Why I Like Baseball

Well, the USA staved off elimination in the WBC so we still have no Jeter. The thing I miss most is watching him play long toss before every game.

Looking forward to Joba today! Although he just walked the first batter on 4 pitches, then struck out the next on 3… (cue ominous music).

1:26 PM
Joba is clearly working out some kinks.

He looks a little skinnier than last year.

Yes! Got Ryan Howard looking with a man on second.

1:45 PM
Today’s game is moving a lot slower than the previous two. Both pitchers have struggled with control. Apparently today I am struggling with typing. Must be the after effects of last night’s pilgrimage to Bern’s Steakhouse.

Lots and lots of Phillies fans here today.

Joba is still missing some of the time but he is still getting the guys out. Mid the second.

1:54 PM
Just wrote “failed pitch out” in my scorecard. Nunez stole second on a pitch out but the catcher had butterfingers.

Yesterday’s trivia quiz was tricky. Who was the first Yankee batter announced by Bob Sheppard? I will answer next inning…

They put the shift on Howard and got the ground ball but didn’t get him out because he hit it too softly.

2:24
The guys sitting behind us played high school baseball with Kevin Cash. So we hope he gets in the game. Lately we’ve seen Cervelli and Montero though.

Bruney pitching now.

Oh, and the first Yankee batter announced by Bob Sheppard was Jackie Jensen.

2:40
Cody Ransom looks really good today on both offense and defense. Now if he was 23 instead of 33 he would be a hot prospect.

Nick Swisher uses Jimi Hendrix as at bat music and Joba has AC/DC.

2:46
Oh no. Kei Igawa.

3:12
Igawa got out of the fifth without giving up a run but he didn’t look good. How much of that is our expectation, I don’t know but he threw a lot of balls.

Second inning of work Igawa’s bacon was saved by an amazing but ugly grab to start a DP by Edwardo Nunez. Nunez now leading off the sixth and got a nice hand. And then beat out an infield hit.

3:30
The Yankees broke it open in the 6th, sending 11 men to the plate. One of them was Kevin Cash, making our friends happy. Cash hit a pop foul on the first pitch that ended up just fair and ended up in the seats. RBI ground rule double.

With such a big lead, Igawa gets another inning.

4:03
Cash was on deck last inning so we grilled his pals over whether he was always a catcher, that is, did he always have those ham hocks for legs? Or as corwin put it, “catcher’s butt”?

Apparently he was a third baseman until after he went pro. “but he always walked funny, like he’s wearing high heels.” His pal also pointed out Cash might be the only guy who has won all three World Series, Little League, College (FSU), and MLB (Red Sox).

Cash is on again on another lucky pop! Flubbed by left fielder for two bases.

It is 11-0 Yankees.

Coke started to lose it in his third ining of work with two outs. He allowed three line drives on a row, then walked a guy. Dave Eiland made a visit and he got a dribbler out of the next guy.

Posada out of the game.

This game is flying along. Like yesterday, which had no walks, this one is walk-free. We are halfway through and only one hour has passed.

Phil Coke did his part with two perfect innings. As we said in the Maple Street Press Yankees Annual, Coke would be wasted as a situational lefty. The annual is on sale now, FYI

Swisher just lived up to his name and struck out on 3 pitches.

What is it with pitchers getting hit here? Yesterday one of the Astros got hit in the hand with a line drive. Today Glen Perkins of the Twins just got hot with Matsui’s broken bat and fell right off the mound. It was the third out so they took him right out.

The first outbreak of the Let’s Go Yankees chant came in the second inning after a nice two strike clap. Pettitte then ended the inning with a K.

Huge hand for Jorge. He has been DHing so it is not like he hasn’t played but still.

Wow, Jorge beat out an infield hit! And because they were holding that speed demon on, Damon’s grounder became a hit instead of a double play. And then he tagged and took third on a foul pop! Apparently while having his shoulder fixed, Posada got new legs.

Amusingly, Posada is leading off.

[Blogging Live via the Steinbrenner Field Wifi]

The weather is perfect again today. 81 degrees, breezy, and we were just treated to a special forces parachute drop.

With any luck, we’re about to be treated to Jorge behind the plate and Pettitte on the mound.

[I've now consolidated all the live blog posts into a single post.]

1:09 PM
Amusingly, Posada is leading off.

1:29 PM
Huge hand for Jorge. He has been DHing so it is not like he hasn’t played but still.

Wow, Jorge beat out an infield hit! And because they were holding that speed demon on, Damon’s grounder became a hit instead of a double play. And then he tagged and took third on a foul pop! Apparently while having his shoulder fixed, Posada got new legs.

1:42 PM
The first outbreak of the Let’s Go Yankees chant came in the second inning after a nice two strike clap. Pettitte then ended the inning with a K.

2:03
What is it with pitchers getting hit here? Yesterday one of the Astros got hit in the hand with a line drive. Today Glen Perkins of the Twins just got hit with Matsui’s broken bat and fell right off the mound. It was the third out so they took him right out. It looked like it hurt.

2:11
Swisher just lived up to his name and struck out on 3 pitches.

2:22
This game is flying along. Like yesterday, which had no walks, this one is walk-free. We are halfway through and only one hour has passed.

Phil Coke did his part with two perfect innings. As we said in the Maple Street Press Yankees Annual, Coke would be wasted as a situational lefty. The annual is on sale now, FYI.

