Rosterized

Playing a Slow Left Field for Team Fatal Flaw, Adam Dunn

2008-10-15T09:57:00.007-04:00

The dichotomous maker-of-enemies; the hot-button issue, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the taking of the Rhineland. Adam Dunn is a divider. The two schools of baseball thought and cultural processing take their sides, one against the other, cracking off sniper fire from respective foxholes. The old school vs. the new school.

The old school thinks that the flaw is half empty. Adam Dunn strikes out just a whole whole bunch. Seems like every damn time to the old school (ranking him fifth in the NL this year with 160-some-odd Ks). And when he's not striking out, he's taking good sound hittable pitches, lusting passively after the base on balls like a pauper waiting for his ship to come in. "Jee-suz! Swing the bat, meat!" The old school grabs his fedora and crumples it in his hooked fists, the vein on his forehead swelling like the Old Man, the Mississippi, in flood season.

Whatever new school contingent of execs in Cincinatti must've grown weary from fending off the old schoolers, as they shipped out probably the fifth most productive hitter in the league for some prospects who I'm sure are just fine. Might've been something about a contract year, too, but in their weary hearts the new schoolers were likely glad to be rid of the man who came to dominate every scouting meeting, drink at the bar and sauna session in Cincinatti. (BTW, the folks at FJM are much better at poking fun at the old school than I).

And what, you might ask, did Adam Dunn do to deserve this? What is his fatal flaw, and why is he on this team at all? Perception is the flaw. Dunn is a divider, tearing war rooms apart, rending a tear in the delicate fabric of administration. It's better to be rid of the man--productive as he may be--than to let the acrid debate continue.

Some team somewhere will be happy with the Texan. The board room will buzz with anticipation, knowing that they're bucking the straps of the old school for the emancipation of sabermetric success.

Team - The Chicago Cubs - Team #3 The Fatal Flaw

2008-10-07T17:42:00.002-04:00

Fatal flaw: the small sample size. The Cubs excelled over a great swath of time--history's clock. The clay sculptor whose masterpiece collapses with the final dab on the tip of the nose, the structural tenuousness of greatness, the weightiness of excellence. Pressures.

Fatal flaw, Suggestion #2: The Cub fan. Statistical irregularities are not tragic. The infrastructure built around them, the scaffolding of fear and loathing; that is the wreckage of tragedy. You could break down any part of the human experience in this manner, heartlessly. Failed relationships are statistical anomalies (or more accurately, regularities). I suppose it doesn't do any good to get so cold about it. It's tragic, after all, to raise a score of hopes and disappoint.

Is it a flaw to get all excited about something that you care about? To commit time and energy to the pitiless trials of chance? No, I don't think so. Flaws, after all, suggest strengths in the otherwise. For what's a hero cut down but a hero still?

Does even a hero clad in iron not sometimes wear a terrible goatee?

Bengie Molina Post - The Word Cloud

2008-06-12T09:58:00.002-04:00

The Bengie Molina rosterization, as word cloud.

C - Bengie Molina - Team #3_The Fatal Flaw

2008-06-09T22:43:00.006-04:00

I recall from some far off, long ago TV broadcast, hearing about how Bengie Molina was the slowest ever. Laughing, jocularity, surrounding the reliable World Series champ and his footspeed. A little research uncovered an article in the Hardball Times: "Run Slowly and Carry a Big Bat." Craig Burley writes " I suppose I have always known that Bengie Molina was slow." Exactly. We all know, through some trick of the collective unconscious, that this third of the Molina catchers is quicksand.

Bengie is a good ballplayer, renowned, even, for his catching skills. He's got a good bat, overlooking a few sabermetric short comings. But The Slow. Every ball that I've watched Molina put in play is coated with The Slow, because there is the question of the ball itself (a hit, a homer??) and then there is the question of the The Slow. A slow, slow dribbler down the line means one thing with an average runner, but with Molina it is like reading a long poem: a familiar language made the more interesting for a slightly altered vocabulary. The third baseman can hesitate for a hair longer and set his feet, unrushed. Molina's barely two-thirds of the way down.

(This is the flaw's role. It changes the rules when that player steps in.)

