Why I Like Baseball

Began the day this morning with breakfast with my roomie at the hotel buffet, then to the Women in Baseball committee meeting. The meeting was lovely, as Justine Siegel was there to present a pilot qualitative study she has done on a current girl playing high school baseball who is trying to get a Division II scholarship. Justine is special to me because she was the one who pointed me at the Pawtucket Slaterettes when I was falling out of the revamped New England Women’s Baseball League. She’s now getting her PhD in Sports Psychology and still running a 12-and-under girls team for the annual Cooperstown tournaments (where they play against boys teams), coaching a men’s collegiate baseball team, and helping to organize international tournaments for women’s baseball programs. And probably more. And raising a daughter, too.

The first research presentation I attended at Alan Nathan’s presentation on Pitchf/x. This is Sportvision’s three-camera system that has been installed in all MLB stadiums and if you look at the live Gameday pitch by pitch window at MLB.com, these days you will see a graphic showing the trajectory of the pitch and data on the pitch speed, location, and the amount of break that it displays. It is the same technology that you see on ESPN as K-Zone, and on Fox as Fox Trak. The center field camera is used only to determine the height of the strike zone. The other two are a “high home” camera, and a “high first” camera, whose angles are calculated together with software to determine pixel locations in each plane, and which then makes a three-dimensional set of coordinates for each frame.

The system is accurate to within a half mile of pitch speed (both at release and as it crosses home–the usual pitch loses 10% of its speed as it travels), with a half inch for location, and within 2 inches for magnitude and direction of break. It also records the type of pitch (fastball, slider, curve, etc.), and because it records each pitch live, it is also recording what each batter does with each pitch. Not only that, all this data is available FREE online. (He gave URLs for Dan Turkenkopf, who has a tutorial online on how to mate Pitchf/x data with Retrosheet, but I didn’t get it written down so you’ll have to Goggle for it, and Dan Brooks’ site: brooksbaseball.net/pfx/, who also has info on how to use the data.

Among the things Nathan was able to show that Pitchf/x demonstrates are the fact that pitches really do move differently in Colorado than elsewhere. He combined the data from 3000-7000 pitches in Toronto versus Denver. In Toronto the average speed dropped by 10% after release and broke 12″. In Denver pitches broke only 8″ and lost only 7.5% of their velocity. He also showed some fascinating graphs of pitchers Jon Lester, Brandon Webb, and knuckleballer Tim Wakefield, which I cannot really describe here. Also he showed how pitchf/x shows how the slider and the fastball really do look remarkably similar for the first 40 feet of their trajectory (with only a 4″ variation), and then drastically different for the final 20 feet, resulting in a 12″ difference in where they end up. Nathan’s own website about the topic is: http://webusrs.upl.uiuc.edu/~a-nathan/pob/pitchtracker.html

Then it was time for a little culture. Anthony Salazar presented a really fascinating look at the baseball art of Jacob Lawrence, a painter of the Harlem Renaissance. He was born in Atlantic City in 1917. He moved to Harlem when he was 13 and took classes in arts and crafts at Utopia House. There he met such figures as Langston Hughes and others, and by age 21 had his first painting exhibition. He was very influenced by the Mexican painter Diego Rivera and mural painting, with much emphasis on triangular shapes, elongated hands, and primary colors “right from the jar.”

In 1949 he painted two paintings, both 20″ x 24″ in egg tempera, with baseball themes. “Strike” depicts a black catcher, catching a pitch, while a white batter strikes out, and a racially mixed audience is depicted. In “The Long Stretch,” a white first baseman is catching the ball, as a black player barely gets one spiky toe onto the bag, and a white umpire calls him safe.

The images are imbue with great energy, highly stylized, and capture the tenacity of the pioneers integrating baseball at that time. Salazar pointed out similarities between the catcher figure and Roy Campanella, and the runner with Jackie Robinson. It’s fascinating art and a fascinating way for art to capture the complex situation and that moment in history. Thanks to Power Point, Salazar was able to show the paintings to good effect.

Then came Zak Hudak’s talk on how many home runs Babe Ruth might have hit, had he been on steroids. Hudak is 14 years old, very poised for his age (and probably tired of hearing people tell him that), the youngest presenter ever at a SABR convention.

Hudak started with a study done by Professor Tobin at Tufts University that posited that the muscle development from steroid use would increase homer production by 50% to 100%. Looking at the careers of Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Bary Bonds, and a couple of other sluggers who weer alleged to have used steroids, and found they tended to have a 4-5 year surge of about 50% above their usual production late in their careers.

Predicting that if Ruth had used enhancers, he would have also followed this pattern, Hudak calculated a 50% increase for Ruth’s 5 most consecutive productive years toward the end of his career, and came up with 842 home runs. By the same token, Aaron would have ended up with 856, and Ted Williams 608, among others.

Then it was off to the beautiful and wonderful Cleveland Public Library. There was an author roundtable, where Tom Swift, who just published a book on Chief Bender, Rob Neyer,

oops, just realized I am late for a presentation about the “Mitchell 89″ — more later!

Well, here I am in Cleveland! Apologies in advance for typos in this report. My trusty Macintosh laptop, which has, shall we say, high mileage on it, finally went kaput on the way here. I am forced to post this via he wacky WebTV thing in my room. I’s keyboard is horrible, I can barely see the TV screen, and it shows me maybe a tenth of the page?

But we persevere.

My flight last night flew right over the Indians’ home ballpark, which I still think of as Jacobs Field, but which has been renamed Progressive. I’m not actually expecting much about Cleveland to be very “progressive,” but well, let’s face it, I am an East Coast liberal, and my peer group when finding out I was going to Cleveland was full of jokes like “I think they have running water and electricity there now.” And Internet, I was assured! I feel a bit like I am riding a horse and buggy using WebTV….

Anyway, yes, they have electricity. The lights of the ballpark could be sen when we were still miles away, the distinctive “toothbrush” style lightstands making it look sort of like a kid’s birthday cake from a distance. Or perhaps a crown of some kind, though it does not look like this year the Indians will be capturing that.

Went to four fascinating research presentations today. Jim Odenkirk presented a very enjoyable recap of the years when the “rivalry” was between the Indian and Yankees, not just the Red Sox and Yankees. He used some attendance figures and such to prove that the Indians/Yankees rivalry from the 1940s and 1950s was every bit as hot and exciting as Red Sox/Yankees. I’m not so sure about that, as the rivalry between the cities of NY and Boston pre-dates the existence of professional baseball, and even when NL ball first came to the Northeast Corridor, supporters of the tams would waves signs rooting for them from the train platforms all along Connecticut (which has always had to divide loyalties);. But it was a very enjoyable reminscence of what was a very unique era in baseball. Mr. Odenkirk lived through it, and even was paid $3 per ride to drive a busload of 40 kids to ballgames on weekend afternoons, where owner Bill Veeck gave away thousands of tickets to children.

I unfortunately had to miss most of the talk on the decline of the inside the park home run by Ron Selter. I was on the phone to a friend who works at the Apple Store, and I was buying my replacement computer. I did hear his conclusions though, which were basically:

-outfielders are bigger/faster/stringer now days
-there are fewer bunts & hit & run plays
-smoother field result in fewer bad bounces
-better gloves
-smaller outfields

Anne Aronson gave a nice presentation on Women’s Baseball in Australia. Interestingly, one of the reasons they have significant womens baseball recreation programs there is because baseball is not a hugely popular sport, the state baseball federations there sponsored women’s baseball as a way of promoting the game to more people–why limit yourself to half he population? It also helps that the majority of sports played are organized through sports clubs. You pay your membership in a club, and that club will sponsor a whole menu of teams including T-ball for the kids, multiple men’s and women’s teams, and more. Since club membership and participation are largely family-oriented, when baseball was introduced, there were already plenty of women, including mothers, daughters, wives, sisters, etc… who weer ready to give it a try. They also lack the “baseball is for boys, softball is for girls” weirdness that rules American attitudes.

