Good Riddance, Joe Morgan; or, 'We Won't Really Be Safe Until We're Sure the Head Has Died'

On Monday, ESPN announced that it would not invite Jon Miller and Joe Morgan back for a 21st season as play-by-play and color-commentary men for their flagship baseball show, Sunday Night Baseball. Response across blogs and message boards ran the gamut from celebratory to orgasmic. Wishing that Joe Morgan would somehow please shut up has been common practice amongst fans for nearly a decade, to the extent that I'm sure some enterprising viewer has tried to deliver a pizza to the announce booth to contrive a way to at least temporarily stuff Morgan's word hole.

Morgan exemplifies old-school baseball thought. For intelligent and progressive fans, he's an antique impeding smart new approaches to understanding the game. For those afraid of change, for traditionalists, for the incurious, he's a relic that must be preserved, locked in the booth and left to talk until he dies. Even then his body should be encased in lucite, some tiny Easter Island head monument to calling the game the right way: gritty, devoid of senses, wrong. Naturally, it didn't take long for the defenders of the old school to lament his release. Because I have both cool friends and awesome readers, it also didn't take long for a guy named Nate to pass along a link to a truly disastrous piece of sports editorial.

The author in question is Milton Kent, one of those poor sorts saddled with two first names that could be read forward or backward and sound lame either way. Rounding out the bookishly forlorn picture his name conjures is the fact that under his byline he's listed as "National Reporter." It's just a sad distinction made on a major website, so unnecessary that it seems more like an affirmation than anything else. It brings to mind Wile E. Coyote holding out his business card labeled, "Super Genius," or those sorts of waterproofed pants that toddlers wear, the ones with names like "Big Boy Pants." Milton Kent is a big boy now. He's readed all over the America by grownups. If only he'd aimed his editorial at them as well.

When he sent in the link, Nate asked for only one thing: "Please go after this guy." With pleasure.

Opening Daze #1: ESPN's Enduring Failure

When Josh Beckett throws his first pitch, on April 4th, to officially begin the baseball season, I emit one of those involuntary ahhhhhh sounds that you occasionally hear when you walk out the front door of an airport and are surrounded by smokers lighting up for the first time in five hours.

I'm sure that I have a sincere and elaborate opinion somewhere in me explaining why baseball is the greatest game, but at this moment, only three explanations come to mind:

1. It's back, and football isn't. Also, the World Cup hasn't started yet.

2. You really don't have to pay too much attention. I mean, yeah, there's all that poetry in what doesn't happen — or so say people like George Will, who claim that social justice occurs when you don't do anything either. Basically, you can glean as much or as little from a baseball game as you like. If you want to observe defensive shifts and whether a pitcher is banging the outside of the plate against somebody, great. If you've got work to do, great. You can hook up the radio, worry away at something on the computer, do the dishes, make a dinner or tinker in the garage. Baseball is the most rewarding auditory game. Vin Scully proves this. Most people who get all uptight about how you have to watch everything are usually annoying, even if they aren't statistics wonks or bad gamblers. Most of them are probably dishonest, too. Practically everyone I know grew up with as much baseball on the radio as on the TV. And we grew up into having MLB cable packages.

3. It's a long season, so missed games and losses don't matter that much. Football is so immediate and so statistically compacted that everything seems pressing. With football, most of the games each week happen at the same time on the same day. If you're busy then, you miss out. Worse, it's on for less than half the year (20 weeks, counting the postseason), and most of those weeks feature so much head-to-head stuff that you can't see it all. Baseball happens for most of the year. Many of those days, there are games on at 1 pm, 4 pm, 7pm and then 10 pm (Eastern). Best of all, even if your team is absolutely amazing, they're still going to lose 60 times. You can afford to not sweat the small stuff — while in the garage, trying to fix your stupid lawnmower.

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.

Welcome, Massive Influx of New People

The bar graph of pageload activity on this blog for the last five days looks like four faint linoleum bubbles in a row standing next to a sequoia large enough to drive a car through. It's the inverse of Spud Webb in an NBA all-star lineup. It's a simile Dennis Miller would find himself incapable of making because he'd run out of hyphens.

I'm simultaneously very pleased while also grudgingly aware that that big traffic spike kinda reflects on all the preceding days of total obscurity in such a way as to make me look like a bit of a schmuck for all that solitary labor. It's things like this that remind me of a suggestion a friend made that I read one of those Dummies books on internet marketing, and it certainly seems like maybe he had a good point there. But any time I spent reading one of those Dummies books would only cut into my time doing anything other than reading them, so you can see the bind I'm in.

MLB Tonight: Glenn Beck Deconstructed

"I'm terrible with sports."