[Catchers get a bad rap for being slow (it's a bad rap but an accurate one, according to Burley's tabulations). When I was in high school, I enjoyed challenging middle infielders to on-the-spot sprint races. "To that fence post, Go!" I'd pace them if not beat them and notch a small victory for catchers. That was a good little trick until my junior year or so, when I got a little bigger and I guess slower, and the middle infielders got quicker. In youth, I could bend expectation, but as we neared maturity, the roles were solidified. That I could keep up, a lead-footed catcher, became a comical notion, a farce.]

Molina has stolen 3 bases in 10 years in the league. That is 12 seconds of the highest drama, when the farcical hits the e-break, locks up and spins the heads of all present.

stats, the bros., a tear in the space-time fabric

Lineup - The Fatal Flaw

C - Bengie Molina
1B -
2B -
3B -
SS -
LF -
CF -
RF -

SP -
RP -

Manager -

Memo: Team #3_The Fatal Flaw

2008-06-09T22:04:00.003-04:00

Your third team in the Rosterized library, as dictated by the Rosterized Board of Directors: The Fatal Flaw.

This team is made up of those players who, despite any manner of impressive baseball abilities, possess one or several obvious on-the-field deficiencies. This isn't a bash, though. This is a celebration of the fatal flaw. Finely honed skills are nice and all, but there are as many instances in which the fatal flaw is as compelling and endearing as any beneficial trait. On this team, I sing the imperfect, the rough edged, the flawed.

Most of these players are current. One of them, a player to be named later, is done in the major leagues, and in the Mexican Leagues and the Korean League. His flaws were numerous, but for a moment in timed he had only one: he couldn't pitch away from home.

Most of these players are also very good. Keep in mind that a single flaw does not always portend an unsuccessful career. Instead, the flawed player attunes the other facets of his game to compensate, and takes the shit from the media and punks like me and spins it into gold.

Decisions - Team#2_The Movies

2008-06-07T19:11:00.003-04:00

The movies have been done for a while, my mind dragged off to elsewheres, mostly to the baseball season itself. Team #2 The Movies was a tough haul. I thought, in the beginning, that it was a home run team, full of colorful characters, easy-to-use personae and plot companionship. In the end, though, it was a bit of a chore. There aren't, after all, very many good baseball movies. A list of the top five will get you far, and you'll miss nothing good beyond that.

That is the point, though: movies about baseball will never--with the exception, perhaps, of Field of Dreams--be as good and as moving as baseball itself. One nine-pitch postseason at-bat has more dramatic tension than any--any--cinematic, simulated pitch and hit, no matter the bursting orchestral score.

So ultimately I kept going back to the same wells, self-consciously mining only a few of the exceptional sources. They are great movies, but give me an afternoon in Chicago, with a long view of the lake over the right-field bleachers. I won't need a plot but for the one unfolding on the green.

Lineup - The Movies

C - John Kinsella
1B - Jack Elliot
2B - Ken Burns
3B - Roger Dorn
SS - Nicky Rogan
LF - Terence Mann
CF - Kelly Leak
RF - Shoeless Joe Jackson

SP - Bugs "Baseball Bugs" Bunny
RP - Ricky Vaughn

Manager - Morris Buttermaker

Manager - Morris Buttermaker - Team#2_The Movies

2008-05-07T11:41:00.003-04:00

Amanda Whurlitzer: I know an 11-year-old girl who is already on the pill.
Coach Morris Buttermaker: Don't ever say that word again.
Amanda Whurlitzer: Jesus! Just who in the heck you think you are?
Coach Morris Buttermaker: The goddamned manager, that's who!
Amanda Whurlitzer: Big wow!

In all honesty, the entire Bad News Bears (1976) roster could populate this category based on charm and originality. So perhaps it is appropriate that their manager will manage, in turn, The Movies Team, Team Number Two.

I stood at the mercy of many men in my baseball career (no women, that I can recall, in the lead role). Childhood and adolescence take their shape from the series of adults to whom the child submits for decision-making and leadership capacities. Baseball is perhaps an extreme example of this, as the adult/s in fact determine whether the kid gets to engage in the activity at all. When a kid goes to violin lessons, there is absolutely no chance that a teacher will prohibit the kid from actually playing the violin.