The best presentation I went to though, which truly fascinated me, was Geri Strecker’s talk about wartime baseball in the Philippines. The USA took over the Philippines in 1898 and by 1902 they had a professional quality ballpark. Early filipino newspapers show photos of native Ingorot tribesmen as the “G-String Basebal Team” (because that was pretty much all they wore.) By 1913 the All-Filipino team was touring the US and Japan in more traditional baseball uniforms.

The professional Manila Baseball League incorporated in 1909 and players got shares of the profits of about $45 – $60 per month. I imagine not only was that a fair it of money back then, but in the Philippines especially. Heck, that’s probably a good salary there NOW.

The playing season went from Thanksgiving to July 4th, to avoid typhoon season. They once had a rain delay that lasted 3 weeks for an All-Star Game because 3 typhoons came one after the other.

Her research centers around the 24th Infantry, an all black company serving in Batangas. The Manila League had four teams, the All-Filipino team, made up of native filipinos of many ethnicities, the Manila team, made up mostly of US citizens in the Philippines, the Army, and the Marines. But the Marines pulled out of the Philippines in mid-season. At the halfway point, the 24th infantry were invited to join the league, making the league integrated for a time. There were protests, though, and the experiment only lasted for that half-season.

Interesting to note that many of the presenters are women. The presentations are chosen based on blind abstracts, so the committee does not know the gender of the people they pick. It’s interesting that although general SABR membership runs about 4% female, it would appear that a greater number of them are doing presentable research than among the male population. I hypothesize that women who join SABR are more likely to do so BECAUSE they are motivated to do research, and not as content to just sit back and enjoy SABR as a passive experience, which is how I think some guys do.

Brain is full now, so must rest and then dinner with baseball writer/editor friends.

I’m not sure if I’ll post again! Depends on how painful this WEBTV continues to be.

These days every movie or TV show has a “making of” documentary to accompany it. And every sport is analyzed up and down, from the drafting of talent to the construction of the roster, from the strategy employed on the field to examination of each and every play that happens. So I thought it was about time I parted the shrouds of mystery on how to turn out a top notch game story, including the secret techniques employed by all sportswriters, myself included, and tips for getting the most out of every game story.

1. PLAY ON WORDS
A sure-fire way to grab people’s attention is with some kind of pun, double meaning, or play on words. Sometimes this can be in the title of the piece, or it might just be a clever (or painfully obvious) connection, like “It was 95 degrees at game time today in the Bronx, and Joba Chamberlain was hitting 95 mph on the radar gun.” I considered that one for todat’s piece, but actually Joba hit all the way up to 99 in the first inning, so for the sake of accuracy. I scrapped it. How about “The bats that heated up yesterday stayed hot in the Yankees’ 6-3 win over Kansas City, while the fans stayed hot because of surprisingly sweltering temperatures.” Eh, kind of wordy and not that sensical. maybe something simpler, like: “Temperatures soared and Joba was throwing heat.”? You get the idea.

2. EVOKE NOSTALGIA
The Yankees have a lot of history associated with them, and especially any story about a game that takes place in the final season of Yankee Stadium ought to have a patina of nostalgia on it. So, for example, making a comparison to games or figures of the past, allows you to pull in some history. Joba’s barrel chest, jowly face, and exuberant spirit make him an easy comparison to Babe Ruth. The pitcher he looks the most like from the upper deck, though, is actually Roger Clemens. Opposing players can be useful for evoking the past, too. After Joey Gathright ended the Yankees’ first inning rally, and prevented another one from starting in the second, both with unbelievable catches in center field, the old fellow sitting behind me remarked that he was “like Willie fucking Mays out there or something.” (These are Yankees’ fans, remember.)

3. ANOINT A HERO
Sometimes the hero is really obvious. Like in yesterday’s game, Johnny Damon went six-for-six and every hit was part of a rally, not to mention that he had the game-winning walk-off hit. Today, though, we could debate whether Bobby Abreu deserves the hero title or Jason Giambi. Abreu, after all, hit the two-run shot in the first that gave Joba some breathing room, whereas Giambi hit a solo shot in the sixth that broke the 3-3 tie and was ultimately the difference in the game. When anointing a hero, it’s important to take into account past performance–and to recap recent heroics if relevant. Right now Giambi is leading the major leagues in home run frequency, hitting one per 11 at bats or something like that. Not only that, he had a pinch-hit walk-off with two outs in the ninth in Thursday’s game, and just yesterday ALSO had a solo shot to break a tie in the sixth. I’d say Giambi gets it this time around, also because…

4. EVERYBODY LOVES AN UNDERDOG
Now, when you write about the Yankees, the term “underdog” can seem a bit ironic, if not oxymoronic. But in the eyes of some fans, a guy like Giambi went from MVP to underdog when he had all his health problems, and then fought back into shape. There are not many candidates for underdog in today’s game though, unless we count the Kansas City Royals themselves… Wait. How about Dan Giese? This is a pitcher who has been waiting for his chance to pitch for a long time, and who got called up for Joba’s first start last week, as the team has Joba on strict pitch counts while they stretch him out from short relief to a starting role. He pitched extremely well in the long relief role, and then the next day was sent immediately back to Triple A. He was recalled after just a few days and praised by team management for being cooperative and professional about the whole thing. And he pitched effectively again: two and a third innings, no hits, no runs.

5. WORK A MOTIF
The overwhelming theme of the day had to be heat, but I’ve already harped on it so much. The last time I remember being so steamy at the stadium was in August 2005, when we took in a game that was stopped twice by passing thundershowers. And Bernie Williams hit two home runs. The Belmont Stakes was yesterday and Big Brown, trying to win the Triple Crown, came in dead last. Hm. Probably not a good comparison. I hope. I’ll be avoiding horseracing references for a while just in case.

6. QUOTE SOME STATS
Authority in baseball writing is always conveyed by the use of numbers. Some of my best friends are baseball statisticians. And I do some number crunching myself, though I often have the feeling that if there is a case I want to make, I can surely dig up numbers to support it that will look extremely convincing to all except perhaps my stat geek friends. So I try to look at the numbers with an open mind, and see what they suggest to me. Among other things, what they suggest is that Mariano Rivera is still improving with age. The solo shot he surrendered yesterday (in a non-save situation) was only the second run he gave up all season. It caused his ERA to “balloon” to 0.64. For those of you who are new to baseball, that’s SMALL. He has converted 15 of 15 save opportunities. Not much arguing one can do with numbers like that.

7. LOOK FOR THE UNSEEN STORY
Of course if you want to give your readers the feeling that you are really, really on top of everything, write about not only what you saw, but what you didn’t see. I didn’t see any hint of Kyle Farnsworth in yesterday’s game. Now that Joba Chamberlain is in the rotation, doesn’t the eighth inning belong to Farnsworth? Unfortunately, with his recent tendency to give up the long ball, he has lost what tentative trust the crowd had begun to put in the “re-invented” reliever. “He’s a bum,” is what the 12 year old sitting next to me said. “We better get some more runs,” said the guy on my other side, “because you know Farnsworth is coming in and he’s going to give up at least one run.” But although the Yankees got two insurance runs on a two-RBI double by Alex Rodriguez (which he tried to stretch into a triple but ended up thrown out at third), Farnsworth did not appear. Instead, Jose Veras pitched, and pitched well. That’s two games in a row that Veras pitched. After the game, manager Joe Girardi said he held Farnsworth out of the game because he has a slight tweak in his biceps. Interesting. I think Girardi is bending over backwards to maintain his trust in Farnsworth, because he knows the moment Farnsworth thinks Girardi has lost confidence in him, Farnsworth will fall apart. And unfortunately, they need him to contribute because if there were better alternatives, they’d have already explored them. It looks to me, though, like Jose Veras is on the verge of earning the 8th inning job.

