The Rake Magazine

Author: Brad Zellar

  • Making Noise And Treading Water

    The Twins are 9-3 in their last twelve games, and have gained exactly nothing on the White Sox. I can’t quite decide whether that should be encouraging or discouraging news for either Minnesota or Chicago. Flip a coin, I guess. I suppose, really, it all depends on whether or not you believe the Sox are for real.

    As I’ve said before I think Chicago is a much improved team, but I sure as hell don’t think they’re going to continue to play at the torrid pace they’ve managed to sustain into the season’s second month. The White Sox have now had two eight-game winning streaks, and are 16-4 over their last twenty games. The Twins have gone 12-8 over the same stretch.

    The pitching staffs, even beyond the top two starters, are probably pretty comparable over the long haul. At the moment, of course, Chicago leads the league in team ERA (at 3.04), and four of the five guys in the rotation have ERAs under three. That said, the Twins –at 3.43– aren’t that far behind, and if anything are performing better than they were last year at this time.

    Minnesota clearly has the edge in the bullpen, and has superior control up and down the pitching staff. I also think the Twins have more pitching depth than the White Sox. Barring injury, the key is probably going to be the guys at the back of the rotation for both teams, and if (or when) any of those guys falter Minnesota’s bullpen and depth should be the key factor in the race.

    Chicago’s much-ballyhooed small-ball approach has been only modestly successful so far. The team batting average is only .258 (opponents, however, are hitting a ridiculous .228). Paul Konerko leads the team in homeruns with nine, but his batting average is .198. Jermaine Dye is batting just .210. Scott Podsednik is hitting .250, but he’s also walked twice as often as he’s struck out and has swiped sixteen bases.

    The White Sox have a marginal edge in homeruns over the Twins, but otherwise Minnesota has a higher team batting average (.283), more total bases, more doubles, runs, and walks. They’ve also played half their games without Justin Morneau in the line-up.

    Morneau has obviously been unreal since coming back from his beaning. Despite appearing in just sixteen games (and accumulating only sixty-three at-bats) he leads the team in homers, RBIs, total bases, and triples. Even assuming that he’s in the midst of an astonishing streak and is going to cool off, the guy is already making comparisons to Kent Hrbek look almost foolish. The question right now is really the question it seemed ridiculous to ask six weeks ago: have the Twins ever had two young guys –or two guys, period– hitting in the middle of their line-up who were capable of generating such excitement?

  • A Consultation

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    You were talking about disinclination. Let’s explore that idea further, if we may.

    No, sorry, I thought I made it plenty fucking clear that I’m feeling disinclined.

    Well, perhaps then you might tell me a bit more about your travels in Saudi Arabia.

    I’m afraid you’ve once again mistaken me for another patient. I’ve never given Saudia Arabia so much as a thought, let along traveled there. I’ve no doubt I’d find the place repellent –nothing personal. A great deal of sand, if I’m not mistaken? Camels? Not the sort of exotica that appeals to me, I’m afraid. I have similar reservations about Asia.

    (The doctor consults his watch –a slow, deliberate gesture– and commences to drumming impatiently on a clipboard with his pen.)

    You’ll certainly agree that nothing productive can come of this if we sit here night after night talking about absolutely nothing. Perhaps by mutual agreement we might put an end to these sessions, or –and this would be refreshing– you might tell me what it is you hope to accomplish by spending this time each evening. (He glances again at his watch.) It’s four o’clock in the morning, actually, and I don’t suppose I need to tell you that it is not generally my habit to keep such unorthodox practice hours, particularly when the patient is so reticent and entirely devoid of insight or even interest regarding his own predicament. Could I please ask you to turn down that music? How can you possibly think when you’ve got that gloomy racket pounding away?

  • The Art Of Indexing (Continued)

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    I’ve written previously about my love of indexes (or indices, if you’re so inclined), and my huge admiration for the people who make a living compiling these things. Many of these folks clearly have a perverse sense of humor and the souls of poets. Some of them are perhaps batshit crazy.

    Check out the decidedly odd and obviously personal agendas at work in some of the examples cited in that previous piece and I think you’ll see what I mean.

    I continue to scan the indexes of books for additional wonders, and I now have a pretty fat collection of utterly useless but nonetheless personally entertaining material. Eventually I’ll go to the trouble of posting some more of it here, but in the meantime I’ve stumbled across an index that is a pure and deliberate work of art.

