Author: Brad Zellar

From the pages of Matthew LeCroy’s 1993 Belton-Honea Path, South Carolina high school yearbook:

Damn, Dave Gassner was a lot of fun to watch today. He sure looked like one of those cool, crafty lefthanders who could have a nice, long career. Whenever the build-up on a guy places so much emphasis on the fact that he doesn’t have “overpowering stuff,” it always seems like the people doing the building up are trying to downplay expectations. At the very least that phrase is the worst sort of backhanded compliment.

It’s weird to see a guy making his major league debut display such poise and such a relaxed delivery. Weirder still to see him take such an aggressive approach to attacking the strike zone. Gassner already seems to be a pitcher, and I suppose he’s had to learn to pitch his ass off precisely because he doesn’t have that classic overpowering stuff. The beautiful thing about his performance against the Indians today was that he mixed his pitches so well and everything in his arsenal seems to have nice movement. I’d love to see the chart on today’s game to get some idea of the breakdown on what he was throwing. I’d wager, though, that pitching coach Rick Anderson will be going over that chart with guys like Joe Mays and Kyle Lohse.

It sounds like we’ll get one more look at Gassner before Carlos Silva come off the DL, but, holy shit, isn’t it a beautiful thing to know that if somebody else goes down the Twins have guys like Gassner and Scott Baker (and J.D. Durbin, etc.) in the pipeline?

Peter Schilling has another fabulous edition of his Mudville Magazine up online. Peter’s digest has long been one of my favorite things on the internet, and it’s gotten better (and broader) every year since I first discovered it. The great thing about websites is the extent to which they can be a reflection of the obsessions and personalities of their creators, and Mudville is clearly the work of a smart, funny, and fascinating guy whose curiosity runs far beyond the baseball field. It is, though, primarily a baseball site, and Peter always has a nice mix of historical and contemporary essays, rants, and proposals. He also has perhaps the finest and most eclectic collection of links of any site out there.

Check out the latest issue, which contains a modest proposal of sorts regarding Ron Gardenhire and the expectations regarding this year’s team. Also be sure to explore the archives, investigate some of those links, and spend some time with Peter’s other labor of love, Loafer’s Magazine. It’s all good, and Peter’s one of the best people I’ve met in the years I’ve been writing about baseball.

Also, just in case you’ve been living in a hole for the last month or so, go immediately to Batgirl Juggernaut Inc. and watch Oh Five! The Musical. Watch it a dozen times; I have. Better yet, buy the DVD. I’ve been pimping this work of mad inspiration all over town, but I’ve been remiss in not crowing about it here (primarily because I’m still not convinced there’s any here here).

—illustration: James Dankert

All day I was looking forward to hustling home from my job as a lobby gnome at an office building downtown so I could settle into the couch to watch the Twins and Indians. Friday nights –like most other nights– are usually a clear, blank radar screen at Jumbo’s posh hovel, but that generally changes during the baseball season. I even stopped on my way home for some Taco Bell, a bag of red licorice, and a six-pack of Grain Belt.

But I’ll be good and damned if the TV bastards didn’t take the night off. Where’s Victory Sports when you need ’em? And where the hell does that leave me? I’ll tell you where it leaves me: pissed off and desperately in need of another six-pack (and another bag of licorice) by the end of the third inning.

I had to dust off the old man’s trusty Philco transistor radio; the tubes take a while to get warmed up, but once the thing gets crackling it’s like listening to a ballgame that’s being broadcast from a doomed spacecraft. Or, in this particular case, a ballgame being broadcast from a doomed spacecraft piloted by two raving idiots.

After hibernating all winter, joining the yahoo convergence at the Dome for the home opener was a difficult, if necessary, excursion. Thank God for Xanax, 3.2 beer, and the obsessive diversion of a scorecard. It takes me longer every year to get used to the sort of forced and wholly artificial camaraderie that exists at the ballpark. As far as I’m concerned 12,000 is a nice, comfortable attendance number; I like to be able to stake out a piece of private territory in left field, and the big crowds wear me out.

When the team’s going pretty good it’s hard to find things to bitch about. Actually, of course, it’s never really hard to find things to bitch about, but so far the Twins haven’t done a whole lot to chap my ass. All those first inning runs made me rant and rave like Charlie Callas, but if an opposing team’s going to score I’d rather have it happen in the early innings when the Twins still have a chance to recover. The runs in the eighth and ninth inning are the ones that kill you; those are the ones you carry home and take to bed with you, the ones that linger right into the next day like a hangover.