As a player, I was benched and withheld from Actual Baseball Action many, many times. Post-age 15 was an era of Playing Time Interuptus, characterized by stuttering inclusion in the course of the actual game. In high school and college there was 7/8 of the time a better catcher in front of me, and easy for various coaches to enjoy the fruits of my catching labor without payment in playing time.

In college, one coach nearly broke me. He was a football-type guy, and I knew far more about catching than he did, and he yelled a lot. His boss was irresolute and succeeded only when the players on his team transcended leadership. In high school, it was a zealous winner-type; charming and intense. An old friend from that team told me of a conversation long after high school, in which the coach told my friend that he should've played me more. By that time he'd left high school sports to be a car salesman in New Mexico (at the behest of his wife, the story goes), which seems a suitable enough penance.

That high school coach was a true lover of baseball, to the point of addiction. He pitched live batting practice, took swings in the batting cages, simulated games, all with a competitive scowl. He played in over-30 leagues. Instead of swearing--and thereby breaking his own rule--he bellowed "Dad-gummit!" on the minute. He was a hard man to dislike, and it was a slowly unfolding truth that though I played for his team, I never really would.

I have now done some coaching myself, a bunch of 13-year-olds. I am absolved of most of the personnel responsibilities, thankfully, but I've realized quite quickly how ruthless a coach's mind can be. There are kids I don't like to see out there, who've earned my bias. This is true, and maybe unavoidable. What I've tried to do, however, is to steer my biases based almost solely upon effort. The kids that rankle me are the ones who don't bust their humps.

Did I bust my hump as a player? Not always, but usually. Probably didn't look like it. A little lazy, not so dogmatically committed to excellence as some others. Pretty easy-going. Oops.

now, bad news bears, god-awful remake

Lineup - The Movies

C - John Kinsella
1B - Jack Elliot
2B - Ken Burns
3B - Roger Dorn
SS - Nicky Rogan
LF - Terence Mann
CF - Kelly Leak
RF - Shoeless Joe Jackson

SP - Bugs "Baseball Bugs" Bunny
RP - Ricky Vaughn

Manager - Morris Buttermaker

Memo: General

2008-04-14T14:28:00.005-04:00

BEGIN

The Rosterized board of directors discovered another compatriot from the multi-nation of creative lineup fabrication.

The Graphic Tales blog has a team comprised of illustrators. The board's favorite GT criterion: "you have to be dead." Needless to say, the board does not require such for inclusion in Rosterized.

While the board is short on knowledge of the illustrating biz, the collective favorite (voted upon in the wee hours of this afternoon, in the lull between lunchtime handball and late afternoon engraving session II.a) is most assuredly Robert Weaver.

END

RP - Ricky Vaughn - Team#2_The Movies

2008-04-14T12:22:00.008-04:00

Willie Mays Hayes: What the hell league you been playing in?
Rick Vaughn: California Penal.

I was a freshman in high school when Dale Allen was a senior. He was a pitcher, the older brother of my good friend Mike, and he was large, tanned, with a dopey handsome smile. I was a catcher at the bottom of the totem pole, which meant that I caught long, long bullpen sessions in the off-season where pitchers like Dale "honed their stuff" and "worked on a new pitch," which was most often some weird slider that hopped to the plate and caromed like a bb off of me and then the backstop.

Dale threw hard, in general contrast to his sort of cocky slow meandering but also charismatic persona which would later make him a like #1A and almost admirably committed frat boy. He was not however able to control the flight path of even his fastball, the old standby 3-0 strike getter. The strikes that he did throw were like lightning strikes in that they were frightening and beautiful and rare and could not be expected to happen again soon or ever.

And so not only was I this young kid on (not "on" yet but at least "in proximity to") a team of men--for men they seemed and still seem even as I am ten years older than these "men" were at the time--with goatees and neck hair and developed musculatures and babe girlfriends, etc., but I had to quite literally wrangle in the most frightening aspects of one of this one guy's advanced level of at least let's say physical maturity, his fastball. I was not quite literally required to "catch" and "block" and "control" the very sort of a hyper-masculine "high hard one" if you will, rather than fading into the pattern of the wallpaper which was more my preference at the time.