2:40
Coke started to lose it in his third inning of work with two outs. He allowed three line drives on a row, then walked a guy. Dave Eiland made a visit, and he got a dribbler out of the next guy to end the inning. Nice job.

Posada out of the game.

Hideki Matsui just hit a comebacker that knocked pitcher Alberto Arias from the game. The Yankees couldn’t do anything with him as it was, as he struck out the side in the third.

Burnett has continued to impress. Four inings so far and not a single baserunner. The ’stros are looking weak and foolish against him. This makes us feel good, to say the Least.

So, today is my first spring training game. Renaming Legends field to Steinbrenner Field, the Yankees also made some renovations.

There are new ribbon boards for video. And there is Wifi!

So I am sitting behind home plate and typing this on my iPhone.

Burnett looked really good in the first, punctuating his inning with a strikeout. His stuff DIVES. Change and slider?

Now Aaron Boone is at the plate for the Astros. He got a nice hand from the crowd when he came to the plate and a nicer one when he grounded to second.

More as it goes!

Winter is officially over, because I’m on the plane to Tampa as I type this. My words look calm, but the excitement is bubbling as I look around me and all of a sudden everything seems to be about baseball. We arrived at Logan Airport with enough time to grab a meal before boarding, and corwin and I ate at Jerry Remy’s bar/restaurant. (Yes, they have a hot dog on the menu which they call the Remdawg, though the food was actually quite good). While sitting at the bar, just ESPN, the Deuce, and NESN weren’t enough, so I showed him the MLB At Bat app I have on my iPhone and read him an amusing article about how Mike Mussina dropped by Yankees camp. Then we went to our gate and in the hallway to our gate was a photography exhibit, Red Sox Then & Now.

I didn’t have time to read the plaque, but some longtime fan of the Red Sox has been taking/collecting photos at Fenway Park for years and years. I would have lingered over them but we spent a little too long lingering in Remdawg’s, and as we walked up to our gate it turned out we were among the last stragglers to get onto our flight. (Of course, people were being so slow to put their things into overhead bins that as it was, we still stood on the jetway in the freezing cold, waiting to get into the plane anyway.)

Now we’re on the plane, and it is equipped with XM Satellite Radio, which means I am listening to the Yankees vs. Red Sox from Fort Myers! It’s currently 7-4 Sox, neither Chien Ming-Wang nor Tim Wakefield were good, and I slept through most of the third and fourth innings so now I’m not sure who is pitching.

We’re landing in Atlanta soon, and then carrying on to Tampa. If I can grab some Wifi there I’ll post this and post again later. We’ll be seeing four games in a row at George M. Steinbrenner Field (formerly Legends Field) and I’ll be reporting here at WHY I LIKE BASEBALL on all of them.

(Originally posted on February 25, 2000 and a fascinating look at the news of the day… Reposted on new URL on December 21, 2008.)

The news is fairly well-plastered these days with two types of negative articles about baseball. Those about Darryl Strawberry’s relapse into cocaine use, and those on John Rocker’s December Sports Illustrated interview, where he offended just about everyone with his racist, homophobic, and generally ass-headed comments.

It has been interesting to see how few people have come out in support of Rocker, at least in the mainstream press (I don’t read the KKK’s newspaper so I wouldn’t know…) — Ted Turner, media giant and owner of the Braves, who has been in controversies over his own foot-in-mouth statements, basically said, well you have to give the guy another chance. Several ballplayers have also come out saying that we can give Rocker at least a little benefit of the doubt for being dumb enough to act like a tough guy the only way he knew how, even if he doesn’t really feel that way “in his heart”–as Rocker said in his statement of apology. Hank Aaron didn’t exactly embrace Rocker, but cited his youth and inexperience with the spotlight of fame. So, if you want to give the guy the widest possible leeway, he appears redeemable. If you want to take his comments at face value, though, you have to pretty much believe that white militias everywhere will soon be carrying flags with his face on them. Where will John Rocker be in ten years, mentally, and ethically? Will anything change?

I’m asking myself those same questions about Strawberry. Talk about widest possible leeway… Straw has lots of people on his side. His teammates, coaches, former teammates, they’ve all come out in support, saying they know he has a problem and they hope he beats it. But they’re sad. Strawberry doesn’t have the benefit of the doubt, because nobody doubts what is going on. He is still fighting his cocaine addiction, and losing. Everyone wishes him well, but no one knows how to help him. Strawberry is not the young superstar blinded by the lights of fame, unaware of how to act and of the consequences. In this case when we ask “will anything change?” we’re asking for a miracle, perhaps.

And what does this all have to do with baseball? Everything. Because who the players are has as much to do with the story of the game as the actual plays that happen on the field. Otherwise we could just sit around and watch video-game baseball year-round. We don’t go to see robots hit, run, catch, and throw. We’re watching people, personalities, in action, as much as plays.

On the one hand, a team is something more than its players. Players come and go, but the team is still loved (or reviled) by its fans (or enemies). But that doesn’t mean that who the players are and what their personalities are doesn’t matter to us. On the contrary, they matter more, sometimes, because they may not be around for that long, because their impact on the story, the soap opera, that is a baseball season, can be great even with only a short contribution.