The damage baseball does over a long season is cumulative. When it comes in dribs and drabs like it has so far this year I can generally forget all about it. Granted, beer is mighty helpful in this regard. But as I’ve gotten older every victory is a salve that allows me to flush the defeats out of my system more quickly. I guess it’s that one-game-at-a-time business. I can’t hold grudges like I used to, at least during the season. I can, however, nurse a grudge –even a series of festering grudges– through the entire off-season.

I guess what I’m saying is: so far, so good, and those words don’t come easily to a guy like me. This early in the season, though, the damage hasn’t yet had a chance to do its steady, corrosive work. I’m still getting a feel for this team, and trying to be optimistic about how good they can be. We’re still in the honeymoon period. I’m just grateful to have that chunk of time accounted for every day. Even a night like this, a night that began in disappointment, is better than any single Friday night in mid-winter.

I’m fully aware, believe me, that there’s still a very good chance this team will have my ‘nads in a vise before the year is out, but it’s too early to start fretting about the perhaps inevitable pain that’s waiting for all of us down the road. For now, at least, even I can cling to something that feels almost like hope, if not outright optimism.

As I’ve been listening to the game –and it’s been a decent game so far– I’ve been intermittently standing before the mirror in my living room, fine-tuning my Whiffleball swing. I’m nothing to look at, I know that, particularly in my boxer shorts and Hudson Hawk tee-shirt, but I’m not looking at myself. I’m looking at my swing, analyzing it closely and with the utmost wonder and disembodied appreciation; I’m nursing a modest buzz, but even so, I’ll be damned if that swing isn’t still a pretty picture, a very pretty picture indeed.

I figured out pretty quick that I didn’t have the goods to be any kind of a proper accountant, despite pissing away God knows how much money on what some fools would call an education. Maybe, actually, I should have said ‘real accountant.’ I lacked the discipline and the attention (and, frankly, the interest) to make it at any of the big firms –or, for that matter, any of the small firms, at least the legitimate ones. I couldn’t handle the hours or the office bureaucracy, and the math just seemed to get more complicated all the time. Every couple months or so somebody was dumping some fat book full of new regulations on my desk, and I couldn’t make head nor tails of any of it. When you shove numbers around for a living, after a certain point they stop adding up. That’s been my experience, at any rate.

I don’t know what I was thinking, to be honest with you. If I think hard enough I guess I could blame it on a lazy high school guidance counselor, who probably just pulled the suggestion out of his ass without any real consideration of aptitude. I can still picture the old troll, hair coming out of his ears and a can of Diet Shasta perched on his belly as he sat behind his desk peering over his spectacles at me like I was a chess move. He was clearly just waiting for somebody to tell him he could finally hang it up and go home to die.

After I got laid off –okay, fired– from my first job out of college I was unemployed for a long time. I choose to blame it on the economy even though I know damn well things were booming then. At one point during this period of extreme indolence I went to see a career counselor, who actually did go to the trouble of giving me some kind of aptitude test. The problem was –and I’m not shitting you– the woman told me the results indicated that I’d probably be happiest in “some kind of itinerant trade.” What does that mean? I asked her.

“Oh, you know,” she said, “something like a truck driver or carnival worker.”

Let me assure you: that’s exactly the sort of encouraging thing you want to hear when you’re twenty-six years old and absolutely clueless about what your next step in life is going to be.

Out of pure laziness I ended up taking a series of temporary accounting gigs, generally as a tax preparer for one of these joints that gives people an advance on their returns in exchange for some ridiculous piece of the action. The last several years I worked for this outfit that did your taxes while you wait. Our customers were almost all service sector employees, students, and poor people.

Two years ago they started making us wear Uncle Sam costumes while we did people’s taxes. It was a brutal, ridiculous gig, but I was desperate, and I’d pretty much parted ways with my dignity years ago.

The guy who owned this racket had like fifty of these places, and he’d rake in the cash for three months of the year and then spend the rest of his time on a boat in Miami banging stewardesses.

The final straw came this year, when I showed up for work and discovered that everyday one of us –the fucking tax preparers, for God’s sake– would have to go out front in our Uncle Sam costumes with a sandwich board and wander up and down the sidewalk trying to drum up business. There was a rotating schedule and I got stuck out there skulking around like a jackass the very first day. It was cold as shit, and people –go figure– would shout insults and throw stuff at me.

