“I’m Taking Him Deep”
Love American-Style in Bull Durham
By Scott M. Irwin, July 23, 2022
“Money, it’s gotta be the shoes!”
Spike Lee, in character as Mars Blackmon, added that exclamation to the American lexicon in 1988 with a television advertisement featuring Michael Jordan.
Lee, however, wasn’t the only movie director to find heady humor in footwear that year. Ron Shelton, creator of Bull Durham, did, too. Last night, the Durham Bulls celebrated that fact by stepping out as the Shower Shoes.
The nickname offered a tip of the cap to Shelton’s eye for details. Crash Davis holds up a moldy flip-flop—the kind that used to sell for a dollar—and lectures Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh.
“Your shower shoes have fungus on them,” he says. “You’ll never make it to the bigs with fungus on your shower shoes. Think classy, you’ll be classy. If you win 20 in The Show, you can let the fungus grow back, and the press will think you’re colorful. Until you win 20 in The Show, it means you’re a slob.”
The authenticity of Bull Durham charmed critics. Hal Hinson of The Washington Post said the film “eases up on you, lazy as a cloud, and carries you off in a mood of exquisite delight. To borrow W.P. Kinsella’s phrase, it has the thrill of the grass.”
Hollywood agreed. Writer-director Ron Shelton received an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay. But the general public bestowed the highest honor on Bull Durham. Shot for about $9 million (a reasonable budget then) the film grossed more than $50 million. Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins shot to stardom.
Making a baseball movie should be a simple endeavor. However, in Hollywood, where big egos and the conflict between art and commerce lead to bitter disputes, Bull Durham almost ended up on the cutting-room floor. At one point, according to his recently released memoir The Church of Baseball, Shelton even grabbed a producer by the throat.
As it turns out, the producer wanted to cut one of the film’s funniest scenes—the meeting on the mound that addresses every challenge from the live chicken needed to end the curse on the first baseman’s mitt to getting candlesticks as a wedding present for Millie and Jimmy.
Apparently, the producer slept through Annie’s English Lit 101 class. Comedy—as playwrights from Shakespeare to Shaw have illustrated—is just terror and tension with a wink and a smile.
No sports film ever wore the theatrical masks of tragedy and comedy better than Bull Durham. While the film delights in all manner of adolescent antics—from Skip’s bat-throwing, profanity-laced diatribe in the showers to Crash’s late-night, drunken hijinks on a flooded field—the movie centers its plot on the everyday struggles of modern Americans.
Some of those problems are even more pronounced today than they were 34 years ago. For instance, in spite of their obvious intelligence, the two main characters have been eking out a marginal existence their entire adult lives.
Annie might wax philosophical and drop quotations from such great poets as William Blake, Walt Whitman and Thomas Gray—Full many a flower is born to blush unseen/And waste its sweetness on the desert air—but she makes minimum wage as an adjunct professor at neighboring Alamance Junior College.
“I’ve spent thirty years trying to figure out the movie and why it works,” Shelton says. “Some of it, I was unconscious of while we were making it. … We’ve all loved something more than it loves us back.”
Many Americans love their work, yet they go unrewarded. It’s been a half-century since the last real wage increase. Unions have been gutted by corporations that feed the greed of shareholders and pay executives eight-figure salaries.
Meanwhile, temporary workers like Crash and Annie assume an ever-increasing share of the U.S. labor force. Nearly half of all jobs in America’s “gig economy” are now temporary ones without benefits. Television advertisers cynically promote them as paths to “freedom” that allow folks to work whenever they want, however they want, wherever they want.
But Crash, the iconic Durham Bull, knows bullshit when he sees it. He has been the backstop to baseball’s structural inequality for too many years. Ebby’s slavish devotion to consumer consumption—“I’ve got a Porsche already. I’ve got a 911 with a quadraphonic Blaupunkt“—just fuels his resentment.
“Come on, Meat,” Crash challenges the bonus baby in a back-alley showdown. “Show me that million-dollar arm of yours, ’cause I got a good idea about that 5-cent head.”
We see Ebby’s disregard of Crash’s work expertise, and management’s tolerance of it, and we’re reminded that baseball practiced ageism long before it became standard practice in the American workplace.
“How come you don’t like me?” Ebby asks, oblivious to the privileges of his age and class.
“Because you don’t respect yourself, which is your problem,” Crash barks. “But you don’t respect the game. That’s my problem.”
Ironically, Crash’s accomplishments in the dog-eat-dog world of men at work can only be appreciated by a woman unemployed by it. Annie is the one who knows that Crash is approaching the record for most home runs hit in the minor leagues—a feat that embarrasses Crash, but impresses Annie.
Annie also empathizes with Crash, not just because she’s a woman, but because she too knows what it feels like to have her body exploited. As with Crash, she puts up a brave face, boasting of women’s sexual power to Millie, the submissive town pump: “Women never get lured. They are too strong and powerful for that.”
And she certainly plays the role of the second-wave feminist, glibly explaining to Crash and Ebby: “These are the ground rules. I hook up with one guy a season. Usually, it takes me a couple of weeks to pick the guy—kinda like my own spring training. And, well, you two are the most promising prospects so far.”
But truthfully, Annie (like Crash, soon to turn 40) can feel her powers of seduction disappearing, like wrinkles hidden by too much makeup. The anxiety mounts when Ebby superstitiously avoids her sexual advances on the kitchen table, because the Bulls keep winning.
“You’re messin’ with my mind,” Ebby says.
“I’m tryin’ to mess with your body!” she insists.
“Annie Savoy is a woman at an equal crisis point in her life,” Shelton says. “She’s invented a game around boys and young men, something that’s unsustainable, too. So they’re both at this crisis.”
The dramatic pas-de-deux reaches its climax in the following scene, which cleverly subverts traditional gender roles. Frustrated and horny—and still wearing the apron, mini skirt, halter top and heels in which she just served Ebby lunch—Annie storms into Crash’s apartment, where the bachelor stands in his skivvies, drinking “good Scotch” and … ironing.
Unlike Ebby, who can’t even warm up a can of Campbell’s soup, Crash is a modern man who does his own domestic duties, even the grudging ones.
