Every day, every day I hear
enough to fill
a year of nights with wondering.
–Denise Levertov, from “Every Day”
Bring me all your dreams,
You dreamer,
Bring me all your
Heart melodies
That I may wrap them
In a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too-rough fingers
Of the world.
—Langston Hughes, “The Dream Keeper”
Here’s the frustrating and telling thing about last night’s half-assed performance in Kansas City: Sure, the Twins scored just one run off Runelvys Hernandez, but it’s what they did –or didn’t do– when they weren’t scoring that one run that was so pathetic.
Hernandez was making his first 2006 start, this after going 8-14 with a 5.52 ERA last season, a year in which he walked almost as many batters (70) as he struck out (88). He also gave up 172 hits in 159 and-two-thirds innings –172 hits and 70 walks. You do the math.
Yet the Twins managed two lousy hits off Hernandez in seven innings, and didn’t draw a walk all night. They struck out three times (twice against relievers).
What does that mean?
It means they don’t seem to have any freaking idea what they’re doing. It means they’re going up there and getting cheated or guessing wrong against a garbage-spitter like Runelvys Hernandez. It means they’re swinging the bats and making outs, lots and lots of outs.
It means they’re clueless, and it means –even if the pitching gets straightened out, or when it gets straightened out (Lohse and Baker were both just fine)– they’re in trouble.
But I’m a positive thinker, dammit, or at least I’m still willing to nurse my delusions. So I’m going to say that maybe the recent offensive embarrassments just mean that the Twins need to get April in their rearview mirror.
I know these things about my barber:
He refers to his wife as “the battle-ax.” Or, alternately, as “the fucking battle-ax.”
Though uncommonly foul-mouthed, even by my debased standards, his favored exclamation remains the sturdy and old-fashioned, “Oh, my stars!”
The project of his old age is reading all thirteen volumes of the Lewis and Clark Expedition journals.
When he was in the army in Korea he got more tail than a dickweed like me could even dream about, and he never paid any woman a red cent.
And: Oh, my stars, has he ever heard some stories. He should write a book. He really should.
The other day, as I sat waiting for my haircut, the old fellow in the chair said, “I don’t know who to believe anymore.”
“I don’t believe anybody,” the barber said.
“Not even me?” the customer asked.
“Fuck. Are you shitting me? How long have I been cutting your hair? I’d have to be an even bigger fool than I am to believe a word that comes out of your mouth.”
Sure, the Twins scored two runs against a lousy Royals team, but look on the bright side: Last year they would have given up three.
Good news: The Twins are now 4-1 in one-run games.
Bad news: They’ve now scored three or fewer runs ten times, and are 1-9 in those games.
There, I’ve posted. Now get off my back; the 800-pound gorilla’s starting to feel a little bit crowded.
He wasn’t even sure anymore if he could jump, could get his fat ass off the ground. One more pathetic little milestone on his way down the drain.
Still, he could always find consolations. There were people out there who couldn’t get out of bed, people for whom showering was an adventure worthy of Indiana Jones. When you got as big as he was you had to budget extra time for all sorts of average things. Use your imagination: great weight makes unreasonable demands on the human body.
He woke up one morning and noticed that his feet looked like snakes that had swallowed cantaloupes (knock, knock, he thought. Who’s there? Cantaloupe. Cantaloupe who? Cantaloupe tonight, dad has the car…). He had to wear plastic sacks for socks and endure the embarrassment of wearing down booties to work. Horrible experience, as you might well imagine.
He discovered himself naked at times, puzzling before the mirror at the new and exotic contours of his body, the folds and bulges. He couldn’t deny that there was something fascinating about it. He’d been a little slip of a boy once upon a time.
He wondered: could he still dance? He didn’t care to find out. He didn’t much feel like dancing.
He recognized that he had no one to blame but himself. He’d let himself go. Any athletic endeavor –however generously defined– was out of the question. He didn’t have any interest in offering himself up as a spectacle.
So maybe his jumping days were behind him. Big deal. How important was that? What did he need to reach? Why would he want to leave the earth behind?
He was still capable of sitting still, though, and that had always been the one truly important thing he expected from his body. From what he had seen there were plenty of people who didn’t have that gift, and these poor souls seemed to him to be the truly cursed among the living.