8. INCLUDE AMUSING ANECDOTES
Sometimes the amusing anecdotes come from the clubhouse, from players, other times from other people associated with the game. And still other times they come from my own observations, in which case maybe they are only amusing to me. Here’s today’s: I have a new nickname for Jorge Posada, which is El Jardinero. “Jardinero” in Spanish means “gardener,” and in Spanish baseball lingo also refers to “fielders” especially outfielders. However today was the annual Puerto Rican Day parade in New York City, which perhaps put me in mind of the Dominican salsa master Wilfrido Vargas, who had a huge salsa hit in the 1980s under the title “El Jardinero.” So Jorge, who is proudly Puerto Rican, earns the title for all the gardening he does around home plate. After Joba finished throwing his warmup pitches, the first thing Jorge did was fluff up the dirt right in front of the plate. He seemed to be carefully building up a layer right at the edge of the plate, and then smoothing the rest. He also obliterated the lines of the batters’ boxes closest the the plate, presumably because of glare in his eyes on the sunny day? I’m not sure why. I just know he spent a lot of time looking like he really wanted a garden spade in his hand.

9. END WITH A BANG
Of course, every piece should end with something that makes the reader go either “aww” or “aha!” or “wow.” This effect can be achieved by looping back to the beginning to close the thematic loop (“and as the weather stays hot, hopefully the Yankees will, too…”), by making bold predictions for the future (“and Joba Chamberlain will likely be in the rotation for the rest of the season…”), or by adding one last tidbit that was held back until now. Um, except I didn’t actually hold back a tidbit. I left it all out on the field.

I recently found my notes from a panel discussion I did a few years ago on the subject of baseball at a science fiction convention.

Why, you may wonder, were they having a panel at a science fiction convention about baseball?

Well, first of all, have you ever noticed how many of the great baseball novels have an element of the supernatural, fantastical, or unexplained about them? There are some ways in which baseball literature can be said to be a sub-genre or offshoot of fantasy. (And you should know that “science fiction” in the common vernacular encompasses not just space opera and cyberpunk, but things that have no science in them at all, like high fantasy, vampire fiction, and so on. Why fantasy and science fiction are one genre in the bookstore is a topic for some other journal.)

Second, there’s the simple fact that many hardcore fans of science fiction and fantasy are also fans of baseball. On the panel with me were noted writers like Shane Tourtellotte and comic book creator Ken Gale. Since then I’ve done similar panels including noted figures like Eric Van, who both works for the Red Sox as a stat-head and is an organizer of the annual Readercon sf/f literary convention.

Anyway, on this particular panel, we came up with the Ten Reasons Why Baseball Is Like Fantasy.

1. It’s something you get hooked on as a ten-year-old.
2. The movies are adapted from books.
3. The books are better.
4. Everyone complains about how much better it used to be in the old days.
5. Involves a system of rules that seem like magic to the casual observer.
6. Current stars often seem to imitate previous stars.
7. There are always moments of comedy and drama, and sometimes you don’t know if you’re headed for tragedy or triumph.
8. An appreciation of history can increase one’s appreciation of it.
9. If you like one, you’ll probably like the sequel.
10. Some people just don’t get it.

This led to a discussion about how fantasy baseball and Dungeons & Dragons are similar. A closer analogy is Strat-o-matic baseball and D&D, which both rely on the statistical probability of events occurring to determine the outcome. And how wiffle ball is the equivalent of baseball boffer fighting.

But if I try to explain what boffer fighting is, I’ll be here all day. Hm, although I suppose if I say “it’s the wiffle ball equivalent of sword fighting,” people might get what I mean.

This is going to be a kind of personal piece today, about life and baseball. Or perhaps about baseball and life.

I cried a lot yesterday. There are a lot of reasons why, and they all come back to baseball.

I drove to New York City Sunday night, had a lovely dinner with my good friend Lori in the Bronx, who shares the same birthday with me. We have a tradition of going to Opening Day at Yankee Stadium together, since the home opener often falls on or next to our birthday, and then having dinner at a steakhouse in Yonkers that we like (and that gives birthday discounts).

I thought I was going to miss the opener for sure last year, since I had a trip to China and Japan planned for early April, but as it turned out I was able to go to the game, then head home and leave pretty much the next day for the Far East. This year would have been my ninth Opening Day in a row.

And of course, as the media has trumpeted repeatedly, the last home opener ever in The Old Ballpark.

I wanted to be there. Sure, it’s just a game. Sure, I’ll have plenty more chances to attend games this season. I’ll very likely be there for the last game of the season. So you’d think it wouldn’t have been such a Big Deal that yesterday’s game was rained out, postponed to tonight, and that I decided to drive back home instead of trying to stay another day.

But it wasn’t until I was partway home that the tears hit. That the disappointment came on me like a wave.

I’ve often said one of the most amazing things about baseball is how it can reduce a mature adult to being ten years old again. I didn’t quite feel the disappointment as keenly as I would have at ten. But the more I thought about it on the way home, the more I realized I wasn’t just upset over one game or one rainy day.

The two-hundred mile drive back to my house from the Stadium is never longer than after a loss, and I associate it with nights like the time my friend Rich and I drove down to see Game 2 of the ALDS in 2001, with our hearts still raw from 9/11 and the game felt like attending a wake. Coming home after various other playoff losses, too. That drive is joyous and wonderful after clinching–one can get WFAN late at night through over half of Connecticut and there was one night after they clinched a round we did the drive and listened to happy fans calling in until well past New Haven. We also listened as long as we could the last night of Joe Torre’s tenure, too, the night Suzyn Waldman cried from the clubhouse while trying to report on the radio about how all of Joe Torre’s coaches were in tears.

Yes, there’s crying in baseball. Because people care. Because it’s a huge thing in the fabric of our lives, as huge as the things we associate it with, like family, and religion, and triumph and defeat.

They’re going to tear down my stadium! MY stadium, I say, like it belongs to me. I’ve been resigned to the destruction of the place since an Old Timer’s Day in 2002. I was sitting in the stands before the game, just looking around, and the realization hit me then that even if they did tear it down and rebuild on the same spot–it would never be the same. At the time we didn’t know what the plans for a new building were going to be. But preservation was pretty much out of the question.

As a historian, I hate to see real, actual things disappear from the world. The reason some of the things one sees in Cooperstown at the Hall of Fame are so striking is because these are the actual objects that were involved in the history. It’s one thing to know the story of how Jack Chesbro’s one wild pitch at the worst possible time cost the Yankees the pennant, handing it to the Red Sox in 1904. It’s another thing entirely to see the actual ball that got away sitting there behind Plexiglas.

I talked to Reggie Jackson this spring about the Stadium. And here’s what he had to say. “I don’t think I am as caught up yet, because I’m not there now. When the end comes, I’ll probably get teary-eyed.”

He went on to explain all the good and valid reasons why we’re going to enjoy the new stadium. And I have no doubt that I will. I believe that the fans that will cheer and root and pour their hearts out there are what will give that new building life, and the feats that the team that plays there accomplishes are what will make it precious to us eventually. I have no doubt about that.

But he went on to say, “I’m just not that sentimental yet. Maybe when it gets closer. I really wouldn’t want to be around to see them tear it down.”

No, I don’t think I could stand that. At the time I was nodding my head right along with him, excited about the new stadium, and the new season, too. It was a spring full of optimism in Yankee camp, after all. But he was right, I think, about not feeling as sentimental because he wasn’t there. I think Reggie will be feeling it as much as I am when the end actually comes.