This realization doesn’t shock us, because several clues have been dropped about Crash’s non-traditional masculinity. Most notably, in his famous “I believe” monologue, delivered as a rebuttal to Annie’s cattle-call treatment of the two Bulls, Crash reveals that he has read books by Susan Sontag, a novelist and feminist.
While Crash would never be confused with an intellectual, or the stereotypical “sensitive male” liberal of the ’70s—he believes Sontag’s novels are “self-indulgent, overrated crap”—he nonetheless shows interest in “reading a book without pictures” (as Larry jokes). More than one, in fact.
In the first bus scene, Crash is studiously reading, while trying to drown out a tone-deaf Ebby, who is butchering Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness”:
Ebby: “She may get wooly. Young girls, they do get wooly … because of all the stress, yeah. When they get wooly, try a little tenderness.”
Crash (seizing the guitar): “Stop it. It’s not wooly. Nobody gets wooly. Women get weary. They don’t get wooly. Nobody’s got stress. They’re wearing a dress. Goddamnit, I hate it when people get the words wrong.”
Crash hates the fact that Annie, well-read and cultured like himself, would choose a “young, wild, dim pretty boy”—one who describes French chantreuse Edith Piaf as “that crazy Mexican singer”.
In this manner, Bull Durham dog-paddles the choppy waters of post-feminist, heterosexual relationships. More than three decades later, those waters have only gotten rougher.
While “cougars” like Annie and young bucks like Ebby can serve their appetites via Internet sites and pickup bars tailored to their tastes, the proliferation of relationship-oriented, online-dating apps suggests that the majority of single men and women want something that will last.
Still, as the film shows us time after time, the games people play aren’t easily retired—even for aging veterans like Crash and Annie:
Crash: “I never told [Ebby] to stay out of your bed!”
Annie: “Yes you did!”
Crash: “I told him that a player on a streak has to respect the streak.”
Annie: “Oh fine.”
Crash: “You know why? Because they don’t … they don’t happen very often.”
Annie: “Right.”
Crash: “If you believe you’re playing well because you’re getting laid, or because you’re not getting laid, or because you’re wearing women’s underwear, then you are! And you should know that! Come on, Annie, think of something clever to say, huh? Something full of magic, religion, bullshit.”
Annie: [Dramatic pause] “I want you.”
Crash: “What?”
Annie: “I said I want you.”
Crash: “Stop it.”
Annie: [Dramatic pause] “You’re scared.”
Crash: “Maybe I am. But I still think you should leave.”
When Annie overturns the ironing board, the film reaches its apex: Annie and Crash must overturn Victorian Age domesticity, in order to create a modern love.
Ebby’s call-up to the Atlanta Braves provides the catalyst for Annie to accept that weaponizing sex only postpones the problems inherent to any relationship. Similarly, Crash cannot avoid the brutal truth that his career is ending in failure.
Far from the “reassertion of a highly stylized version of traditional masculinity” that academic Marjorie D. Kibby sees in the sports movies of the ’80s (most notably, the Rocky franchise) Bull Durham offers an alternative hero: a man comfortable enough in his own skin that he can don Annie’s sexy kimono, before laying her on the kitchen table.
The joint they share before sex, like the chaos of the kitchen, elicits a giddy feeling of domestic freedom. The film could have ended there, and it still would have been a classic. the movie reaches its zenith with the coda.
At dawn of a new day, Crash steers his Mustang convertible across Carolina’s blue highways to Asheville, where he joins the Tourists long enough to hit the record homer that caps his dubious career.
Meanwhile, left alone to pick up the pieces in her chaotic kitchen, Annie tries to empty the emotional trash by going to the ballpark. A relentless rain falls, as she sits alone under a black umbrella. She shivers, in spite of the Durham Bulls jacket draped over her shoulders. This picture, shot from the spot where Crash once manned home plate, doubles the earlier image of Crash wandering the vacant streets of Old Durham a few blocks away.
When Annie returns to her house in the twilight, and sees Crash rocking in her front-porch swing, home suddenly looks different. At last, Annie can commit to a man who wants to stay at home.
And Crash? Instead of a competitive space to be contested, in gear that protects him from getting hurt, home now offers refuge from the disillusionment of a dream deferred. Retired as a player, he wonders aloud whether he could make it to The Show as a coach.
In her nervous urge to show support, Annie provides the final scene with the necessary dramatic tension.
“You’d be great, just great,” she says, choking back tears. “ ’Cause you understand non-linear thinking even though it seems like baseball is a linear game ’cause of the lines and the box scores and all, but the fact is there’s a spacious, non-time kind of time to it…”
Annie’s rambling recalls her reply to Crash during her interview for a new suitor.
“Why do you get to choose?” he asks.
“Well, actually, nobody on this planet ever really chooses each other,” she says. “I mean, it’s all a question of quantum physics, molecular attraction, and timing. Why, there are laws we don’t understand that bring us together and tear us apart.”
This time, however, Crash doesn’t answer with his own speech, before walking away. Instead, he stays seated right next to Annie.
“I gotta lotta time to hear your theories, and I wanna hear every last one of them,” he says. “But right now I’m tired … and I don’t wanna think about baseball, and I don’t wanna think about quantum physics, and I don’t wanna think about nothin’. I just wanna be.”
“I can do that, too,” she vows.
“If they stop doing what they love, they’ll have to grow up,” Shelton says. “That’s the risk that it takes them [the whole movie] to work through.”
Two generations after the release of Bull Durham, Americans still can’t stomach growing up. Graybeards clad in leather gun their Harley-Davidsons at stoplights. Mothers go “Back to School” shopping with their teenage daughters, dressed in matching below-the-hip jeans and Lycra tops. Millions continue to idolize an emotionally retarded ex-president.
All of which suggests that our development may be permanently arrested.
And, yet, Bull Durham assures us—maybe, just maybe—we might be willing to try.
Fight Club
Reading between the Lines of Violence in Baseball and America
By Scott M. Irwin, June 30, 2022
Basebrawl. The word elicits a chuckle from most sports fans and an Internet search for montages capturing the comical antics of baseball’s wannabe boxers.
