros are light-years in quality beyond those kids. But they aren't machines; they aren't infallible.

And thank God for that.

A flawless game is a sterile game. Tic-tac-toe holds no interest for anyone but kids, because adults can figure out the perfect strategy pretty easily and make a perpetual tie of it. Several years ago, computers solved the game of checkers, figuring out its optimum strategies, and the world of human tournament checkers has been reeling ever since. Once there's an equation for a game, the game is over. It's a solved puzzle, thrown out like a completed crossword in yesterday's paper.

It is the possibility, indeed the inevitability, of imperfection that makes the game what it is. The pitcher missing the outside corner; the batter getting under a fastball; the infielder's dive deflecting the hot-shot grounder. You can be perfect for a moment, or for a few at-bats. You might, like Philip Humber, be perfect for a whole game—but then there's the next game.

This should give us a bit of perspective. The players are going to keep striving for perfection, and we're going to keep rooting for our teams to exhibit it, and that's exactly as it should be. But the pursuit of that flawlessness is only interesting because it's so hard to achieve, even briefly, even for the best in the game. In baseball as in so many other endeavors, nobody's perfect.

Except for Holland's team, that is. They're 4-0 on the season so far—but there's still a lot of baseball left to be played.
Posted by: Shane Tourtellotte

April 23, 2012

Ivan Rodriguez career highlights

It was recently announced that veteran catcher and current unsigned free agent Ivan Rodriguez intends to officially retire in Texas on Monday.

When a great player like Rodriguez retires, it’s nice to look back over his career, what his highs and lows were, his career milestones, and the best (and oddest) games he ever participated in where. That’s what’s listed below, the career highlights of Ivan "Pudge" Rodriguez.

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Posted by: Chris Jaffe

April 20, 2012

Holland and Granderson

"Uncle Shane, what if a player hit a home run every time?"

I've been hearing questions like that a lot lately. My sister just moved up to Asheville with her two children. Among doing other things, this has thrown me in pretty close with my nephew Holland, who is a pretty fair ballplayer for nine. Trying to help the boy through a rough transition, I've been taking time to watch some baseball games with him the last couple weeks.

I've been getting peppered with Holland's questions during these games, and in trying to deepen his baseball knowledge I've actually tried to answer a few. For instance, after I explained how most pitchers don't bat too well in the bigs, he asked if a pitcher had ever managed to hit an over-the-fence home run. This is where I got to tell him how Babe Ruth started in the majors. The name "Babe Ruth" strikes Holland the way I imagine invoking Zeus struck the classical Greeks: awesome power at a distant remove. Telling Holland the Babe had been a pitcher left him speechless, and this is no easy feat.

So when Holland asked if someone could hit a home run every time, I actually tried to engage the question. Nobody could do it over a whole career, I explained, but for a single game I supposed it was possible. Pretty easy, actually, if you were a pinch-hitter and came up only once. (Images of a fist-pumping Kirk Gibson flitted through my mind.) Holland needed the term "pinch-hitter" explained, though, and the train of thought wobbled off-course and lost steam.

Events of the evening would bring it back.

Holland and I were watching the Rangers and Tigers on MLB Network. This disappointed Holland, as he likes the Yankees, but their game against the Twins wasn't being carried by MLBN in our area. I had my iPod loaded with the proper app, though, so I could follow the score on his behalf (and mine, of course). The Twins leaped ahead with four in the first, but the Yankees got most of that back in their half, sparked by a Curtis Granderson home run. New York rallied again in the second, and took the lead ... on a Curtis Granderson home run.

And as I told Holland this, suddenly a question he had asked in youthful ignorance began gaining some heft.

I knew a bit about the players who had hit four homers in a single game. Lou Gehrig had been the first, his accomplishment swept off the front pages by John McGraw's retirement the same day. I recalled those four homers and a double off the wall at Ebbets Field, though I was blanking on Joe Adcock's name. I knew it had been done a number of other times—but I did not know whether anyone had accomplished it in just four plate appearances.

And I didn't know whether Curtis Granderson had this kind of historic accomplishment in him. But I was sure thinking about it.

As Yu Darvish doused a Detroit rally with only one run scored to maintain a slim lead, bedtime came for Holland. He left for bed without resistance, which I suspect wouldn't have happened had the Yankees been playing. As Texas began mounting its own threat in the top of the fifth, I checked my app again, just in case. And there it was. Bottom of the fourth, one out. A single, deceptively prosaic line.

"Curtis Granderson homered."

It had only been a couple minutes, so I went to knock on my nephew's door. Three home runs, and it's just the fourth inning. Pretty exciting news for Holland, yes, but more so for me, because I understood the context. I knew how unusual this was. I knew Granderson had a shot now, a real measurable shot, at history. Four home runs would tie the record. And with four-plus innings at least left for the hot Yankees' bats, he would have more than one chance.

But Holland's question echoed within me. What if Curtis hit a home run every time? What if ...?

Five?