“[The new one] won’t have its history,” he said. “And I don’t think you’ll lose the history. It’s just like I don’t play anymore, and I’m nothing in baseball except an old name, but I have my memories. They’re always with me. So if you wouldn’t let me in the ballpark, or you took my uniform away from me, I would be sad, but you wouldn’t take my memories away. I don’t think I’m explaining it well. But the memories that I have in my mind and in my head, whether it’s old cars or old homes or things like that, things change, things get better, and so I try to understand what they’re doing. You know, I remember when Mickey Mantle walked in front of me in Yankee Stadium and I looked down at his shoes, and he had the tongue turned over and it said number 7. Players don’t even have tongues on their shoes now. They’re not marked the way they were before, you know. And the 407 foot sign in right center, the 344 in right center… those are all numbers for me that I’ll always remember, forever. The field was sloped, it was sloped down toward left field. The old fence, the low fence was a Cyclone fence like that (points). The new fence hasn’t taken away my memory of the old one. So it’s not going to be gone for me. I was lucky to see it. And to have lived in it for a while. I’m not sad about it.”

He’s right, in that nothing will take our memories away. But I can’t deny that real things have power. Artifacts have power.

And for all my rationalization about how great the new place is going to be, that doesn’t negate the hurt that the ten-year-old in me feels about losing the old place.

When I was ten years old, my family moved from one place to another. We’d left New York City a few years before, and this was a move from one New Jersey suburb to another. I had a terrible time adjusting to my new school. I regularly came home crying and miserable.

Is that some of what I’m feeling, when I look at this move? I fixated a little on our old house. But it wasn’t the house itself that I missed–it was my old life, my old friends. But the house seems like such a tangible thing.

The House That Ruth Built. The outraged ten-year-old in me cannot believe they’re going to tear it down.

Meanwhile, I may as well take this opportunity to announce that I’m retiring from the playing field. I’m forty. The Slaterettes are happy to have me so long as I can haul my ass down to Pawtucket to get in uniform. But it’s not fun in the late season when the light gets real dim and you know the ball’s coming because you saw the pitcher wind up, but it seems to disappear into the sepia-tone of the world.

I actually had a decent season last season. My team was fun and my bad knees even held up pretty well. But I don’t think I’m ever hitting .400 again, and I don’t ever want to feel like I’m the 15th player on the 15-woman roster.

Of course, then comes the question… if you quit playing, what are you going to do with yourself?

I don’t know. I’m going to miss it terribly. I don’t want to find some 40+ softball league near my house that plays on a well-lit field and allows courtesy runners. Just so I can smell the dirt and touch the grass?

I’ve thought about learning to umpire. But, I don’t know. Maybe someday.

The truth of the matter is that baseball isn’t fun when you miss your pitch all the time. I played my last season at forty years old and that seems like a good time to call it quits. Playing more years won’t make up for the fact that I wish I had started much younger and that the opportunity to play didn’t come along until I was in my thirties.

corwin says he won’t believe I’m really retired until I actually sit out the season, though. He’s right. There’s always a possibility that I won’t be able to stand it and I’ll show up on when Slaterettes season opens with a bat and glove. But as of right now, no. The hill is getting too steep to climb. Which is a depressing prospect, but there you have it. Maybe I’ll have to look into vintage baseball…

The next logical step for me, actually, is starting a women’s and girls league in Cambridge, MA. But honestly right now I don’t have the time. Perhaps that is something for some years down the road, too.

Meanwhile, in this year, it’s been a very long winter. And they’ve been teasing us with the start of “baseball season” with several false starts, too. The Red Sox played an opening series in Japan over a week ago. The Nationals opened their new ballpark a night earlier than everyone else because… I’m not sure why. I guess because ESPN wanted them to. And yesterday, things were supposed to finally be underway.

But they weren’t. It rained. And then it rained some more. And I drove 200 miles in the rain to get home after the game was called, crying. I’m definitely depressed and I should be old enough by now to recognize the symptoms. But the best treatment I’ve found is baseball itself, so go figure.

Meanwhile, tonight, they will play the first home opener at Yankee Stadium that I have not been at in almost a decade, and the fact that it will be the last home opener in the building really does make a difference. Because as a historian and as a fan, I know that Being There is a meaningful thing. Real events happen in real places and are witnessed by real people. “Reality TV” is such an oxymoron. The compelling thing about sports on TV or radio is that they are live, the next best thing to being there, but nothing beats being there.

Now that my retirement is upon me, it is starting to sink in how significant being on the field really was. This thing happens when you play, I think, where your mind focuses so much on the game and on the mindset necessary to play, that you forget a lot of the other stuff around the game. Playing itself, the act of playing, fielding, baserunning, keeping your head in the game, and so on is so all-absorbing at the time it is going on that you develop a mindset for playing that is quite different from the one you have as a spectator, or fan, or historian.

This is why I was surprised today when I finally started going through the stack of baseball books that have accumulated on my desk over the past 12 months and discovered my name so prominently featured in one of them. I’ve gotten a lot of good books. Some I bought, some were sent to me by publishers or authors hoping for a review, others I got as gifts. I’ve been meaning to read them all, but I haven’t had time.

One of the largest in the stack is the “Encyclopedia of Women and Baseball,” edited by Leslie Heaphy Mel May. Leslie gave me a copy of the book at last summer’s SABR convention in St. Louis. I’ve been a member of the women and baseball committee of SABR for a couple of years now, and we’ve corresponded a lot in email about it. I recalled sending her some photos of the New England Women’s Baseball League and such.

I didn’t realize, though, what a lynchpin in the system I apparently was, as a bridge between the historians and the current players. But I am the very first person thanked in the Acknowledgments. “There are many individuals who deserve special thanks for their help in gathering materials, starting with Cecilia Tan,” it says, “who is herself a player. Cecilia provided information not only about her own experienced but also about the 24-hour benefit game in Arizona. Most importantly, she provided contacts with a couple of hundred other ball players.”

Yeah, I guess I did! It was only then that it occurred to me that… holy crap… am I actually IN this encyclopedia? Yes. There I am on page 282. 162 words encapsulating my sporting and athletic achievements.

In other words, I was there.

Sometimes it doesn’t feel like much. What did I do really, but drive around like a nut searching for the right out of the way ballfield in Lynn where the North Shore Cougars were due to take on the Lowell Robins? But put on cleats and tear up the grass two nights a week in Slater Park in Pawtucket, RI? Maybe I’m the Joe Garagiola of the women’s leagues. I was never the best player, but I’ve told the most stories about it.

I can tell the stories differently because I was there. You can look it up.

And so, yes. It would have mattered to be there for this home opener. But I’m not going to be there. I will pin my hopes instead on being there for Game Seven of the World Series, which would be the only truly fitting occasion to say goodbye to the old ballpark with. We’ll see if it happens. A lot depends on the weather, and the Yankees, and things beyond my control.

As I was looking at the rather hematic smudge in the sky last night, it occurred to me that the last time I’d seen the “blood moon” eclipse was in 2004. Curt Schilling’s bloody sock, too. And the Sox themselves won the World Series.

And, as it turns out, they won the most recent World Series, also.

But if I am going to try to use voodoo, feng shui, and the Farmer’s Almanac to predict next year’s winner what signs and portents should I be looking for in the news and current events?

• While appearing at a rally for Senator John McCain in Arizona, President George W. Bush is bitten by a rattlesnake. Diamondbacks over Texas Rangers in 5.
• Paris Hilton starts a new rage in fashion when she and her dog begin appearing in public with a bengal-striped hair dye design. Winner: Detroit Tigers.
• Paleontologists uncover the remains of a human ancestor that turns modern evolutionary theory on its head. Unlike all previous skeletons unearthed, this find shows a pre-homosapiens that is much much bigger than the average human. Winner: San Francisco Giants.
• Further research into the remains shows that it was a Neanderthal after all, mysteriously pumped up on hormones. Speculation runs rampant that early humans were experimented on by space aliens. Winner: Houston Astros.
• New Pope. San Diego Padres.
• Divine intervention: The Angels, wherever they are.
• The Devil Rays drop the word “devil” from their name and… oh, wait. never mind. They’ve still got no shot.
• Panda bear breeding program doubles population. Chicago Cubs get hopeful. Then they figure out pandas are not really “bears,” but more related to the raccoon family. Rangers over Cubs in four.
• Ted Williams is revived from cryogenic freeze and sets out Old_man_and-the-Sea-like solo in a boat to land the big one. He disappears. Marlins over Red Sox.
• He reappears: Red Sox over Marlins in seven.

