-
sponsorship
Stephen Strasburg was spectacular in his Major League debut Tuesday night, striking out 14 batters in a 5-2 Washington Nationals victory. The sports media have settled on a single word to describe the rookie pitcher: phenom. A Lexis-Nexis search spanning the last seven days turned up around 200 phenom mentions, two-thirds of them in reference to Strasburg or Washington Nationals draftee Bryce Harper, who was 16 when he appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated last June.
Why is Strasburg a phenom and not some other superlative? The term has actually been used to describe baseball players since the 1880s. According to The New Dickson Baseball Dictionary, the term was also used to describe 19th-century boxers and racehorses, but phenoms have mostly been found on the baseball diamond. In his 1911 tome Base Ball: America's National Game, Albert G. Spalding explains that the baseball phenom "came into the game from Keokuk, Kankakee, Kokomo, and Kalamazoo. He was heralded always as a ‘discovery.' His achievements were ‘simply phenomenal.' Once in a while he ‘made good.' Usually he proved to be a flat and unmitigated failure." On one hand, it's fitting that Strasburg, who grew up in a small city in Southern California, is being called a phenom. On the other, his debut made it seem unlikely that we'll have to worry about unmitigated failure.
Strasburg and Harper are not the only inhabitants of planet phenom. Along with baseball, the word is also tossed around in golf a fair bit, having been used in reference to youngsters Jennifer Song, Ryo Ishikawa, and Rory McIlroy in recent days.
Lexis-Nexis also brings news of other, more obscure luminaries. Take, for example, Trinidadian soca phenom Machel Montano. According to his official Web site, Montano was the first soca artist to sell out two back-to-back shows at Madison Square Garden. His latest album features Lil Jon and Shaggy.
Banjo and fiddle phenom Frank Fairfield also makes music, the kind that LA Weekly's Jeff Weiss thinks belongs in a Faulkner novel, not present-day Los Angeles. "It's difficult to imagine Frank Fairfield living in an apartment, let alone using e-mail or a cell phone," Weiss wrote. "It's much easier to picture him ... camped by the bank of some slow-moving tributary, fiddling forgotten Appalachian murder ballads, surrounded by hobos chomping cold beans."
If banjo isn't your thing, there's also Pop-a-Shot phenom Ricardo Reyes. The 5-foot-7 Jimmy Kimmel Live! guest beat LeBron James and Charles Barkley in the arcade basketball game. Reyes, like James and Barkley, has never won an NBA championship.
-
sponsorship
One of the most memorable passages in Michael Lewis' Moneyball comes in the chapter "How To Find a Ballplayer." As the Oakland A's are preparing for the draft, General Manager Billy Beane and his scouting department debate the merits of doughy college catcher Jeremy Brown. "He's got big thighs," one of the scouts says, "a big butt. He's huge in the ass." Beane, who's obsessed with the ample slugger's ability to take a walk, rebuffs all of these concerns with a simple maxim: "We're not selling jeans here."
While the talent evaluators in Moneyball saw Brown's big booty as a negative—and perhaps they were right, as Brown retired after notching a mere 10 at-bats in the big leagues—a recent report in Sports Illustrated suggests that baseball scouts have a more nuanced take. In his cover story on Philadelphia Phillies ace Roy Halladay, SI's Tom Verducci writes:
There is an adage among scouts that the shape of a player's butt helps project what the prospect will become. Kids with flat butts generally don't fill out much. Kids with a curved butt will add strength to their frame—what the scouts call good weight. "Roy looked like he could easily carry another 15 to 20 pounds," says Mike Arbuckle, who ran the draft for the Phillies then and now is a senior adviser to the general manager in Kansas City.
Is it true that you can divine a ballplayer's future by looking at his hiney? Chris Buckley, who was a scout for the Toronto Blue Jays when the team signed Halladay out of high school, says he's not familiar with the butt-curvature school of scouting. Buckley, now the scouting director for the Cincinnati Reds, remembers that Halladay was a tall, lean guy. When you're scouting a high schooler in particular, Buckley says, you want to assess whether he'll be able to add weight to his frame. To that end, though, you're less likely to look at his butt than at the size of his parents—if mom and dad are big and tall, junior will have a good chance of growing into his uniform.
Jim Callis of Baseball America, like Buckley, says he's never encountered any butt-specific scouting. While it's common to assess how a player carries weight, "I've never heard a scout say, He's got a flat butt, we're not going to take him," Callis says.
Baseball Prospectus' prospects maven Kevin Goldstein, by contrast, says he has "seen scouting reports with the actual word rump in them." "A lot of baseball players tend to have big asses," Goldstein says. And while this "tends to be a pitcher thing," the boffo backsides aren't entirely confined to the mound. "[Albert] Pujols has a tremendous rump, and it serves him well," he notes.
Update, 2:45pm: Another data point: At the 2010 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, former Texas Rangers manager and current ESPN analyst Buck Showalter reportedly decreed that players with flat butts do not succeed in Major League Baseball.
Update, April 9, 4:20pm: Thanks to the blog Nerd Baseball, we have more of Buck Showalter's wisdom vis-a-vis the butt's importance in baseball. "You don’t see a lot of good power hitters or good pitchers that generate arm speed that don’t have a good, high butt on them," Showalter said on ESPN's Baseball Tonight. And who, according to Showalter, best exemplifies high-buttedness? Cubs first baseman Derrek Lee. "I don’t want to say he’s got a perfect butt, but when I look at it I say, Wow."
What do you make of Showalter's scouting of Lee's rear? Judge for yourself.