Last year, one of the great stories was Strawberry’s comeback from cancer and then his drug suspension. He came back not broken and bedraggled, but with a bat that was on fire. It was inspiring to watch. As season-long hero Chili Davis began to tire and feel the end of his career approaching, Darryl was the hero that came from the wings to keep the Yankee championship drive going.

But now it’s a new season, and I feel almost a little like I do when, on the X-Files, something seems all resolved and finally going right for Fox Mulder, and then in the next season it all turns out to have been a hoax. Strawberry’s recovery wasn’t a hoax, so to speak, but it was short-lived.

And what about Rocker? Will he get on the comeback trail? Will the Braves trade him away? What will he say when he finally meets with his teammates and they vent their feelings at him?

I think he should come to play in New York. Here’s why. Ultimately, for all I’ve said about how we love personalities and people here, we do still love the plays they make as well. I think this may be especially true of Yankee fans. Would we be so sympathetic to Straw if he hadn’t made a terrific comeback last year? I think we are much more willing to like him and to give him a place in our hearts because he did so well. A lot of my friends here in Boston hate Roger Clemens, but they hated him when he was here, too. “He’s a jerk,” they say. But you know what? I think if he can pitch the way he pitched in Game Four of the World Series, New York will keep loving him. (If he doesn’t, it’s “ya bum!” “Get rid of da bum!”)

(It’s a little like Bill Clinton, in some ways. OK, maybe he’s an adulterous boob, but as long as he keeps going to bat for the things I believe in when it comes to governing the country, I give him a thumbs up. Of course, he hasn’t batted a thousand for me, so I do have my gripes, but that’s for another essay…)

If Rocker came to New York, made nice with his teammates and the community (starting a foundation to help minority kids get
baseball scholarships or something along those lines would be a really nice gesture, don’t you think?), and pitched like an unbeatable bat out of hell, I think he’d do okay. I think people would warm to him and give him another chance. He might even become a can-you-believe-it comeback story of his own.

Stay tuned…

(Originally posted on February 20, 2000. Reposted to new site on December 19, 2008.)

I’ve said before how I “can’t wait” for the season to start. (Or even for Spring training to start!)

But now I know I have it bad. Well, not that I didn’t know before, but yesterday I went to new extremes for my baseball fix. I knew that Mariano Rivera, Yankees closer, had his arbitration hearing Thursday, and that the answer would be delayed until Saturday. Yesterday I diligently checked my usual spots, several times, The Sporting News online, majorleaguebaseball.com, etc… and still no posting of the story. Many of the stories that run on these sites come from the Associated Press. So I went straight to the AP site, and voila, not one but three articles about it…! Ahhhh, at last.

(In case you don’t know, Rivera lost, and as a result will only make $7.25 million dollars next year, be the highest paid closer in baseball, and has the highest salary ever awarded in arbitration, even though he lost. His agent wanted $9.25 million. Rivera’s was the last deal the Yankees needed to wrap up in core players–everything else from here on out is what non-roster and minor league guys will make the team during Spring Training. But that’s not important right now.)

Anyway, teams are working out on sunny fields across Florida and Arizona, and there’s snow on the ground in Boston. It’s fourteen days until I leave for Tampa!

Going to see games at Spring Training is something that, when I was a kid, I never thought I would get to do. We would see little news bits about it on tv, and for some reason I had it in my head that only a few really special people ever went to Spring Training. Now I realize it’s the special few who either live in Florida, or who can surf the Internet for tickets months in advance, take time off to fly down there, and, as the Nike commercial says, “Just Do It.” There are serious advantages to being an adult and not a kid anymore…

Here’s what I’m going to do over the next fourteen days:

1. Print Out Blank Scorecards (just in case)
2. Print Out Spring Training Previews on the Opposing Teams
3. Launder My Yankees Shirts (I own two, both Xmas gifts this year) & warm weather clothes
4. Visit Mapquest and get driving directions to all the ballfields
5. Fax Rick Cerone (Yankee Press Relations) re: freelance article I’m working on
6. Check for any last minute available Braves or Red Sox tickets
7. Load laptop with web connection software (so I can keep checking majorleaguebaseball.com while there, and add entries to this journal!)
8. Read Tampa area restaurant reviews (gotta eat sometime!)
9. Pay Cell Phone Bill
10. Find Cat-sitter
11. Confirm Reservations
12. Gloat to friends
13. Find sunglasses
14. Rub hands with glee

Oh, sure, before I go, I’m also going to put in about 140 hours at my desk, plus some 20-25 hours working at the tae kwon do school. And I’ll probably sleep about 100 hours, too. Nothing important, in the fanatics’ scheme of things.

(Originally published on February 19, 2000. Reposted to new site on December 18, 2008.)

I always liked going to Yankee games as a kid, even if I didn’t really understand what was going on all the time. Being with my Dad, the excitement of the crowd, having a picnic lunch in the stands or getting to stay out late, those were plenty of reasons to like going to the game without anything to do with baseball itself.

But when I really started to enjoy watching the game, was when Dad and I started keeping a scorecard. He’d score one inning, and then I’d score one inning, and we’d go like that for the whole game.

I think I must have been about ten years old when we started. We were at Yankee Stadium early–we often arrived early enough to see batting practice beforehand–and we had bought that day’s program and scorecard book. We were reading it to keep from getting bored. I think we always bought one, but this was the first time we read the instructions in it on how to keep score. Or maybe that was the first time we’d seen it printed–I notice that in the scorecard I picked up in August ‘99, there’s no description of how to keep score. Which is a bit sad, to me.