It seems like Roger Clemens, and baseball as a whole are just going to continue to “take it in the nuts” so to speak as a result of the Mitchell report, so former major league pitcher Mark Littell is right on time with his new product, The Nutty Buddy.

Now, I thought a Nutty Buddy was an ice cream cone coated in chocolate and dipped in nuts. I swear that’s what I used to buy from the ice cream truck that trolled my neighborhood. But Littell has other ideas. He has built the proverbial Better Mousetrap. Well, actually, he’s built a better protective cup.

Before we go any further, you should probably watch Littell testing the product for himself on YouTube. The two-and-a-half-minute video opens with the ominous words: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME.

In it, Littell takes a shot straight to the business center, from a pitching machine only a few yards away. They have a young blonde woman drop the ball into the machine. My guess it’s because no man could bring himself to do it. Littell, like any good stunt man, has his athletic trainer standing there to supervise the stunt. That poor guy looks like watching what happens hurts him far more than taking the shot does Littell.

The latest craziness in the Clemens soap opera has Brian McNamee’s lawyers practically throwing in the towel in frustration because they believe Clemens will lie through his teeth only to be pardoned by George W. Bush later. They figure if Bush would pardon Scooter Libby for screwing around and lying on matters of actual national security, then pardoning Roger Clemens for carrying on his longstanding tradition of self-centered egoism ought to be a no-brainer. Pun intended.

As for where I stand on the whole issue, I think the whole story has yet to be known. Who “leaked” Clemens and Pettitte’s names to the press as appearing in the Grimsley affidavit? When Grimsley’s testimony was unsealed, their names were nowhere to be found. Is there more going on here than just a drug and cheating scandal? It reminds me a bit of when the Iran-Contra Scandal was unfolding and bits and pieces emerged over time. Except, again, that was a story with actual implications for national security and our government.

I suppose one of the things that makes the Clemens and other baseball-performance-scandal stuff so compelling is that regardless of its relative “importance,” (or unimportance) in the grand scheme of politics and American life, it feels highly relevant. Because people actually care about baseball. For people like me, it’s a part of our way of life, not just a mindless form of entertainment that we could take or leave. Baseball will not be replaced by episodes of “Lost,” Texas Hold ‘Em, or blogging as a part of the fabric of American life. It is important because we make it so, because we care. So, no, I have no problem with Congress spending time on the issue–up to a point. There is a war going on, and the economy is in a shambles. On the other hand… it’s the offseason. I know, I’m so fickle.

To distract myself from political circuses of all kinds, I’m reading the news from spring training and discovering things like… it’s amazing how many YouTube videos come up if you type the words “hit in the nuts” into the Search box. Hey, didn’t they say Do Not Try This At Home? Maybe this is outside the guy’s office:

42 days to Opening Day!

I just heard the news that Tommy “The Wild Man” Byrne passed away. I visited him in March of 2003 and spent a couple of hours at his home talking baseball and in particular recapping that hreatbreaking Game Seven he pitched against Johnny Podres in the World Series. Since Phil Rizzuto died, I’ve been thinking Tommy might go next. Thank goodness Yogi is still going strong.

Since I’m just now re-launching Why I Like baseball under a new URL, I figured I’d remember Tommy by reprinting here the recap of the day we met. He’ll be missed.

Reprinted from: March 6, 2003

When I arrived at Boston’s Logan airport this morning, the roads were crackling with fresh ice and the forecast was for snow. When I stepped onto the tarmac three hours later at Raleigh-Durham International Airport, the air was moist with balmy rain. Folks here tell me it’s unusually cold for this time of year, but you won’t hear me complaining. Suddenly, my brain is thawed and I can think about baseball again. I am here in North Carolina to begin a drive through the the south in search of baseball landmarks.

Ostensibly I am here as research for a novel I am writing, one where the characters will be trekking south in search of a way to reverse the Curse of the Bambino. But as I inhale the humid, lazy breeze I realize that maybe what I am really in search of heart’s ease. Not to go into gory detail on my personal life or state of mind, but this winter has been cold and long.

This has nothing to do with baseball, or does it? I flew to Carolina in the smallest plane I have ever been in. It seated thirty people and the plane was full of men, businessmen mostly, mover and shaker types, from their mid-thirties to their mid-sixties. Them, and me. In that way it was not unlike being in a major league press box. Story of my life, I guess, to be one of the only women in a man’s world. No one seems to mind.

One of the themes of my novel, and indeed one of the recurring motifs in baseball history, is that strange coincidences occur. Here’s the first one of the trip: the rental car they gave me has New York plates on it.

My first stop was Fayetteville, NC. In 1914, Babe Ruth was signed by the minor league Baltimore Orioles straight out of St. Mary’s Industrial School, from the arms of Brother Mathias to Jack Dunn. Dunn had a friend who owned a hotel in Fayetteville and who said he’d put the team up for free if Dunn wanted to bring them down for spring training. The young Ruth, entirely naive about the world, rode on a train for the first time and learned, to his delight, that he was allowed to eat as much as he wanted on Dunn’s dime. His first appearance as a professional player came in an intra-squad game and the home run he hit into the cornfields was of note not only because homers were so rare in those days, but because back then they still thought of the big kid as a pitcher, not a hitter.

The homer was hit at a field on government land, an old fairgrounds, which is now the site of some government buildings and the offices of the highway department. In 1951, just a few years after Ruth passed away, the son of the hotel owner lobbied to have a marker erected on the site. While driving through the historic section of Fayetteville you see quite a few of these historic markers, commemorating poets, soldiers, the sites of historic buildings, and so on. Ruth’s marker is located where it is easy to see from the road and seems to indicate that the actual spot being commemorated is “135 yards northwest”–beyond an impassable chain link fence as far as I could tell.

Now you might be asking, why did I have to drive all the way to Fayetteville, North Carolina to see this marker, to see this historic place, if the place itself isn’t even there anymore? I already know the story of the homer–I know quite a lot more than one can tell from looking at a plaque. So, why go to see it? Right now I’m not sure I can articulate the answer to that question. It may be that if you have to ask the question, you wouldn’t understand the answer, anyway. To me, the answer seems self-evident, but not that easy to explain. I suppose one answer is this: the same thing that drives me to go to visit sites like this, drives other people to put up brass plaques and markers in the first place. It’s important.

From Fayetteville I headed to Wake Forest to meet Tommy Byrne. I spent the afternoon at his house talking baseball with him. When I originally contacted him, I was hoping to put together a feature on him for Yankees Magazine. I had no idea that he had a connection to Babe Ruth, but he does. Byrne was a wild lefthander in the late Dimaggio and early Mantle eras who several times led the league in hit batsmen. He also lost a heartbreaker of a game in 1955, Game Seven of the World Series against the Dodgers. The connection to Ruth dates back further than that, though. Byrne met Babe Ruth when he was only four years old, when he was living in an orphanage in Baltimore. I asked him if he wanted to be a ballplayer. “Every lefthanded kid in Baltimore wanted to be Babe Ruth,” he told me. “And I figured if he could do it, I could do it.” Late in his life, Ruth used to come to Yankee Stadium for Old Timers festivities. “He would always borrow my glove,” Byrne reminisced. “A ‘pud,’ he always called it a ‘pud.’ He’d say to Pete Sheehy the clubhouse man, ‘where is the Baltimore kid’s locker?’ I’d have let him have everything in the locker if he wanted. He could have borrowed a glove from Lopat, we had lots of lefthanders around. But he always asked for me, the Baltimore kid.”