"Impossible." We use that word pretty loosely sometimes, as shorthand for "so unlikely it's not worth thinking about." And at the start of the game, a five-homer performance was just that kind of impossible. The same kind of impossible that some randomly chosen journeyman, hanging on to a rotation slot by his fingernails, will pitch a perfect game.

But at some point, as the statistics accumulate, that rhetorically tossed-off "impossible" becomes "you know, maybe." Curtis Granderson had reached that point, and because of a question my nine-year-old nephew had asked, I was at that point with him.

Of course, Granderson didn't make history. He singled in the sixth and singled in the eighth, and the Yankees hung on to win. Only in the context of his first three at-bats could that be considered any kind of disappointment. Or perhaps if you're still nine, and don't fully grasp the bounds of the game, and of human abilities.

But Holland picked an awfully good time to ask what adults would consider a pretty silly question. And when he comes home from school today, I will have an answer for him. If a player hit a home run every time ... he would be Carlos Delgado. Of the 13 players to hit four home runs in a game, he is the only one who did it in four plate appearances.

The date, though, is a bit galling: Sept. 25, 2003. Not even nine years ago, and I had forgotten this unique baseball accomplishment so thoroughly that I had to look it up to know it had even happened. Maybe to get any long-lasting recognition, you do have to hit five home runs in a game.

Impossible, you say. But you know, maybe ...
Posted by: Shane Tourtellotte

January 09, 2012

Jorge Posada career highlights

On Saturday, news surfaced that Jorge Posada intends to retire after 17 years in baseball. In that time, he combined two things that rarely go together. He was a longtime New York Yankee, and he was constantly underrated. Players for the game’s marquee franchise usually get at least their share of attention yet, somehow, Posada slipped through the cracks.

In honor of the recently retired catcher, let’s take a look at his career, his best and worst moments, the greatest and most significant games he played in, terrific performances he viewed, and some weird oddities he was on hand for.

One thing I should note: Normally I try to include as many playoff games as I can in these career highlight bits, but he played in 125 postseason affairs. Some notable October moments might get left out to keep this from going too long.


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Posted by: Chris Jaffe

November 08, 2011

A baseball card mystery: who’s that Yankee?

Ten years ago, Topps included a terrific subset within its regular issue of cards: a series of “Golden Moments” celebrating some of the most iconic occurrences in the game’s history. One of those cards featured a moment that no Yankee fan over the age of 40 will ever forget.

On an October afternoon in 1978, Bucky Dent, the ninth-place hitter for the Yankees, stepped in against Mike Torrez of the Red Sox. Trailing 2-0, the Yankees faced the prospect of losing the pennant race in game no. 163. Yet manager Bob Lemon opted not to pinch-hit for Dent.

Moments after Dent hit a Torrez fastball toward the Green Monster, Yankee fans watching the game on television struggled to see the ball against the October background of late afternoon sun and shadows. “Deep to left,” cried Bill White, announcing the game on WPIX-TV in New York. “Yastrzemski will not get it… it’s a home run!! A three-run home run by Bucky Dent…”

White’s words provided Yankee fans with confirmation of something they could not believe they had seen—a home run by the Yankees’ weakest hitter, a man who had managed all of four home runs during the first 162 games.

As we can see on Topps’ “Golden Moments” card, many of the Yankees are surrounding Dent, the newly crowned conquering hero. The Yankee player trailing Dent is Chris Chambliss, who was one of the two Yankees on base at the time of Dent’s unlikely home run. The other was Roy White, who is not visible in the picture.

It’s also easy to pick out most of the other “happy Yankees,” as they were described by White, streaming out of the dugout and onto the field. The first Yankee to emerge from the dugout is the jacketed Cliff Johnson, one of the potential pinch-hitters that manager Bob Lemon bypassed as a replacement for the light-hitting Dent.

Then there is another man in a jacket, Lemon himself, the in-season managerial replacement who looks as relieved as he is happy. Behind Lemon is backup outfielder Jay Johnstone, another one of the would-be pinch-hitters.

To the far left of Johnstone is Gene Monahan, the longtime trainer who just retired from the Yankees at the end of this past season. Directly behind Monahan we see the injured Willie Randolph, who was unavailable to play second base, giving way to the unheralded Brian Doyle.

That leaves one Yankee that I’m unable to identify, the muscular player to the right of Randolph. Whoever he is, he is as thrilled as any of the Yankees, all of whom have just witnessed a singular baseball moment.

I thought I knew every thing there is to know about the 1978 Yankees, but I have fallen short when it comes to this mystery player. I really have no idea who it is. He is partially obscured by the gold foil on the card, but there is still enough there to make an ID. Unfortunately, his face does not look familiar to me. It’s certainly not Thurman Munson or Graig Nettles or Ron Guidry or Ed Figueroa or Catfish Hunter.

So who is it? I really don’t know. Perhaps a faithful reader can supply the answer.


Posted by: Bruce Markusen


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