-
sponsorship
On June 12, 1970, the Pittsburgh Pirates right-hander Dock Ellis pitched a no-hitter in a game against the San Diego Padres. In an interview 14 years later, Ellis stated that he had dropped acid before the game and was tripping the entire time. The claim might have seemed farfetched coming from another player. But Ellis, who died last year of alcoholism-related liver disease, was one of baseball's fiercest competitors and most dedicated eccentrics, prone to outrages on and off the field. In 1972, he was maced during an altercation with a security guard at Riverfront Stadium, the home of the Cincinnati Reds. Two years later, Ellis was removed from a game against the Reds in the top of the first inning after attempting to hit every batter he faced. The two incidents were apparently unrelated.
Ellis' LSD no-hitter, though, is his most folkloric achievement—a piece of Nixon-era Americana that has been celebrated in sonnet form, in the pages of High Times, in visual art, and in song. And now, in animated film. "Dock Ellis & the LSD No-No," a new four-and-a-half minute short by the artist James Blagden, combines narration by Ellis himself (taken from a 2008 NPR interview), with Blagden's vivid pen-and-ink-style animation, and funky blaxploitation ambience. As a work of art, it's a delight. (I especially love the scene where Ellis and his teammates stand open-mouthed beneath a rainstorm of "greenies"—green Dexamyl tablets, ballplayers' amphetamine of choice in those days.) As cultural history, it's eye-opening: a reminder to belly-aching baseball declensionists that drugs, recreational and performance-enhancing, have been floating around our national pastime for decades.
-
sponsorship
If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.)
No. 18: "lbj." Searches for former president Lyndon B. Johnson's favorite drink dominated the Google Trends list this morning. LBJ's drink of choice was the $1 million question posed to Kevin Basin of Los Angeles on last night's "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire." According to the show, LBJ had four buttons installed in the Oval Office so he could order his favorite beverages on demand. The buttons included "coffee," "tea," "Coke," and..."Fresca"—not Yoo-hoo, which was Basin's unlucky answer. Watch the video here.
No. 36: "Acadia National Park." Searches for Acadia National Park were up this morning after several people were injured and a young girl killed when a rogue wave caused by Hurricane Bill swept them out to sea. A group of around twenty people had gathered at a spot in the park called Thunder Hole, where a small cavern forces incoming waves into a giant waterspout that can shoot as high as 40 feet during storms. The park is located near Bar Harbor in Maine and was the first national park east of the Mississippi River. Video of the rescue can be seen here.
No. 57: "Unassisted Triple Play." The beleaguered Mets were dealt an especially humiliating defeat by the Philadelphia Phillies last night when Phillies second baseman Eric Bruntlett ended the game with an unassisted triple play. After Bruntlett caught a line drive hit by Mets outfielder Jeff Francoeur, his teammate Shane Victorino started frantically yelling at him: "Touch everybody. Touch everything." Bruntlett did as his was told and made history: Only once before, in 1927, has a baseball game ended on a triple play. Watch the video here and read the play-by-play here.
Photograph of wave caused by Hurricane Bill courtesy Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images.
-
sponsorship
There’s a guy at Harvard who claims that happiness doesn’t last (it’s good news: unhappiness doesn’t either!) because we humans wildly overestimate how happy or unhappy any given event will make us. He’s got all the research and the tenured professorship, but I have—the 2004 Red Sox. For my whole life, I imagined that a Red Sox world championship would make me deliriously happy. I was not wrong. And the effects have not worn off: Right now, just thinking about this play, I was so overcome with warm and fuzzy feelings that I momentarily forgot that we have dropped seven of our last 10 and are now 3.5 games behind the Yankees.
So my reaction to the news that David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez were on a list of players who tested positive for steroids in 2003 is this: I am disappointed (Big Papi, did you have to?) and defensive (hey, the other guys were doing it, too!) but not, on the whole, any less happy. Besides, I tell myself, this was in 2003—and we all know what happened then. Even if the whole team was popping steroids like sunflower seeds, it was not enough to overcome the incompetence of Grady Little. The 2004 championship remains untarnished.
Or so I tell myself. One of the joys of being fan, even in the age of Moneyball, is the freedom—the obligation?—to be irrational.
Photograph of Manny Ramirez courtesy of Flickr user KeithAllison.
-
sponsorship
Variety reported yesterday that the Steven Soderbergh/Brad Pitt production of Moneyball, Michael Lewis' great book about how Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane used statistics to change baseball, was closed down just 96 hours before shooting began. Apparently, Columbia Pictures chief Amy Pascal read Soderbergh's latest revision to the script, became wary of big changes in it, and pulled the plug, leaving the director casting about for a new studio. One unusual element in the planned film? Soderbergh intended to splice "interviews with such ballplayers as Beane's former Mets teammates Lenny Dykstra, Mookie Wilson and Darryl Strawberry" throughout.
This news raises the possibility of two grim outcomes: 1) that Moneyball may never get made and 2) that if it does get made, it may not be any good. Although interviews with Dykstra are always entertaining, the plan to include documentary footage worries those of us who are big fans of blockbuster Soderbergh (director of Out of Sight, Erin Brockovich and the Ocean's Eleven movies) and less enamored of his arty, experimental alter ego (director of Bubble and the two-part, four hour-plus Che epic). We'd assumed that Moneyball, the tale of a general manager leading a poor, underdog team to unprecedented success, would be a kind of Ballpark Eleven: A heist movie about a team of likeable smartypantses (including Pitt as Beane, comedian Demitri Martin as number-cruncher Paul De Podesta, and charming ballplayer Scott Hatteberg as himself) sticking it to the smug baseball establishment. But perhaps Pascal got spooked because Soderbergh has something more unorthodox in mind: A star-studded feature film intercut with a semi-documentary meditation on Beane himself. We may never know!