On a sober anniversary

Posted on September 12, 2021 by Jeff Kallman

Honouring the murdered and the fallen who tried to save them during the original 9/11 atrocity at the World Trade Center, the Mets and the Yankees stood shoulder-to-shoulder before Saturday night’s game. Shown left to right here: Pete Alonso, Gleyber Torres, Javier Baez, Anthony Rizzo, Jonathan Villar, Giancarlo Stanton, Brandon Nimmo (still on the injured list), and Aaron Judge.

Members of the 2001 Mets, including Hall of Famer Mike Piazza, escorted various groups of first responders onto and around the field Saturday night. The Citi Field audience cheered loud and long, not just for those Mets but for those first responders who survived or whose comrades were lost in the 11 September 2001 atrocity upon the World Trade Center.

Several of today’s Yankees and Mets—wearing assorted New York first-responder hats, this time with the blessing of baseball’s government—lined up intermingled on the baseline and came close enough to tears. The Mets wore the same non-pinstriped home whites the team wore in 2001, complete with “9-11-2001” embroidered on the right sleeve, but this time with a black-shadowed version of their “New York” traveling letters across the chest.

After a moment of silence in honour of those murdered in the WTC attacks, and those who died trying to rescue the attacked, the New York City Cops & Kids Choir sang “The Star Spangled Banner” in a striking balance of chorale, section, and soloist. The cheer at the finish amounted as much to a prayer that a country now fragmented in enough ways might yet un-fragment once again in enough ways, as it did the performance that truly honoured the dead.

The Fox Sports telecast cut to a special anniversary video story, recalling the moment New York can never forget, ten days after baseball ended its self-imposed hiatus following the original atrocities—Piazza blasting what proved a game-winning, two-run homer in the bottom of the eighth, in old Shea Stadium, off Braves reliever Steve Karsay, off the second tier of a television camera stand behind the center field fence.

Then, the Mets’ and Yankees’ 2001 managers, Bobby Valentine and Hall of Famer Joe Torre, threw ceremonial first pitches to the plate, after Valentine puckishly ran back onto the mound to toe the rubber. That was a very far cry from Valentine having led his 2001 Mets in running rescue-and-recovery efforts outside old Shea Stadium itself—and having fear of further danger, as he’s acknowledged often since—after the WTC attacks.

After a commercial break—including a stunning montage of a young lady named Rowen Emerson Jones playing “God Bless America” on her violin, at various New York spots including the Brooklyn Bridge and a 9/11 memorial—it was time at last to set sober reflection and ceremony to one side, play baseball, and grip the Citi Field crowd until the last out of an 8-7 Yankee win.

On baseball terms, the Mets’ home crowd would have loved to have back the awkward should-have-been double play finisher second baseman Javier Baez—hurrying the throw to first—sent airmail past first baseman Pete Alonso that allowed the eighth Yankee run in the top of the eighth in the first place.

This was an interleague game whose sole significance otherwise rested solely in the now-faint postseason hopes of both the Mets in the National League East and the Yankees in the American League East. Had it not been for 9/11’s twentieth anniversary, the bigger baseball news of the night might have been Brewers pitchers Corbin Burnes and Josh Hader collaborating on a major league record ninth no-hitter of the season in their 3-0 win over the Indians—now the first team to be no-hit three times in a season.

The Yankees and the Mets exchanged single-hit halves of the first inning off their starting pitchers, Corey Kluber for the Yankees and Taijuan Walker for the Mets. The baseball fun really began in the top of the second, when the Yankees battered Walker for a pair of two-run homers (catcher Kyle Higashioka, center fielder Brett Gardner), a solo bomb (Aaron Judge, right after Gardner), and a too-early 5-0 lead.

Judge led the Yankee attack with two home runs Saturday night.

The Mets got right back into the game in the bottom of the inning. Second baseman Javier Baez, one of the notorious Thumb Bunch, waited out a leadoff four-pitch walk and stole second while left fielder Jeff McNeil struck out swinging. Then a second Thumb Buncher, Kevin Pillar, drove Baez home with a liner just inside the left field line, before catcher James McCann—who’s seen as one of the Mets’ more dubious free agency signings ordinarily—hit a drive that eluding a leaping Judge at the right field wall into an RBI triple. Walker himself followed with a line single to right sending McCann home effortlessly.

From there, Walker overcame his own wounding flaw, trouble commanding his fastball, and retired each the next thirteen Yankees he faced. Along the way, Baez turned on a Kluber service with two out in the bottom of the third and ripped it on a fast high line into the lower left field seats to pull the Mets back to within a run.

Kluber endured through four innings before Yankee manager Aaron Boone opened his bullpen and brought Lucas Luetge in to work the bottom of the fifth. The good news for the Yankees: Luetge shook off a one-out base hit by Mets right fielder Michael Conforto, shot through unoccupied shortstop territory on the defensive shift, to get rid of Alonso on a fly to the back of right field and Baez on a bullet liner Yankee third baseman Gio Urshela speared in a somewhat spinning crouch for the side.

The bad news for the Yankees was Luetge opening the Mets’ half of the sixth by walking McNeil on four straight pitches. Exit Luetge, enter Chad Green in a double switch sending Tyler Wade to play third base. Unfortunately, enter three baseballs thrown onto the field in right by unknown Citi Field idiots, followed by another couple of jackasses running onto the field but taken down swiftly enough by stadium security.