In any event, it's all very Freudian and fraught with latency and fear, etc. etc. and I'm not sure it's very interesting, but suffice it to say that young men encounter these situations with great frequency, ie. in which older men act a certain way and younger man/boy must interpret and negotiate and extrapolate and later, in his blog, try and piece it all back together and hope that he is not nailed in the junk with a metaphorical or proverbial fastball.

I once took a curveball in the dirt on one hop right into the stones and it hurt very badly, even though it was only a slow curve from a coach and not like a Dale fastball or anything. That would've been that much worse.

major league, summon the righty

Lineup - The Movies

C - John Kinsella
1B - Jack Elliot
2B - Ken Burns
3B - Roger Dorn
SS - Nicky Rogan
LF - Terence Mann
CF - Kelly Leak
RF - Shoeless Joe Jackson

SP - Bugs "Baseball Bugs" Bunny
RP - Ricky Vaughn

Manager -

Memo: Team#2_The Movies - Competition

2008-04-02T23:40:00.003-04:00

BEGIN

The Rosterized board of directors keeps abreast of the competition.

Here is the latest threat.

We do not "draft" here, as much as "devise," "deploy" and "design" teams. Nevertheless, once again The Fan makes an appearance. Who has even seen that movie?

END

RF - Shoeless Joe Jackson - Team#2_The Movies

2008-03-31T22:52:00.006-04:00

I love the movie, I won't apologize. By now three team members can claim it as their alma mater. I watched most of it on television the other night (and it takes a lot for me to watch a whole movie in spite of commercial breaks).

There are four moments (at least) that jar me and make shudder and point at the screen. I've already immortalized the first. Here are the other three:

- the aforementioned "brush them away like flies" moment when Terrence Mann waves a paw in front of his face, brushing away the buzzing memories of the collective brain that will buzz in the near future.

- when Moonlight Graham lifts a hand in farewell to the other ballplayers, after this stirring moment. His hand only raises to his third shirt button down, palm open, the beginnings of a salute. But it need rise no farther; it's clear.

- when Terrence Mann is illuminated by the headlights of the VW bus, revealing that he has not been completely forthright, and then revealing like only a few seconds later that he heard the voice say "go the distance" at Fenway too.

- when Shoeless Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta) says to Kevin Costner (Ray Kinsella), "No, Ray, it was you," suggesting what only an old ghost ballplayer would know which is that Kevin Costner built a field and went on a road trip with a writer and did all of that to ease his own pain, or something to that effect.

Lineup - The Movies

C - John Kinsella
1B - Jack Elliot
2B - Ken Burns
3B - Roger Dorn
SS - Nicky Rogan
LF - Terence Mann
CF - Kelly Leak
RF - Shoeless Joe Jackson

SP - Bugs "Baseball Bugs" Bunny
RP -

Manager -

CF - Kelly Leak - Team #2_The Movies

2008-03-21T12:27:00.006-04:00

Kelly: Just cool it, runt.

The cool older kid: a spectre in younger childhood that is both mesmerizing and frightening. There is a sense, as a child, that one will never get there oneself, and that childhood is a kind of endless, powerless purgatory. The power centers will always reside elsewhere, out of reach and impermeable, grabbing away every fly ball that comes into reach and offers a little hope for acknowledgment.

Into young adulthood, it's all the same, with different players. The power brokers are still older, but they are not cool. They are veiled. They don't strut or peel out of the parking lot. They squat and whisper in an unknown HQ, at the earth's poles, or below the shifting crust, slowly turning dials labeled in angular, illegible fonts. They don't steal the fly ball as it nears your mitt, but instead they uproot the field and pay others to shoot out the lights, so that there was never a game there to begin with.

kelly vs. roy, once and future, imdb, unofficial

Lineup - The Movies

C - John Kinsella
1B - Jack Elliot
2B - Ken Burns
3B - Roger Dorn
SS - Nicky Rogan
LF - Terence Mann
CF - Kelly Leak
RF -

SP - Bugs "Baseball Bugs" Bunny
RP -

Manager -

SP - Bugs "Baseball Bugs" Bunny - Team#2_The Movies

2008-03-13T14:55:00.005-04:00

Bugs: "Eh, I think I'll puh-plex him wit my Slow Ball."

