CBS tinkers with the magic formula, and the youth of America burn in Hell: “Joan of Arcadia” is out; Jennifer Love Hewitt talking to dead people is in.
“I think talking to ghosts may skew younger than talking to God,” Moonves said.
Author: Brad Zellar
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Human, All Too Human
Okay, let’s add one more to that list of truths we hold self-evident: keep the fraggin’ ball in the damn park.
I suppose it was inevitable that Johan Santana would eventually run into a little patch like this, but what’s been sort of disturbing is how hard he’s getting hit. The Blue Jays had four doubles and two home runs tonight, and though you’ll read and hear all sorts of quotes about command and location tomorrow, take that stuff with a grain of salt. Those are just the standard lines after a lousy game.
Granted, Santana was obviously getting his fastball up in the first inning, but in the past he’s consistently shown he can get away with that as long as he has his other pitches (particularly that change-up) in his back pocket and can keep the hitters guessing. They’re obviously doing a pretty good job of guessing of late, and I think this may be a little case of over-confidence on Santana’s part. When you’re essentially bulletproof for as long as he was, it’s easy to think you can get away with aggressive pitching. He’s a smart guy, though, and just as long as he’s not dealing with a tired arm or something more bothersome, I’ve no doubt he’ll make the necessary adjustments and figure out what opposing hitters have figured out about him, which is really, of course, what pitching boils down to.
Though only a couple particularly meddlesome and odious characters have been brazen (or cruel) enough to call it to my attention, don’t think for a minute I’m not well aware of what has happened to Jacque Jones –for the second year in a row, I might add– since I came to the conclusion –for the second year in a row, I might add– that he had finally turned the corner.You can scroll down to the April 27th entry and see for yourself. On that date Jones was batting .393, with all sorts of unexpected peripheral production. In the seventeen games since I once again crawled out on a limb and handed Jones a saw, he has gone 11-for-55 and his average has dropped to .295.
I swear some of these guys like nothing better than to make me look like a complete fool. And, believe me, I’m fully aware that I don’t much need their help.
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I Believe It's Raining All Over The World
Remember when you imagined stars on the roof of your mouth, and stood in the river in the rain, naked and mooing, your head and palms raised significantly (or so you imagined)? You desperately wanted something momentous to wash over you; to be claimed by something outside yourself, even as you were almost utterly incapable of feeling the presence of anything outside yourself.
I’m sure you have no idea now why you wrapped your feet in aluminum foil.
Still, how could you forget all that time you spent falling, those days when you just let it all go, your whole self, surprisingly heavy, a sinker dragging all the world’s earnest bobbers right down with you? Twice, at least, you thought yourself done for and drowned, and in those moments there was just this vague glimpse of sadness mixed with regret, almost like the last fragments of an evaporating dream.
Remember the lights and the way everything smeared, blurred, and swerved away from you for a while? In the distance, sometimes, you imagined a fire tower, then a lighthouse, then a tiny chapel deep in the woods and dimly illuminated like a jack-o’-lantern, then finally a graveyard down a long gravel road somewhere in the country. The thin ones, your desperate companions reduced to nothing but haunted eyes and bones, they were so dangerous, and you were perhaps the most dangerous of all.
Can’t you even remember anymore how you were saved? Isn’t that one memory you should have held on to with –as some would say– dear life?
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We Hold These Truths To Be Self-Evident…Or Maybe Not
A walk is as good as a hit.
Never make the first or third out at third.
A bloop single looks just like a line-drive in the box score.
You can’t steal first.
Homerun hitters drive Cadillacs.
Respect the game.
Bust your tail and have some fun.
Good pitching beats good hitting.
Pitching is ninety percent of the game.
Chicks dig the long ball.
Throw strikes.
Get it over.
Let the guys behind you make the plays.
Keep your head in the game.
Hit it where they ain’t.
Swing hard and hope you hit something.
If the double-play is a pitcher’s best friend, then the three-run homer is a groomsman.
You better check your ego at the door.
It’s a team game.
There’s no I in Team. There is a U in Us.
Take it one game at a time.
That’s why they play the games.
A buck-eighty will get you a cup of coffee and a slap on the back on your way out the door.