The unruly delay knocked Pillar out of his batting rhythm and into a swinging strikeout. But it didn’t stop McCann from turning on a 1-1 service and driving it into the left field seats, yanking the Mets into a 6-4 lead and inspiring one fan adjacent to the broadcast booth to holler, “Rock ’em! Sock ’em!” Those who remembered Piazza’s 2001 blast hoped against hope that another Met catcher’s bomb would prove the winner on the actual 9/11 anniversary, instead of in the first Mets home game back after baseball’s self-imposed September 2001 break.

The Mets had one more run in them in the bottom of the seventh, when with two outs and Clay Holmes on the mound for the Yankees, Baez chopped one off the plate up toward third, with Wade having a tough throw to make and Baez beating it by a hair as a few television replays plus the umpires’ review showed. McNeil singled him to third, Pillar singled him home with a liner to left, and it looked as though the Mets had an insurance run.

Seth Lugo had relieved Walker and thrown a spotless top of the sixth, and now Trevor May took over for the seventh. Oops. Gardner opened with a base hit through the hole at second, and Judge hit a parabolic punt sailing above the top of the stadium roof but landing halfway up the left field seats to tie the game at six. Yankee left fielder Giancarlo Stanton chased May with a long single, and Aaron Loup took the mound for the Mets.

It looked like Loup would have a simple gig when he got rid of Yankee first baseman Anthony Rizzo in a hurry on a fly out that nudged Conforto back almost to the track in right. Shortstop Gleyber Torres smashed one hard enough on the ground to short that his Mets counterpart Francisco Lindor couldn’t handle properly and got ruled a base hit.

Luke Voit pinch hit for Holmes. He grounded one to short on a very weird hop, but this time Lindor snapped it up at once and threw to second to get Torres. Baez in his rush to end the inning threw flatfoot off his right leg, mid-pivot, and the ball sailed over and past Alonso, enabling Stanton’s pinch runner Andrew Velasquez to score the eighth Yankee run.

The blameless Loup promptly struck Higashioka swinging on four pitches, but the Mets couldn’t cash in the two-out baserunner they got when Lindor wrung Yankee reliever Albert Abreu for a full-count walk. After another delay from another idiot running on the field—Hall of Fame pitcher/Fox Sports analyst John Smoltz wondered aloud, and appropriately, why people pick even evenings of sober commemoration for their “look at me!” moments—Conforto wrung Abreu for another walk.

Up to the plate came Alonso, the Met everyone in the ballpark wanted in this situation. He gave it his best shot, too. On 1-1 he hit one high and deep to center field, but he’d connected just on the underside of the ball, enough to give the Yankees a momentary jolt but not enough to keep Gardner from catching it on the edge of the track.

Veteran Mets relief pickup Brad Hand rid himself of Wade (ground out to second), Yankee second baseman D.J. LeMahieu (identical ground out to second), and Gardner (foul tip swinging strikeout) in the top of the ninth. But Mets pinch-hitter J.D. Davis’s one-out ground-rule double wasn’t enough in the bottom. He took third when strike three escaped Higashioka but the Yankee catcher recovered the ball soon enough to keep Pillar from taking first by just a step.

Then McCann gave one a ride out to right. It wasn’t enough of a ride. Judge snapped the ball into his glove to end the game, snapping a low for the Yankees in which they’d entered Saturday night having lost seven straight and—how cruel the irony—nine of eleven.

In baseball terms, the win put the Yankees into a tie with the Blue Jays for the second AL wild card, the Blue Jays having taken a doubleheader from the hapless Orioles. The loss kept the Mets five behind the Braves in the NL East and four behind the Reds and the Padres—both defeated earlier Saturday—for the second NL wild card.

In spiritual terms, the full Citi Field house, the pre-game ceremonies, and the shoulder-to-shoulder interweaving of Mets and Yankees on the baseline during those ceremonies reminded people of the better sides of New York City. The sides that show recovery and perseverance with little more than just basic effort of the heart. Even commemorating the anniversary of an atrocity that—who could have predicted—killed fewer people than were reported to have died Friday alone from COVID-19-related illness.

Maybe sports don’t really heal, but maybe something like a baseball game relieves the sting of certain atrocities, pestilences, and sorrows for just a little while.

But to the idiots throwing balls on the field, running onto the field, and even booing the 7 Line Army—that particular group of orange-shirted, die-hard Met fans—for refusing to partake of the still-idiotic Wave in the seventh inning (if the 1980s call demanding it back, let them have it back, unapologetically), three words: Go to hell.

Entering 9/11’s anniversary losing . . . 9/11

Posted on September 11, 2021 by Jeff Kallman

Sanchez’s bail-and-reach tag attempt on Jonathan Villar only started the Mets’ scoring Friday night.

Even if you hate everything Yankee because it’s everything Yankee, this is the kind of cruel symbolism to which the Empire Emeritus didn’t deserve to awaken on the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities. Even the Yankees didn’t deserve to awaken on 9/11 having lost . . . 9/11, if you look at it one way.

If all you know of Friday night’s game against the crosstown Mets in Citi Field is the line score, it looks on the surface as though the Mets pasted the Yankees 10-3, even with three errors charged to the visitors.

But if you saw the game itself, you know the Mets did benefit from more than a little inadvertent Yankee generosity.

“Just a poor performance, period,” said Aaron Boone, the Yankee manager for whose head Yankee fans have called since, oh, the first Yankee loss of the season. That’s the painful reality of wearing the fabled Yankee pinstripes.