But anyway, at ten years old, I was fairly well impressed with whoever invented scorecard notation. I mean, how brilliant–each box has four corners which represent the four bases and what happened at or around each one to advance or put out the batter/runner. When I was ten this seemed like another proof that the fundamental physics of the universe made baseball the perfect sport. Or something.

To the left, the way we would have scored an inning where Knoblauch walked, then advanced to third on Jeter’s single (there’s a line in the upper left corner that’s hard to see ont his scan), O’Neill popped up to the catcher, and then Williams hit a home run, scoring both runners. (Jeter stole second in there, too.)

I don’t remember us marking things like the Strike Out Swinging vs. Looking, and I do remember the way single, double, triple and home run were scored–and it was a bit different than the way that’s popular now. As I learned from talking to people at the games last summer, and from poking around–where else–the Internet.

There’s a great site –The Baseball Scorecard–with tutorials, glossary, and other info about keeping scorecards. I didn’t agree with all of Patrick’s definitions there (i.e. it had said that on a walk, all runners advance one base, when actually if there’s a guy on second and no one on first, the guy remains on second…) but most of it is pretty good. Lots of explanation of what the significance of various stats is, and how to calculate them.

Nowadays, they sometimes print a little gray diamond inside the box, and for a single, the scorekeeper draws a line showing the runner’s path from home plate to the base. For a walk, same line, but BB written in the corner. If he advances to second on a play, or steals, another line, drawing his travel from first to second and a notation to mark how he got there. To the left I’ve scored the same inning as above, showing by the numbers of positions in the corners whose hit or play it was that advanced each runner. In Knoblauch’s box, you see the “2″ for Jeter advancing him to third, and the “8″ for Williams scoring him.

OK, the more modern method has some elegance, and is a clear evolution of the way I learned to do it. We used to just circle it whenever a runner would score. Now the trip around the bases makes its own kind of “circle.” And it is in some ways easier to jot down how each base advance worked. But too many little numbers–if there’s then an error on the play, the position number from the opposing team also has to be entered, and to me it’s not as obvious on the glance how many runs scored. But hey, whatever works for you.

I guess I’m just a traditionalist, and like to keep doing it the way I learned. I have adopted the backwards K for Strike Out Looking, though. Because it’s fascinating to watch the patterns emerge for certain batters throughout a game, the battle between pitcher and opposing lineup. Is this pitcher overpowering them with speed and heat? Or is he just keeping them guessing? I don’t, however, write in the count for each at bat, and there’s just no easy way (other than with a computer) to keep track of total pitches thrown. (I don’t like to do too much math when I’m trying to enjoy a game…)

Another thing I’ve started doing is marking the difference between, say, a pop up to the first baseman (“3″) and a grounder to the first baseman that he takes and then steps on the bag (“3, with a little squiggle representing the grounder…). I got this from a friend (Aaron, the husband of my friend Bonnie who got married on the day of Game One of the World Series last year), who not only records each out, but draws the trajectory of the ball on each fly, so you know if it was a high pop up, or a line drive that was miraculously caught, or what.

Did I mention I even keep score when I watch games on tv? I even do it sometimes when I listen to the radio (or Internet), if I’m not in the middle of doing something else. For televised games last year, I found myself improvising scorecards on the back of napkins, placemats, yellow legal pads. Of course, some of the improvisation was due to my being in weird places when I watched the game.

I was in Atlantic City for a convention during the final Yanks/Rangers playoff game last October, and ended up in a bar/restaurant at Caesar’s Palace keeping my score on the back of a Caesar’s napkin, which turned out to be just about the right size. The maitre’d was a nice old guy, Yankee fan, too, who kept stopping by to find out what had happened while he was away from the big screen tv, seating high rollers who had gotten meal tickets and what have you. And because I had the scorecard I could give him a really good recap…

Then there’s the Game Three of last year’s World Series, when corwin and I were in Disneyworld, and I used the placemat from the fancy french restaurant in Epcot Center that night when we went to the All Star Sports Cafe to see the game. Did I mention there were no Braves fans left in the place by the seventh inning? Kind of strange since the Disney Wide World of Sports Complex is the Braves’ spring training home. We had thought maybe we’d be on enemy territory there. But well, Florida’s actually full of retired New Yorkers, and of course Disneyworld is just a planet all its own. So in the end it was us and a couple of other guys from New York cheering. (They were pretty shocked to find out we’re from Boston.)

Now, of course, in the long cold nights of the off season, I’ve made up a scorecard template for myself in Quark Xpress that I can print out at will. And corwin’s wondering if there’s a scorecard for the Palm Pilot (and if there is, if he actually wants it). If anyone out there wants a PDF of it, here’s the PDF of it now.

(2001 Season Update–my scorecard has evolved and improved: see the entry Scorecards, Part Two.)

Remember, mine doesn’t have the dinky baseball diamond in every box. At least, not this year.

Then there’s the whole question of whether to KEEP old scorecards or not. I think my policy will be: I’ll keep the ones in the souvenir magazine from the games, because I don’t actually get to go to that many games. And I’m keeping my Caesar’s napkin, for instance. But day to day regular season televised games? No. After all, that’s what the Sporting News is for.