Pjacks alerted me to this masterpiece of history and baseball with his mysterious, confident work on the subject, which I will link to when it is published. Speaking of confidence, Bugs "Baseball Bugs" Bunny qualifies for every position on the field, that being his omnipresent charge once the teetering, elderly incompetents vacate in the face of a massacre. On the mound, though, he is the king magician. Bugs the pitcher's secret weapon?: the slow ball.

I tried for the last three years of my college baseball career to throw the perfect knuckleball. I found a grip that seemed up to the task (fingernails dug in on the outside curve of the horseshoe), and once or twice I got the ball to waver in flight, creating the sought-after sensation that one's vision is failing them, that the laws of physics have been manipulated. Without any remarkable physical prowess, the knuckler was my chance to amaze and perplex. It was my daydream of choice.

The Middlebury catcher who played ahead of me, his magic trick was endurance beyond what should have been possible, playing both games in a double header in the Florida heat. In high school, my better was a specimen of strength. The ball spun so tightly when he threw it that it would tail away and sink as though it produced its own gravitational urge.

The pro knuckleballers, a well-documented if tiny clan, are the most impressive athletes in the history of sports. They bend physics on every pitch and foil Major League gorillas every day. Compared with that eccentric, tantalizing, horrific task, Tim Burton's body of work looks like Saved By the Bell: The College Years.

movie, wikipedia, another kind of baseball bugs, another notorious slow-baller

Lineup - The Movies

C - John Kinsella
1B - Jack Elliot
2B - Ken Burns
3B - Roger Dorn
SS - Nicky Rogan
LF - Terence Mann
CF -
RF -

SP - Bugs "Baseball Bugs" Bunny
RP -

Manager -

SS - Nicky Rogan - Team#2_The Movies

2008-03-12T15:14:00.006-04:00

Honestly, I don't even remember this movie, Game 6, very well. That Don Delillo wrote it was an intrigue, but critics were lukewarm. I went into it with low expectations, and watched a movie that didn't exceed them. What I recall of it involves manic middle-aged male reckless wandering, which is more likeably captured in Wonder Boys without the paranoiac gun-toting nemesis (although gun-toting itself is a component the two films share).

The great tragedy of Game 6 is, of course, that the Red Sox finally won, and they continue to win. Without the baseline tragic flaw to haunt the lost, tortured protagonist, he is simply a madman. Delillo wrote the script in the 90s, when Boston's century of near-miss water-boarding still retained its pathos. When the Red Sox won, however, the volumes of art and meditation devoted to their losing was washed away almost completely, at least as anything other than bare nostalgia. A Red Sox fan pining over constant loss is no longer loved and wept over for the losing's sake alone. He's got to do better now. The pity party is over.

Regarding the shortstop position, Nicky Rogan's manic self-destructive wiseacre melange would make for an unpredictable and therefore entertaining game, with the effect of a massive tanker ship thrashing about the harbor in a storm, with a pool toy for an anchor.

Lineup - The Movies

C - John Kinsella
1B - Jack Elliot
2B - Ken Burns
3B - Roger Dorn
SS - Nicky Rogan
LF - Terence Mann
CF -
RF -

SP -
RP -

Manager -

2B - Ken Burns - Team#2_The Movies

2008-03-04T10:15:00.005-05:00

This pick might have an air of "last kid picked" about it. Burns isn't an imposing physical presence, undoubtedly. But when it comes to the calm sashay of baseball history, his work is without cousins. Widely accessible presentations of historical information have, I think, the goal of adding movement (migration, descent, ascent, parallel transfer, confluence) to the human actions now committed to paper and lasting media. In that respect, the so-called "Ken Burns effect" is an exact analogy to the task. Still photographs--resting quietly in a file cabinet in an attic in a museum in a quiet New England/Midwestern/coastal California town--suddenly and marvelously shift and float across the screen (the epic Baseball is best enjoyed over an antennae broadcast, with a veil of static and the looming possibility that the single will go out completely).