    Lisa Robertson’s Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office of Soft Architecture was one of my favorite books from last year, even though I read it late in December and so didn’t have a chance to include it on my end-of-the-year list of highlights. Robertson’s a hugely entertaining and aphoristic writer, a poet with a terrific eye, abnormal curiosity, and a gift for rambling far afield. Her prose style is sort of like Walter Benjamin meets Jane Bowles meets Djuna Barnes meets Anne Carson. She drives her words in and out of incredibly dense thickets, and yet time and again her paragraphs arrive abruptly at these unexpected vistas that leave you stunned.

    Strangely enough, the first time I read the book I hadn’t even noticed the index, which was compiled by Stacy Dorris. I discovered this icing on the cake the other night when I picked up Occasional Work and was looking for a quote.

    Here are some examples from Dorris’s index:

    “Hey Cobweb,”, 237; Babylonian doilies, 13; Chili preferred, 92; Dandering here, 236; fountains that want us to act like knowledge, 58; frost-tolerant hermaphrodites seem capable of swallowing barns, 125; leaps the frame with a sack of narcissus bulbs, 104; mauveness, 15, 217; pie, 126; Placating foods appear, 241; primal shack-envy, 182; roofliness, 15, 96, 110, 177, 179, 181, 183, 277; scumble, 142; their nylon halos, 259; toilette ghosted, 27; We ate the cheese, 237; what a wall is without being a wall, 163.

  • Can We All Just Agree…

    That if Dougie Baseball was still flashing the leather over at first and saving more runs than most first basemen produce with the bat we’d already be looking at the White Sox in our rearview mirror?

    Oh, and by the way, Justin Morneau’s slugging percentage (.780) is higher at the moment than Mientkiewicz’s on base-plus-slugging (.749).

    Also, doesn’t it strike you as sort of funny that if Gardenhire hadn’t inserted Morneau in the game yesterday as a defensive replacement (did you ever think you’d see the day?) he’d never have gotten the chance to hit that bomb off lefthander Trever Miller (who was, of course, brought in specifically to face him)?

  • Uncle Jumbo's Playground

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    –Illustration by James Dankert

    Last week was a mess all around, and Friday night was the capper. I guess I drank too much of something bad, and things got away from me. I swear, though, that I was determined to get something to Zellar, but my mother called me in the middle of the game and prattled on forever about how her new priest has all these tattoos and she’s sure he’s a card shark with a drinking problem. He’s an ex-Marine, she says, and “no spring chicken.” She claims this guy –it’s always “Father” with my mother, no matter how shady the character might be or how much of her money he mooches– hosts poker games damn near every night, and she says there are always motorcycles lined up outside the rectory “like it was a cathouse.” There was also an unnecessarily detailed monologue about her having to “digitally express” her ancient dachshund’s anal glands to “relieve impaction,” which as you might well imagine is something that will ruin a guy’s appetite for pizza rolls in a hurry.

    I was trying to watch the game while enduring my mother’s weekly torments, but between her breathless and severely unhinged rambling (which can sometimes continue unabated through three innings of a slugfest) and whatever cheap malt beverage I was swilling things sort of spiraled out of control. Then, to top off the evening, I had nothing but problems with the piece of shit Radio Shack computer Zellar gave me. I’m no computer expert, and never mind that I was admittedly a bit indisposed: I’m pretty sure it’s more than a little unreasonable for anyone to expect me to produce reliable work on a machine that some guy got for a high school graduation present twenty-five years ago.

    So, yeah, I punted last week, or rather I phoned it in, or at least tried to phone it in –go ahead and sue me, you bastards. I really didn’t have anything to say anyway. Like I said, it was a long week, and sometimes I just want to be able to go home at the end of the day on Friday and drink alone in front of the TV like any other normal guy who doesn’t have a single redeeming hobby or a friend in the world.

    Some of us, I try to tell Zellar, have real jobs. Granted, I don’t do anything, but that pretty much is my definition of a real job, and it’s exhausting. I also have to wear a dime-store security uniform that’s a couple sizes too small (the result of a laundry mishap; I guarantee you I’m holding steady at 265, give or take a few pounds), so there’s something of a humiliation component to my weariness as well.

    I don’t have squat to say about Juan Rincon’s piss scandal. It’s tough luck, I guess, but I’d trade my kidneys for cat food to have Rincon’s problems. Let him come and sit on my couch for a few days and let’s see how sorry he feels for himself. I mean, seriously, people, a ten-day suspension? Guys routinely miss more time from shower accidents.

    What I can say about the Twins right now is what I can say about the Twins pretty much all the time: I wish they were a whole hell-of-a-lot better. I have a hard time getting anything but frustrated with any team in April, and I’m not about to get excited about a club that’s five games over .500 and plays in the same division as the Kansas City Royals. The Twins eat up a lot of hours, which is all I ever really expect from them.