Pencil or pen? Pencil. I can actually write smaller with a sharp pencil–and of course erase if I need to. Do you write down the time of the first pitch and of the final out? The weather? Total playing time? Attendance at the game?

Then of course there are the times when, no matter how closely you’re trying to follow the game, you just don’t know what happened. The story goes that one day Fran Healy leaned over to Phil Rizzuto in the Yankee broadcast booth, glanced down at Phil’s scorecard, and said, “Scooter, what’s ‘WW” mean?”

Rizzuto: “Wasn’t Watching.”

Today I’ll be reviewing four books out of the many I’ve received this year. Three I’d say would make good holiday gifts, while the last one is more of a book one should read for yourself.

• The Greatest Game, by Richard Bradley
• It Takes More Than Balls, by Deidre Silva and Jackie Koney
• The Spitball Knuckleball Book, by Tom Mahl
• Bash Brothers, by Dale Tafoya

The Greatest Game: The Yankees, the Red Sox, and the Playoff of ‘78
by Richard Bradley

There are some classic legends and tales that can be told over and over again in many different ways, and even though we know how they end, each telling is just as captivating. The Christmas story, the sinking of the Titanic, the Odyssey… and the story of how the Yankees and Red Sox did battle on that fateful October day in 1978.

Bradley is a fluid and captivating writer who has researched all the interesting backstories and the intriguing characters (like managers Don Zimmer and Billy Martin), and retells not only the events of the game, but also how the significance of the game fit in a highly turbulent era for baseball and the country. Free agency, race issues, changes in the media, all created a unique atmosphere that only increased the place of the game in the historical context. He brings in elements of each team’s history, both in relation to each other as rivals and each as a sociological force in their home city.

Let’s not forget that it’s fun to read about the game, too. Bradley recreates key moments with great clarity. The description of Mike Torrez throwing the first pitch to Mickey Rivers comes on the 11th page of the chapter on the “Top of the First.” A sample:

Rivers was an unconventional leadoff hitter in one way: in 555 at-bats that season he had walked just 27 times. He… loved to swing at first-pitch fastballs. In the first game of a late September series the year before against the Red Sox, Rivers had lined three hits on first pitches. The next night, Red Sox pitcher Reggie Cleveland had begun the bottom of the first by nailing Rivers in the ribs. The game was in the Bronx, and as Yankee fans began hurling beer and other unpleasantries in Cleveland’s direction, Carlton Fisk had trotted to the mound to ensure that his pitcher wasn’t rattled. “Let’s see the little bastard try to hit that first pitch,” Cleveland had told Fisk.

As third baseman Jack Brohamer moved two steps in on the infield grass in case Rivers should bunt, Torrez starting with a breaking pitch, thinking that Rivers would guess fastball and swing over the pitch. But Rivers took it low, for a ball.

“The Greatest Game” is a nice-looking hardcover and would make an excellent gift for any baseball fan who wants to re-live the intensity of that late-70s era. If you got them “The Bronx is Burning” (book or DVD) last year, this is your follow-up gift. The hardcover is still available from Amazon
and if you are low on cash, there is also a paperback editionwith a less dignified cover and the more lurid subtitle of The Greatest Game: The Day that Bucky, Yaz, Reggie, Pudge, and Company Played the Most Memorable Game in Baseball’s Most Intense Rivalry.

It Takes More Than Balls: The Savvy Girls’ Guide to Understanding and Enjoying Baseball
by Deidre Silva and Jackie Koney

This is for the baseball fans on your list who are just catching fire with their enthusiasm for the game. I would say it’s mostly for the female fans, because some guys would take offense at any book which purports to tell them the stuff they were supposed to learn by osmosis magically through the Y-chromosome just from hanging out in sports bars. But I will tell you, from hanging around in those selfsame bars, that a lot of guys don’t know the difference between a forkball and a split-finger fastball, nor that the foul pole is fair territory, nor why it is that after a manager calls for an intentional walk, he usually pulls that pitcher (instead of letting the next guy do it). I know these things because I’m a relentless student of the game, but The Savvy Girls have it all spelled out for you in their fun and informative book.

(By the way, if you have a male friend you think needs a book like this and he’d be offending by the implied attack on his masculinity that a “girl’s book” might bring, I suggest Zack Hemple’s Watching Baseball Smarter, which came out around the same time, and covers much the same territory as the Savvy Girls’ book.)

The Savvy Girls cover stats, history, game strategy, and just about everything else you can think of and they make it all entertaining to read, too, with anecdotes and examples.

A sample:

Sometimes successfully managing a team means holding your tongue. In 1987, when the oft-vocal Lou Piniella was managing the Yankees… New York was playing in Los Angeles and leading the game, 1-0. Pitching the game were two starters known for their craftiness and trickery, Tommy John for the Yankees and Don Sutton for the Angels. … Television cameras showed Sutton in the Angels’ dugout taking sandpaper out of his pocket. … [Steinbrenner] was incensed to see [obvious evidence of cheating]. He called Piniella to ask what the manager intended to do about Sutton “doctoring” the ball. Referring to the fact that the Yankees were winning, Piniella told his boss he wasn’t planning on busting Sutton…. “What it means, George,” Piniella said, “is that our guy is cheating better than their guy.”

Points off, girls, for saying the game was in Los Angeles, when the Angels have played in Anaheim since 1966, but you won’t find many errors in this book. (Buy it from Amazon.)