Of all the cliches around the Yankees and their fans, the truest is that they don’t like to lose. Of all the sub-cliches to that, the truest is, alas, “To err is human; to forgive must not become Yankee policy.” If one loss draws calls for heads to roll, nine losses in eleven games probably calls for public executions.

“It’s a bit of a broken record,” Boone said, speaking of the game itself even though he could have been speaking about Yankee fans and their expectations and demands. “We got to keep grinding at it. We got to keep working at it and we will, and trust that it will turn, but it’s obviously going to take everyone and, obviously, that starts with me and making sure we’re ready to roll.”

The Yankees seemed to get a roll going early Friday night, with Brett Gardner scoring on Aaron Judge’s ground out up the middle to second in the top of the first and Joey Gallo—the trade deadline import from Texas, who walks a ton, hits home runs a ton when he hits them, and does little else otherwise—hitting Mets starter Tylor Megill’s first one-out service into the right center field seats in the second.

In between, in the bottom of the first, the Mets offered up a leadoff single (Jonathan Villar), a one-out single up the pipe (Michael Conforto), and a two-out RBI single (Javier Baez, one of the Thumb Bunch) off Yankee starter Jordan Montgomery. The trouble on that hit was Gallo throwing home almost perfectly from left field but Yankee catcher Gary Sanchez bailing on the throw that had Villar a dead duck twenty feet from the plate.

It took a replay review to confirm it: plate umpire Ted Barrett’s initial out call was overturned. Inexplicably, Sanchez stood, bailed backward just enough, and reached up on the play, letting Villar get his foot on the plate before Sanchez got the tag on his helmet.

“He got in between Gary’s legs,” Montgomery said postgame. “It was unfortunate.” Alas, it’s par for the course for the hapless Sanchez this season. Only Baltimore’s Pedro Severino has been as bad behind the dish as Sanchez—each is worth -8 defensive runs saved, the worst mark in the American League.

Still, Gallo’s go-ahead bomb in the second gave the Yankees every right to think they’d hold the Mets off yet. They just didn’t bargain upon their own further misbehaviour starting in the bottom of the third.

Villar opened again with a base hit. Montgomery walked Thumb Buncher Francisco Lindor to set up first and second, then wild pitched that pair of Mets to third and second before walking Pete Alonso to send Villar home with the tying run. Then Baez whacked a feeble grounder up toward third. Uh, oh. Yankee third baseman Gio Urshela picked the ball slickly enough as he hit the ground sliding, but he threw it past Sanchez enabling Lindor to score.

Then Jeff McNeil, spotting the Yankee infield playing a little too deep, dropped a bunt past the mound on the second base side, catching every Yankee around the infield by surprise enough that Conforto came home unopposed. Kevin Pillar of the Thumb Bunch sent Gallo back to the track to haul down his sacrifice fly making the proceedings 5-2, Mets, and counting.

One busted double-steal bid later, McNeil taking second but Baez thrown out at third, Mets catcher James McCann, not exactly one of their more threatening hitters, sent a line double bouncing into the left field corner to score McNeil with the fifth Met run of the frame. Lucky for Montgomery that his next batter was a guaranteed out—even after opening Magill with two balls before striking him out swinging on three straight to follow.

And if the Yankees weren’t able to find bullpen relief for Montgomery just yet, the Mets thought nothing of making his night miserable even further in the fourth. With one out, Lindor going the other way kind of snuck a home run past the right field foul pole. Then the Yankees went to the pen, but an infield hit and a fly out later off Joely Rodriguez, Baez bounced an RBI double off the right center field fence. Making it 8-2, Mets.

The Yankees were mostly futile against Megill (ten strikeouts in seven innings) and the Mets’ defense from the second forward. But they weren’t finished being generous to the crosstown rivals. With the bases full of Mets in the seventh—after a one-out single (Baez) and back-to-back plunks (on McNeil and Pillar)—Yankee reliever Michael King fed McCann a ball that had inning-ending double play stamped on it.

Uh, oh, again. Yankee second baseman D.J. LeMahieu picked it and shoveled it perfectly to shortstop Gleyber Torres on the run. But Torres threw on about two stories above first baseman Anthony Rizzo’s glove, and home came the two plunk victims unmolested. By the time Rizzo whacked his own leadoff bomb in the top of the ninth, likewise sneaking it inside the foul pole, there were few real thoughts of any Yankee comeback.

Mets reliever Yennsy Diaz made sure those few thoughts disappeared swiftly enough from there with two swift air outs, before Sanchez tried to battle him from an 0-2 count: two balls, a foul, ball three, and then the game-ending fly out to deep right.

“It gives me all the confidence in the world,” Megill said post-game, “just to throw the ball over the plate in a way and attack hitters more confidently knowing I have, I guess, room for mistakes pitching. The offense killed it today. It’s awesome, they’ve been playing really well.” The Empire Emeritus went 0-for-5 with runners in scoring position and stranded four on the night, including Gardner after a two-out single in the third when the Yankees still had that 2-1 lead.

The Mets needed only Diaz and Heath Hembree before him out of the pen Friday night. They’ll need all pen hands on deck the rest of the weekend. Especially if the Yankees are only too conscious of losing 9/11 entering the twentieth anniversary of those atrocities.

Dear Joe and Jane New York Fan . . .

Posted on August 31, 2021 by Jeff Kallman

Jeff McNeil (bottom) and Michael Conforto crash attempting to catch a shallow outfield pop fly. The ball plus Mets first baseman Pete Alonso eluded injury on the play, which allowed two Marlins runs to score. The Mets’ 2021 season may be beyond repair. So may their fans.