    I’m not saying, though, that I’ve never gotten excited about a baseball team. Because as much as it pains me to admit this I was as infected by the yahoo contagion in 1987 and 1991 as anybody else, and after game six of the ’91 Series I actually danced for the first time in my entire life. I was alone, of course, and the spasm of happiness didn’t last more than twenty seconds, but it was an unusual moment nonetheless, and I’ve been waiting fourteen years for a repeat performance.

    Before I sign off I have to acknowledge what was an obvious cheap shot on Zellar’s part. I’m referring to his bit yesterday about players with the worst ratio of RBIs to homeruns. I’m sure he thought he was delivering a purpose pitch, and I’ve no doubt he figured I’d duck.

    Fat chance. Here’s the deal: in both my years at Labette Junior College in Kansas I failed to crack the two-to-one ratio of RBIs to homers, but I obviously can’t be blamed for that. We played a forty-five game schedule (which included twenty-seven doubleheaders) in those days; the first season I hit nineteen homeruns and had twenty-six RBIs. The second year I finished at 23/31. Big deal. You can’t drive in non-existent runners, and is it my fault the guys who hit in front of me couldn’t get on base?

    I’m sure Zellar will try to strike back by throwing my doubles totals in my face (seven and three). Again I say, big deal; so I was born with a bum pair of wheels. I could have stretched more than a few singles into doubles, but for what? An extra base didn’t mean a damn thing on that team. And though I never hit a triple in my life, that was strictly a matter of principle. I always figured once I hit the bag at second my work was done.

    Triples are overrated, and are too often the result of an unnecessary risk. Even singles and walks were disappointing to me. I’d stand there at first and think about all that miserable running I was going to have to do to get around the bases, and it just pissed me off. No, sir, Jumbo’s job was to look for the number one and turn it around. I couldn’t run, but I never had a problem jogging.

  • The Words Have Orders, And They Will March

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    I was put in this world to march, but one leg’s longer than the other, my boots are too tight, and I walk with a limp that gets more pronounced by the day.

    Still, those were my early orders: March. And I am a man who follows orders, if not instructions. Instructions, it seems to me, are a good deal more complicated than orders. I spend so much time thinking about my feet that I have a difficult time following instructions beyond the first few sketchy details, and the inevitable confusion that results often as not gets me a savage whipping.

    I’m one of the simple ones, a marcher plain and simple. Every once in a while they’ll ask me to carry something, or to lug something along as I march, but even these requests are best made in the form of a blunt, concise demand. I actually prefer if they just shove things into my arms or saddle me like a mule. I don’t need to know what it is I’m carrying or where it is I’m carrying it to.

    When they holler at me to stop, I stop, and when they relieve me of my burden I just assume we’ve arrived somewhere. It doesn’t pay to look around or get too curious in my line of work. Marching is hard enough work as it is, emotionally and physically taxing work, particularly with my infirmities, and I generally have my hands full with the dust and the complaints of my body.

    I also wouldn’t say we’re particularly well fed, although I don’t really have any frame of reference for that allegation, so perhaps I’m being unjust.

    When the day comes that you simply can’t march anymore –and it’s inevitable, of course, and can arrive unexpectedly– they whallop you over the head and leave you by the side of the road. I’ve seen it a thousand times, but I have no clear idea of what happens to you after that. Some of the marchers claim that Sisters come along the road with wagons and haul the survivors of the cudgeling back to the convent to work in the orchards. Others allege that the unfortunate wretches are carried away by body snatchers and sold to the vivisectionists for ale money. It’s also possible, I’ve had reason to imagine while I’m curled up on the soggy earth at night, that the fallen marchers are simply fed upon by black birds and wild dogs.

  • What A Day For A Day Game

    Turn that frown upside down Twins fans.

    I could, and should, just leave it that, because I really didn’t get much of a chance to pay attention to today’s game. I needed to roll a rock up a hill, so I had to take a pass on sneaking away to the Dome. I also felt like I needed a break, quite honestly. It’s been a tough several days in Twins Territory. And in a lot of ways, with Juan Rincon’s suspension, the stadium business, and the mini-skid on the playing field, it felt like the return of the old familiar Good News/Bad News Bears doppleganger Twins.

