Jim Kaat and the lost art of withholding judgment

A few days ago I was trying to watch the Astros play the White Sox, but apparently my couch cushions are stuffed with opium and some seeped through and affected me because while I’m wide awake at 4 AM I was out like a light at 4 PM.

Nothing says “reconsider your lifestyle” like having the same schedule as a vampire.

So after getting the kind of high-quality sleep you only get during major surgery or going to the opera, I wake up and listen to Bob Costas, Buck Showalter and Jim Kaat announce the last few innings of the game and decide the last two guys are terrific.

Announcers who never played baseball tend to like anecdotes, emotional stories and statistics that while they may be meaningless – “The last player to have four hits after eating a meatball sandwich on a Tuesday was Ty Cobb” – have the advantage of making the announcer sound like an expert to other people who also don’t know jackshit about baseball which almost certainly includes the people who hire baseball announcers.

Which is why those non-ballplaying announcers love stuff like launch angles and exit velocities: without doing any work of their own or having a career that included standing on dirt and having hard objects being thrown at their head, they can quote those stats and sound like the know something about baseball.

Meanwhile…

The ex-manager and ex-player – Showalter and Kaat – were providing meaningful information about the game which helped fans understand what was going on and improved their viewing experience.

Like:

• When a pitcher attempts a pickoff you look at the runner’s right knee and if it buckles (like he started for second base and then had to change direction) now you know what he plans on doing when a pitch is delivered and can plan accordingly.

• Hitters who get jammed will get a bad jump out of the box because they have to lean back from an inside pitch.

• If a reliever has to face a team multiple times in a series, a good manager might try to make sure he faces different hitters during those appearances.

That’s the kind of stuff that helps you understand what you’re seeing and makes baseball more interesting which is a damn good thing if you’re going to take five hours to play nine innings.

Ignoring the good example set by his co-announcers, Costas told some long, rambling story about either Dusty Baker or Tony La Russa (can’t remember which because Costas’ story was putting me back to sleep) being related to Abraham Lincoln through some Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon bullshit which Showalter called him on – “You could do that with anybody” – and Kaat pointed out that the count was 2-0 on the hitter so maybe they ought to focus on that.

So I’m all ready to write something praising announcers who add something meaningful to a ballgame and then find out that earlier in the game, while I was dead to the world, Jim Kaat said something that was taken to be racist.

The Jim Kaat is a bad guy story

While I slept Buck Showalter talked about White Sox player Yoan Moncada and said the first time he saw Moncada play, his reaction was: “Could we have one of those?”

And Kaat added: “Get a 40-acre field full of ‘em.”

According to a CNN story:

Some believe the "40-acre" term may be from the 1865 proposal to give freed slaves in the US "40 acres and a mule" following the Civil War.

So it sounds horrible and pretty much everybody with a Twitter account was outraged and kicked Kaat around the internet like a soccer ball and Kaat has apologized.

Which is interesting because right here in Kansas City we have the “Forty Acres & A Mule” auditorium and the “40 Acres and a Mule Soccer Fields” and Spike Lee’s production company is called “40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks” and nobody has said anything about any of that so it’s offensiveness would seem to depend on who uses it.

And I don’t have a problem with that because when overly-White people get upset because Dave Chappelle can use the N-word and they can’t, I tend to think: “Hmmm, hundreds of years of slavery and bigotry and now we want everything to be even-steven? Plus, how often are you wanting to use the N-word?”

I’ve read numerous stories about the incident, but still haven’t read anything that explains what Kaat was thinking or why he said it.

So if you want to think Jim Kaat is a bad guy, there’s that.

The Jim Kaat is a good guy story

I have always liked listening to Jim Kaat because he seems highly-knowledgeable and I once heard a story that made him sound like a good guy and I don’t know if it’s true, but I do know I heard it and here are the parts of the story that I remember:

According to the story, Kaat was throwing a complete game and needed one more out when his rookie third baseman dropped a pop fly that would have ended the game. Pitchers are really, really tired after complete game efforts and Kaat could have lost his mind and screamed at his third baseman, but instead Kaat walked over and said:

“That’s OK, kid…someday you’re going to win one for me.”

That kind of grace under pressure is rare and being just the kind of ballplayer likely to drop a pop fly, I appreciated Kaat’s understanding and generosity. 

The kicker to the story is the game continued and the kid who dropped the pop fly drove in the winning run and whoever told that story (I remember the story, but not the teller) made a great point: if Kaat had screamed at the kid, what would that have done to the kid’s confidence and how would it have affected that last at bat?

So the lesson here is don’t be a dick to somebody you may need to count on later.

So does one incident – good or bad – define Jim Kaat?

Withhold judgment

I once read something about forming opinions and the article suggested that when you don’t have enough evidence to form a worthwhile opinion you can do the one thing that’s completely within your power:

Withhold judgement.

Which doesn’t mean you never reach a conclusion because after you get enough evidence maybe it’s OK to decide Jon Gruden is a racist homophobe or Andrew Cuomo treated women like crap or Bill Clinton did have sex with that woman.

(And if you don’t think blow jobs count as sex, you’re probably a man justifying what you did on that trip to Las Vegas and if you’re a woman who doesn’t think blow jobs count as sex, you’re probably pretty goddamn popular.)

But withholding judgment isn’t what we do these days; everybody has to have an opinion and they have to have it right now.

So people who don’t know jackshit about Jim Kaat beyond the “40 acre” comment are willing to call him a racist and people who don’t know jackshit about Jim Kaat beyond the dropped pop fly story are willing to think he’s a good guy. (And by “people” I definitely mean me.)

We like our opinions cut and dried because if we have to think maybe Jim Kaat’s a good guy who said something stupid, that’s too complicated and won’t fit in your average Tweet.

If you take everything you ever said and examine it, my guess is pretty much everybody has said something racist during their lives, but you thank God or Ellen DeGeneres or the deity of your choice that you didn’t say it on national TV and hope you learn from it and quit saying stupid shit.

Most of us would not want to be judged on our worst moments and maybe we ought to back off on burying Jim Kaat until we know more and if we never know more maybe we don’t have to have an opinion on absolutely everything and everybody which is ironic coming from a political cartoonist.

So in conclusion:

Any time I’m the most reasonable person in the room, the room is pretty fucked up.