We watch pitchers drill batters—as Andrew Wantz did to Jesse Winker on Sunday. We watch batters angrily threaten retaliation. We watch bullpens and benches clear, and much jawing and chest-thumping ensue. We watch players flip the bird to fans.
Occasionally, we watch real violence erupt—and we are inspired.
“Man nothing gets my caveman juices flowing like an actual baseball fight with some knucks being chucked,” one fan tweeted.
Indeed, the lure of violence, perhaps even the necessity of it, is as old as human history. Cavemen killed in order to survive. The Romans and Ottomans erected great civilizations that ultimately were cut down by the spear and the sword.
And America? As Sunday’s debacle reminded us, violence pervades our culture. After watching Sunday’s melee, I flipped through the channels and, for the 1,000th time, saw policemen storming yet another high school terrorized by a teenaged shooter; reality TV shows starring America’s most notorious rapists and murderers; and rioters, posing as patriots, impaling fellow countrymen with the American flag.
Historian Richard Slotkin argues that violence is the key to understanding the American story. Colonists forged a new nation with the musket and bayonet. Daniel Boone tamed the American wilderness with the rifle and hunting knife. The U.S. Army won the West with the Gatling gun and cannon.
“After watching Sunday’s melee, I flipped through the channels and, for the 1,000th time, saw policemen storming yet another high school terrorized by a teenaged shooter; reality TV shows starring America’s most notorious rapists and murderers; and rioters, posing as patriots, impaling fellow countrymen with the American flag.”
Rugged individualism became intertwined with the valorization of violence, as heroes emerged from the haze of gun smoke: James Fenimore Cooper’s legendary Natty Bumppo, slayer of deer, Magua, and the French; Jim Bowie and Boone shooting the Spanish at the Alamo; Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday gunning down the Cowboys gang in Tombstone, Az.
“Regeneration ultimately became the means of violence, and the myth of regeneration through violence became the structuring metaphor of the American experience,” Slotkin writes.
Sport, of course, was no exception. In 1973, when Slotkin’s Regeneration through Violence was published, football was supplanting baseball as the national pastime. The entertainment value of violence—amplified by America’s built-up tolerance for it, after a decade of war in the jungles of Southeast Asia and our own city streets—fueled football’s popularity. The Super Bowl usurped the World Series as the sporting event of the year.
Baseball purists wrung their hands. “Football’s real problem is not that it glorifies violence, though it does, but that it offers no successful alternative to violence,” Washington Post columnist Thomas Boswell complained.
That superior attitude has survived in the 21st century. “At least no one at the ballpark wants anyone to get beaned in the line of fire 60 feet 6 inches between home and the mound,” Santa Barbara sportswriter Max McCumber states in an op-ed with the ominous title “Sport vs. Brutality—The Game of Football Is Simply Too Violent”.
“It scares the bejesus out of us,” McCumber continues. “To avoid such occurrences at all costs is part of baseball. In contrast, football gives us one too many scary moments. Blitz after blitz, concussion after concussion, it never ends. It comes as no surprise that many ex-gridironers have suffered impaired cognition and brain trauma once their playing days are over.”
McCumber is right to emphasize the afflictions of football players; however, like many baseball advocates, he views his favorite game as essentially peaceful. Truth be told, violence has always lurked on deck. And when it strides to the plate, it carries a big stick.
Nearly every baseball fan knows the legend of Casey at the bat, but few recall these lines from Ernest L. Thayer’s poem:
The sneer is gone from Casey’s lip, his teeth are clenched in hate;
He pounds with cruel violence his bat upon the plate
And now the pitcher holds the ball, and now he lets it go
And now the air is shattered by the force of Casey’s blow…
Given Casey’s spectacular failure (he whiffs mightily), perhaps Thayer was being ironical when he described America as “this favored land” where “the sun is shining bright”—an allusion to the prevailing belief in Manifest Destiny at the time. Indeed, in 1888, Americans of good social standing were convinced that God had ordained America as conqueror of the continent. Just two years later, Col. James W. Forsyth commanded the 7th Cavalry to slaughter the Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee, signaling the end of the Indian Wars and the ultimate “justification” of American violence.
Paradoxically, then, baseball—the pastoral game with the nostalgic goal of returning “home”—came of age during America’ bloody rise to empire. Besides, the thousands of fans who converged upon sandlots from Cincinnati to Chicago admired the bare-knuckled ballers in those barnstorming days of the new National League.
According to Frank Keetz, a historian of 19th-century baseball, “The stereotypical baseball player was second-generation Irish or German, rough-hewed, uncouth and profane, a heavy drinker and brawler.”
Contrary to the sanitized Horatio Alger myth, perpetuated by pulp fiction, these Americans didn’t ascend from “rags to riches” by virtue of clean living and the Puritan work ethic. They succeeded by sharpening their spikes, and slashing players who dared to tag them while sliding. They succeeded by wielding bats as clubs—even against grandstanding hecklers. They succeeded by hurling heaters intended not to “brush back” a hitter, but to harm him.
“Professional baseball during the 19th century was aggressive, intense, often harsh, at times bitter,” Keetz wrote. “Winning was the objective, the only objective.”
America’s incipient might-makes-right ethos, consecrated by a century stained by war, swept the nation. The Robber Barons of the Gilded Age used intimidation and violence to horde their ill-gotten gains. In 1892, goons hired by steel magnate Andrew Carnegie engaged in gun battle with striking workers. The steelworkers lost.
Meanwhile, baseball’s day laborers kept scratching and clawing each other for the few remaining crumbs of American pie. If blood had to be spilled, so be it.
Bluebloods like Harvard president Charles W. Eliot sniffed, “I think baseball is a wretched game. I call it one of the worst games, although I know it is called the American national game.”
But the hoi polloi—especially working-class immigrants and their second-generation American sons—hailed their common heroes. Simply put, they were winners.
Baltimore captured three straight National League pennants from 1894-96 with a rough-and-tumble group of men featuring Hall of Fame rogue John McGraw, twice-beaned Hughie Jennings, and Wilbert Robinson (who had part of a finger amputated).
