So what's the deal with me and baseball?

Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one:

(I believe my stories get better with age and if someone offered you a shot of 72-year-old Macallan whiskey – a mere $129,999.99 per bottle including some kind of wooden stand apparently hand-crafted by Jesus of Nazareth so you don’t feel completely ripped off – would you say, no thanks, I already tried that. So from here on in, try to think of my repeated stories as rare and finely-aged delicacies and just be happy Jesus is not my co-author or prices would go way up.)

Moving on…

Back in 2010 the Kansas City Star asked me to cover the Royals and most of what I produced appeared on their website and fortunately for me the Star only had a vague idea of what they wanted so I got to choose what to write about and for the most part, I chose “process.”

Now here’s the deal on that:

Most sports writing is about “results” (what happened) and I was focusing on “process” (how and why it happened).

To make a long story short (and when people say that you can rest assured they plan to do no such thing and I’m no exception), in 1990 my wife sent me to Royals fantasy camp as a Christmas gift and in the process of getting ready to play baseball for the first time since grade school I worked with ex-pros like Chris Egelston, Greg Pryor and Russ Morman.

I’d been watching baseball all my life and like pretty much every other American male, mistakenly thought I knew the game, which is remarkably similar to assuming you understand quantum physics because you know MIT’s street address. (Which is 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139, so now that you have that information, head down to your basement and try to build a time machine and see how far you get.)

Anyway…

My baseball education started when Russ Morman (at the time he was the Royals first baseman) informed me I was holding the bat incorrectly and when I assured him I had it by the skinny end, Russ informed me that professionals hold the bat in their door-knocking knuckles while amateurs push it back in the crook between thumb and forefinger which is called “choking” the bat and leads to a number of undesirable results.

Who knew?

After more than a century of fairly smart guys playing baseball, there was a right way to do everything and I knew pretty much none of it. I was also holding a baseball incorrectly, catching a ball incorrectly and had screwed-up throwing footwork, all of which could be corrected and while it wouldn’t actually make me “good” it would make me “better.”

All of this came as news to me because when I was still playing baseball some father who also didn’t know jackshit about the game would coach the team and he didn’t know how to fix anything so he’d just send you to right field and hope nobody hit a ball in your direction, which is a pretty good incentive to start playing football, which I did.

Nevertheless, I got fascinated by all the stuff I didn’t know about baseball and it turned out the more I knew the more interesting the game became, but unfortunately for baseball, Americans have been trained to have the attention span of over-caffeinated hummingbirds and if you’re going to understand what’s happening, baseball requires you to pay attention.

Example:

As of this morning the Kansas City Royals team batting average is .243, but when they put the first pitch in play it’s .375. If the Royals take the first pitch for a strike, after that their batting average is .210.

So that first pitch is really important because pitchers are trying to get ahead in the count to get to that .210 average, so they want to throw a strike and a lot of them have to throw a fastball to do that (because it’s straight and easier to control) and most hitters want to hit a fastball (because it’s straight and easier to hit) so pitchers who can throw breaking balls for strikes have a huge advantage.

If you want to know how a pitcher is going to do that day, pay attention to his off-speed stuff and whether or not he can throw it when he needs to throw a strike in counts like 2-0, 2-1, 3-0, 3-1 and 3-2.

And if those last three paragraphs bored you, now you know why baseball is in trouble.

People who can’t enjoy a movie unless something blows up every five minutes have a hard time concentrating on small stuff like counts and I’d write more about that subject, but I need to finish this up so I can get online and get my tickets to Fast and Furious 9.

Moving on…thank you, Baby Jesus

OK, so I’m writing about stuff like pitch sequences and infield positioning and letting players and coaches and managers and beer vendors explain why they did what they did and last night’s Royals-Rangers game offered an excellent example of why most baseball people appreciated that.

In most ballparks there’s a waist-high fence behind home plate so when a defender gets a ball hit in his direction he has at least some chance of having a good backdrop for spotting the line drive trying to rearrange his lips.