When it came time for my lunch break I ditched the sandwich board in an alley behind the Super America and walked the three miles home in the Uncle Sam outfit. I’ve got the damn thing for sale on eBay this very moment. It’s a pretty elaborate get-up, and with any luck I figure I might get a hundred bucks out of the deal.

Then I’m thinking I’ll start looking around for something in the itinerant trade.

I’m not quite sure how to say this. I realize this is an awkward moment, and I apologize in advance if what I’m about to say hurts your feelings. I certainly value our friendship too much to jeopardize it over something which I fear might sound terribly petty.

I can assure you I’ve gone back and forth on this question for weeks now, trying to look at it from every angle and turning it over in my mind until I thought I might go mad. I think –I hope– that you know me well enough to recognize that I would never say anything to deliberately hurt you, and I have always been a man willing to bite my tongue if I thought it would in any way advance the cause of civility.

I’ve no doubt, in fact, that you are well aware of the perception of me as a man of no small reserve; that, at any rate, is how I believe the world sees me, and not without reason. I have rarely felt myself compelled or qualified to address another man’s shortcomings or pry into his personal business, even when, as now, I’ve been concerned for a friend’s well-being.

I’m sorry, I can see I’ve already alarmed you. It’s nothing, really.

Forget I ever mentioned it.

Really, all he wanted was to fill pages, to spill ink across the lines, to blow through as many pens and as many lines and pages and empty black books as he possibly could.

He hoped that somehow, in the trickle and torrent of words he might stumble into something that seemed like…the way it is. The way it was. That he might blow some breath across the pages, build something sturdy that resembled truth; that he might sketch the places that were continually taking shape in his head, the cities and suburbs and small towns beyond the highways and the quiet homes scattered in the dark countryside around these small towns; that he might populate these places in his head, and move words from the tongues of the people who habitated them, plant dreams in their heads and navigate them through heartache and loneliness and loss, and when all the joy had been kicked out of them bring them safely through the darkness back to life again, back into the harbor of human kindness and compassion; that he might imagine –or, even better, that he might believe— that such a thing, or people possessed of such things, still existed.

That was all he really wanted.

There are plenty of things you whippersnappers take for granted that were nothing but dreams and mysteries to those of us who were responsible for digging up so many of the early answers. We had to get to the bottom of all manner of monkey business, and to say that we had limited resources at our command would be the sort of understatement that was pretty much our stock in trade in those days. We didn’t dare to overstate.

Some of our discoveries were pure products of curiosity or confusion, but there were also speculations and necessary innovations that were literally life-and-death matters. We had people dropping like flies who’d barely learned to walk yet, and had to learn to feed and clothe ourselves in a hurry.

Those were dark, cold, brutal days. The Dark Ages were a period of positive enlightenment in comparison. We had no idea how our bodies worked or what our business was on this unforgiving planet. God? God? We weren’t nearly that crafty yet. You could say we were savages, and you wouldn’t be missing the mark by much.

The nose and the mysteries of its purpose and productions was one challenge, a relatively minor piece of the puzzle, granted, but important all the same. The responsibility for this undertaking of discovery fell to me by virtue of my natural scientific inclinations, although we certainly weren’t yet equipped to think of it in quite that way. Everything I say in this regard is thus hindsight, and a literal case of ‘relatively speaking.’

Truth was, I didn’t know my ass from a hole in the ground, but compared to most of the others I was an advanced specimen. When I first got started on my researches I didn’t –or we didn’t– even have any sort of basic understanding of the sense of smell, and we certainly didn’t connect it in any way with the nose. For all we then knew, what we now think of as odors may well have been perceived through our mouths or eyes, or even our skin.

I spent years on these labors. I probed and mulled and hypothesized. I like to think I made some progress. I was, I’ll admit, entirely flummoxed by congestion. We didn’t have microscopes, of course; we didn’t even have the most rudimentary sort of magnifying devices. I smeared more snot on rocks than I care to remember, and sat in the dirt studying it, moving it around with a stick and trying to make sense of the damn mess. Was it, I wondered, some sort of delivery or storage mechanism for odors? Or perhaps, I hypothesized early on, it was dead matter being sloughed by the brain and evacuated through the nostrils (by this time we’d dabbled a bit in forensics, and had cracked open more than a few skulls and studied their contents).

I never reached any satisfactory conclusions, I’m afraid, but I’m proud to say that when I officially retired they appointed five men –a damned committee– to carry on my researches, and that pack of learned baboons never got anywhere either.