Illegally shaved bats, used to bunt, helped the Orioles win games; but their fear tactics won championships. They stomped on catchers’ feet, threw masks at runners, yanked on jerseys and pants, put pebbles in opponents’ shoes. They even “out-jawed the umpires, who were cowed by the in-your-face antics of the Orioles, most of whom were about as short, and as combative, as [Hall of Fame manager] Earl Weaver,” Mike Kingman wrote for the Baltimore Sun.
No Oriole drew more wrath than McGraw. Poor son of an Irish immigrant (who abused him) and Union Army veteran of the Civil War, McGraw employed all kinds of skullduggery at third base to prevent runners from scoring.
One New Orleans sportswriter observed that McGraw “adopts every low and contemptible method that his erratic brain can conceive to win a play by a dirty trick.”
The roughnecks of Baltimore loved McGraw’s tough-guy tactics. He was one of them— a sweat-of-the-brow Everyman who would do anything to win. In Boston, against the Bean Counters, he started a fracas that spread to the wooden bleachers, where a mob of fans joined the fray and burned down the ballpark.
And you thought Red Sox fans were obnoxious.
All kidding aside, such antics rear their tribalistic heads every season; and when the rivalries run deep, as they have for decades between the Dodgers and Giants, so too does the blood. In 2013, Dodgers fan Jonathan Denver was stabbed to death by a Giants fan following a game in San Francisco. The murder apparently was an act of revenge. Two years earlier, on Opening Day in Los Angeles, Dodgers fans beat Giants fan Bryan Stow into a coma. Stow suffered permanent brain damage, and still remains under medical supervision at his parents’ home.
Fortunately, no Angels or Mariners fans engaged in felonious behavior on Sunday; and neither did the players, coaches or managers. Still, MLB suspended a dozen for a total of 47 games. Angels manager Phil Nevin got the harshest discipline: a 10-game suspension without appeal (because Wantz hit Winker after warnings were issued to both benches).
Blame baseball’s longtime eye-for-an-eye lunacy—or blame Nevin himself. Just two weeks earlier, the Los Angeles Times heralded Nevin’s hiring with the following headline: “How fiery Phil Nevin won over the Angels: ‘The energy he brings is contagious.’”
As American history continues to show us, so too is the seductive lure of violence.
Licensed to Ill
MLB’s Callous Attitude toward Pitchers’ Health
By Scott Irwin, June 17, 2022
These days, ESPN.com reads like a stack of charts written by an E.R. doctor working the weekend graveyard shift:
Buehler out 6-8 weeks with elbow strain
White Sox’ Kopech leaves game after 13 pitches
Mize to undergo Tommy John surgery, Tigers say
Rays’ Kittredge needs TJ surgery; season over
If it seems like pitchers are succumbing to more season-ending injuries, that’s because they are. On May 16, Baseball Prospectus reported that more than 50 pitchers had suffered elbow injuries through the first 38 games of this season, an increase of nearly 40 percent when compared to 2018.
The causes for this spate of surgeries are many. First, throwing a baseball with great velocity and significant spin is inherently risky business. As Buck Showalter said, “The Good Lord did not create man to throw a baseball 100 miles per hour.”
Showalter, the New York Mets’ manager, is surely feeling that pain now. Jacob deGrom, the team’s longtime ace, has been shelved since spring training with a stress reaction in his right shoulder—yet another serious pitching injury that has become commonplace.
But the physical stress of hurling isn’t the only thing making pitchers an endangered species. Covid-19 has wreaked havoc on baseball, disrupting pitchers’ routines (which are crucial to maintaining health) and curtailing innings pitched (which adversely affects durability).
The media have wrung their hands over the coronavirus, yet they have ignored the elephant convalescing in the living room: the lockout. Just when players were returning to the rigors of a full-season workload—and dealing with the injuries that come with it—the owners shut them down last December.
“With the snap of a CEO’s finger, pitchers with injury concerns were forbidden from communicating with team doctors. Since no one knew when, or if, spring training would start, a cloud of uncertainty hung over the health of the sport and its players.“
Ballplayers found themselves facing a new threat: the loss of their identity as workers. In one particularly cynical move, the owners made the players faceless on the MLB website—scrubbing heads shots and replacing them with creepy gray silhouettes.
With the snap of a CEO’s finger, pitchers with injury concerns were prevented from communicating with team doctors. Since no one knew when, or if, spring training would start, a cloud of uncertainty hung over the health of the sport and its players.
As it turned out, the scrubbing done by MLB’s website managers was a foreshadow of much more to come—only this time the scrubbing would be done by surgeons. As of last week, 36 pitchers had already undergone the procedure, and the numbers continue to rise. Just yesterday, the Toronto Blue Jays announced that Hyun Jin-Ryu had undergone Tommy John surgery.
Of Lockouts and Labor Pains
When the owners voted unanimously to lock out the players, their motive was obvious to anybody savvy about labor history. For decades now, major corporations (MLB included) have sought to curtail—or eliminate—the power of organized labor. Central to their strategy is the policy of outsourcing labor to replacements, willing to work temporarily for much cheaper wages.
To that end, MLB has embraced sabermetrics. Armed with the knowledge provided for them by staff economists, owners now have a blueprint for getting the job done for much less money. Hence, their attempt to break the players’ union.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the bank. As the lockout stretched into its fourth month, the union refused to blink. Suddenly, the impasse threatened the season, ironically at a time when owners were flush with money from their new television contract.
Faced with the possibility of losing hundreds of millions of dollars for the second time in three years (this time due their own hubris, instead of a pandemic) the owners capitulated to significantly raising the minimum wage and slowing down the shuttle that taxied players between Triple-A and MLB (and back again).
But here’s the bitter irony: Owners, in their dogged pursuit of crippling the players’ union, ended up crippling more pitchers. Sure, the risk of pitching remained, as did the disruptions caused by the pandemic. But the extended lockout abbreviated spring training, reduced rest days, and rescheduled postponements as doubleheaders.
Did the chaos caused by so many season-ending surgeries weigh on the owners’ consciences? Do those owners (most of them billionaires) even have consciences?
Well, consider the curious case of pitcher Chris Paddack. During his injury-plagued career, Paddack has been traded as easily as a Topps playing card.