    Still, I seldom miss a game. I pretty much always find a way to either attend in person, listen on the radio, or watch on tv, but today, for only the second time this season, I had to make do with a half-assed attempt to follow the action on my computer at work. That’s not a very satisfying experience, quite honestly, and I never quite have the feeling that I’ve actually watched or listened to a game. It’s sort of like playing pull-tabs; every time the screen refreshes you sort of hold your breath, and as things unfold in maddening slow motion you often get the feeling that nothing ever happens in a baseball game. It certainly felt that way through the early innings today, and I thought, this is what my wife must feel like when I make her sit through a game.

    When I saw the line-up Ron Gardenhire was sending out there against C.C. Sabathia I have to admit I didn’t have much in the way of expectations. No Mauer or Morneau, no Jacque Jones. Luis Rivas back out at second. I’m sure they must have done it a few times last year, but I can’t remember the last time the Twins went with an entire line-up of right-handed hitters.

    After Radke got out of the first couple innings without giving up a run I got sidetracked and didn’t get a chance to check back until the sixth inning, when the Twins were suddenly up 6-0 and Sabathia was long gone. I pieced together what had happened as best I could, and then sort of forgot about it again. When I finally took another look it was over. A nice, tidy two hour and twenty-six minute baseball game.

    Just looking over the boxscore, though, it looks like it was a much more interesting contest in real time. Radke obviously pitched well –complete game, three hits, eight strikeouts and no walks. I don’t feel like figuring out his game score, but that’s certainly the best pitching performance by a Twins starter so far this year, and after the first couple games of the series I thought this Cleveland line-up might whack the ball all over the yard against Radke.

    It’s weird to see that the Twins scored nine runs, yet still managed to strand ten runners. That’s a lot of guys on base: thirteen hits, five walks, and two hit batters. It’s also curious that Rivas, batting in the ninth slot, walked twice; and Jason Bartlett, despite going 2-5 with two RBIs and two runs, still managed to strand five runners.

    I see as well that Gardenhire got ejected, and Matthew LeCroy demonstrated why he deserves a spot on the roster. The bullpen got a breather. And Terry Tiffee did more at the plate in one game than Corky Miller is likely to ever do in a complete season.

    I guess the only bad news on the day is that the White Sox eeked out another one-run game against the Royals. With the ridiculous unbalanced schedule, before it’s all said and done that woebegone team of curs in Kansas City might well end up handing the division to somebody.

    ON AN UNRELATED     note, John Garry –a scion of one of my hometown’s legendary masculine dynasties– and I have been kicking emails back and forth for the last couple weeks trying to figure out which player in Major League history has managed to hit the most homeruns with the fewest RBIs. John, I’ll confess, has done most of the leg work to date (okay, all of the leg work), although most of his findings so far have confirmed many of my own suspicions.

    Specifically, we –or, once again, rather John– were looking for full-time players with a roughly one-to-two ratio of homers to RBIs. I’ve pored through Total Baseball trying with no success to find anybody in the modern era who has managed to slip below that ratio. I also sort of thought that for the sake of integrity the player in question should have hit at least ten homeruns. John figured the likely candidates had to be either power hitters who played on truly lousy teams, or leadoff hitters with some power.

    Here were some of John’s early findings:

    Harmon Killebrew, 1963: 45 HRs/95 RBIs (and only 18 doubles)

    Dave Kingman, 1973: 24 HRS/55 RBIs

    Steve Balboni, 1990: 17 HRS/34 RBIS (John: “The key to his success was a .192 batting average. He had 51 hits and 17 of them were homers.”)

    Interestingly enough, the only other guy John found with a one-to-two HR/RBI ratio played on the same team –the 1990 Yankees– with Balboni. That year, Kevin Maas had 21 homers and 41 RBIs, and the Yankees lost 95 games. (John: “They were fourth in the league in homeruns and last in runs scored.”)

  • Okay, I'm Over It

    It’s amazing how quickly a breaking story can be covered from every conceivable angle. Early yesterday the reaction to Juan Rincon’s suspension was a mixture of shock, incredulity, and outrage. The details in the initial press release were sketchy, at best. It wasn’t clear what exactly Rincon might have ingested to merit the suspension, but it quickly became apparent –based on the immediate suspension– that it was something included on the list of banned performance enhancing drugs.

    It sucks to the tenth degree that MLB doesn’t release information on what chemical is detected in the dirty piss of violaters of its policy, because the secrecy ultimately raises as many questions as it answers. I’ve looked at that list of banned substances, and there are all sorts of things on there I couldn’t pronounce and which I wouldn’t recognize on a cold medicine label, let alone within the fine-print catalog of multi-syllabic nonsense that accompanies the average nutritional supplement.