I was walking around New York this past weekend and I kept seeing cabs with these snazzy ESPN sports tickers scrolling across their roofs. I saw the Twins-White Sox score on one of the things late Friday night, and then saw what I thought was the same score Saturday night. I just assumed the information didn’t get updated very often. I had no idea until I got back here this morning that the Twins essentially played the same shitty game three days in a row.
I refuse to believe this is ‘here we go again’ until it’s so obviously ‘here we go again’ that I can no longer deny that it is, in fact, ‘here we go again.’
Or something like that.
In the meantime, I’ll have nothing further to say until this team atones for its sins by winning another series.
Or at least another game.
I don’t know if there’s a manager in the Major Leagues that gets a blanket pass from his team’s fans.
Maybe, you’d think, Joe Torre would, but anybody who’s ever spent any time in New York listening to sports talk radio (don’t ask) knows that every move Torre makes –and doesn’t make– is as scrutinized and subject to fanatic screeds as the decisions Ron Gardenhire makes here in Minnesota.
I’ve thought about it for years, and I still can’t make up my mind about what sorts of qualities, characteristics, and personality traits I’d want were I hiring a manager for my imaginary baseball team.
There have been plenty of instances where obvious boneheads have managed excellent teams, and even managed clubs that won world championships (Bob Brenley being the example that comes immediately to mind).
Once upon a time –not all that long ago, really– I used to be able to rattle off the names of every manager in the Major Leagues. Right off the top of my head, no problem. A lot of those once-upon-a-time managers were as famous as the players on their teams, and recognized primarily for their fiery and colorful personalities and combativeness with umpires. I’m thinking of guys like Leo Durocher, Earl Weaver, Billy Martin, Dick Williams, and Tommy Lasorda. Or old warriors like Gene Mauch.
I still haven’t made up my mind whether any of those guys were great managers or not. Among that group there were certainly a lot of different philosophies, many of them tailored to the sorts of teams they managed. Looking over their career records makes it hard to draw any definite conclusions, other than that when they had good players to trot out there every night they tended to win.
I think the same thing is probably just as true today, but I also suppose it’s possible that a truly lousy manager (Butch Hobson, for instance) can actually sabotage a decent team’s chances to win.
I also know that today there an awful lot of pretty anonymous characters out there wearing manager’s uniforms in Major League dugouts.
What really are the fundamental qualities of a good manager?
One of them, I’d think, would be the ability to recognize talent in his organization and to make the best use of the talent he does have. That seems pretty obvious, but it’s always surprising to me how many guys who get these jobs fail even that most basic of tests.
With all the money in today’s game, and the big egos that come with it, more and more it seems like the job really does boil down to the job title –an awful lot of time and attention has to be paid to managing disparate personalities in the clubhouse and on the field. People always talk about leadership and chemistry with regard to big league clubhouses, and it’s struck me in recent years that with almost every team those intangibles flow first and foremost from the manager’s office.
Other than personnel decisions, it’s a manager’s strategic approach –or lack thereof– that leads to the most debate among fans: making out the batting order, calling for sacrifice bunts or hit-and-run plays, stealing bases, and the handling of the pitching staff. All of these decisions are a constant source of debate, and tend to look brilliant when they work out and counter-productive when they don’t.
The bottom line, of course, is the bottom line: Whether a team wins or loses. When there seems to be a consistent pattern to the way a club wins or loses I suppose you can draw some conclusions about how much of the credit for that goes to the manager and how much to the players.
I watch a lot of baseball games, though, and have watched a lot of baseball games over the last several decades, and I pretty routinely see managers –even supposedly good managers– make decisions that have me scratching my head.
So, you tell me: what is that makes a manager good? Who are the great ones in the Major Leagues today, and why? What do you have against Ron Gardenhire, or what might you say in his favor? And, finally, if you ran the zoo and could pick anyone, who would you hire to manage the Twins?
I’m headed to New York for a few days, and, weather permitting, might take in a Yankee game.
Before I go, though, I’d also like to discuss what the hell seems to be wrong with Jesse Crain. I did think it was strange when his strikeout rates –which were always pretty impressive in the minor leagues– declined so drastically last year, even as he was inarguably effective.