Drafted in 2015 by the Miami Marlins, Paddack initially enjoyed success in the low minors. He drew such rave reviews from scouts that the Padres dealt two-time All-Star closer Fernando Rodney for him at the 2016 trading deadline.
“[The Marlins] were willing to put in good pieces to get good pieces,” Padres manager A.J. Preller said at the time.
But were they … or did they just deal in bad faith? Shortly after the trade, Paddack went under the knife for Tommy John surgery.
Cast off by the Marlins—when the front office arguably knew he was damaged goods—Paddack trudged ahead. For a year and a half, he rehabilitated his surgically reconstructed right elbow, until finally he could return to work.
Paddack dominated again, and steadily worked his way up the ladder. Finally, in 2019, he realized his longtime dream of pitching in the major leagues. After making 26 starts for the Padres, and posting a 3.33 ERA, Paddack’s problems seemed to be behind him.
However, Paddack’s horror story had just reached intermission. Thrown off-balance by the coronavirus in 2020, Paddack’s ERA soared from 3.33 to 4.79, and his innings were cut drastically from 140 to 59—a red flag for any pitcher with a history of injuries.
Sure enough, the abbreviated season led to a variety of ailments last year. First, Paddack suffered what was mysteriously termed an “undisclosed injury”. Then he strained an oblique muscle. Finally, with the season’s end in sight, Paddack got the news he most feared: doctors informed him that he had a slight tear in his ulnar collateral ligament, the same one that had been repaired in 2016.
Reluctant to endure Tommy John surgery for the second time in six years, and grind through another 18-month rehabilitation, Paddack opted to receive a stem-cell injection with the hope of pitching the following spring.
Initially, it appeared he had dodged calamity.
“[Paddack] looks okay this spring and I assume [the] Twins did their due diligence…” Nate Nelson of TwinsDaily.com tweeted.
As it turned out, the Twins, who acquired Paddack during a tornado of transactions after the owners’ lockout, did not do their due diligence. Paddack, in fact, was injured; but because there were no up-to-date records (the lockout prevented that) Paddack’s medical report raised more questions than it answered.
As MLB insider Jon Heyman wrote in mid-May, shortly after Paddack’s second Tommy John surgery: “Now it can be told. The Mets-Padres deal was canceled after Mets doctors raised a red flag over right-hander Chris Paddack’s medicals.”
That’s right. The Padres’ front office apparently used the same cynical strategy that the Marlins had used against them six years earlier, when they dealt Paddack to the Padres. The ploy failed with the Mets, but it worked to a “T” with the Twins, whose general managers were so busy flipping players that they didn’t realize Paddack was damaged goods.
Paddack used humor to cope with his predicament.
“Looks fairly good to me,” he said after getting shipped to the Twins. “Better than the gold and brown (of San Diego). I looked like UPS.”
Actually, he looked like one of those parcels labeled “Fragile: Handle with Care”. You know, the ones that rattle when you pick them up.
Nonetheless, MLB executives continue to send pitchers like Paddack packing—leaving some other franchise to foot the doctors’ bills, and some other pitcher fearing the end of his career.
In other words, business as usual in America.
Sisyphus and the Heroic Act of Hitting
By Scott M. Irwin, June 4, 2022
For a philosopher apparently indifferent to sports, Albert Camus sure had a lot to say about the heroic act of hitting a baseball.
At first, such a thought might seem absurd, yet explaining the absurd was Camus’ bailiwick. And what could be more absurd than trying to hit a dancing sphere with a wooden stick?
“[T]o see one’s work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this
has no more importance than building for centuries—this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions,” Camus wrote.
Sounds like 0-for-4 with three punchouts to me.
To illustrate the absurd, Camus turned to the Greek myth of Sisyphus, who endlessly sweats and strains to roll a boulder up a hill, watches helplessly as it tumbles down to earth, and then repeats his futility over and over and over.
That’s what you get when you piss off Zeus.
It’s also what you get as a hitter. I was reminded of that when George Brett—who once flirted with a .400 batting average—welcomed Miguel Cabrera to the 3,000 Hit Club in a video tribute featuring all living members of that exclusive fraternity.
“On top of that … on top of that,” Brett emphasized, “it’s another great club to be able to say you made 7,000 outs.”
I was floored. Rolled over by a boulder, you might say.
Camus, an Algeria-born writer who probably never saw a bat or baseball in his life, understood repeated failure like no other; and dealing with repeated failure is the inescapable condition of every hitter—even the great ones.
“Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined.”
– French philosopher Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus“
Not having read Camus’ essay on Sisyphus since my undergraduate days, I retreated to my library, dug out my tattered paperback of The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, and began to reread the annotations.
The findings astounded me. It was as if Camus were a batting guru like Doug Latta or a sports psychologist like Harvey Dorfman, hired to help a struggling slugger out of a long slump.
“Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined,” Camus posited.
What sage instruction! Philosophers and novelists might delve into deep thought, but to a hitter, thinking can be as fatal as a back-door slider. Crash Davis, hero of the classic comedy Bull Durham, hilariously demonstrated the hitter’s battle with the mind:
“Relax. Relax. Quick bat. Pop the clubhead,” he says. “Open the hips. Relax. You’re thinkin’ too much. Get outta your fucking head, Crash!
“You’re thinking too much. Get out of your fucking head, Crash!“
– Minor-league hitter Crash Davis, Bull Durham
Like Sisyphus, Crash is locked in perpetual struggle—with his opponent, yes; but primarily with himself. Staring into the face of adversity, he knows he will succeed only occasionally. The monumental challenge of his endeavors fuels his desire to break the record for career home runs in the minor leagues—a dubious honor at best. For this, he solicits the trainer for “the shit that don’t smell” to soothe his aging and ailing body, so he can crouch behind home plate one more night.
That’s absurd.
“[A] day comes when a man notices or says that he is thirty,” Camus observed. “Thus he asserts his youth. But simultaneously he situates himself in relation to time. He takes his place in it. He admits that he stands at a certain point on a curve that he acknowledges having to travel to its end. He belongs to time, and by the horror that seizes him, he recognizes his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought to reject it.”
Cabrera knows that feeling. At age 20, the Venezuelan hitting prodigy homered in his big-league debut. He homered for his 1,000th and 2,000th hits, too.