The luminaries who talk baseball in the Burns documentary are the absolute lynch pin of the project. I could watch Robert Creamer's dentures dance for an eternity. And so in that sense Burns' task is not dissimilar to my own: team-building. Without his preternatural talent for finding the most interesting monologists in the baseball universe, all that's left are floating pictures. That might be enough in and of itself, but we are all lucky that the Ken Burns effect extends far beyond.

As far as the position is concerned, there is the threat that Burns' innings at second base might be a dreamy tour of duty. It is hard not to envision him losing himself to flights of fancy incessantly, pawing at the infield dirt with suggestions of OCD, or at the least a little hyperactivity and a distracted charm. "Burns! Look alive!" He jerks his head to the dugout and away from a single charismatic cloud floating across the sky--marking Zeus as the first true owner of the Ken Burns effect--moving like a drift log floating down a slow river.

Lineup - The Movies

C - John Kinsella
1B - Jack Elliot
2B - Ken Burns
3B - Roger Dorn
SS -
LF - Terence Mann
CF -
RF -

SP -
RP -

Manager -

LF - Terence Mann - Team#2_The Movies

2008-02-27T21:21:00.004-05:00

Terence Mann: The memories will be so thick they'll have to brush them away from their faces.

He's lost some foot speed over the years; hence the move to left field. But in left he has more time to think. All he's got to worry about is a line drive fading towards the foul line, but by now it's a familiar passage. He glances on occasion over to center field, where he walked into the corn.

Lineup - The Movies

C - John Kinsella
1B - Jack Elliot
2B -
3B - Roger Dorn
SS -
LF - Terence Mann
CF -
RF -

SP -
RP -

Manager -

Memo: Team#2_The Movies - This is hard

2008-02-26T11:38:00.007-05:00

BEGIN

I am struggling to form a team from the baseball movies. While there is no lack of excellent options, it is difficult and annoying to try and match a player/character with his/her position on the field and to continue on from there.

Therefore, rather than thrash around in the muck of endless deliberation, I have made an executive decision, cleared by the Rosterized Board of Directors as of this morning: from here on out, I am simply going to think of a great character from a baseball movie, then decide what position I think that he/she would or should play.

END

C - John Kinsella - Team#2_The Movies

2008-02-20T23:59:00.009-05:00

Ray Kinsella: Hey... Dad?
[John turns]
Ray Kinsella: [choked up] "You wanna have a catch?"
John Kinsella: I'd like that.

My dad taught me how to play baseball, because he taught me how to play catch. Nothing fancy: a couple of ratty gloves and a heavy old ball, in the front yard. The lawn was dome-shaped to funnel away the product of summer thunderstorms, and I had to skitter down the side of the grass dome to chase a badly thrown ball.

My glove was a black and silver Russell as light as you would expect a few folds of polyester to be. My dad's glove was the more expressive of the two, having survived the sixties. It wasn't well-built, but it was leather, the color of sun-baked plywood, wrinkled and broken in poorly, so that the thumb crossed the other fingers at a wonky impractical angle.

Dad's fundamentals were sound even if his experience was limited. He scolded me for throwing sidearm. Lucky thing, too, that he took me out to the fields by Rice University with a friend, and made me throw from the catcher's crouch until at last I flung it overhand. Legions of coaches would later reiterate my dad's prescient message, until I couldn't throw the ball but right from my ear without feeling like something was wrong.

I'm not gonna say that John Kinsella threw the ball as though he'd been at it for 15 of his formative years. But I cry every time he and Ray flip it back and forth, I do.

imdb, quotes, the field, people will come ray

Lineup - The Movies

C - John Kinsella
1B - Jack Elliot
2B -
3B - Roger Dorn
SS -
LF -
CF -
RF -

SP -
RP -

Manager -

1B - Jack Elliot - Team#2_The Movies

2008-02-19T10:35:00.009-05:00

Jack Eliot: We're not athletes, we're baseball players!

In high school, the baseball team spent the winter lifting mildewed plates on rusty bars in the weight room behind the auditorium. Three shrieks from the coach's whistle meant we were to disentangle ourselves from one medieval torture rack and promptly engage the next.

