Gardner WebLog

A quick observation before I go to bed.

Baseball owes it’s longevity as a sport to its perfection.  Most of the time, games evolve to root out asymmetry—to make both halves equal, to put all players on equal standing, or to make the field totally square.  

Baseball is uneven.  It’s lopsided—sometimes really lopsided.  If one team can’t get three outs in the bottom of the seventh, they might have to finish the game the next day because of it.  Keep in mind, however, that even though there are no time limits on games, they almost all end after 2 ½ or 3 hours.

A hitter has three strikes, but a pitcher has four balls?  Why is that?  That doesn’t seem fair.  Why not give a hitter four strikes, because it’s obviously harder to hit than pitch (remember good hitters fail 7 out of 10 times…)?

Those who know baseball revel in its asymmetry.  They laugh when people ask why there is no halftime, or why no left-handers play anything but first base or outfield.  Once the pattern of the game is learned, everything else makes sense.  It’s like this elite club where people who ‘get it’ can delve deeper into the details of this crazy game that for some reason, works out.  Read Moneyball.

Or the fact that at any point in time, only two players from opposing teams actually face one another.  But still, there’s this one guy who faces the opposite way of his own team on the field…and gets special gear too.  Games like football or soccer are directional—everyone’s going for this goal or that one.  The baseball field is a shared commodity—you guys try your luck at it, then if you don’t, our team will give it a shot in the bottom half of the inning, using the same field.

Some people describe baseball as the endless pursuit of fundamental perfection.  Fielding every ground ball perfectly and throwing the runner out.  Having an efficient swing that can catch up to a 95 mph fastball, but isn’t so out of control that you can’t slow up and hit a breaking ball to the opposite field.  Throwing strikes.  The pitcher’s mound never moves, and the plate is always 60.5 feet away.  The best pitchers are as good as they are because they have come the closest to perfecting their fundamental task—to throw strikes, and get outs.

It’s so weird that it’s cool.  Baseball is easily romanticized because of how crazy it seems to an outsider, but everything eventually works out and the game actually makes pretty good sense.  Most of the time.

The scene when we get home from long road trips is always pretty hilarious.  Last night, for example, we got back from a three-day trip to
Visalia, and the bus pulled up to the stadium in San Jose around midnight.  Our team, now almost 30 strong with injured guys and trainers, piled off the bus after being cooped up for about 4 hours, forced to listen to the end of the movie Sleepers and the first half of Primary Colors.  We all stumble off the bus, red-eyed and irritable, wanting nothing else but to go to bed, but knowing that unpacking and a short drive still stands in between us and unconsciousness.

There are also a few guys who’ve slept the whole way and have been awakened abruptly.  They’re in that zombie-like state where everything feels like it’s happening really fast around you.  You’ll tap someone on the shoulder and they’ll jump like a gun went off.  “What!?!” they ask, and you just needed to squeeze by to grab your bag from under the bus.

It’s such a flurry of activity that sometimes things get lost.  The bus pulls up to the curb, and guys have found toiletries in the gutter outside the stadium the next day that they thought they’d lost on the trip.

Some of the players just decide to cut their losses and spend the night on the couches in the clubhouse.  This always looks funny to come in the next day after going to the gym and dressing out next to a guy on the floor in a sleeping bag.  Sometimes it looks like a homeless shelter in there.

This reminds me of something else.  Since many on the team have tired of the San Jose nightlife scene, we’ve got into staying late after the game just kicking it in the parking lot, many times with adult refreshments.  Several of us noted the lack of acceptable ambience, so I went and bought a ‘chimenea,’ this outdoor fireplace, stove looking thing.  Since then we’ve used it just about every night, and the thing is great.  It gets cold now at night here, so we have these great mini-parties around the chimenea every night in the stadium parking lot.  If anyone’s interested, they cost about $75 bucks and can be found at any local Home Depot.

We have eight games left.  Then playoffs.  I can’t believe the end is approaching…

10. The training room is always chocked full of players—and our trainer has run out of ibuprofen.  By this point in the season, painkillers and anti-inflammatories are the saving grace of most injuries.  Surgery or serious rehab for any nagging ailments can be put off for the last few weeks of the season, so guys can stick it out.

9.          People start talking more about fantasy football than baseball.  By this point in the season, baseball ceases to be an acceptable discussion topic.   For one, we’ve played a lot of games and are sick of it.  Secondly, we’ve probably exhausted most of what you can say about baseball anyway, so there’s no point in seeking a novel topic.  Fantasy football is where off-season bragging rights are won and lost, and how a lot of guys keep in touch.  Our 12 member league is on Yahoo.  We held the draft in a conference room at the hotel in
Bakersfield, and although my team is very Redskins-heavy (Clinton Portis, Mark Brunell, and Chris Cooley…all STUDS), I think we should be a force to be reckoned with this year.

8. The pre-BP stretch routine has completely deteriorated.  During spring training, our stretch routine would have impressed a drill sergeant—not a single player out of sync, choreographed form running, and all players giving their full effort.  Now, our team’s stretch routine more resembles sheep grazing in the outfield.  Most guys know what they need to stretch, and others simply figure that it’s hot enough they’re already loose…I guess?