At the apex of his career—the MVP and Triple Crown years of 2011 and 2012—Miggy waved a bat like a magician conjuring all kinds of sorcery.
In 2012, I watched in awe as Miggy reached the seats in left field one night, then right field the next night. Some starstruck fans in the field-level boxes stood and bowed, as he salsa-danced around third on his way home.
I was one of those worshippers, paying respects to the High Priest of Hitting. At the time, it seemed as if Miggy had to pick the direction of his homers just to keep the game interesting. Hitting a baseball, the hardest task in all of sports, looked laughably easy to him.
Of course, Miggy always knew it wasn’t. In order to reach the summit, he had spent thousands of hours taking batting practice – on the dusty fields of Maracay, Venezuela and in hitting cages from Miami to Detroit.
“Hitting is hard,” Miggy recently whispered, shy of the swirl of reporters documenting his march to 3,000 for fans from Saitama to Santo Domingo.
Ljke Miggy, Camus knew that greatness is sculpted out of the hard clay of constant failure.
“The best are led to make greater demands upon themselves,” Camus wrote. “The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
Miggy smiles often these days, even after fanning on yet another belt-high fastball that he used to destroy. He is 39. He is fat. He moves slower than a refrigerator on a dolly. Still, he smiles, because he has finally embraced those 7,000 outs.
“Living an experience, a particular fate, is accepting it fully,” Camus wrote.
Miggy has recorded 3,000 hits, 500 homers, and 600 doubles, becoming only the third person in history to accomplish that trifecta. But he knows there won’t be many hits to come (and rarely doubles and homers at that).
But even though the power has sapped from his colossal 6-foot-4, 267-pound frame, Cabrera evinces the joy of staying present in each game. There are moments, when the shadow of dusk crawls across the field, that Cabrera, still playing a game without a clock, seems to suspend in time.
The soft light bathes his baby face, and he looks up to the heavens, at peace with the inevitable end. Finally, like Crash swinging on Annie Savoy’s front porch after retiring, Miggy can allow himself to reflect.
“I know that the sky will last longer than I,” Camus said.
But the legends will live forever.
The Young and the Restless
MLB’s Awkward Courtship of Millennials and Generation Z
By Scott M. Irwin, 5/16/2022
If ever there were a sport that qualified as a cherished American institution, it would be baseball. The sport is so deeply woven into the country’s history that it once earned the nickname “the National Pastime”.
But baseball’s Golden Age expired a half-century ago, and the sport now finds itself creaking and groaning to catch up with faster, livelier sports like football, basketball and hockey. Magnifying the problem, baseball has resisted the implementation of change—a pitch clock, elimination of the shift, a limit on pitching changes—that would attract more interest from young fans.
Off Base, an afternoon talk show on MLB Network that targets Millennials and Gen-Z members, attempts to remedy baseball’s bland image with a panel sporting trendy haircuts and splashy clothes. But the show amounts to little more than hipster window dressing.
The show’s tagline boasts that “Lauren Gardner and a panel of experts celebrate baseball culture while giving a fun and unique spin.” But the pitch, like the show itself, is mere snake oil. Not only does the show lack experts, it largely ignores baseball’s rich culture.
Worse yet, it undeservedly promotes itself as a show committed to the good cause of advancing the careers of women and black broadcasters in sports.
Gardner, the host who came to MLB Network in 2019, occupies center stage in this public-relations stunt. She joined four other women last year in comprising the first-ever, all-female broadcast team for a baseball game. But while her participation in such an historic moment is notable, Gardner hardly seems guided by principle.
In an interview with Rachel DeSantis of People magazine, Gardner revealed that “she didn’t realize she was about to be a part of history” until she was informed by a public-relations staffer for MLB Network.
Eek.
Gardner, whose big break came in 2004 when the Denver Broncos hired her as a cheerleader, spoke volumes with that seemingly innocuous comment. Corporate sports networks love to pat themselves on the back for supposedly advancing progressive causes.
Consider Disney, which owns ESPN. The media powerhouse paints itself as the Mighty Mouse that roars social justice—and it all starts with the dream factory that has been churning out assembly-line child fantasies for more than half a century. As Alex Abad-Santos of Vox correctly noted, “Disney has parlayed the feel-good, empowering message of its movies to position itself as a progressive, diverse, inclusive, and highly profitable company.”
But its recent “Don’t Say Gay” stance proves how superficial those claims really are. In reality, Disney—like MLB Network and other major media conglomerates—bases its decisions on coldly calculated business strategies. Their attitude about female broadcasters is no different.
In quick succession last summer, Disney/ESPN and MLB Network followed suit after taking their lead from YouTube.TV, which debuted the first all-female broadcast two months earlier. In each instance, major corporations received extensive free advertising from the national media for “breaking boundaries” and “challenging gender stereotypes”.
Just like that, “progressivism” led to publicity, which led to profit—the bottom line (and the only uncrossable one for corporations).
Simply put, MLB Network didn’t hire Gardner because she’s an “expert”. The network hired her because the camera just adores her flaming red hair, Pilates body and fashionista flair. There’s nothing wrong with that per se. Television, after all, is a visual medium; and to a large degree, what looks good is good.
Still, it’s hard to overlook the obvious disconnect between Gardner as eye candy and Gardner as baseball dilettante. During the April 19 broadcast of Off Base, Gardner committed one of the cardinal sins of national broadcasting by root-root-rooting for the home team. Touting Colorado’s early success, the Denver native chirped, “It’s probably why I’m wearing purple today. It’s totally subconscious.”
Totally.
Suddenly, I’m reminded of media critic Andrew Keen’s perspicacious comment in The Cult of the Amateur: “The information business is being transformed by … the sheer noise of a hundred million [people] all simultaneously talking about themselves.”
Or, just as tiresomely, “talking” on Twitter, Tik-Tok and other self-serving social media. Commenting on a routine catch by rising star Ronald Acuna Jr., Gardner said “it went viral on Tik-Tok. It’s all about Tik-Tok.”