The Spitball Knuckleball Book
by Tom E. Mahl

This is a “coffee table” book that arrived in the mail recently, from a small publisher called Trick Pitch Press. It’s a lovely piece of work, possibly a labor of love, that details the history of baseball’s two most infamous pitches and the men who have thrown them. Biographies of the pitchers are divided into “The Legals,” (Eddie Cicotte, Urban Shocker, et. al.) the “Great Illegals,” (Gaylord Perry, Don Drysdale), “The Dry Spitter–The Knucklecurve” (Burt Hooton, Freddie Fitzsimmons), The Knuckleball (Hoyt Wilhelm, Jim Bouton, Tim Wakefield…). The biographies are copiously illustrated, with many, many photos of the various pitchers’ grips. An extensive section on how to throw the trick pitches, especially the knucklecurve, is included.

Author Mahl spent four years researching the book, and by all appearances self-published the book. (Buy it here.) That alone makes it a unique gift, as it doesn’t appear to be widely available in bookstores.

The book is not perfect. It needed a professional proofreader–for example, Pedro Ramos is listed in the caption on his bio as “Padro Ramos,” but even world renowned Sports Illustrated photographer Ron Modra’s book has caption misspellings in it (“Cal Rikpin” “Raphael Palmeiro”) so one cannot really say that the quality is lower on this book than on what one finds from the big presses. They also have amateur editing mistakes, like
Ramos played for a secession of awful Washington Senators teams in the late ’50s.” A good editor would have changed that mistake from “secession” to “succession.” But again, these kinds of mistakes are actually becoming all too common in publishing as a whole, as bigger presses cut corners.

Bash Brothers: A Legacy Subpoenaed
by Dale Tafoya

This is a book that was also in need of one of those copyeditors. Tafoya tries to be as colorful a writer as his brash subjects, Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire, but one gets the impression the book was written quickly and edited even more quickly. The result is dumb copyediting mistakes like the word “fanfare” appearing as “fan fare” and plain bad word usage like in this description of the rough-and-tumble playing and living conditions faced by McGwire in Dominican Winter baseball: “The luxuries and amenities he enjoyed in American eluded him.” Elude is a synonym for escape or dodge. The amenities ran away from him? I don’t think so.

The fact that there is a weak or shoddy sentence like this on nearly every page almost caused me to give up on this book. I started reading it only to put it down again many many times. But eventually it won me over as an important addition to the canon of baseball history. I wouldn’t give this one as a gift, because I wouldn’t be able to do it without issuing an apology for the seeming lack of editing, but I will recommend it to anyone trying to come to grips with “the steroid thing” themselves.

Every fan has to make their own decision where they stand on steroids, but no matter how you feel, you should be informed. It’s amazing how much information about what went on in the 1980s and early 1990s is already seemingly forgotten by commentators and columnists on the issue. The story of Canseco’s meteoric rise as a star in Oakland, his struggles in the minors and later his run-ins with the police, McGwire arriving on his heels in Oakland and the entire “Bash Brothers” phenomenon is all fascinating reading, and more importantly, quite relevant to all that is still going on with steroids and other performance enhancing drugs in MLB today.

Tafoya has done what seems to be fairly exhaustive research and interviews, and the book presents a fairly meaty picture of a tumultuous time in baseball that is already being shoved by some into the mists of forgotten history. Some of the facts are intriguing, like the A’s were one of the first teams to employ a conditioning coach who forced the players through stretching drills; now all teams do so. Others are ironic: the A’s 1986 Media Guide featured a photo of Canseco and the headline “The Natural.” Thomas Boswell called Canseco “the most conspicuous example of a player who has made himself great with steroids” on national television in 1988–twenty years ago. Tafoya’s book will be an incredible resource for historians and writers 20 and 50 years down the road who are still trying to make sense of it all. It is, in a lot of ways, a very raw resource, only one step removed from the transcripts and clippings that formed the basis of the research. So the bad word usage and the weak sentence construction in the end come off as almost forgivable for me, the way spots and graininess are in old movie footage. It annoys me that it didn’t receive the editing polish it should have, but I’m glad to have it on my reference shelf. (Buy it from Amazon.)

So, I was floating through the blogosphere and came across this list of “Top Ten Greatest Yankee Fan Books” on the Yankzology blog. And my book is, amazingly, at number one. Of course, the book is called “The 50 Greatest Yankee Games,” so maybe having “greatest” in the title skewed the results? I’m still amazed. The other 9 books on the list are pretty much ALL in the bibliography of my book, and on my shelf. (Well, OK, 7 out of the 9.)

I’ve got a stack of books I’ve been working my way through which I’ll be reviewing here ASAP, partly in case anyone wants gift-giving advice for Yankee-loving family members this Xmas.

THE GREATEST GAME: The Yankees, the Red Sox, and the Playoff of ‘78, by Richard Bradley
BASH BROTHERS by Dale Tafoya
a retrospective on Yankee Stadium
and a few others will all be reviewed soon!

(Originally appeared on February 18, 2000. Reposted at new URL on December 10, 2008.)

So, today spring training gets underway in earnest. So many of the articles I’ve been reading have been about the players who have rehabbed from injury or surgery during the winter. Even Cal Ripken! Pitchers galore. And more.

I’ve been “recovering” from a back injury since 1996, so I can say something about strength, or lack thereof, and about how it takes a kind of focused mindfulness to come back from injury.