We talked plenty about Dimaggio, Mantle, Don Larsen’s perfect game in ’56, the 1949 pennant race, and the importance of a good change of speed. I also had a gander at some of his memorabilia, including Mickey Mantle’s custom Rolls Royce style pinstriped #7 golf cart. Yes, golf cart. The thing has a built in cooler and stereo sound system. Tommy got it for $6500 in a charity auction and is thinking of donating it to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, if they have room for it. A memorabilia guy in the neighborhood figures it could be worth as much as $56,000. Wow.

On my way out of Wake Forest I stopped at a nearby Appleby’s restaurant which had more of Tommy’s photos and memorabilia on display as tribute to their local hero. Tommy’s wife passed away just a few months ago and he isn’t feeling too good himself lately. “A lot of the old guys are running out of gas now,” he said, when we were talking about Ted Williams and Enos Slaughter (who also passed on recently.) “I’m going to run out of gas myself soon,” he said, “but I hate to give up my hobby.” What hobby? I asked. “Breathing,” he joked. One of the niftiest photos on the Appleby’s wall is an aerial view of Yankee Stadium, taken when Tommy was on the mound, if the caption is to be believed. The photo was taken over fifty years ago, and the Stadium has changed, but the Macombs Dam Bridge, the municipal ballfields, the elevated train line, are all the same as today. It makes it seem like maybe it wasn’t so long ago after all.

For dinner I made my way into Durham, to Bullock’s Barbecue, to meet local baseball writer/editor Chris Holaday for dinner. Bullock’s came onto my radar as a place that features photos of many famous celebrities on the walls, including photos of the game when the Yankees played the University of North Carolina in 1981 and the post-game party that the restaurant catered. Catfish Hunter, Yogi Berra, Bucky Dent, Tommy John, Graig Nettles, Reggie Jackson, and many more are in the photos. That alone would have made it worth the trip, but then there were the best hush puppies I have ever eaten. The pork barbecue, fried chicken, and Bismarck stew were also super-tasty, and a great way to cap off a very busy day.

End of reprint. The rest of the travels can be found at the Why I Like Baseball Archives, Here!

I woke up this morning from a dream that Dominic DiMaggio had passed away. I’m certain this is my brain still working through the loss of The Scooter in recent weeks. As time marches on, we must necessarily lose the great players who are still living, but those who remain from the generation who played in the 1940s are starkly few in number.

I never had a chance to interview Phil Rizzuto, but I did interview Dom DiMaggio not that long ago. In preparation for yet another Red Sox-Yankees showdown which starts in a few days, I thought I’d share with you some words from a true veteran of The Rivalry and one of the last standard bearers of a great generation of baseball players.

Cecilia Tan: So, your brother Joe played in New York, and you played in Boston, putting you on opposite sides of the rivalry. What was it like playing in Boston?

Dominic DiMaggio: The people in New England are fabulous, just fantastic fans. The Red Sox are their team, and Red Sox nation exists all over the world, not just in the US. Red Sox Nation is everywhere. I suppose there are other teams that have such a following, but it’s nice to know we have so many people in distant places. I get mail from them, from everywhere, got one today from England.

CT: Is there a lot of interest in England? I have a friend in Scotland who follows a semi-pro league but that is all they have.

DD: Perhaps it’s all the inclement weather they have there. Though 56 degree weather is not too hard to take, in San Francisco it gets pretty cold, and we still played there. They probably wonder why we don’t play cricket.

CT: What was Fenway Park like when you played?

DD: Oh, I enjoyed Fenway Park. I enjoyed it very much. I bounced off the wall a number of times but I didn’t try to do anything I shouldn’t have done. They treated me very nicely, there. I lived right in Kenmore Square and it was very convenient to walk to the park. I was single–I didn’t get married until 1948–so I lived at the old Sheraton Hotel on Bay State Road, and then the Miles Standish, and then when I was married we lived out in Wellesley Hills. The area was very nice.

CT: I think both those buildings are university dormitories now. In 1948, that was the year the Yankees were out of it and it was the Indians who went into the one-game playoff against the Red Sox.

DD: We lost that playoff to Cleveland. We lost the game, but at least I was able to get married a little sooner!

CT: You got married right after the season?

DD: Yes, and the World Series would have made it a week or ten days later. Not that I wouldn’t have waited!

CT: I’m sure you would have been great in the World Series, too. In the 1946 World Series you batted third and went 7 for 27.

DD: I batted third that entire year! And that was the only time I batted third. I always wondered why I never batted third again, even though we won the pennant and almost won the World Series.

CT: Did you never ask anyone why?

DD: No, I never did. They felt my value was where they put me. We had some pretty solid hitters and for me to go up and say ‘I want to hit in this spot’ would be ungentlemanly and unsportsmanlike. But Bobby Doerr paid me the ultimate compliment by telling me that if I had been batting down in the lineup I would have driven in 100 runs annually. Being a leadoff man, that was the ultimate compliment.

CT: The Sox and Yankees faced each other pretty often in those days, but was there a particular time you remember? Like the Allie Reynolds no-hitter?

DD: He was a tough pitcher, a real real tough pitcher, tough to face, and a darn good pitcher. I remember when he pitched his no-hit game against us, I was batting, and Ted was the next batter. 2 outs in the ninth inning, and I got a base on balls, and Williams hits the ball straight up–and Berra dropped it! And the next one went right up in the air, too, and Reynolds went right over there to make sure he caught it!

CT: Any other games stand out for you?

DD: Forty-nine. The last two games in New York, we came in from Washington and we should have won the pennant in Washington. We did not, so we went into New York with one game in front and they beat us two in a row.

CT: There was a whole story they tell about how one of those games it was Joe DiMaggio day, your whole family was there on the field with him, including you, and Joe had the flu.

DD: I recall him leaning on my shoulder–he was pretty weak.

CT: Joe’s speech that day ended with the words “I’d like to thank the Good Lord for making me a Yankee.” He then went out and got two lucky hits that were the difference in the game.

DD: It’s been really nice talking to you, but it’s my cocktail hour so I had better go.

-end-

One of the baseball adages oft-repeated by grizzled third-base coaches and Little League parents alike is “it all evens out.” Those screaming liners that were caught, robbing a hit, even out by those soft dribblers that the infield can’t get to.

Well, Yankees fans and Red Sox fans alike know that the disparity between the two teams’ championships is unlikely to ever “even out.” A popular shirt in the Bronx reads “Got rings?” and points up the difference between 26 and 6. But this is little consolation to citizens of the pinstriped empire as their team as of this morning had lost seven in a row, including four meetings in a row now with these same Boston Red Sox.

In the opener of this three game set in the Bronx, the Yankees did everything wrong. Their one so-far reliable starter, a man with an ERA under two and what would have been a 3-0 record had the bullpen not blown two leads (one against These Same Boston Red Sox a week ago), was Andy Pettitte. Was. Pettitte spit the bit and did not make it through five innings. The bullpen was not much better, with Sean Henn being the only one to put in an effective performance.

The sight of Joe Torre going out to take the ball from Mariano Rivera was shocking for its rarity and demoralizing to the crowd, who–like Red Sox fans of the past–seemed determined to sit through every slow minute of the excruciating loss. The offense provided very little to cheer about, their only “rally” coming courtesy of Sox starter Daisuke Matsuzaka, who had a bout of wildness in the fourth and walked three men in a row.