Despite her flippancy, Gardner uncovered yet another ugly truth. For more than a decade, decisions about journalism—who covers what, what they cover, and how they cover it—have been driven not by qualification, but by traffic on social media, where the squawking gets so pointlessly shrill in the digital henhouse that one wishes a salivating fox would come knocking on the door.
“Programs for which there is a high volume of online chatter – so called “social shows” – have been found to have larger audiences and are more likely to be viewed live rather than recorded and viewed at a later time,” marketing academics Beth L. Fossen and David A. Schwindel wrote in 2017. “For television networks and content owners, it is important to have a social media strategy that spurs social TV activity for television programs. Encouraging program-related chatter can increase the total audience size and the fraction of the audience engaged in live viewing. Also, programs with high social TV activity are attractive to advertisers interested in increasing online sales.”
That must explain why Gardner pitches Tik-Tok and her panelists repeatedly check their iPhones, even while the “on-air” sign flashes red. In the Darwinian world of social media, where attention span is measured in moments, you’re either trending or you’re toast.
Gardner certainly is not alone in straining to look and sound the part. To complement Gardner’s blue denim jacket, flaming-red hair and chartreuse mini-skirt, panelist Hannah Keyser favors ostentatious outfits that scream, ”Hey! Look at ME!” But the blood-red socks and ankle-length Holstein boots do nothing to divert attention from cringeworthy comments like “If that looks stupid in a month, well, I saw him in a game.”
Keyser’s diffidence is shared by fer fellow panelists, who often shuffle through cheat sheets when they’re not updating their Twitter and Tik-Tok feeds. All of which just adds to the show’s slap-dash approach and apparent tokenism.
Not surprisingly, MLB Network panders to male viewers (especially its fantasy-playing, basement-dwelling adolescents); but if the network really wanted to make a sincere statement about gender equality, it would drop all the smoke-and-mirror stuff. Trying to have your cheesecake and eat it too (“We want to advance women’s careers … as long as they’re sexy.”) strikes honest advocates of gender equality as little more than chauvinism wrapped in “woke” clothing.
The same could be said of the presence of two black commentators, including former major-leaguer Xavier Scruggs. While Scruggs, a gifted broadcaster, is the only regular panelist with any baseball expertise, he gets precious little air time. The fault lies not only with Gardner’s limited hosting skills, but with the show’s directors, who should be sensitive to the problem of airing a talk show featuring white women who often talk over and around black men.
While featuring two female and two black broadcasters makes sense, given the country’s shifting demographics and dearth of black baseball fans, slapping a generationally and racially correct Band-Aid on the sport’s 50-year boo-boo just won’t cut the hot-dog mustard. But as the recent lockout indicated, baseball’s uber-rich, hidebound owners are prone to shortsighted strategies that undercut not only their own interests, but those of the fans as well.
If the owners are serious about keeping the game relevant in a rapidly changing 21st century—and that’s a big “if”—they need look no further than former staff members to help achieve that goal.
Alanna Rizzo is one of the game’s best analysts—regardless of gender. That’s one of the reasons MLB Network hired her a decade ago, and why Christopher Russo frequently invites her on High Heat, his daily cutting session. Russo likes Rizzo because they share the same philosophy for baseball reporting and commentary: Make it smart and make it sharp. That’s a far cry from the long legs, high heels, and runway walks that MLB Network favors in its female broadcasters.
Rizzo, who curiously left the network to pursue other career opportunities several years ago, should be rehired (assuming she wants that). Granted, the 46-year-old is a Gen-Xer, and Off Base is looking to attract the younger generations. But is it written in stone that a television show must limit its participants to people who are the same age as its viewers? Rizzo’s presence would provide Off Base with the credibility it so sorely lacks; moreover, she would serve as a role model for young women who aspire to careers in male-dominated and sexist professions.
Similarly, the directors of Off Base should expand Scruggs’ role on the show by giving him more attention and time to explain the finer points of baseball that make the sport uniquely attractive. Breakdown segments like those conducted on MLB Tonight by fellow black broadcasters Harold Reynolds and Cliff Floyd would further advance the show’s credibility and entice black youths to give the sports a try.
In summary, MLB Network should stop all the gum-flapping and start respecting the intelligence of its media-savvy, younger viewers. Who knows? baseball might be saved in the process.
“The Bird” and the Sounds of Summer
By Scott M. Irwin, April 22, 2022
I discovered baseball as a four-year-old fugitive from day camp. The discovery was accidental. Bored with finger-painting stick figures and making necklaces out of Fruit Loops, I slipped out of the back of the Elm Street Recreation Center and, with fingers clenched in the chain-link fence, marveled at the shining diamond held before me.
I was smitten by bat meeting ball, the supple leather of a trusty glove, the smell of hot dogs. But more than anything, it was the music of the game that captivated me. The click-click-click of cleats on concrete. The clink of aluminum bats. The high-pitched chorus of boys spazzing on sugar. Some say there’s no crying in baseball. Try telling that to a 5-year-old strikeout victim. He sounds as moving as the bridge to “Let It Be”.
I always had an ear for the game; but then, I had an ear for everything. I learned from the crib, listening to my mother’s sweet nothings, that singing was stronger than speech. Later in childhood, Sundays meant worship; and church meant music. The pipe organs my parents played had the power to lift a congregation, celebrate a marriage, grieve a lost loved one.
But holy days aren’t holidays. Summer mornings, free from the burdens of school and church, weren’t spent singing sacred songs, but rather profane ones like Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” and Dr. John’s “Right Place, Wrong Time”. (Back then, we cued the needles to scratchy 45s).
“This was the ’70s. The Age of Evel Knieval’s roaring motorcycle, Keith Moon’s manic drumming, Howard Cosell’s loud mouth. Like any precocious youth, I mimicked the adults, and soon realized that running commentary was the best way to pass time between pitches.”
So, inevitably, the sounds of summer defined my passion for baseball. The whirring of a Wiffle ball and the metronomic pop-pop of playing catch marked the hours like a sundial. By Little League, my enthusiasm for chatter rivaled the cicadas that descended on our town like a plague sent by an angry god. Hey, batta-batta-batta, suh-WINGGG, batta!
