CONTRAPHONIC

Posted in Baseball Pie - Posted on Fri 5th December 2008 9.38AM No comments.

"Lockman squares around to bunt.

There's a man in the upper deck leafing through a copy of the current issue of Life. There's a man on 12th Street in Brooklyn who has attached a tape machine to his radio so he can record the voice of Russ Hodges broadcasting the game. The man doesn't know why he's doing this. It is just an impulse, a fancy, it is like hearing the game twice, it is like being young and being old, and this will turn into the only known recording of Russ' famous account of the final moments of the game. The game and its extensions. The woman cooking cabbage. The man who wishes he could be done with drink. They are the game's remoter soul. Connected by the pulsing voice on the radio, joined to the word-of-mouth that passes the score along the street and to the fans who call the special phone number and the crowd at the ballpark that becomes the picture on television, people the size of minute rice, and the game as rumor and conjecture and inner history. There's a sixteen year old in the Bronx who takes his radio up to the roof of his building so he can listen alone, a Dodger fan slouched in the gloaming, and he hears the account of the misplayed bunt and the fly ball that scores the tying run and he looks out over the rooftops, the tar beaches with their clotheslines and pigeon coops and splatted condoms, and he gets the cold creeps. The game doesn't change the way you sleep or wash your face or chew your food. It changes nothing but your life."

Don DeLillo, "The Triumph of Death," (originally titled "Pafko at the Wall") taken from the novel Underworld, 1998.

Posted in Baseball Pie - Posted on Wed 5th March 2008 11.06PM No comments.

Less than the Mendoza Line

Not since we learned who our neighbor Roy Bivolo really was, have we been so shocked to learn information about folks we never suspected anything of. The long-awaited Mitchell Report, detailing the extent and scope of steroid abuse in Major League Baseball, definitely delivered on the promise of namedropping, if not so much on actual solutions or recommendations to end or rectify the enduring situation.

There seems to be different levels of players implicated in the report, both in terms of talent, and in terms of surprise. The key players, the ones who aren't so much suspects but examples, are there: the Bonds, Palmiero, Canseco, Giambi players. There's the second tier of not-so-surprising, but still cringe-worthy players the likes of David Justice, Roger Clemens, Gary Matthews Jr. After them, short-lived wonders that make sense being affiliated in light of it all, the Mo Vaughn, Lenny Dykstra, Ken Caminiti contingent. There's some true surprises-- Andy Pettitte? Benito Santiago? Wally Joyner?!? (And we all thought it was his love of healthy chocolate.)

It's from here the shock, and more achingly, the sadness of it all begins to sink in. Unimpressive journeymen like Jerry Hairston and Matt Franco, players whose use seems to coincide with about-to- implode careers like Chuck Knoblauch, Todd Hundley, Kevin Brown. One can only imagine the isolating feeling of desperately ingesting something into your system to not excel like Bonds, but to merely hope to remain relevant or simply, hope to become (why, Nook Logan, why?).

The names signaled out obviously don't reveal all the users, or the magnitude and deep-seated knowledge of the whole problem. But it does illustrate that steroids, HGH, and their ilk, aren't automatic enhancers that will allow your body to become a cash cow. Rather, the stats of the names mentioned shows the problem can be correlated on a relative level to players within their playing skill. From these revelations, it doesn't seem that we've been witnessing one set of players cheating the system and padding their stats against a set of players that don't. What we've been seeing are players of the same level cheating other players within that level. Bonds and A-Rod still play in the same class, but one supposedly tainted and one clean. Apply to Clemens and Greg Maddux. Move down the scale: Fernando Vina and David Eckstein. Further down: Todd Pratt, with 'roids, is still Todd Pratt, and compare him to Charlie O'Brien.

So, what does it all mean? It seems innate ability places players into a certain category, and their substance-enhancement only inflates their figures within their relative subset. Certainly we didn't need to wait nearly 2 years and hand $20 million to George Mitchell's firm for that. But if the list included widely-speculated names such as Brady Anderson, Luis Gonzalez, Greg Vaughn, who certainly seemed to have strangely productive years for a spurt, conclusions might come differently. And that's the thing of it. We just won't ever know, and as much as the Mitchell Report will attempt to shed some light, and as much as Mitchell's conclusions don't seem particularly aggressive or insightful, it might be best used as he himself expressed it, as a measure of closure for this era.

Posted in Baseball Pie - Posted on Thu 13th December 2007 9.25PM No comments.

Fresh from the Oven

Let the Hot Stove sparring begin. Could Mike Lupica's freshly baked goods be any sweeter?

Posted in Baseball Pie - Posted on Wed 14th November 2007 12.04PM (1) comment.