7. The Countdown Begins…  No matter how well a team is playing, everyone knows the number of games left in the season when that number dips below 20.  Anyone on our team could tell you we’re at 12, after tonight.  Sample conversation:  “Man, this is brutal, it’s really hot.  When will BP end?”  “Yeah, I know, only 12 to go, dude.  Then playoffs.  Then we’re done.”

6. Our hats look like science projects.  I try to keep mine clean, but some of the guys’ hats on our team are so sweat-stained that they’re not even black anymore.  Some think it’s bad luck to clean the crusty, white, salty residue from the hat, so they just let it grow.  Hats that started out jet-black are now an odd off-brown color, and so brittle they could double as batting helmets.

5.  The Little League World Series is on TV all the time in the clubhouse.  We’re totally obsessed with it.  These kids are in so many ways the opposite of us— playing their guts out trying to win each game,  totally nervous on the field, and basking in the spotlight of a national TV audience.  We watch it because it’s so real—the kids cry when they lose, the coaches yell, and anxious parents watch from the stands.  I think we all miss parts of that (as well as the shorter 6 inning games…), so we’re big time fans of the LLWS.

I’m sitting in the hotel lobby in
Bakersfield, CA.  As is the usual routine for final days on road trips, we must check out of our hotel rooms by noon, leaving our entire team homeless until the bus leaves for the field around 4pm.  There are about ten baseball players using the lobby’s wireless internet right now—the place looks like an internet café.

Bakersfield gets extra points for a nice gym, good food options close to the hotel, and a fairly decent hotel.  The drawback is that the stadium might edge out the field from the movie ‘The Sandlot’ for the worst baseball field of the century award.  When we came a month ago, there was no grass.  I mean it: no grass.  Apparently the accidentally sprayed herbicide all over the outfield grass instead of fertilizer, and the entire outfield turned brown.  While the grass is growing back in, the field is still pretty rough looking, and the stadium doesn’t make things better.

When you stand at home plate and look toward the mound, you face directly into the setting sun.  This means that no game can start until the sun set below the outfield fence, which is a 40 foot wall (smartly) built up so games can begin before 8 pm in late June.  Attendance struggles also.  We had maybe 50 people at the last game.  Ah, late summer minor league baseball.

We had a great time down in Lake Elsinore, also.  Someone in the bullpen had a great idea to calm the 30 or 40 little kids screaming for baseballs down the right field line right above our heads.  We set up a plastic cup about ten feet out into the warning track down the line, and told all the kids that if they made a quarter in the cup, they would get a free baseball.  Within 5 minutes it was like Las Vegas on a Saturday night.  Quarters flying in, we were making change with mothers, and kids were having a great time trying to score a baseball for 25 cents.  We ended up making $50 dollars in two games.  Since we were staying at the Lake Elsinore Hotel and Casino, we doubled down with our money, and turned that fifty into an even hundred, all for throwing a cup on the field and giving away a few extra foul balls.

All in a single roadtrip, the stories never stop.  Stay tuned for more stories, hopefully not about swindling money from preteen baseball fans…

The blog is back.  Following best practices in most US workplaces, it’s taken a two-week vacation in early August.  The blog is well rested and ready to attack the last two weeks of the season.  The team, however, didn’t have the luxury of a two week vacation and we soldier on, now in the midst of a roadtrip in Southern Callifornia.

The Inland Empire 66ers always play us tough.  They beat us in extra innings two nights in a row until we turned it around last night, winning 5-1.  Running before the game in San Bernardino in the middle of the day in August strangely resembled ripping a pack of cigarettes—all the pitchers were huffing and puffing after our pregame workouts in the less-than-crystal-clear IE air.

Inland Empire has a great stadium–one of the best in the Cal League I think–but they struggle to draw enough people to make it feel very fun.  I’d say the stadium seats 4000, but there weren’t more than 1,500 at any of our games there.  It could be due to the fact that running across the street before the game for a burrito requires dodging bullets…

Tonight we go down to Lake Elsinore–probably the best stadium in the league–for the first of a three game series.  Elsinore takes it to the next level.  I think tonight’s promotion has something to do with a hearse parade before the game.  Creepy.  They’ve also got this rabbit mascot guy who jumps out from behind the right field wall and dances every time the Storm scores.  The first couple times it’s funny, but I think it gets awkward after that.  THey have two jumbo screens, a huge restaurant in deep right field, and pretty hilarious mid-inning antics.  We’ll see what happens this series.

So here we are, in the dog days of August, when everyone is pretty much running on cruise control.  Most everybody’s stats are secure, and we’ve already clinched a playoff spot, so at this point nothing is too crazy.  After BP, everyone just comes into the clubhouse and tries to get a quick nap in, listens to music, or tunes out for a while.  Definitely not the nervous, anxious pre-game clubhouse that we had at the beginning of the season.  It’s a lot more mellow.

More to come…