One wonders why Glenn Beck bothered with the preposition and direct object at all. He uses the fact that Sonia Sotomayor once issued an injunction that ended the 1994 Major League Baseball strike as an excuse to try his hand at extended sports analogy, while analyzing anything that occurs to him. It's the same sort of word salad that ensues when you take the elderly out of hospice care for the day and they editorialize about every thing they see outside the car. Only in this case the person who shits himself and operates barely above a signals-recognition level has the second-highest rated cable opinion show.

I'm not even sure why he writes. The pieces are too short to make a point, let alone five. If they're an advertisement for his ad-libbing on TV, they're remarkably faithful to the content but misguided as brainbait. I suppose these things could just be the 30-second homily that ends his show, or he could legitimately be blogging these things intentionally. That seems hard to swallow, though, because of the the last two dramatically carriage-returned microparagraphs in his piece from May 27 (emphases mine):

In honor of President Obama's new Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, who saved the world by ending the Major League Baseball strike of 1994, I'd like to end with a little baseball analogy.

(I'm terrible with sports, so bear with me.)

Our government needs to keep their eye on the ball when nominating Supreme Court justices. We shouldn't be looking for someone who shows "empathy." Making decisions based on empathy is a violation of the Supreme Court justice's oath and it would lead to some horrible legal decisions based on feeling, not law.

We need China to stand up to the screwballs in North Korea and Iran over nuclear weapons and we need them to buy our debt. In other words, China holds the key to our economic and military future, so why are we talking to them about global warming?

And finally, the gay marriage debate in California: Instead of focusing on this as a states' rights issue, we are making a huge error by looking to international courts to form opinions.

Right now, it's the bottom of the ninth and we are down to our last out and our last strike.

Will our government take strike three looking? Or, will they wake up and save the day with a heroic three pointer on a penalty shot?

It's just a fuckup of such majesty that I literally cannot deal with it. I don't have the brainpower to navigate these kinds of mixed metaphors. Reading this is like doing one of those children's mazes on a McDonald's placemat, only no matter where you turn your pen, someone punches you in the fucking face. Your brain slams against the inside of your skull trying to process it. You get concussed.

Because I can't deal with that, I thought I'd turn to two people who didn't have that kind of problem, two men who really know their way around both punditry and the sports metaphor. Please welcome our guest analysts, Hall of Fame second baseman for the Cincinnati Reds' "Big Red Machine" and host of ESPN's Sunday Night Baseball, Joe Morgan; and former catcher for the St. Louis Cardinals and host of FOX MLB Saturday and The Tim McCarver Show, Tim McCarver.

___________________
See that's the thing. Glenn Beck gets it. As a ballplayer, as a pundit, it's times like this in life that you've just got to dig in, hunker down in the trenches and step lively. The dustoff pitch might be coming, but when it does you've got to dust yourself off and be ready to do the little things, make the sacrifice and swing for those fences. Keep your eyes on the prize and the ball. The left eye doesn't see what the right eye is doing.

You know, he's a real hard-nosed and small-ball and rough-'n'-tumble scrappy player, Glenn Beck is. This is going to surprise you, but the person he reminds me most of is David Eckstein. Believe it. Really scrappy, small guy, tries hard, albino, cries a lot but they're tears that wet down the infield and keep the dust down. Glenn Beck is a cry-hard hitter, because he hits cries a ton and doesn't back down.

I know what you mean, Tim. I do. I believe in saying what you said. You look at Glenn Beck and his tears are something that don't show up in the statistics. There's no crying statistic in baseball and there shouldn't be, because you can literally tell a computer or a robot to cry and they have to because you programmed them to do it, which is actually what makes them explode, because they're electrical. But David Eckstein—and Glenn Beck, I mean—is a machine. Not a Big Red Machine, like I played on, but a crying machine. He really makes Team America better because he pulls them up by their heartstrings.

That is what I have meant for a long time, Joe. You can't look at the box score and talk about tearing up the way Glenn Beck does it, because the box score doesn't talk about crying, doesn't talk about how he's willing to look America in the eyes, in those calm eyes he has. The box score doesn't talk at all. They're just printed words. You have to get a person to say them out loud, and you can't hear a person from a basement. But when you hear them said, you have to read between the lines and examine the fine print. You know what's printed there, in the mind's eye?—heart.

I'm reminded of that movie about the women's baseball team. Remember that one? Starred Tom Hanks, who was in Big. In Big, he put a quarter into a machine and made a wish and became an adult and he learned something about being an adult and a child. I love that movie because he learned to work harder, to get from first to second—in life. You know who sometimes looks a little bit like Tom Hanks? My friend Dave Concepción.