But in the Texas Rangers’ new ballpark somebody decided it would be a good idea to dispense with that waist-high fence and let the fans sit at field level so when a defender has a line drive hit at him he has to spot it with a background made up of people moving around and possibly wearing white shirts and as soon as I saw that I thought: “How long before that becomes an issue?” and I’m pretty sure the answer was four innings.

That’s when Royals left fielder Hunter Dozier got a bad jump on a sinking line drive for a two-RBI triple and if my lip-reading skills are any good at all (my specialty is profanity), once Hunter was back in the dugout, he said: “I didn’t see it.”

Which is why you want to be there to ask Hunter if the fans in the background were an issue and the subsequent answer might change your mind about Hunter Dozier’s fielding ability; maybe Hunter isn’t a bad left fielder, maybe somebody in Texas got greedy about building expensive luxury boxes too close to the field and MLB let them get away with it.  

Also, there was some woman in a blue top sitting behind home plate that talked throughout the entire game which was kind of fascinating because you know those seats cost an arm and two legs and she was never looking at the field so I started focusing on her and by my count over the course of the game four different people wound up sitting in the next seat and each every one of them had to hear what was on her mind and I’m guessing her companions could only take so much before they pretended they had to go to the bathroom and told somebody else it was their turn to hear this lady’s non-stop monologue.  

(And I think I just made my point about short attention spans, including mine.)

Anyway…

For the most part players and coaches liked what I was doing because I was letting them tell their side of the story and then carrying that explanation to the fans so they’d understand as well.

So everything was hunky-dory up until 2017 and the Royals went from being World Series champs to having a losing season and all those “Forever Royal” fans lost interest and my page view numbers were trending the wrong way so the Kansas City Star decided they could live without me.

A word to the wise-ass

When you retire – voluntarily or otherwise – one of the things you’re going to struggle with is meaning and how you fill your day and if you think you’re going to do it playing golf, sounds to me like you haven’t played golf for seven days straight in quite a while because once you do, your knees, hips and back might form a union and go on strike.

So good luck with that plan.

In my case I decided to just keep working and still churn out a daily cartoon for King Features and write about whatever amuses and/or enrages me and the older I get the more often I feel both emotions at the same time. I can be pissed off and laughing at myself for being pissed off at the same time, a skill you don’t acquire until you’re too old for it to do you any good.

But I digress and there’s really not much either one of us can do about that.

I still love baseball and writing about it, so I made a deal with the Star to occasionally provide them with an article on the subject which gave me an excuse to have a press pass and talk with the players and coaches, but that got blown out of the water once they decided to not allow reporters in the clubhouse or on the field and only conduct interviews over the internet.

Bottom line: unless they lose their goddamn minds (and once in a while they do) athletes and their coaches do not say anything controversial when a camera or microphone is in the same zip code, so my preferred information-gathering technique (going to practices and talking to players and coaches one-on-one) is no longer allowed and I haven’t been to the ballpark since 2019.

If they start allowing reporters on the field, I’ll once again start showing up which may be an excellent reason for them to keep the current policy in place.

Nevertheless, I still turn out the occasional baseball piece for the Kansas City Star and here’s a link to a story about rookies and why some succeed and some fail and why some look like they’re the second coming of Babe Ruth for about two months before heading back to Omaha.

As I’ve explained before and no doubt will again:

I can’t gather information in a big league park and then use that information on a private blog because if MLB lets me get away with that then everybody could start a blog and demand a press pass and get the best seat in the house, which is probably one of those seats behind home plate in Texas and as long as you paid top dollar to sit there, who cares if the players can’t see the damn ball?

So anything I write using information I gathered while using my Star press pass has to appear in the Star, so here’s that link:

https://www.kansascity.com/sports/mlb/kansas-city-royals/article252313168.html

Mainly it’s about rookies struggling or succeeding early on and why fans shouldn’t take either one too seriously.

OK, that’s it for a Saturday and I’ve got lots to do before the Royals come on at 3 PM and I can’t decide if I want that lady with a blue top to show up again, because if she conducts another baseball filibuster I’m pretty sure I’ll get distracted and quit paying attention to what happens on a first pitch.

Where’s a $5,199.99 shot of Macallan’s when you need one?