Baseball is a funny game.
It ain’t cheating if you don’t get caught.
This game will humble you in a hurry.
The game will eat you alive.
Mistakes will kill you.
Don’t try to do too much.
Keep it in front of you.
Stay within yourself.
Youneverknow.
It ain’t over until it’s over.
Leave it at the ballpark.
The totals on the board are correct.
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Look, I Said I'm Sorry. What More Do You Want From Me?
—Dan Corrigan, Bud Blanchard, Motivational Speaker. Omaha, Nebraska, 1978.
…he does not notice that he has reached the age of forty-five; then suddenly he realizes that all the time he has been acting and making a fool of himself, but it is now too late to change his way of life. Once in his sleep he suddenly hears like the report of a gun the words: ‘What are you doing?’–and he starts up all in a sweat.
–Chekhov, Notebooks
But the sadder and more troubled they were, the more they yearned for omnipotence. The really troubled ones believed they had it.
–Ross MacDonald, The Zebra-Striped Hearse
I’m not going to lie to you. I could sit here and throw words at you until the cows come home, but who the hell really wants the cows to come home or even pretends to understand what that phrase means? I don’t suppose it means a damn thing to anybody, including farmers. Do cows really run away from home? And, supposing they do, would you actually sit around waiting for them to come home? I’d think you’d probably have to go looking for them, and if it was up to me I doubt that I’d bother. I’d say the hell with the delinquent cows. Let somebody else stun them, slit their throats, and hack them up into meat.
I guess I’m feeling pretty much the same way about words right now.
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Uncle Jumbo's Playground
–Illustration by James Dankert
That was horseshit.
I’m a superstitious guy, and I should have known better than to drag my ass from the house on Friday the thirteenth. I already had a sick feeling on the drive downtown. The muffler on my Celica was kicking up sparks all the way down Portland, and was drowning out Motorhead even with the fifteen-year-old cassette player cranked up as high as it would go.
I also should know better than to sit in the expensive seats. A guy in my building gave me one of his season tickets, but I’ve got no business sitting anywhere inside the foul poles, let alone above the visiting dugout. I know when I’m an interloper, and I was hemmed in on all sides by yahoos. The clown beside me, noticing that I was keeping score, kept asking me who was batting, and though I pointed out early on that this information was provided in various prominent places all over the ballpark, he was clearly addled by all the 3.2 beer he’d consumed (and continued to consume); he was one of those cup-stackers who apparently feel it’s some kind of achievement to spend forty dollars on beer at a baseball game. By the seventh-inning stretch he practically had to get down on his knees to pour beer into his face from his wobbling tower of plastic souvenir cups.
This guy and his pals appeared to have driven in from Dogpatch, and I was almost disappointed that they made it through the eighth inning without taking off their shirts. Actually, they didn’t make it through the eighth inning. Before the Twins came to bat they stumbled away up the aisle and disappeared. Maybe they had some weird animal instinct that a shitstorm was brewing, or perhaps their faithless departure –and they weren’t alone– brought the thing on.
Either way, they ruined the game for me even before the game was completely ruined for me by its ruinous outcome. They thought Buck Showalter was Buddy Bell, and that Orel Hershiser was also Buddy Bell, or at least the same person as Showalter. Every time Hershiser or Showalter went to the mound they chanted, “Buddy! Buddy! Buddy!” or “Bell, you suck!”
I have no doubt that by three o’clock tomorrow afternoon the whole lot of them will be drunk in a boat somewhere, attempting to murder innocent fish with their new Kent Hrbek fishing lures, which I was frankly surprised they didn’t throw at Buddy Bell.
My God, though, I honestly don’t know what happened. That game was over. I’m not about to go back and look at my scorebook to try to recreate the nightmare, but I swear to God if I ever see Terry Mulholland trundling in from the bullpen to relieve Joe Nathan again I’m giving up the lousy game once and for all.
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Rain Delay
It’s been a damn fine day here in the Twin Cities. Cold rain and temperatures forty degrees below normal. A perfect day for an indoor baseball game, in other words, or for hunkering down on the couch to watch the Twins playing somewhere better else.