This may or may not shock you gentle readers (all six of you, if that many), but I’ve never once booed at any professional baseball game—major, minor, or independent league. Not even over what seems to some an obvious lack of hustle . . . which may not be all that obvious, after all.

I don’t really know what’s inside the heads of any particular professional baseball player in any particular moment. For the boo-birds in any ballpark, never mind Citi Field, I have news for you: neither. do. you. Until or unless a player speaks about the moment in question, you don’t know any more than me.

Except that I’m reasonably enough aware that I’m not going to just haul off and boo the poor guy, or rip him ten new ones in these pages. If it seems that everyone else in the park is booing, I’m not going to join in that kind of fun.

I’m not in his position. I played ball when I was growing up but I wasn’t good enough to even think about trying out for the junior high or high school teams. By the time I got to the former, I couldn’t hit a fair ball unless the foul line ran straight across the rear point of home plate, and I couldn’t throw a strike unless the zone began on the batter’s derriere.

So my career was really over a year or so before I was bar mitzvahed. If you don’t count the day I got into a game in summer camp and ran the bases as though I had a process server on my tail (and a lead run to score, after stealing second and barreling around third on a base hit), from that point forward I engaged my love of the game purely as a fan. And, in due course, as a writer, too.

Watching as many baseball games as I can since, I know that I didn’t throw a pitch meant to miss a bat but launched into orbit.

I didn’t scamper over to pick off a hard grounder expecting that my throw to start a double play would escape the next infielder. I didn’t set myself up to take a throw at first base only to see the throw shoot past where I could snap the mitt around it. I didn’t dive into the hole reaching for a line drive I knew I could catch only to see the ball miss my glove by the fraction of a fraction.

I didn’t amble over reaching down for a ground ball that hit an unexpected rut, stone, clump of dirt, or other anomaly on the field and skip past me, either.

I didn’t see a delicious pitch coming my way at the plate—knowing in minus one second that I could rip it through any given infielder, drive any given outfielder to climbing the wall, or send it into the path of an oncoming airplane—then put the best swing I could put on that pitch and miss it by a hair’s breadth because, in that moment, that pitch was better than my swing.

Or, if you prefer, I didn’t connect with that delicious pitch, drive it to the farthest reach of the outfield, knowing up the first base line I had a shot at putting a number on the scoreboard, then seeing an outfielder take a flying leap and snatch it for an out the split second before it might have fallen behind the fence. Or, rip it like a cruise missile headed through the hole for the outfield only to see an infielder take a flying leap and snatch it as if he had a vacuum cleaner hose for an arm.

None of those things ever happened to me on a professional baseball field. Guess what, Joe and Jane Fan—they didn’t happen to you, either.

You sit there in the stands, expecting millionaires to play to perfection a game that by its very design remains the proverbial game of seventy percent failure. You forget, assuming you ever really knew, that a million-dollar salary conferred upon a professional baseball player isn’t going to turn Clark Kent into Superman.

It’s bad enough in places like Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia, three cities that know occasional triumph and protracted despair, sometimes self-inflicted and sometimes the net result of outrageous malfortune. But New York? Listen up.

Joe and Jane New York Fan, you had reasons to take baseball success in the 20th or the 21st Centuries for granted, never mind that—in the 21st—the Red Sox have it over the Yankees. (The Olde Towne Team in Century 21: four World Series championships. The Empire Emeritus: count it—one.) But one of your native sons now pronounces, with no fear of contradiction that can stick or escape perjury charges, that you are spoiled rotten. To the Big Apple core.

Between the formerly imperial Yankees, the long-gone Dodgers and Giants, and the occasionally triumphant but otherwise tragicomic Mets, you have 68 pennants and 38 World Series championships since 1901. Now the bad news: only two of those pennants and one of those World Series championships have come in the 21st Century. A little humility might be in order.

But no. To err is human, to forgive is not New York policy. Don’t even think about it: I was alive to see you booing even the heroic among your baseball favourites. I’m old enough to remember how often you acted upon that malarkey that Mickey Mantle—Hall of Famer, ranked by Baseball Reference the number four center fielder, ever—should have been “better.”

I’m old enough to remember you booing (and maybe wanting to beat) the living snot out of Roger Maris for daring to challenge the Sacred Babe one fine season—aided and abetted by a brain-damaged baseball commissioner (who just so happened to have been a Ruth ghostwriter once upon a not-so-fine time) and a sportswriter who could be bought by obsequity if not dollars.

I’m old enough to remember you accepting and adoring the embryonic Mets on the ground that they were inept enough from birth to make baseball seem human again after all those decades of Yankee, Dodger, and Giant success. They had Who the Hell’s on first, What the Hell’s on second, You Didn’t Want to Know on third, and You Didn’t Even Want to Think About It at shortstop. With the Three Stooges in the outfield, the Four Marx Brothers on the bench, the Keystone Kops in the bullpen, and Buster Keaton pitching to Charlie Chaplin.

Then the Mets made a tragic mistake. They turned eight years old, the age at which children enter third or fourth grade. And at age eight, three months after Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon, they won the pennant and the World Series. Oops. Pinocchio, you’re a real boy now.

“Now, it is all different,” wrote Leonard Shecter, then Jim Bouton’s Ball Four editor and writing in The New York Times, as those Mets approached the Promised Land, in an essay expanded subsequently into Once Upon the Polo Grounds.