The football team shared the space. They appeared in groups of three or four, and they were often trailed by one of the army of football coaches. They attacked the weights, yelling and sucking air over their teeth. An offensive lineman, surname Shellnut, would let 250 pounds of bench press drop to his chest, caving it in momentarily before the bar sprang back up, traveling not far up again as his arms were short and compact. Shellnut shaved his head, and was not taller than five-foot-six.

In 8-year-old Sunday School, I once pulled the chair out from under Shellnut as he lowered himself to recline at a miniature arts and crafts table. He dropped and the back of his head socked the front of the wooden chair's seat as I watched in terror. I had not anticipated the successes and the ramifications of my actions, and was made to apologize.

mr. baseball, quotes, perhaps slightly unfair commercial juxtaposition

Lineup - The Movies

C -
1B - Jack Elliot
2B -
3B - Roger Dorn
SS -
LF -
CF -
RF -

SP -
RP -

Manager -

3B - Roger Dorn - Team#2_The Movies

2008-02-18T14:13:00.005-05:00

Jake Taylor: What I was concerned with was why you didn't come up with that grounder that Rockert hit in the 9th?
Roger Dorn: It was out of my reach. What do you want me to do, dive for it?

I played one game at third base in the last ten years of my career, during a summer ball game in high school. It was a night game; from my new strange location I was seeing double, completely disoriented by the perspective shift, like looking at your own house on Google Earth.

I was a catcher exclusively by then, just specialized enough to stay on each year and do the grunt work and keep quiet. Summer ball was an improvisational exercise, with kids out of town or without a ride or just gone, and I probably asked to play third base from boredom, or I might have leaped eagerly at the suggestion.

I borrowed a mitt and stood anxiously on the infield dirt, hoping that I might discover a hidden talent for ground balls, the way that I used to hope that a basketball scout would drive past the hoop at the park by chance and notice how effortlessly I could lay the ball up with both my right and my left hand (I hoped in turn that they wouldn't pull up whilst I practiced my leaping sky-hook, or my free throws).

Catchers aren't supposed to play anywhere else but maybe first base in an emergency, or at the end of a pro career. Catchers are used to balls delivered by hand directly, from allies; there is always the undercoat of collaboration; the ball is a friend, and a ball in the dirt is a friend whose fallen in with some sour crowd and should be pulled up out of that business.

A ground ball though is not a friend. It comes off the bat--which is more than anything just weird--and it is as angry and unpredictable as a mean drunk. And a ground ball is charged with malice--hitters want to beat fielders, and would just as soon see their hit careen off of a wrist or, Jesus forbid, a face. A pitch and a ground ball are completely different, and in the field you don't get to wear a mask unless you've already had your nose reupholstered.

In my short time at third, a batter finally chopped a slow ground ball towards me. I charged, but in the air the ball seemed to bend its path like a ping-pong ball played with English behind it. My footwork was so unruly that in the face of this perceived ripple in the space-time fabric I'd turned 90 degrees and--by then facing the pitcher's mound--I watched the ball mozy by over my shoulder as peacefully as a passing cloud.

It went foul. I grinned; it was summer ball, and there was a small chance that my ballet looked deliberate and intuitive. I had no further action that day, and I never played third base again.

major league, quotes

Lineup - The Movies

C -
1B -
2B -
3B - Roger Dorn
SS -
LF -
CF -
RF -

SP -
RP -

Manager -

Team#2_The Movies

2008-02-15T14:34:00.006-05:00

The baseball movie player lineup has been done before, and it will be done again (amazingly, I have seen a character from The Fan appear on more than one list).

Redundancy aside, my truth of it is that baseball movies are like baseball players: success rates are low, but the successes are grand.

When real, live baseball is packed with narrative intrigue and surprise endings, it seems redundant to gather a film crew together, write a script, craft a narrative, etc. etc. And so it's got to be very good or very bad to justify existence.

The successes share a taste for misanthropy and dysfunction (read: yes, so does the rest of art, literature and civilization). Baseball's film characters are better-liked for their deficiencies, their wildness, their gut shots to the belly, mile-wide fastballs, crippling appetites and transience.