No such luck, which means we have an extra twenty-four hours to gargle Mountain Dew and attempt to rinse the lousy taste of yesterday’s game out of our mouths before the Rangers come to town. There’s nothing worse than an ugly game against an ugly pitcher, and yesterday’s 7-4 loss to the Orioles and Sidney Ponson more than fit the bill on both counts. After already seeing Ponson, Bartolo Colon, and C.C. Sabathia, the Twins just need to face Randy Johnson and David Wells to complete their tour of the American League’s All-Ugly rotation.
The Baltimore series was disappointing on a lot of fronts. The pitching match-ups going in couldn’t have been more promising for the Twins, with Silva, Radke, and Santana all taking a turn. Those eye-popping control numbers for Minnesota’s staff are starting to catch up to them, though, with opposing teams taking a very aggressive approach in the early going. The Twins coaches have always preached the importance of strike one, and both Radke and Santana have long been in the habit of pounding fastballs in the strike zone in the early going, and early in the count, in an attempt at getting ahead in the count. The scouts have obviously noticed, and now it’s time for the Twins to make their own adjustments.
When an opposing team makes three errors at the major league level you really need to make them pay for those mistakes, but the Twins just haven’t been able to capitalize. The bottom of the order continues to be a train wreck. Yesterday the one through five hitters were a combined seven-for-eighteen; the other four guys (and pinch hitter Matthew LeCroy, batting in the eight spot) went 0-13.
The other thing I’ve noticed lately is that with Torii Hunter struggling teams can pitch very carefully to Justin Morneau, and he’s not going to see a lot of balls to drive until Hunter starts hitting consistently and taking a more patient approach at the plate.
I’ve also decided that J.C. Romero is virtually worthless unless he starts an inning with the bases empty. He’s got a bit of LaTroy Hawkins syndrome going on the last couple years. Consider that opposing hitters are batting .231 against Romero with the bases empty (over twenty-six at-bats), with a respectable .333 on base percentage. They’re actually hitting worse with runners in scoring position (.091, if you’d care to believe that), but thanks to Romero’s apparent case of the yips the opposing OBP in those same situations is .412. That’s almost hard to fathom, yet between the walks (five BB and one K w/runners in scoring position) and his penchant for uncorking wild pitches at the most inopportune times, Romero’s simply not a guy who can be trusted with inherited runners. So far this year he’s averaging 6.28 walks per nine innings, which is the worst ratio on the staff by a huge margin.
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Brave New World
I’ll burn this life down and climb on a plane for Iceland. My new life might be waiting for me there. Or I might pack my bags and light out for a village in Peru. Maybe I’ll head to Boise. That might be the place of answers and inspiration.
Or, no, I’ll go someplace warm where there are palm trees and I can live right around the corner from a 7-11 and a tattoo parlor. Every morning I’ll walk over to the 7-11 in my flip-flops for a Big Gulp, a chili dog, and a game of pinball, and then I’ll go up the street to get some more ink drilled into my flesh. I’ll have a map of the world tattooed around the circumference of my torso, just like a globe, very detailed and colorful, complete with ornate compass roses and the whole fucking works.
I’ll never wear a shirt if I can help it. I’m thinking there’ll be a driving range or a batting cage somewhere in the vicinity where I can go every afternoon and hit balls until my hands bleed. I’ll become a fucking hitting machine. There for damn sure will be a barbecue joint in the neighborhood, and a bar with a decent jukebox. I’m thinking this might be Tempe, maybe, or Orlando.
I’ve got nothing against living in a trailer, just so long as I can have a dog and people leave me the fuck alone. I don’t give a rat’s ass if I never look at a television again in my life. At night I’ll work on my screenplay, and when I turn out the lights I’ll stretch out on the bed and gently trace with my fingers all my broken dreams across the continents and deserts and oceans of my body.
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Finally, For Crying Out Loud
I don’t feel like trying to figure it out, so maybe someone else can tell me: what was the last date the Twins gained a game on the White Sox? It’s been at least nine games, right?
A long time, at any rate, considering how well the Twins have been playing. And the encouraging thing about the last couple days is that Minnesota’s pitching almost completely shut down the Devil Rays until the last few ugly innings of the last game of the series, and this was after Tampa Bay scored twenty-eight runs in sweeping the Yankees.