Casey Stengel is gone. The players, who try no harder than the old Mets, succeed more often and as a result are indistinguishable from baseball players all over. There is stuffiness in the front office. There is great concern about unimportant things. [The manager not long ago suggested to a newspaperman that he need not have blabbed in the public prints that the Mets scored their winning run on a bunt.] And, worst of all, when the Mets lose, there is nothing funny about it at all.

I’m old enough to have watched Joe and Jane Yankee Fan turn tail when the machinations of a former regime—selling the team to a broadcast network that knew as much about baseball as the Beatles knew about quantum physics—left the Yankees aged, injured, parched, and chock full of journeymen for the better part of a lost decade.

But I’m also old enough to remember how right Shecter proved to be, sort of. Now, I sat often enough in Shea Stadium hearing fellow Joe and Jane Met Fan fuming, booing, hissing, and bellowing—unless the game was a 27-0 shutout and the pitchers retired 27 men straight on 27 pitched balls.

Joe and Jane Yankee Fan’s haughty imperialism was bad enough. Now Joe and Jane Met Fan, too, behaved as though a two-game losing streak was grounds for the firing squad? As though a harsh loss on an enemy game-winning hit was grounds to put the pitcher into the electric chair? As though nothing short of the pennant every year would do?

“God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble,” said the apostle Peter. Joe and Jane Met Fan, whose team had evoked that very precept at the end of its first nine seasons, replied, “Who is this fool, and which team traded him for a bag of broken bats?” Those occasional pennants and another World Series title since did little enough to remind Joe and Jane Met Fan of the proverb: “When pride comes, then comes disgrace.”

Don’t get me started about how often the post-Boss Yankees have fallen into slumps and Joe and Jane Yankee Fan suddenly felt nostalgic (What would George do?!?) for the owner who used to throw out the first manager of the season over such slumps—even in early April—and sicced a street-hustling low-life on his Hall of Fame outfielder’s trail.

(What would George do? He’d execute the coaching staff, the trainers, and the clubhouse staff, trade the entire roster for that of the Pittsburgh Pirates, and make the Taliban resemble Alphonse and Gaston. Then he’d really get mad.)

Now the Mets, who looked deceptively powerful enough, until the beginning of August, have found their injuries and inconsistencies catching up to them. Joe and Jane Met Fan have no further patience for excavating core causes than the barracuda bereft of his third square of the day. To the boo birds whose loyalty makes the fair-weather friend resemble the man or woman of all seasons, a few Mets had the answer.

They had it a lot sooner than it exploded into headlines, heavings, and harangues after Sunday. As retaliatory gestures go, emphatic thumbs-downs aren’t exactly the same as flipping the bird, fuming to reporters, or turning fire hoses onto the box seats. Only nobody really paid them much mind until a few of the culprits—Javier Baez, Francisco Lindor, Kevin Pillar—came right out and said it: You want to boo us when we come up short, we’ll “boo” you when we get back on the track.

They had only upended the longtime, lugubrious compact that says Joe and Jane Fan can abuse the professional athlete to his or her heart’s content and the athlete has no choice but to take every last piece of crap dished out. Whether it’s booing in the stands; or, brickbats, slanders, and, yes, even threats against the lives of themselves or their families aboard social media.

But I’ll say it again: Joe and Jane Fan would shiver, quake, or run home to Mommy and Daddy at the very thought that they might go to work tomorrow morning with 55,000 people waiting to see them perform their tasks and boo them upon the first mistake or mishap on the job. Not to mention about five million other people, maybe, watching on television or the Internet, or listening on the radio. Wait till those observers climb all over them and they even think about climbing back. Watch and listen to their bosses. (Who might have had, too, prepared denunciations in their pockets ready to deploy.)

Joe and Jane New York Fan make their historic counterparts in Boston (On my tombstone, it will say: “Cause of death: Boston Red Sox”—Cleveland Amory, critic), Chicago (Wait till next year!—a banner hoisted in Wrigley Field once . . . when the first pitch of the season was being thrown), and Philadelphia (Those people would boo at a funeral—Bo Belinsky, a 1965 Phillie) seem the epitome of empathetic reason.

Joe and Jane New York Fan forget that their sports city is Goliath. That there have been and remain everyone else aching to take their Yankees and Mets down, a hundred stories if need be. That now and then, though lately now more than then, a kid with a slingshot comes along and does just that. Either that, or their Yankees and Mets can be and often have been equivalent to the cobra finding its own mongoose.

To all other baseball fans in danger of becoming spoiled rotten likewise—this includes you, Joe and Jane Dodger fan (since 1901: twelve pennants, six World Series titles) and Joe and Jane Cardinal fan (since 1901: nineteen pennants, eleven World Series titles)—this native son of New York would say two things:

Thing One: Contrary to popular misconception, baseball players are not androids or automatons, and the down side to loving a game is the irrevocable law that somebody has to lose. (And stop treating baseball injuries as evidence of “fragility” or moral failures.)

Thing Two: Study Joe and Jane New York Fan, behave the complete opposite, and you will do well in reducing your likelihoods of ulcer, high blood pressure, stroke, or heart failure.

If you don’t, and you find your earnestly struggling heroes discovering more creative ways to prove you can dish it out but you can’t take it, either, you can’t say nobody warned you.