In other words, although the rain stopped during the night, it was a very dark day for Yankees fans on the morning of the second game. Don’t forget Bobby Abreu’s slump, Johnny Damon’s balky back, and Derek Jeter’s sore leg from being hit by pitch in Tampa Bay. Alex Rodriguez had to come down from the stratosphere sometime. You know it’s bad when the one good thing the offense can talk about from the past few days is that Jason Giambi is taking the ball the other way.

The Yankee starter was slated to be youngster Jeff Karstens, coming off of arm stiffness that had kept him from the Opening Day Roster, against Sox veteran Tim Wakefield. Veteran may be a bit of an understatement in Wakefield’s case. He currently has won more games in a Red Sox uniform than anyone but two men: Roger Clemens and Cy Young. Karstens meanwhile still counts his major league service in innings (47). He faced These Same BRS last week, didn’t get out of the fifth, and earned seven runs for his trouble.

It was with all these clouds of doom and gloom, both metaphorical and literal as rain showers threatened, that Karstens took the mound for a nationally televised Saturday game. At least the temperature was pleasant, and any weekend day at the Stadium is a treat whether the team is winning or losing. The cheers were long and loud as the starting lineup was introduced. Ice cream and beer were served in copious quantities to Sox fans and Yankees fans alike as the stands filled up.

Given the overworked state of the bullpen–leading the American League in relief innings thus far–the Yankees hoped for a long start from Karstens. Unfortunately, on the very first pitch of the game, Julia Lugo hit a line drive back and Karstens, who took the shot off his leg and fell off the mound looking as though he had been shot. Infielders, team trainers, coaches and umpires gathered around. After a bit, Karstens stood up, threw a few test pitches, and was allowed to pitch to the next batter, Kevin Youkilis. Youkilis got a hit, and Torre came to take Karstens out. It was later revealed that Karstens had faced Youk with a broken leg. (For those of you who watch ER and love your medical jargon: cracked fibula.)

Embattled Japanese import Kei Igawa came on to relieve. It was only a few days before he had been told he was being demoted to the bullpen while Karstens, whose control had been better than Igawa’s, would be in the rotation. Fate, though, placed Igawa on the mound against the Sox anyway, but this time with a two-runner handicap.

Igawa was at his best. Although he did walk three in his first three innings, he held the Red Sox scoreless through six, departing in the seventh with the game in much the same state as it had been at this entrance. Two men on, no outs, and no score. He induced Big Papi to ground into two double plays and to pop to first. And he dealt out six strikeouts, three of which came on three pitches.

But no pitcher can win without offense. The Yankees had their usual spasticity against Wakefield, putting various men on by the walk and scratching some hits, but having trouble cashing them in as the ball fluttered unpredictably toward the plate again and again.

Leave it to Jorge Posada to make the difference. Even though Jeter reached base five times (three singles and two errors by Mike Lowell), Giambi and Abreu had four more walks between them, it was Jorge who finally squared up a Wakefield pitch, sending the ball into the upper deck in right field. Matsui was on at the time (also by base on balls), making it a two run shot. Jorge was responsible for the insurance run, as well, walking to lead off the sixth, moving to second on a comebacker to Wakefield that might have been a 1-6-3 double play if the pitcher had handled it cleanly. Melky Cabrera followed with a pop fly remarkably similar to one the Trot Nixon hit in an extra innings game at the Stadium in July 2004. That one Derek Jeter raced over to catch just shy of the foul line and then fly into the stands to save the game. This time, three Sox converged toward the ball, but it hit the grass untouched and bounded into the stands–a ground rule double. Jorge therefore scored, and Wakefield’s day was done.

The Sox got a run back off Kyle Farnsworth in the eighth, but although he put the first two men on, after a mound visit from Gator, Farnsworth threw strike one consistently and managed to escape the inning giving up only one, setting the stage for Mariano Rivera in the ninth.

Rivera is to the Red Sox as Pedro is to the Yankees, a dominating pitcher who has an outsize number of losses to the rival team for no explicable reason. The Sox have beaten Mo numerous times, including once just last week.

Not this time. Mariano returned to form, aided by one truly great defensive play from Alex Rodriguez. If the night before, they had done everything wrong, this afternoon the Yankees did everything right, including a terrific catch of a foul pop off the bat of Big Papi by Jason Giambi, who was only playing the field so that Johnny Damon could have a day at DH. Giambi reached into the seats to snare the ball, off balance but determined not to give Ortiz another swing.

It would turn out to be Mariano’s first save of the year. Igawa would be awarded the win and a spot in the rotation. The only person who went home unhappy was Jeff Karstens, whose broken leg will keep him on the shelf indefinitely.

Someone should tell him that it will all even out.

I saw the news about the plane crash while doing errands with a good friend yesterday. We were walking through Davis Square in Somerville, just as it was starting to drizzle, feeling good about ourselves for having visited the post office and farmer’s market before heavy rain started to fall. As we were passing Mike’s, a pizza joint that recently installed giant plasma screen TVs, the image on the screen of a building on fire caught my eye.

I pressed against the glass, recognizing New York City the way a child recognizes her mother’s face in a sea of strangers. What I couldn’t tell was whether it was the west side or the east side, couldn’t make out which bridge was in the background. We hopped in the car and turned on newsradio, breathing a sigh of relief when the words “not terrorism” were spoken.

After all, it was October 11th, a day I will always associate closely with terrorism and September 11th, because of my trip to Yankee Stadium on that day in 2001. (Read the entry) The one-month anniversary. Game 2 of the ALDS. A friend of mine (who is a Red Sox fan) and I drove down to the game together, had our pocket knives confiscated by overzealous stadium security (knives were not on the list of newly-prohibited items posted outside the Stadium and on the web site), watched Bush’s speech on the Diamondvision while they delayed the start of the game, and so on.

We hadn’t gone a mile in the car, though, when the word came over the radio that the plane had belonged to Cory Lidle. Now things were simply surreal.

Just the day before, I’d interrupted my workday to take notes and file a story on Joe Torre’s press conference. (The one where he announced that nothing was changing.) It was as if, having been bumped in the first round of the playoffs, the Yankees still had to be in the headlines. At least that’s the way Charley Steiner bitterly put it on his XM Radio show when his phone-in interview with a guest was interrupted for the Torre presser. (Gee, Charley, have some sour grapes?)

I’d wager he had no such callous things to say once it was confirmed that Lidle had been on the plane. News trickled in bit by bit once we got back to the office. Lidle’s passport had been found on the ground outside the building that the plane had hit. At first they were reporting four fatalities, but as it turned out, everyone in the building was okay. Two bodies were found on the ground, though.

A while later, it was the Yankees themselves who confirmed that Lidle had been in the plane. His wife and son were also on a plane at the time, flying cross country, and so did not hear the news until hours after everyone else. I assume they were headed to California, where Lidle hailed from. Lidle and Jason Giambi had been teammates in high school in SoCal, and had played together in the majors in Oakland. Lidle was also a replacement player, one of those like Shane Spencer and Kevin Millar, who crossed the line during the 1994 strike and so were barred from joining the players’ union.

By dinner time, when my significant other came home, the fire was out, firefighters and NTSB investigators were picking through the rubble, and the news that a mayday call about a fuel problem had been made shortly before the crash. Taking off from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, they had flown past the Statue of Liberty and were headed up the East River when, it appears, they might have tried to make toward LaGuardia for an emergency landing. Instead, they veered and struck the north-facing side of a condo building around 71st Street, a building where one of the Mets coaches lives.

As we ate dinner, I told corwin I felt bad that I didn’t feel worse about Lidle. “I just don’t feel anything,” I said. “And I feel bad about that. I mean, I feel generally bad that a terrible thing happened. But I dunno.”

He pointed out that I never met Lidle, unlike many of the players, I had no personal connection to him, had hardly seen him play.

A terrible thought occurred to me. “Do you think I’d feel differently if either he’d pitched better or the Yankees had won?” Could my bitterness over the Yankees’ loss in the ALDS have dampened my feelings about this?