And then the red hot White Sox go into Tampa Bay and lose two straight. Tonight the Rays hit just about everybody the Sox threw out there, with the exception of Damaso Marte, who almost certainly should be given the closer’s job over the shaky Takatsu. It was also especially nice to see Chicago lose a one-run game for a change, and on a walk-off homerun.
Jose Contreras was wild as shit again tonight (big surprise, that), and has now walked twenty-one batters (while striking out thirty) in thirty-nine and two-thirds innings pitched. Despite which the guy inexplicably has a 3.18 ERA and .197 batting average against. Suggestion to opposing hitters: make the overpaid bozo throw strikes. In the couple games I’ve seen Contreras pitch this year he should have walked a minimum of ten, but guys kept going up there and flailing at stuff nowhere close to the strike zone.
The other encouraging recent sign that the White Sox have thus far been lucky beyond reasonable expectations was Jon Garland’s lousy performance in Toronto on Saturday, in a game in which he lasted just five-and-two-thirds innings and gave up six earned runs (and still managed to pick up the victory and run his record to 6-0). The whole damn team should have headed to the nearest off-track betting parlor and laid heavy money on Giacomo.
These are all the sorts of things that make you think maybe the genie has gone back into the bottle on the Southside. Then again, given the weirdness of those three straight up-and-down series in Tampa Bay, perhaps the Sox are just as likely to reel off another winning streak.
One last thing: I’ve finally made up my mind on the ugliest player in Twins history. I should mention that I’ve decided to be sporting by limiting the pool to guys I actually had a chance to watch play, some of whose physical flaws –more chins than the Hong Kong phone book, for instance, examples of which have been so relatively common as to be disqualifying as a sole criteria– I actually had a chance to…umm, appreciate up close. I gave David West strong consideration, and would certainly rank his physical structure (or utter lack of physical structure) as among the worst in the annals of the team. David West, I can assure you, made Matthew Lecroy look like Jack La Lanne.The guy I finally settled on, however, is Scott Klingenbeck, a man who demonstrated every time he waddled to the mound that life is not the only thing that is nasty, brutish, and short. Check out those career numbers, by the way, and, please, somebody do the noble thing and shell out the five bucks to sponsor his Baseball Reference page.
Perhaps you have other ideas regarding the most unsightly Twin, or an all-time unsightly Twins team. I do feel, however, that eligible candidates should represent some combination of a generally displeasing physical appearance and utter ugly incompetence on the field. But that’s just me. Maybe someone comes to mind who was just so damn ugly that you feel compelled to disqualify any and all statistical accomplishments, however rarefied. I’ll confess that I can’t bring myself to feel strongly enough about this to argue with you either way.
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Revelations, Etc.
Since I was a child I’ve enjoyed end-of-the-world fiction based, however irresponsibly, on Biblical prophecy. There’s always been a good deal of this sort of thing around, but of late there’s been a splashy and satisfying surfeit of the stuff, and lots of other folks have been climbing on board the Glory Train.
I guess I’d describe the genre as solid meat-and-potatoes fare. It’s pretty entertaining for the most part, and also food for thought for those who might be so inclined.
The end of the world has fascinated me since I first started having apocalyptic dreams and visions while in elementary school. I’ve always hoped that I’ll be alive when the world does eventually end, or at least for the clear beginning of the End Times as outlined in the Bible. Depending on your perspective, of course, I suppose you could argue that the beginning of the end is already here. I know plenty of people would like to believe that we’re living through the End Times right now, but I remain skeptical.
Natural disasters and human atrocities have been around forever, it seems to me, and I guess I’m holding out hope for some clearer and more spectacular indication of Divine Wrath.
As I said, when I was younger and could still occasionally get a good night’s sleep, I used to routinely have dreams about the end of the world, and delighted in recounting these visions in great detail to my mother at the breakfast table. She eventually became so alarmed by the graphic particulars of my stories that she sent me to a psychiatrist, a serious man who refused to believe my contention that these dreams constituted not nightmares, but rather supreme entertainments.