“Before a downfall the heart is haughty, but humility comes before honor,” says another proverb. Baseball players are reminded the hard way, daily. (This ain’t football—we do this every day.—Earl Weaver, Hall of Fame manager.) Joe and Jane New York Fan need to learn, and re-learn, the hard way, daily.

“Hey, Dad? Want to pitch me a walk-off?”

Posted on August 13, 2021 by Jeff Kallman

Tim Anderson, finishing the hype-busting Field of Dreams Game with a two-run homer in the bottom of the ninth Thursday night.

The game finished by crossing its original protagonist, Field of Dreams, with The Natural. The most poetically inclined screenwriting/directing team in film couldn’t imagine climax that surreal.

A pair of two-run homers in the top of the ninth to yank the Yankees back into the lead at 8-7. A two-run homer in the bottom of the ninth to win it for the White Sox, 9-8. This wasn’t the way they won ballgames during the 1910s evoked by the special uniforms the two teams wore for the occasion.

Hey, Dad? Want to pitch me a walk-off?

It was as jolting a climax as ever provided by David Freese, Aaron Boone, Joe Carter, Kirk Gibson, Chris Chambliss, Bill Mazeroski, or Bobby Thomson. Even if it didn’t win a World Series, push a Series to a seventh game, send a team to a Series, or put them in the postseason at all in the first place.

It defied the game’s subtexts. The ones not spoken often if at all in the hype. The ones involving Field of Dreams‘s unlikely turning of baseball’s worst gambling scandal into a fantasy of reconciliation; and, The Natural‘s study of a live young prospect shot Eddie Waitkus-like, into long, long wandering, into a haunted elder returning to prove neither he nor his old dream died, for however long it still had to live.

No volume of pre-game hype—this game’s tribute to artifices of fantasy was as hyped as any sports event could be—could have promised and delivered that kind of a ninth inning. Even Field of Dreams star Kevin Costner, escorting both teams onto the field from the corn beyond the wall, asking the crowd, “Is this heaven?” with the crowd hollering back, “No, this is Iowa,” wouldn’t have dared demand that in a script.

But there was Liam Hendricks, the engaging White Sox relief pitcher, looking made for wraparound sunglasses thanks to being endowed with wraparound eyes, working the top of the ninth, shaking a leadoff single off to strike Yankee veterans D.J. LeMahieu and Brett Gardner out swinging on four pitches each.

Then there was Hendricks at 2-1 to Aaron Judge. He threw Judge a high fastball and watched it sail far enough into the right field corn. Following which Hendricks wrestled Joey Gallo—the former Ranger whose stock in trade is either home run feast or strikeout famine, but who has the odd discipline of working walks (he averages 94 per 162 games lifetime)—into a walk after starting him 1-1 without throwing another strike.

Up to the plate stepped Giancarlo Stanton, a former National League Most Valuable Player and one of the game’s more formidable bombardiers until injuries began to grind away at him in earnest. Stanton hit Hendricks’s first service into the left field corn.

Even the somewhat partisan, small audience—savouring a game on the field built adjacent to the famous Field of Dreams farmhouse field, many paying through the nose secondarily for tickets with face values of $375 or $425, Iowa fans and White Sox season ticket-holders, the latter by special lottery—roared when that fabled Yankee power detonated in the top of the ninth.

It was nothing compared to what happened in the bottom, when Yankee reliever Zack Britton, himself having been in the top tier of his particular profession before injuries began shaving him down, too, took the role normally assigned to the injured Aroldis Chapman. He opened by luring White Sox pinch hitter Danny Mendick into a ground out to first but walking White Sox catcher Seby Zavala—who’d hit one into the corn himself in the bottom of the fourth.

Up stepped Tim Anderson, the lively White Sox shortstop. Britton pumped and pitched, a fastball right down the pipe. It was too fat a pitch to resist. If the White Sox have a classic kangaroo court in their clubhouse, Anderson would have been fined for malfeasance.

It didn’t win a pennant. It was more out of The Natural than Field of Dreams, whose co-protagonist by default Shoeless Joe Jackson had only one known walk-off hit in his entire career. (For the White Sox, against the Yankees, in July 1919.) But when Anderson hit it out, it won a ball game keeping the Yankees from gaining on the second place Red Sox in the American League East and fattening the White Sox’s AL Central lead to eleven and a half. Slamming an exclamation point down for baseball itself.

What began with Field of Dreams star Kevin Costner escorting the Yankees and the White Sox through the corn and down across the field ended with an African-American man from Alabama, who wouldn’t have been admitted to the 1910-1919 Show because of his race, channeling his inner Roy Hobbs, The Natural‘s psychically-buffeted protagonist.

Hobbs in the film version was down 0-2 and struggling mightily with an ancient bullet lodged in his insides, causing him to bleed through his lower stomach, when he hit the pennant-winning bomb that also shot the ballpark lights out. Anderson had no such encumbrance when he sent Britton’s canteloupe into the left field corn.

Until that ninth inning viewers at home and the fans who’d paid into the field saw a very reasonably played game. They saw White Sox first baseman Jose Abreu hit the first major league home run ever hit in Iowa in the bottom of the first. They saw Judge become the first Yankee to go long in Iowa when he hit a three-run homer in the top of the third.

Wearing 1910s style uniforms, the White Sox and the Yankees entered the Field of Dreams Game through the corn Thursday evening.

They saw White Sox starter Lance Lynn nail the first major league strikeout in Iowa when he froze Gardner on a high called strike, on a night when plate umpire Pat Hoberg was as generous with the strike zone ceiling as he was skinflint about proper strikes on the sidewalls of the zone.