I’ll tell you one think I noticed the last couple years that seems to be missing from his approach so far this season: Last year in particular he was one Minnesota pitcher who was never afraid of pitching inside, and his above-average fastball was a great weapon for keeping opposing hitters from crowding the plate. I remember remarking that I couldn’t remember the last Twin pitcher who brushed back so many batters, usually early in the count.
I haven’t seen much, if any, of that so far in 2006, and Crain looks to me like he’s consistently finding too much of the plate with his pitches. I think it might be time for him to get back in touch with his inner Don Drysdale.
That bottom of the tenth inning had to be one of great examples of karmic retribution in the history of professional baseball, and it sure as hell had to be exactly the sort of scenario Ron Gardenhire started dreaming about the moment he heard the news that J.C. Romero was no longer a Minnesota Twin.
And wherever this odyssey leads, and whatever else this team serves up in the way of entertainment and disappointment, it’s going to be mighty hard for the Twins to deliver a stretch of highs and lows to rival the first two weeks of the season. In five days they’ve already played two of the best games –and staged two of the greatest comebacks– in recent memory.
Honest to God, Saturday’s 6-5 win over the Yankees and tonight’s game of Rock Em Sock Em Robots againsts the Angels were spectacular examples of why baseball is the greatest game ever invented, and why anybody who bails on a game in the middle innings deserves to be banished from the ballpark forever.
We can save the discussion of just how the hell Kyle Lohse manages to hoodwink Major League arbitrators year in and year out for another day. For now, though, let’s just try to be grateful that J.C. Romero is wearing an Angels uniform, and that Mike Scioscia was fool enough to send him out to the mound in the tenth inning of a tie game.
So this fucking midget walks into a bar with a chimpanzee on his shoulders, right? It’s cold as shit, and both the midget and the monkey are covered with snow and frost; the chimp, in fact, looks almost like it could be dead.
There’s not another soul in the bar but the blind bartender and his seeing eye dog, which is seated on a stool down at the other end of the bar.
“What can I get you?” the bartender asks the midget.
“Give me a shot of brandy,” the midget says, “and keep ’em coming.”
“And for the monkey?” the bartender asks.
“How’d you know I had a monkey?” the midget says.
The bartender jerks his head toward the back of the bar. “The dog told me.”
“Well, the monkey’s on the wagon,” the midget says. “He’s presently laying off the sauce.”
The bartender nods and fetches the brandy, which the midget commences to nurse in silence. After a number of minutes the chimpanzee seems to thaw out and proceeds to bare its teeth and drum furiously on the midget’s head.
“What the hell is it?” the midget finally demands.
“I never heard that fucking dog say a word,” the monkey says.
“Well?” the midget says to the bartender. “You heard the monkey. Let’s see you make the dog speak.”
“I can’t make the dog speak if he doesn’t want to speak,” the bartender says. “It’s a trade-off. I respect his occasional glowering silences and he makes sure I don’t get hit by a bus.”
“Come on,” the monkey says, addressing himself now directly to the dog. “Let’s hear you say something. Fifty bucks says I’m the only talking animal in this bar.”
The dog glares across the room at the midget and the monkey, takes a long drag on his cigarette, and finally says, very slowly, “Chocolate milk.”
Maybe Rondell White is going to snap out of his slump in spectacular fashion any day now and reward the confidence Ron Gardenhire has shown in him by writing his name in the clean-up spot night after night.
This is a guy, after all, with a career .289 batting average, who’s never hit lower than .270 in a season. In his abbreviated season last year with Detroit, White hit .313 in 374 at bats.
Maybe he really has been discombobulated by the designated hitter role, even though he’s done a bit of DH duty over the last few years and knew coming into the season that that was going to be his primary responsibility with the Twins.
Still, holy shit, White’s 2006 start has been absolutely brutal on so many levels, and truly painful to watch. It’s been even worse, of course, precisely because he has been the DH, and isn’t contributing in any other way.
The numbers are really something to behold: Four hits in 47 at bats. One extra base hit (a double). Sixteen strikouts and zero walks. An .085 batting average, and .100 on base percentage.
And, sorry, but you can’t avoid this number, either: $2,500,000.
I know that 47 at bats aren’t a fair barometer, but they sure seem to be enough to have messed with Rondell’s head in a big way. What do you think the chances are at this point that White will end up making a significant contribution to this team? And can the Twins still have a competitive season if they get nothing from him?