I’ve been practicing tae kwon do for over a decade now. And I’ve had my set-backs because of injuries. Doing something physical at a very high skill level, I’ve come to appreciate just how hard it must be for some of these players.

I injured my knee skiing in 1991, right after starting up in tae kwon do again after a three year hiatus. That time, I was stupid. I “stayed off it”–meaning I didn’t work out for about a month, but I was still walking from the T station to work every morning, and working on the fourth floor of a building with no elevator. I did untold damage to the knee by not going to the doctor right away, but I was between health insurance providers at the time (my job had just switched companies and I didn’t have a doctor assigned yet). Besides, it was the first time in my life that I’d ever been injured. That’s right, all those years running cross country track, but I’d never sprained my ankle. Never broke a bone or needed stitches. Never dislocated my shoulder. So I had no mentality for how to deal with injury or rehab.

Then there’s the fact that I was out of shape in the first place. I never would have hurt my knee in the skiing fall if I had been in shape. But after all those years of cross country track, teaching skiing professionally, and tae kwon do in college, I had no concept of what being out of shape was. never in my adult life had I been so inactive as those two years at a desk job. I didn’t jog, didn’t ski, didn’t do anything. I even ruined my eyes at that job. (Don’t get me wrong, it was a good job, an exciting and fulfilling one… but it led me to neglect my physical self.)

That’s why I wanted to get back into tae kwon do so badly, and why it was particularly heartbreaking to have to stop again after only about two months of it, because of the knee.

Like I said, I “stayed off it” for a month. Then I went back to tae kwon do class, because I was bound and determined that I wasn’t going to slack off.

And that’s when I did the real damage. The muscles still being weak in my leg, and giving no protection to the ligaments, I blew it out again in class.

That time it was a year I was out, but that time I finally went to a doctor. Got an orthopedist. Then got a physical therapist. And started doing quad exercises.

I’ll never forget the moment though, when the physical therapist said to me that I’d probably never compete again. Here I’d been going in to therapy with the mindset that I’d be as good as new when I was done. Insert Six Million Dollar Man music here…”we can rebuild her, we have the technology…” But he brought me up short with that dose of reality. I remember feeling physically ill at that moment, dizzy. To tell you the truth, I didn’t have plans to win any more medals and had figured I was done with that years before. But to hear him say it was no longer an option… it was a blow to my spirit. I cried when I got home.

Later, though, I came to decide he was wrong. I look at someone like David Cone, or Kerry Wood, or Jackie Chan, for gods sake, who have not only recovered from serious injury, they have returned to form and been able to perform at a very high level. I kept doing my exercises with the thought that although some things are unlikely, they are not impossible.

I’m still doing those exercises today, nine years later, because the inherent flaws in my knees are still there, and given the noises it has been making, I think the “good” knee is going to be the one to go next. But as long as I keep doing my exercises, I have a chance to keep it together.

That’s hard when my back is out. The back injury was a similar story to the knee, only this time I was in the best shape I had ever been in in my life. When I got my black belt I weighed 10 pounds less than I do now, could work out two to three hours at a time without feeling tired, and felt more or less invincible. That’s the problem–I felt invincible, and thought I could lift something that I could not. And–crack–I threw out my back.

I didn’t go to physical therapy this time–I didn’t need machines to do the rehab really. What I needed was to do lots of stretching, lots of trunk strengthening exercises I can do at home, and I needed to stop doing a lot of things that put stress on my back.

Nothing makes a person feel old like a bad back, though. Instant old lady feeling. “Oh, my back!”

Now it’s a couple years later on the back thing, and really only about three months ago did I feel like I could start trying to get back in shape. My cardiovascular system is at another all time low, my flexibility is shot, and I have a long way to go to get back to the level I was at in 1996 when the injury occurred.

But I look at guys like Cal Ripken, and the other players who are suffering through the dull winter months on their machines and doing their sit ups and their stretches and so on, and so forth… and I think maybe I can make it. Sure, they have professional trainers working with them, and sure, they get paid to get in shape, and I’ve just got me.

But maybe that’s all I’m going to need. Me, and the inspiration those guys give me.

(Originally posted on February 17, 2000 and re-posted to the new URL on December 10, 2008)

I’ve waxed poetic before about Yankee Stadium, and well, I’m about to do it again. Yankee Stadium embodies, for me, the Platonic Ideal stadium. If my baseball history is right, it was the first three tier stadium, as well. Add to that the fact that it is The House That Ruth Built, and the tremendous amount of baseball history that has been made in that park, and, well… I could go on and on. (But won’t.)

It does occur to me, though, that my views on Yankee Stadium are a bit skewed by the fact that, well, I’ve never really been anywhere else. There was one year when the stadium was being refurbished in the seventies. I remember going to Shea for a Yankee game that time–but most of what I remember about it was that it poured rain. And I do mean poured; Niagara-like spouts of water were shooting from the upper decks. We arrived home sopping wet and wringing out our clothes. I was probably about seven years old at the time.

So, not counting that one soggy trip, I was at Shea for a concert in the 1980s (was it 1983?)–The Police, Joan Jett, and R.E.M. I don’t think that counts either.

And I’ve been to Fenway Park only once, despite the fact that I lived a block from the place for five years, and it was to see a high school World Series game in around 1995.