They saw the early 3-1 Yankee lead disappear in a four-run White Sox third, when Anderson doubled center fielder Adam Engel home with one out, and recently-restored-from the-injured-list designated hitter Eloy Jimenez cracked a three-run homer into the right field corn.

They saw Gardner put a number on Lynn’s pitching evening when he hit the second pitch of the top of the sixth not too far from where Jimenez’s bomb landed. They saw Yankee infielder Tyler Wade, one of a host of spare parts coming into regular service thanks to the Yankees’ ongoing shuttle back and forth from the injured list, drop one of the only bunts that should be allowed in a game.

With one out, nobody on, and the non-shifting White Sox infield playing deep enough to prompt calls for sending a search party out to find them, the lefthanded Wade saw enough delicious open real estate to push a bunt to the left side, just enough to the middle to keep third baseman Yoan Moncada from doing anything more than grabbing the ball on the run in.

No wasted out. Nothing but a versatile enough utility infielder, who inclines toward hitting line drives (he has four doubles out of 24 hits this season), not feeling he was going to get something to hit on a line, seeing a free gift and pouncing on it before the supply expired.

Then, Wade stole second while LeMahieu occupied himself with working his way into a walk. Then, a ground out pushing second and third and Judge accepting a walk from White Sox speed reliever Michael Kopech after opening with strike one but seeing four straight balls, including a ball four which should have been called strike two.

No matter, far as the White Sox were concerned. Up stepped Gallo, flashing his usual all-or-nothing style at the plate, swinging mightily enough but whacking a pitch a little up out to shortstop to force Judge for the side.

From the moment Lynn started the game with ball one to LeMahieu and LeMahieu nailed the first major league base hit in Iowa baseball history, to the moment Anderson sent everyone home with his corn ball, the game told the hype to take a shower. Even if the live Fox Sports telecast referenced Field of Dreams to a fare-thee-well.

“I knew it wasn’t over,” Anderson said post-game. “The game’s never over. And once Britton walked (Zavala), I knew there was a chance to start something real dope.” So he finished something real dope with something as dope as it gets. In the immortal words of Hall of Fame baseball writer Jayson Stark, “Because . . . baseball!“

Of fathers, sons, dreams, rapproachment, and baseball

Posted on August 10, 2021 by Jeff Kallman

Kevin Costner and Dwier Brown play extraterrestrially reconciled son and father, respectively, in Field of Dreams.

So the Yankees and the White Sox will play the so-called Field of Dreams Game Thursday. They’ll play on the Iowa field rolled out and planted inside an eight thousand feet grandstand, adjacent to the field-in-the-cornfield that was actually built and used to make the film after which the game’s named.

“How,” asks Athletic writer Richard Dietsch, “do you capture the essence of a famous film on a live broadcast between Major League Baseball teams? That’s the question Fox Sports production staffers have been contemplating for months.” The answer may well depend on how you define the essence of Field of Dreams.

I read the original short story, “Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa,” turned into the novel Shoeless Joe, by W.R. Kinsella, back when both first appeared. I saw the 1989 film when it first appeared and a few times to follow when it was delivered on videotape, then DVD. The fantasy in print and on film had a particular resonance for me.

What began as an Iowa farmer lured to plow two-thirds of his corn, to build a major league-size field onto which Jackson and his fellow Eight Men Out might return to the game from which they were banished eternally, concluded (spoiler alert, to those few who haven’t seen it) with an estranged son (the farmer) and father (presented as a one-time New York Highlanders player) reconciling as time, illness, and death once denied.

Just like any son first misinterpreting a heavenly voice’s instructions to welcome Shoeless Joe Jackson, kidnap a renowned but reclusive J.D. Salinger stand-in, then do likewise to the elderly doctor turned eager youth who’d once been a single-appearance New York Giants right fielder. Then, bringing the latter two to his fresh field to witness games between the Black Sox and assorted deceased baseball stars

(Don’t bother. IMDb lists those cast members only as “additional ballplayers.” It’s up to you whether you think you see Walter Johnson, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Honus Wagner, or Cy Young—though the young Moonlight Graham points to and mentions Smokey Joe Wood and a pair of live-ball legends, Mel Ott and Gil Hodges.)

The story has its charms above and beyond capital crime on behalf of the greater good of the game. Above and beyond the very idea that you could turn into heroes eight men who disgraced the game with their World Series tanking for fun and profit or (in the case of infielder Buck Weaver) refusing to blow the whistle on the tank when it might have made a truly significant difference.

And, above and beyond the implication that there but for the grace of the gamblers to whom two or three of the Eight Men Out reached would the White Sox have steamrolled the inferior 1919 Cincinnati Reds. The actual record shows that implication as false as the still-holding idea that Jackson was entirely innocent, to say nothing of whether Jackson really did play to win in that Series. (Says the actual record: he didn’t, quite.)

For me, the film’s climax is the charm that hits too close to home. The adult, fictional Kinsella gets to reconcile with his father on the field, the father frozen by death in his young adulthood, wearing a Highlanders uniform, with a catcher’s chest protector and shin guards.

Father and son in Field of Dreams were estranged by disputes including the one in which the son chastised the father for worshipping a badly tainted baseball hero. Father and son in my case were estranged by contradictions that would be called child abuse today, followed by the ten-month battle against cancer that my father lost in 1966, when I was ten and he, thirty-nine.