Glenn Beck's got a babyface, but you know who else did? Don Drysdale. Don Drysdale used to say that he had a big babyface. That's what the other teams used to call him, Big Baby Drysdale. They say he sharted once into second base in the 1963 World Series but was called out on interference for being too adorable. Classic case of throwing out the baby with the baserunner before the barn door could come home to roost like a prodigal wolf in sheep's clothing.

Not afraid to get a l'il dirty. That's how you play the game right. Gritty. Shitty.

I'm sure the jukebox jackdaws and the statistics nabobs will tell you that sharting into the bases results in a 3% reduction in headfirst slides, but not when Charlie Hustle was playing. He didn't care if he had just stolen second and laid down a hershey highway coming into the bag. That's the kind of player he was. Hard-nosed and head first and that's what really inspires a team — that and crying.

I had the chance to play with him on the Big Red Machine with him and Davey Concepción, and I have to say, I think it made him faster. He launched like a bat out of hell into the wild second yonder like a rocket from the crypt, and you could tell when he felt the need for that speed he would sometimes show up at second base before the pitch was made to home, and the pitcher just didn't know what to do because you can't go home again.

Did I ever tell you about the time Whitey Herzog and I were in a Cadillac and thought we saw a portal opening up to the steaming feculent maw of Hell? We were so drunk — this was back when you could be drunk on the road as a ballplayer, not like now, when you have to do more training — I tried to drive into it because I thought I could destroy The Devil with Detroit steel. I couldn't, it was a roadside callbox, but that's especially true today. Right now the two devils are socialism and statistics, because they say the devil is in the details and in his bargains. Right now we're replacing our steel resolve with a weak hand that we've dealt ourselves into a corner. The only thing that can break us out is hustle.

Speaking of hustling, I think Beck makes a good point there about getting gay sex and sex before gay marriage. I think about gay marriage as like the infield fly rule, when you have a man on first or second and then another MAN comes up to bat, he either has to get a new base or he's called out. Unless he's really committed to that new base, and it's a woman base, and that's why they don't have that rule in softball.

Gay marriage is gay marriage, and straight marriage is straight marriage. I don't think anyone believes that gay marriage is the same as straight marriage. California isn't going to call straight gay or gay straight, and it's going to be fine. You're not going to see any lifestyle more taxing to live than an another.

That's where you're wrong. I think that—I think taxes are like the sacrifice fly. I think you've got to take yourself out of the game a little, but it lets the team win. But you can't get over the top of the ball. You've got to go deep. No one ever paid an estate tax taking a walk. Is there such a thing as On-Tax Percentage? No. You try walking in a tax. Rich people do all the little things. Go from first to third on a single. Steal. To be honest, most rich people remind me of my friend Dave Concepción.

When the Game of Life gets confusing like this, a lot of the times you'll see a player call for time in this situation, which is funny, because of course they can't stop time. Some have theorized there may be beings who can experience the whole timeline all at once, like seeing the ninth inning at the same time as the first and thinking they exist at the same time. That would be a VERY confusing way of looking at a ballgame, but I think if anyone could handle it, it'd be Bob Uecker. Speaking of Bob reminds me of a TV series called Out of This World, about a girl who could stop time. Amazing fact about that: the concept was revisited recently in the movie Clockstoppers. Which was directed by Johnathan Frakes.

Commander Riker.

Yes! Who I believe used radiation from the Duane Kuiper belt to accomplish that effect in the movie. Of course, it could harm the brain waves of the actors, making them erratic. That would be very similar to what happened to Joe Theismann, when he killed that guy.

Shhhh. I'm Billy Beane. I'm wearing Joe Morgan's skin like a suit. I get pulled over all the fucking time now.

Reminiscent of the movie Dragon Hannibal.

You can't tell me how much that movie made at the box office. It FELT real. To me. To Me as Him. The world he saw around him was imperfect. He saw the game — America's game — broken in two. Rogers Hornsby, greatest second baseman of all time, and he knew he was a racist, that that wasn't the way it is and that things didn't have to be the same, and he had to unite them, the Two Americas. He devoured the evil of The Other in Blake's vision. He became The Dragon. He had to father and give birth to himself. Self-Concepción. He became the Big Red Machine.

I disagree, Joe. There aren't Two Americas. You can split anything with numbers, but we're a whole. Three-hundred years ago a beautiful negress knelt at a crossroads outside New Orleans and wept to the night sky as she held a single rose close to her bosom, vowing to catch in it moonlight as it fell to earth like celestial nectar. Later she drank from it a tonic of her own tears and the night's gentle dew. Near her, in the brush, stood an Indian chief transfixed by her visage, who eventually girded himself to bring her another rose sweetened by the contents of a found honeycomb. The two later married and the child they bore was the first of generations of a tribe that eventually sired me, The St. Louis Cardinals.