    We can presume, at any rate, that Rincon fucked up, and I’m not going to excuse his mistake, whether it was committed in ignorance or calculation. There’s been plenty of talk and analysis of the whole issue already, and though I’ll admit that I was initially shocked by the news, I’m not quite sure why.

    But maybe that’s not quite true. I was shocked because Rincon is such a soft, mild-mannered, and physically unimposing character. None of those facts, of course, precludes the possibility that he used some sort of PED. Maybe, as some people have speculated, he used a little something to help his recovery time between appearances. Maybe he took something that he picked up somewhere, assuming because it came from a seemingly innocuous source that it was safe.

    Whatever the case, I sure would like to know what that little something was, and whether, in fact, it was a little something or a big something. I’d also be interested in hearing how long these banned substances supposedly stay in a player’s system. Does Rincon’s result mean he ingested or injected something in the last two weeks? The last month? The last three months? Maybe none of that matters. I don’t really know, and I’m not sure I care.

    I do wonder whether the team’s doctors or trainers might bear some share of the blame for the Rincon fiasco. Over the years there have been a number of occasions where I’ve had reason to wonder what’s up with the medical staff of the Twins. I wondered about it most recently during Grant Balfour’s sore arm saga, which, it sure seems to me, was allowed to drag out far too long, to the point where there was open suspicion that Balfour was a malingerer. We went through a similar situation with Joe Mauer’s knee last year, and if you want to go back even further (to Joe Mays and Eric Milton, for instance, or Scott Erickson) I think you’d notice a sort of disturbing pattern.

    Don’t you think it’s kind of strange that when push comes to shove the agents of players tend to send them elsewhere –to the physicians of other teams– for a second (or third, or fourth) opinion? If Balfour hadn’t gone to Cincinnati would we all still be wondering about the source of his lingering forearm pain? Now, though, we know that he’s facing season-ending Tommy John surgery, and we’ve heard that just such lingering forearm pain should be a red flag for significant elbow damage.

    Ultimately, I suppose, there’s no getting around the fact that Rincon’s to blame, even if he made a mistake of ignorance. It’s his career, his reputation, and his money that’s on the line, and the final responsibility is his.

    What’s sort of disturbing about all this –for me, certainly, and I’m sure for most fans of the team– is that the obvious implication is that if Rincon is doing this shit, then so could literally anybody else on this team, or any other team.

    The bottom line, though, is that it’s a ten-day suspension, and Rincon will be back in the fold soon enough. How people respond or what his suspension does to his reputation doesn’t particularly concern me, although I’ve no doubt the people in the organization are plenty worried about those angles. It does strike me as kind of pathetic that Juan Rincon is the most high profile player to be affected to date, but if this turns out to be merely an ugly blip in the season and the rest of the Twins pass their piss tests with flying colors, I hardly see how this can be the sort of thing to damage the team’s reputation in the long term.

  • The Early Verdict On May? Guilty Of Something

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    Sometimes I feel like the days are a floor I’m crawling across, blind, with a dead flower in my mouth, trying to find my way to the other side, which is here, and a few body lengths into the darkness beyond here. It’s a slow business, often bruising.

    Where did the flower come from? And where do I think I’m taking it? To the graveyard out back? As if the day were a desolate old country church?

    I don’t know what you’re talking about. Try to speak more plainly. Please make an effort.

    Often, I’ll admit, I don’t know what I’m saying –what I’m saying, or even if I want to say. I’m not really looking for words; I’m merely asking for them. I’m not even in a position to ask nicely. I’m afraid I’m going to have to demand them. Civilized discourse is out of the question. I’m in no position to argue. I’m not going to fucking reason with you. I didn’t come here tonight to entertain you, either. If you’re looking for something in the way of a bedtime story you’re shit out of luck. All I know how to do is not tell stories.

    Words are nothing but beasts of burden which I must lash across the fields. When I am in no position to drive them –which is more and more often the case– they must drag me. I ask almost nothing of them anymore but that they drag me to the bottom of the day. Even our trek across the muddy fields is a charade. The fields are fallow. We are up to absolutely nothing.

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    The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged – the same house, the same people – and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.

    –Vladimir Nabokov, from Speak Memory, via Whiskey River

  • Breaking News: What The Flippin' Hell?

    I just got word that Juan Ricon has been suspended for ten days after testing positive for a banned substance under Major League Baseball’s new drug policy.

    Scott Baker will be recalled from Rochester to take Rincon’s place on the roster.

    This makes absolutely no sense to me. Among the possible candidates for steroid use in the Twins clubhouse –presuming this is related to the whole steroid brouhaha, which I don’t know for certain– Rincon would be nowhere on that list.