Admittedly, most of what I remember from that trip to Fenway was how exciting the game was–and it was. We of course didn’t know any of the players or any of the teams, but what a thrill to see a seventeen year old player blast a home run over the Green Monster! I don’t know that kid’s name, but I gotta wonder if he went on to the big leagues, or if he finished college somewhere and is now working a desk job somewhere…

So, this year will be the first time I really see a big league game somewhere other than Yankee Stadium.

In fact, it looks like I’ll see more of the Yankees at Fenway than I will in New York. I scored tickets to June 19, June 21, and September 8 here in Boston, whereas I’ll probably only see a game in April and a game in August in New York. (OK, maybe I’ll see two games in August, and that will even things up.)

And then there are the five spring training games I’m going to see all over Florida: Dunedin, Clearwater, Tampa, Sarasota, Winterhaven… (and if I get really, really lucky, the Yanks/Sox game in Fort Myers. But it sold out before I could get tickets.)

But back to stadiums. Now every time I have a road trip planned, I look at the baseball calendar to see if there’s a game going on nearby. I’m still kicking myself over not going to see a Yanks/Mariners game last August at Safeco Field, when I was in town there, which turned out to be the bench-clearing brawl game…. (Then again, maybe it’s just as well I wasn’t there…. )

If I have my way, in the next five years or so, I’ll see a bunch of the other stadiums that are out there. Everyone raves about Coors Field and Camden Yards. Will the new PacBell Park be less windy than Candlestick?

And then I’ll come back, and tell you that Yankee Stadium is still the canonical stadium.

(Originally posted February 16, 2000, reposted to new blog on December 9, 2008)

So, I never really thought about the difference between female baseball fans and male baseball fans, until the whole Derek Jeter thing.

Let me explain. Growing up as a kid, I was a tomboy, and was always doing this that the “guys” did: I ran cross country track, and played the sousaphone (tuba), and I was the one girl in my fifth grade class who traded baseball cards. (Because I only cared about the Yankees, I didn’t mind letting the guys bid on my other hot players who were non-Yankees… the going rate for a “trade” back then was a penny a card, or a card of equal “value” for a card… which meant someone like Reggie Jackson wouldn’t go for less than 75 cents, and could get bid up to about $3. In milk money, that was a significant amount! I was also my class’ treasurer… and I made a killing shedding the Dodgers, Reds, and Mets I didn’t want…)

Anyway, the thing is, I didn’t really think of baseball fandom as a masculine thing, particularly. And I still don’t, especially not with all the women I always see when I go to games. And they’re not there as tag alongs to their boyfriends or husbands.

Then again, in New York, maybe they are just there to see Derek Jeter.

I was slightly shocked when I went to a game at Yankee stadium in 1999 to find that, as the players were introduced, the decibel and pitch level of the screams for Jeter were considerably higher than for other players. Being the baseball exile I was for so many years, and not being in New York, I had missed the whole Jeter-as-Heartthrob phenomenon. I thought to myself, hmm, yeah, he’s kind of cute, single, and plays shortstop, chicks dig that. But I didn’t really see the attraction myself. Maybe, I thought, it’s because I’m, ahem, seven years older than he is–I mean, s**t, he’s the same age as my little brother.

During the post-season this year, though, I’m not sure what it was, but all of a sudden I “got” Jeter fever. This was especially weird since I haven’t had that Beatle-mania kind of feeling for any athlete, movie star, or pop singer since I was, oh, a teenager. But, as Mel Stottlemeyer is fond of saying, Jeter is “special.” The more I watched him play, the more fascinated I became. Who is this guy? I wondered.

Then came the offseason, and as I was surfing the Internet, I came across many great Jeter articles and interviews I’d missed while in baseball exile. Turns out, he’s also the nicest, best-mannered guy in the sport. Jeez. I read features from Sports Illustrated, ESPN The Magazine, GQ (!), Time Out New York, People (!!)… Perhaps even more intriguing was that rarely did I read these interviews on their original magazine’s sites. More often than not they were lovingly scanned, or perhaps painstakingly re-ryped, word for word, by dedicated fans of Mr. Jeter. I found hundreds of Jeter fan sites. And not surprisingly, most of these sites are run by young women, in their teens and twenties.

I was deeply involved with teen heartthrob fandom myself when I was young (I ran a fan club for Puerto Rican boy band Menudo, and yes, I met Ricky Martin many times back when he was thirteen–you’ll have to wait for my autobiography to hear more…). So I know the turf. I was capitvated by features on the sites–the modern day equivalent of home-made fan club newsletters–like “101 Reasons I Love Derek Jeter” and the still-ongoing speculations about Jeter’s relationship with Mariah Carey (despite the fact they broke up years ago).

Even more captivating was all the actual baseball talk that got tossed in with the discussions of Jeter’s eating habits, social life, and eye color. Okay, granted, there were many, many messages posted on the boards with subject lines like “OMIGOD DJ IS SOOOOOO HOT!!!!!!!!” but maybe that’s why it was so surprising to me to find women arguing about Chuck Knoblauch’s throwing problems, for example.

Then again, think about the character of Annie in “Bull Durham.” She wasn’t just a dugout groupie–she knew her baseball.

No, I really shouldn’t have been surprised at all, I guess. I salute baseball women, the “diamond girls,” whether what thrills their blood is Jeter’s smile, or his lightning throw to first. Or both. And I’m proud to be one of them.