Fuck math, fuck numbers, fuck everything. I want to drink blood. I want cum, piss, shit. I want to fill my pants with my piss and squib down a child's playground slide and fire out of it like a lubricated golf ball going *PUH* and launching out a whore's ass. Fuck truth, fuck a flag, stick your dick in a terrarium and fuck a whole microecology, fuck this gay Earth. I will EAT it. I will cut open a still-living bird and put my face inside it and try to snort out its fucking life essence. This is why I should represent YOU as Alameda County Supervisor of Elections.

Thanks to e-crony Rigamarock, who wrote about a third of the chat bits (the bad parts).

'I Never Played the Game'

Watching SportsCentury on ESPN or a biographical program on Muhammad Ali, it's easy to get overwhelmed by Howard Cosell's erudition, his pointed opinions, his seeming opposition to all that defines modern commentating's aggressive blandness, gutlessness and obliteration of anything that might rise above the widest appeal. At moments like that, he cries out like the last voice in a gathering darkness of unintelligence. Listening to those few historic snippets, you can't imagine how anyone would prefer Joe Buck and Troy Aikman over him.

Reading his book I Never Played the Game, however, instantly reminds you how — like the Yankees, Joe Morgan and AIDS — he aligned millions of strangers against him and how his adherents are often justly pilloried as the dangerously misinformed, cruel or insane. Despite the obvious intelligence and insights behind it, and despite a co-writer, the book is almost undiluted Cosell — and often in the most toxic boring form.

I Never Played the Game has part of its heart in the right place. Having made his bones as a lawyer and then by working up the ladder of local radio and television broadcasts, Cosell approached sports as an outsider — or, at least, as a man as far outside sports as one can be while still becoming part of billion-dollar athletic and media empires. He writes the book with something like the distant perspective with which he began his career.

Athletes Who Have Speed and Quickness Are Ballplayers

To celebrate the proud return of ENCEE DUBBLE-A FOOBAW this weekend, The Wife and I visited her friend Shana and Shana's husband, Jack. They're both smart, attractive and pleasant people, but I get the feeling that Shana (justifiably) hasn't really the faintest awareness of my existence pretty much 99.9% of the time, and Jack's eyes flash me a glint of neither-pleased-nor-fearful recognition whenever I go over there. Hence, my classification of them as The Wife's friend and the friend's husband.

I like to assume Jack thinks well of me, but I don't know, and in any case, he's probably in the same boat I'm in. I really have no idea how or why Shana became a friend of The Wife's — I strongly suspect that a mutual employer is to blame — but she appeared in The Wife's life one day and thus peripherally in mine. At first, I dreaded that she'd be some earnest, attention-starved matron, but I was pleased to find out she was roughly my age, exuberant, bright and funny. She also seems to more or less like me, which is always a good sign, especially because I more or less like her and wish The Wife bugged her to do things more often.

Jack, however, presents a consistently taciturn countenance, which leads me to suspect that I'm still identified less as me and more as Wife's Consort. Of course, this is perfectly fine: The Wife appeared in his life one day, and I peripherally as her husband. Frankly, I'm relieved not to get the "who the fuck are you?" glance when I'm in his house. But while I hardly expected an open embrace and sudden BFF status, the taciturnity is mildly intimidating, at least in part because he could probably break me over his knee, and one never knows what a wry non-committal smile signifies, especially after offering a potentially contentious observation about whatever's currently happening on his giant-ass TV.*

'Baseball Between the Numbers'

By now you might have noticed that I've mentioned baseball here a lot. The frequency of its discussion is entirely coincidental. The local team doesn't suck this year, prompting interest; pennant races heat up a little more each passing week, prompting more; and the non-baseball books I reserved from the local library keep getting renewed by whatever glacial readers currently have them, prompting the baseball books I reserved to keep coming in one after another.

Also, a few weeks ago, I read a review of one baseball book, which inspired me to check it out. While reading criticism of it, the critic mentioned and praised another baseball book, which I looked into, which led to the namedropping of another book and yet another. At that point, I figured I should try to cover all the bases (pardon the expression) and just read whatever everyone apparently considered to be the new "classic" sportswriting. After all, it beats another round of Nazis having their frostbitten toes gnawed off by mice.

As to why I'd be interested in baseball books in the first place, I enjoy the game. Even if I didn't, I'd probably affect an appreciation of it, considering The Wife absolutely loathes football, and at some point you just need to watch sports for no particular reason other than to watch sports. (Thankfully, she thinks baseball's all right.) But I also especially enjoy relearning about a game I learned in childhood by applying to it sabermetrics, the attempt to understand baseball from new, mathematically quantifiable standpoints.