My parents were foolish enough to believe nothing but physical discipline, with no concurrent attempt at real teaching, applied to mere human childhood mistakes the same as to real misbehaviour or disobedience. Confirmed decades later by an unimpeachable source (my father’s sister), my parents wanted children in the worst way possible—only to have no patience for children merely being children.

My father, alas, was even more foolish for believing the way to teach a son who didn’t know how to fight was to beat him even more violently, accompanied by every demeaning insult he could throw. The thought that a son needs to be taught to defend himself, that it isn’t knowledge with which you’re born, was never programmed into his software.

My father’s death stole any hope of eventual rapproachment in this world from me. Fantasy thought it is, the rapproachment between John and Ray Kinsella to conclude Field of Dreams was and remains something I envied every time I watched the film. The few things I had in common with my father included baseball. (And, in fairness, music, my interest in and facility for which my father encouraged but my mother rejected.)

I don’t remember whom he declared to be among his baseball heroes, other than his having been a Dodgers fan since their Brooklyn years. He spoke of various players without singling one out as a particular favourite, at least within my earshot, while I had as heroes assorted hapless 1962-66 Mets plus Sandy Koufax, Willie Mays, Juan Marichal, Henry Aaron, and Bob Gibson, among others.

But I do remember numerous catches, a few trips to the Polo Grounds and then Shea Stadium to see those embryonic Mets, and, in one fathers-and-sons game, my ripping a line drive off his crotch when he deliberately lifted his glove above it because (he admitted it later) he didn’t want to be the reason I made a hard out.

For all the contradictions and abuse, whenever I watch the Field of Dreams climax I’d give whatever I have to give to see my father walk toward me one more time, whether or not he wore a baseball uniform, and slip a baseball glove onto his left hand when I slip mine on and say, “Dad, want to have a catch?”

How do you capture the essence of a famous film on a live broadcast between Major League Baseball teams? Asking demands we ask just what that essence really is.

Is it giving eight disgraced baseball players a new home and a chance to recover by the gods what their misbehaviours—ranging from the morally criminal to the complicit to the willfully silent—stripped from them in the mortal world’s furies?

Is it the old, long-gone fans who refused to believe those men could have been anything other than victims of their own caprices, married to those of a purportedly unscrupulous baseball owner (and that theory has been debunked, too) and the professional gamblers a few sought to finance their intended subterfuge?

Is it re-discovering a truth enunciated in short form and long double-negative by Hall of Fame manager Sparky Anderson? We try every way we can think of to kill this game, but for some reason nothing nobody does never hurts it. Or in long form by James Earl Jones as Salinger’s stand-in Terrence Mann?

People will come . . . they’ll walk out to the bleachers; sit in shirtsleeves on a perfect afternoon. They’ll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they’ll watch the game and it’ll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters . . . America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it’s a part of our past . . . It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again.

Photographed by his father through a fence, my son ends his first-ever national Special Olympics plate appearance with a home run. (Yes, he back-flipped his bat away!) My fortune includes that we will never require reconciliation.

Is it an otherwise composed, ordinary Iowa farmer compelled to restore an un-restorable purity to men who could have destroyed baseball but engaged his lost father enough to return to earth, fostering the rapproachment too many fathers and sons—including mine, wherever he is in the Elysian Fields, with me—wish with each other but never find?

My own fortune includes being a father myself. By marriage and mutual engagement, not biology. The marriage is long past; my fatherhood, never. We made each other father and son. I did my best with whatever I had, for a son whose intelligence and will overcomes his compromise by a speech and language impairment, and whose heart is too large to be contained.

He joined his southern California softball team winning silver at the national 2018 Special Olympics. (His first plate appearance in that event: a healthy home run.) During the tournament, his coach told me and he affirmed: he credited me with teaching baseball and softball to him. There was no one more proud of my son at that Special Olympics (except his mother, surely) than his father.

All I ever did was observe, see what he had beyond the love of baseball we shared at the outset, then let him develop what he had on his time, through his eyes, ears, and hands, through his heart, never once imposing mine upon him. (He imposed one of his own: his boyhood heroes were Shawn Green and Vladimir Guerrero.) I’d learned the hardest way how damaging the other ways around could be.

The pan-damn-ic has prevented in-person time with my son since last year. We’ve missed the pleasures of going to Angel Stadium, sharing a game, sharing an atmosphere, with accompanying talk, theory, and hopes of catching a foul ball. It may well do so again before this season ends. I’ll talk to my son on the phone and in instant messages, as always we do. No one needs to tell either of us it isn’t quite the same as direct human engagement.

Neither of us are Yankee or White Sox fans. My son is a die-hard Angel fan. His father is a Met fan since the day they were born, a Red Sox fan since the 1967 pennant race, an Angel fan since the first day I took him to an Angel game. (They beat the Yankees and The Mariano in extra innings.)

We will probably each watch the Field of Dreams Game, thinking our own thoughts while the Yankees engage the White Sox, adjacent to where a novel was made into a film of fantasy that raises questions not always simple to answer. When not contemplating the good, the bad, the excellent, the dubious, about the play of the actual game.

Far simpler to replay the fictional Ray and John Kinsella reconciling with a simple game of catch. Even more simple to remind myself how much more fortunate I am, for having overcome my own parental estrangement and bereavement. For knowing I can still talk to, counsel, listen to my now-adult son, and play catch with him when conditions allow—for pleasure, not atonement.

Throneberry Fields Forever

. . . a calm review of baseball

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