Get a grip, I told myself. Life and death goes on a different scale from “baseball.” Which is why I thought I really ought to have felt something other than the general apathy I felt then.

It hit me in the middle of the night. I woke just before dawn with the thought “…flying up the East River.” How much do you want to bet that Lidle planned to fly over Yankee Stadium? He was a free agent, probably going to land with another team by February. He had cleared out his locker on Sunday. Did he want to take one more look, a bird’s eye view, of the place, a view few players have had? (They’re going to tear the place down, you know.)

And then I lay there thinking, about Lidle’s six-year-old son, who must have surely thought he had the greatest dad in the world, who played Major League Baseball. And about how if the bodies were found on the ground, was it the crash that killed them, or the fall? And all the sadness and terror that I have learned to suppress automatically whenever we talk about terrorism suddenly came flooding out.

I’m crying as I type this. I didn’t cry on this past anniversary of September 11th. I kept a lid on it.

And come to think of it, I didn’t cry when the Yankees lost the 2001 World Series. I went to bed that night subdued, but not heartbroken.

Heartbreak didn’t set in until the next day.

This feels much the same.

I didn’t know Cory Lidle. I never stood at his locker waiting for a postgame quote. I’m not even sure I would recognize his voice. But now I’m finding it fitting that about an hour after the crash it started to rain in New York. It rained so hard, it washed out the opener of the NLCS at Shea. When an accident claims two people’s lives, it’s a tragedy, whether any of them played Major League Baseball or not. But given the way baseball, New York, and planes flying into buildings are forever linked–not to mention the fact that the last baseball player to die in his own plane was also a Yankee, captain and catcher Thurman Munson in 1979–Lidle’s death seems like a sign of the times.

And I’m sad. So sad.

Tonight, Alex Rodriguez will be handed his 2006 Most Valuable Player Award in a pre-game ceremony. He was previously the first MVP to ever be traded during his reign. The words “best player in the game” can be placed in a sentence with his name without hyperbole or exaggeration.

So why is he still in Derek Jeter’s shadow?

Perception is a funny thing. Baseball fans and writers alike believe what we see. But what we see–and what it means–is as much a function of expectations as performance. Is this why, even though A-rod hits more home runs than Jeter, Jeter’s always seem to come in “big spots”?

Ask your average Yankee fan to name a Jeter homer and a list will probably follow. The Jeffrey Maier one. The Mr. November shot. The walk-off off Foulke at the Stadium last year. The one off Pedro in 2003 in the Zimmer brawl game. The leadoff homer at Shea, on the first pitch after the Yanks lost a game, the first time they had lost a World Series game in recent memory. The very fact that some of these homers have nicknames limns the point that they are legendary moments.

Now make a list of A-rod’s memorable dingers (as a Yankee–I’ll never forget that one he hit off El Duque’s “eephus” pitch when he was with Seattle…). It’s an unfair question, I know, because he has not had the long tenure in pinstripes Jeter has had, yet fewer of them stick in the collective memory. How about the three taters off Bartolo Colon in a single game last season? Reggie-esque. But no one is more disappointed in the way Alex hit (or failed to) in last year’s ALDS against the Angels than Alex himself.

This year both men are off to hot starts, but Jeter still seems to have an uncanny knack for being in the right place at the right time. He makes his own luck by virtue of being fearless. When he was in a slump worthy of a Sports Illustrated cover story in 2003, Jeter briefly–very briefly–experienced boos at Yankee Stadium. But he has disappointed so rarely (it seems) and come through in the clutch so often (it seems), that the fans’ comfort zone with him is a mile wide. Jeter is home-grown, a fairy tale storybook, and all that. But this does not mean that Alex Rodriguez has to polish his shoes.

Winning the MVP will hopefully add some comfort zone for A-rod, both for himself and the fans. There was a time when Tino Martinez–a guy now thought of as one of the “made” Yankees–was booed at the Stadium as an unworthy replacement for Don Mattingly. A grand slam in Baltimore, another one in the 1996 ALCS, not to mention the homer 2001 World Series… my how perceptions change.

This is what it will take for A-rod to become a “made” Yankee himself. He needs to not only be the best player in the game day in and day out, not just the MVP (though that helps), not only carry the team to another postseason berth, but also to come up big in those big spots in October. Until then, the unfair perception that he is a carpet-bagging attention-seeker will never be completely dispelled on the streets of Yankeetown, and Jeter will always be perceived as the “better” Yankee.

It will be curious to see which one makes it into the Hall of Fame first. I suspect it will be whichever one retires first.

A new book came out today that details steroid abuse in baseball and which singles out three players in particular, Barry Bonds, Gary Sheffield, and Jason Giambi. Can you guess which of the three has admitted what he did?

Now, in the interest of being honest and open (which is the moral of this story after all), I must say that I like Jason Giambi. He was my favorite non-Yankee player in the American League when he was with the Oakland A’s, and I continue to like him despite the controversy. This is a guy I want to see succeed, and not just because the Yankees need him.

But today I feel he deserves to be lauded for what he has done, especially in light of what Bonds has not. It was a year and a month ago that Giambi convened a press conference in New York to apologize for his involvement in the steroid scandal. Now, I know you can say he was backed into a corner by the leakage of his grand jury testimony in which he admitted to using steroids. But bear with me a minute.

Giambi sat in front of a grand jury and actually told the truth. He explained where he went to get steroids initially, then how he became involved with BALCO. He gave dates, names of drugs, sources, the whole works. Isn’t that remarkable in and of itself? Bonds, by contrast, said he didn’t know bupkus. So there is a pretty stark contrast right there.

Giambi’s reaction to everyone finding out was then not to refute the evidence, spin it, nor lay the blame on a trainer or other scapegoat, but to call a press conference. Fears about contract situations made him unable to utter the words “steroid abuse” but his apology to the fans, the media, and his teammates was remarkable nonetheless.

He went into the 2005 season with the apology still fresh on his lips, but determined to move on. At the start of the season he was so awful, the Yankees considered asking him to go to Columbus to work on getting his swing together, but he wanted to stay with the big club under the tutelage of Don Mattingly. Turned out to be the best thing for him. By the time the season had ended, Giambi had racked up impressive numbers and the Comeback Player of the Year award. If he had not had the rough start, it is likely his offensive output would had rivaled AL MVP Alex Roddriguez’s.

Today in the Legends Field clubhouse, Giambi talked about the decision to handle things the way he did and concluded it was the best thing he could have done. “You know to be honest I had no idea what was going to happen,” he told reporters about making the apology. “I just did what I felt needed to be done and never looked back. I just tried to go forward and get my career back on track.”

I’d say Comeback Player of the Year counts as sign that his career in on track. The fans, too, though have come back. “It’s incredible the way the fans have come around,” Giambi told us, with his usual earnest, little-boy expression. “I don’t think I could ask for anything more. To have their respect and the response they’ve given me, it’s pretty incredible.”

It also means that while Gary Sheffield scowls at reporters who ask about steroids and the book’s allegations, spouting various versions of “No comment,” Giambi has already been through it. “I understand you have to ask about it,” he said to the group of reporters clustering around his locker, “but I handled it and I’ve gone forward and I’m worried about winning a World Series now.”

Since we already knew about Giambi and steroids, the only “news” that prompted the lockerside chat was a report in the NY Post that the book claimed that a reason Giambi turned to steroids was to please his perfectionist father. Giambi was offended at the thought that his father needed to be dragged into it. “Pathetic, that’s the word for it,” he said. The authors of the book have since come back saying that although Giambi’s father is mentioned in the book, they didn’t blame Giambi’s seroid use on his father. Which is good, because after all Giambi has done to shoulder the responsibility himself for what he did, no one else should be trying to lay the blame at someone else’s feet.

Now if only Barry Bonds would get that message.