The worst bits of the baseball movies that I like are the wins. The best bits are when somebody fucks something up completely.

For the record, my favorite baseball movie is Field of Dreams.

Decisions - Team#1_The Favorites

2008-02-11T23:11:00.003-05:00

The first full team is in the books. What have I learned from this?:

C - Mike Piazza
1B - Lance Berkman
2B - Craig Biggio
3B - Scott Rolen
SS - Adam Everett
LF - Manny Ramirez
CF - Ichiro Suzuki
RF - Vladimir Guerrero

SP - Greg Maddux
RP - Billy Wagner

Manager - Bobby Cox

I have learned that making a decision and locking it in is difficult. There were issues that I didn't know were unresolved, subtle though they may have been. Choosing a third basemen, for example, left me empty inside. I don't have a David Wright or a Tony Batista to fall back on (wait, Tony Batista might actually be my favorite...). What I had to do instead was evaluate my value system when it comes to baseball players.

Substance, style, history and all of the cerebral highways and byways connecting, dissecting, intersecting and resurrecting in between. Some connections are concrete, some spongy and fibrous. But they are connections, and the resultant construction is, I think, a big happy Frank Gehry building but better: architects have limitations.

What to make of this team of favorites?

There are some defensive holes, filled with slowfoot sluggers. Elsewhere, though, there is speed and wizardry and brute strength. A few selected men have played beyond their best days, and I am shamelessly marketing their pasts. But their pasts are mine as well, in that old familiar peculiar way. Baseball players are different than restaurants--their present deficiencies take nothing from their previous ascensions.

Many of my favorites are great players, Hall of Fame players. But a shortstop who hits like a comp. lit. professor? That is a surprise. I am surprised by that.

Manager - Bobby Cox - Team#1_The Favorites

2008-02-09T17:11:00.000-05:00

What can anyone know about a manager? His decisions go runny, diluted by a group of middle-men. There isn't much that he does that doesn't need translation, or explanation.

That said, what should the criteria be in choosing Favorite Manager?

Upon meditation--because I don't really know what managers do or when they've made a really great decision (bringing in the lefty is not a great decision)--I chose a single criteria. Theatricality. Who puts on the best show?

Bobby Cox puts on the best show, from his seat in the dugout--for the longest time with the Robin to his Batman, Leo Mazzone, rocking next to him--to his classic bow-legged walk to the mound, to the look on his face all of the time, like someone nearby just turned on some Rock & Roll music.

stats, ejections, ejection analysis, more of that

Lineup - The Favorites

C - Mike Piazza
1B - Lance Berkman
2B - Craig Biggio
3B - Scott Rolen
SS - Adam Everett
LF - Manny Ramirez
CF - Ichiro Suzuki
RF - Vladimir Guerrero

SP - Greg Maddux
RP - Billy Wagner

Manager - Bobby Cox

RP - Billy Wagner - Team#1_The Favorites

2008-02-06T21:02:00.000-05:00

The Save is losing its cache, but only on paper. A close game and a hard-thrower and a free-swinger is still as exciting as a baseball game can get. aside: exciting is not always the goal.

The save situation is charged. Billy Wagner is charged.

Wagner's frame suggests one idea: foundation. His legs are short and thick, suggesting the pylons of a pier. His feet are small, suggesting stakes driven into the dirt of the pitching mound. His proportions suggest a skinny man of six-foot-four condensed height-wise into five-foot-eight like a canned SPAM. His arms are dense and short, suggesting speed boat propellers.

His fastball suggests a piece of debris caught in a speed boat propeller and spat out angry.

Lineup - The Favorites

C - Mike Piazza
1B - Lance Berkman
2B - Craig Biggio
3B - Scott Rolen
SS - Adam Everett
LF - Manny Ramirez
CF - Ichiro Suzuki
RF - Vladimir Guerrero

SP - Greg Maddux
RP - Billy Wagner

Manager -

Ichiro Suzuki Podcast 1:57

2008-02-03T11:26:00.000-05:00

Ichiro Suzuki - CF - Rosterized Podcast