Murder, Suicide, Fire, Theft, Racism and Boners: Cait Murphy's Case for Baseball's Greatest Season

At the heart of Cait Murphy's very entertaining Crazy '08 is a simple thesis: that the 1908 baseball season is the greatest in the history of the game. To prove this, she combines daily results for a handful of teams over the 154-game season with character studies of the richly idiosyncratic founding fathers of the national pastime and a selective but enlightening contextual look at American culture and baseball at the turn of the last century. Both approaches have their benefits and shortcomings, and while simultaneously pursuing them provides a natural counterpoint that helps to pace the season and deepen our understanding of it, both elements can at times inhibit the other from feeling fully realized.

On an "and then what happened?" level Murphy's approach is efficient and fairly easy to grasp. She focuses on a team's fortunes over the course of a few weeks, then switches to another team, allowing us to watch the see-sawing of luck, injury, slump and serendipity peculiar to baseball's long season. Non-fans frequently make the complaint that this is exactly what's wrong with baseball — its interminable pace both in-game and over the course of the year. These people are idiots. To the purist or even a lightly engaged fan, this is the essence of baseball: a long journey that inevitably wrenches honesty from the performance of its players, tempering hot streaks during (then) 154 games with their counterparts, the slumps, at the end giving us a fairer idea of the capabilities of all involved.

Thus Murphy shows us the New York Giants on a roll and then suddenly dropping games to weaker opponents. Pitchers lose "their stuff" for a few games and give up heartbreaking losses. Giants legend and Hall of Famer, the gentlemanly Christy Mathewson, comes into a game with an arm that feels like jello, or meets a batter whose owned him for years now and gives up another hit. The Pirates, Cubs and Giants rise and fall in the standings, while other teams languish in the basement. Of course, even under the best of circumstances, this style of recap doesn't always work.

MLB Playoffs '09, Day Two Roundup

I'd intended to keep a liveblog going of the three games today, but I also intended not to have a giant goddamn headache. Instead of watching the Rockies at the Phillies, I wound up lying down and listening to most of it it, then napped through a bit of the Cardinals at the Dodgers, then had the big screen commandeered to watch TiVo'd episodes of Community and The Office during part of the Sox/Angels game. I felt way too funky to put up a fight anyway.

Now of course I feel better and can't sleep, so at the risk of seeming ignorant — after all, I missed quite a bit — here are some stray observations from Day Two of the 2009 MLB playoffs:


Pregame:
• For some reason, the human mattress that is David Wells is in the TBS booth this year, and someone's already cleaned him up from Day One. That was incredible. He wore this strange brown shirt that looked like some earthy tunic a civilian guest star would get on Star Trek and, over it, a brown jacket that I swear was a Members Only™. So you had this guy who made millions as a pitcher and is probably getting paid tens of thousands to be a commentator sitting amidst three other guys dressed in suits, only he looked like he'd stolen his outfit off a pensioner passed out at the local VFW. Amazing.

Jersey Bedeviled

For the longest time, I couldn't see the purpose in wearing a team jersey to a ballgame. Do I need to display my allegiance? I already bought the overpriced ticket to get in, and I plan on getting at least two beers at the game, too. That's like the down-payment on a hatchback. Displaying fealty by paying more money to a multi-million dollar empire seemed like a double-toll. Hell, between tickets and taxpayer-funded stadiums, in theory the team ought to run out there with pictures of random fans and the shape of the county on their jerseys.

To a certain extent, I still don't get the jersey impulse, in part because of some of the people wearing them. If you can rest a pitcher of beer on your stomach while standing, there is no message any sport's jersey broadcasts louder than the one your gut does. Football jerseys, as a rule, just seem odd. Baseball's a sport almost anyone can play, but it's hard to picture most people in a football jersey having played the game past 8th grade.

Baseball jerseys just work better. This is a sport where Prince Fielder is a superstar, despite looking like the product of the Michelin Man and an obese anthropomorphic brownie making babies. This is a sport where the 1986 World Champion Mets smoked cigarettes in the dugout. Almost all baseball jerseys look good on women, because they're basically like men's dress shirts; and all women are sexy wearing a man's dress shirt and nothing else.

Clearly, whatever my problems with sports jerseys, I got over them. Or maybe I just got used to them. Maybe the impulse to fit in wore down my snarky asides over dozens of trips to the ballpark. Sure, I often ask myself, "Why are people smaller than I am wearing XXXL jerseys," but now I usually follow that up with, "And where did they get them?"

The more I looked into it, the more I discovered how much of a problem getting team jerseys can be, both in terms of cost and presentation. My buddy Glenn illustrated this perfectly the other weekend when we headed out to the baseball mausoleum to catch the Rays hosting the White Sox. He wanted to wear a Rays jersey to the game and went shopping at the last minute. Balking at $150 for authentic team jerseys, he went to Wal-Mart and got a Rays jersey for $30. It was perfect — well, apart from the fact that the team's name was in cursive and apparently in the sort of electric pastels usually reserved for the side of a waverunner. At the sports bar, later, I think he got a high-five from a similarly economically minded fan.

Alex Rodriguez Is a Smooth Criminal

I love Alex Rodriguez. Except for what he does on the baseball field, everything about him is plastic, incompetent and weird. Most of which is hilarious. Rodriguez might now be an overrated baseball talent, but his deeply underrated career as a whacko public figure is just beginning.

The unraveling began February, when reporter Selena Roberts came forward with the revelation that A-Rod had taken steroids while with the Texas Rangers. Rodriguez admitted to taking them for a couple years because he felt burdened by his insane contract and obliged to put up offensive numbers commensurate with the numbers in his paycheck. This turned out to be a lie. Yesterday, the New York Daily News reprinted information from leaked copies of Roberts' book, A-Rod, which detailed how he had taken steroids in high school, had taken HGH after leaving the Texas Rangers for the New York Yankees and — allegedly, amazingly — even had a quid pro quo agreement with other teams' infielders to "tip" pitches to them in blowout games to help up their offensive stats and bust through slumps.

While the details are somewhat shocking, the fact that more iniquities were revealed shouldn't be. A-Rod's always been a disingenuous bastard; this, after all, was the guy who wanted to be traded to the Yankees to "play for a contender," when it was his ludicrous contract that absorbed his current team's revenue and precluded their fielding a contender's roster. (If contending was really that important to him, he wouldn't have entered high pressure negotiations that created the implosion of his team's ability to pay for good teammates.) But it was the way he handled the February revelations that told anyone paying attention that there was more going on.

Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez and Restitution

Following baseball for the last few years makes shock at any new steroid revelation virtually impossible. Pretty much everyone could plausibly have been juicing, and unless you're someone like 85-m.p.h.-fastball-throwing Greg Maddux, jaws aren't liable to drop if you're implicated. Which renders Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez's admission that he took performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) in 2003 — his MVP season — kind of quaintly predictable.

Rodriguez started out as a shortstop. He was only forced to move to third base to accommodate the generous all-for-the-team shortstop Derek Jeter's desire to stay at the position despite Rodriguez's unquestionable superiority. The position is important because shortstops traditionally aren't power hitters. In fact, they're usually the worst power hitters on the team. If you have a lithe and rangy frame capable of covering a lot of territory very quickly, you probably don't have the torso that usually accompanies slamming 50 home runs per season.* To be blunt, A-Rod was already sort of a freak. So, again, that's what makes the PEDs thing predictable. That isn't what makes it fun.