This was the ’70s. The Age of Evel Knieval’s roaring motorcycle, Keith Moon’s manic drumming, Howard Cosell’s loud mouth. Like any precocious youth, I mimicked the adults, and soon realized that running commentary was the best way to pass time between pitches.
Even while playing, I simultaneously called the game, which was annoyingly evident to umpires and coaches. Here comes the pitch … and Irwin takes a fastball inside. Two and two. (Umpire shakes his head in disbelief).
One coach (who slept in his El Camino and reeked of sweat, stale beer and cigarettes) growled during practice, “OK, Howard Cosell, tell everybody what you think about this!” He smashed a grounder to me that left a golf ball of a bruise on my shin.
I found therapy in pulling out my Strat-O-Matic baseball cards and Panasonic tape recorder, pressing record, and broadcasting every roll of the dice. I even performed mock commercials that lampooned the day’s popular ads: I can’t believe I ate the WHOLE thing! Try shilling Alka-Seltzer in a Cosellian accent; it’ll leave your family in stitches.
Cosell’s voice was synonymous with the season. He announced everything from title fights with his pal Muhammed Ali to prime-time football games (when he wasn’t throwing up on “Dandy” Don Meredith’s cowboy boots).
Cosell’s ego was so inflated that he announced the absurdly entertaining Battle of the Network Stars. Listening to Cosell narrate O.J. Simpson running loose (without being chased by the Los Angeles Police Department) was inspiring. But busty Adrienne Barbeau bouncing through the tires of an obstacle course? No contest.
But the Spirit of ’76 didn’t always obsess about breasts—even though, at times, it seemed to do just that. There was baseball, too—and that meant the National League centennial, Monday nights with Cosell, and “The Bird”.
Horatio Alger, Meet Mark Fidrych
America loves a folk hero, an underdog who pulls himself out of obscurity one boot at a time; and no one idolizes a folk hero more than a sentimental baseball fan. So, who better to place on a pedestal than a former gas-station attendant with a mop of curly hair and the comic touch of the clueless?
On June 28, a week before the most important Independence Day in a century, Mark Fidrych baffled the New York Yankees. He did so with a diving sinker, a biting slider and, most importantly, the restless optimism and youthful vigor that defines the American Creed. The Spirit of ’76, with a rock-star twist, had 47,855 fans in Tiger Stadium and barstool fans from Barstow to Bangor screaming with glee.
Fidrych gyrated on the bump like an oversized bobble-head. He loped around the mound as he lectured the baseball.
The entire event felt like an arena-rock show. No less an authority than Jan Wenner knew what he was seeing: “Fidrych Comes Alive”—only Peter Frampton’s twin mesmerized his admirers with a baseball, instead of a guitar. “The Bird” eventually made the cover of a Rolling Stone.
But for all the electrifying sounds from the stands that Monday night, it was the basso profundo of play-by-play man Jack Buck and the reedy tenor of commentator Bob Uecker that recorded Fidrych’s virtuoso performance.
I was so overwhelmed by what I heard and saw that the next night I took to my bedroom, turned off the lights, and scrolled to 760 on the a.m. dial: WJR-Detroit, whose 50,000-watt signal barely reached North Carolina after dark.
That’s how I met Ernie Harwell. The gentle Georgian didn’t harmonize with the big brass of television, but it played perfectly on the radio. Humble to the core, Harwell was treasured by his Midwestern listeners, and by 1976 he was being mentioned in the same conversation with Red Barber, Mel Allen, and Vin Scully.
Harwell had a voice as folksy as Willie Nelson’s—a take-your-time tenor that sounded like the pace of the game itself. Relaxed. Timeless. Natural.
I spent those summer nights with my ear pressed to the speaker, enduring the static caused by crashing lightning just to hear Harwell bring baseball to my dark and silent room a thousand miles away.
I never heard that joyful roar from national television again—until the 1984 World Series. In spite of The Bird’s delightful antics and dominant pitching, the Tigers were still a bad baseball team, beloved only by diehard Michiganders. But I didn’t care. “The Bird”—and his flock wearing the classic Olde English D—had appeared as a revelation, and then disappeared. Still, the spell had been cast.
It didn’t matter that the team failed the “eye test”. Baseball was becoming a religion to me, and as such it demanded my suffering and my faith. But the players’ names, when voiced by Harwell and his smooth sidekick, Paul Carey, certainly sounded good.
Houk. Staub. Ruhle. Veryzer. Wockenfuss. Oglivie. Scrivener. I didn’t know any of those names, and their strangeness gave them a mysterious appeal. Hearing them was like listening to the Bible being read out loud:
“In the beginning, the Baseball God created heaven and the field. And the field was without form, and void, so He placed bases on the field, and lines with chalk, and a mound that reached toward heaven. And the Baseball God saw that baseball was good. And the Baseball God chose his people, and thus began the House of Cobb. And Cobb begat Gehringer. And Gehringer begat Cochrane. And Cochrane began Greenberg. And Greenberg begat Newhouser. And Newhouser begat Kaline. And Kaline begat Fidrych. This is the word of tbe Baseball God. So sayeth Scrivener.”
Of course, the profane always wars with the sacred, even in a soul as young as mine. Most nights, listening to those ’76 Tigers was like listening to a late-night DJ spinning old 78s like Louis Armstrong’s “Gut Bucket Blues”. The summer played out like an inharmonious symphony, replete with theme and variations, the sforzando after “The Bird” appeared on national television, and a September coda that included 18 losses.
The next year, I returned to WJR to listen to Harwell spin the oldies-but-goodies (aging veterans like Staub, Freehan and Horton). And when summer shifted to autumn, a new trio hit the stage, featuring young cats that could play, even though folks outside of Montgomery and Bristol had never heard them: Alan Trammell, Lou Whitaker, Lance Parrish. These greenhorns were just about my age; hell, Trammell was a teenager. But they still had stylein spades and talent to beat the band.
And then the players kept coming. Dan Petry (draft class of ’76), Jack Morris (’78). Kirk Gibson (’79). All of a sudden, there was a new sound in Motown—one that would soon have Detroiters dancin’ in the streets of Corktown, where the Tigers played.
That was the Glorious Summer of ’84, which is another story altogether.
Around the Horn 