Gardner WebLog

Well it was a successful weekend for the London Mets organization.  All together, the teams won five and only lost one.  There are four different teams competing right now for the program.  The Broncos which range from about nine to twelve years old are divided into two teams and play on Saturdays.  I stayed in London and helped run the games with another coach.  There is one high school aged team which will be the team I will be coaching, but they didn’t play this weekend.  The last team is the men’s team, and we played on Sunday leaving with two victories, but I will explain the details later.

I showed up early on Saturday with the club president Neil and another American coach Steve.  He’s a great guy who just moved to London from Tokyo after living there for 14 years.  He speaks fluent Japanese (he married a Japanese woman and has two kids who play on the team), this helps with the several Japanese kids who play.  While we were setting up the field he was telling me stories about little league over in Japan, when they would spend more than six hours out on the field practicing several times a week.  Where they find this time I have no idea, but all the Japanese kids have very good fundamentals and mechanics.  One of the Japanese kids was there with his dad practicing way before the game, receiving sharp comments, rolled eyes, and sighs every time one of his pitches was inaccurate.  It was similar to the response Adam, Nathan, and I would get from our father, only that was from nearly breaking the Brown’s (neighbors) window, ruining their flowers, or barely missing their annoying little dog.  Anyways, they were very intense, but good. 

We played a doubleheader, two six inning games.  We lost the first one and won the second, by a lot.  There a few mini-A.Rods on our team (including Daichi, not sure if I spelled that right, the kid who showed up early with his dad.) I forgot how great little league baseball was, just watching kids play baseball and have fun, simple as that.  The great thing about the London baseball league is that it provides an alternative sport for kids who don’t want to play soccer (or were told they weren’t good enough to play or go anywhere with it) because soccer is by far the most dominant youth sport in England.  It also provides a positive time for the kids, which some of them don’t get while at home.  I noticed there really weren’t a lot of parents at the field all day, the kids just showed up on their bikes, or walked to the park.  You can tell the kids really just like just spending time having fun playing a sport.  It was great to meet the kids and have fun coaching a little.

Neil gave me a ride down to Croydon, where we played on Sunday.  The field wasn’t too bad for a baseball field outside London.  We took BP, had a warm-up pregame, and then got going right at noon.  The umpire was American and not all that different from SCIAC umpires, cream uniform, oakleys and all.  I started in center and batted third, here comes the big American slugger…not really.  I really didn’t hit that well, not adjusting well to the slower than usual pitching you see in the SCIAC.  I had a few base hits, but I have had my better days.  One of the highlights of the day for me though, had nothing to do with the game of baseball.  In between games, a WWII British Lancaster Bomber took off from an old airfield right behind the trees from the field.  It flew around very low to the ground in big figure eights for about fifteen minutes.   Even the British players were frozen staring at the plane just cruising around.  It was great.

I pitched the second game and struck out around ten players in five innings.  The team we played was in the division below us, so I guess it was a good warm-up after not pitching in over a month or so.  There is a slaughter rule after five, so the game ended quickly.  I’m still really sore even from throwing only five innings, and not many pitches.  I’m lucky we only play every Sunday. 

After I got back I threw some stuff in a backpack and took the bus down to the south bank to see Big Ben, the London Eye, and all that good stuff.  There were tons of people around, including an odd mini-British techno rave on the beach near the river, on a Sunday night… I just kept walking.  After a snack and a beer I headed back to Stoke Newington which is where I live.  It’s in Northeast London.  Well that’s all for now, sorry this post was incredibly long, I had a busy weekend.  If any of you are interested, my address here is:

48 Chesholm Rd.
London N16 0DR 

Talk to you all soon, cheers. 

Kyle

Well, it was an interesting transit, but I’m here.  Let’s just start out by saying we’ve all taken for granted the times when we go through immigration and it takes under 5 minutes.  Everything was going great, the weather was fine in LA, we were there early, and there was even an empty seat next to me on the plane with a full flight!  Sleeping on the plane was difficult because I was running through my head all the possibilities and excitements of living in London.  We fly into London, the skies are blue, nice and sunny, and everything is looking spectacular. 

This is where the private tour of the United Kingdom immigration office happens.  Starting with “are you traveling by yourself?” and ending with “and what are your plans after you apply to graduate school in February?”  The immigration officer asks me questions for about 20 minutes, calls the woman who’s supposed to pick me up, and then comes back with the old “excuse me sir, there’s been some discrepancies between your answers and her answers, we’re going to need to ask some more questions, search your bags, finger print you, and take you’re picture.” (you hear that all the time you know)  “Sure!!! How bout the color of my underwear while you’re at it! Apparently the United Kingdom was worried about my reasons for traveling, and wanted to make sure I didn’t stay and work for five years or something. 

Twelve tiny cups of water, eight tiny cups of juice, two London gossip newspapers (because I couldn’t read my own magazines sitting in my luggage in the other room), and three episodes of the British Deal or No Deal, I am allowed to enter the UK, sweet.  The wife of the man who asked me to come out here picked me up and felt horrible that I had to be stuck in the UK Immigration Detainment Facility for five hours.  She was nice and gave me a detailed drive of London on the way back.   I’m living with a mother Sandra, her two daughters Bryony and Anna (pronounced Bryny), and then another housemate Shea, who’s Irish.  They’re all really nice and I’m not worried about the living situation at all, except they’re all “mostly vegetarian,” so I’ll learn some good veggy meals to cook.  After I dumped my stuff off I met Neil (Gail’s husband and the club president) and we went up to the complex where the fields are, which are nice for baseball fields in Northwest London.  They took me out to dinner, welcomed me with a nice English beer, and were very nice.  But that’s all for now, I need to finish unpacking and head to bed, I’ve been awake for almost 40 hours. 

It was interesting, but I’m here. 

Kyle’s London experience so far:  three cups of tea, watched a man in a top hat and a long coat say “cheers, enjoy the rest of your stay,” at the restaurant while he was leaving, and heard the words “bloody hell” about a dozen times – more to come.

I wanted to write a separate note to thank everyone who has surfed onto (I guess thats what it is?  Surfing?)  the blog this summer.  I started it to sort of help to keep in touch with people from home (VA and CA now…) and it turned into a good way for me to process a lot of what went on during the season.

I never included any names of the players I played with, and tried to keep descriptions of scenes pretty vanilla, just because I didn’t know who would or wouldn’t want their name broadcast over the internet to a cast of thousands (or the faithful 40 or 50 hits I get on the blog every day…haha).  As most of you can probably imagine, the descriptions of dialogue could have been a lot more ‘colorful’ as well, but we kept it PG.  One side-note I just remembered, I did throw in a few extra pictures in the album for anyone who wants to check them out.

One side-note I just remembered, I did throw in a few extra pictures in the album for anyone who wants to check them out.

But anyway, thanks to everyone.  Playing baseball every day has been a wonderful blessing to me, and to have the support of so many more people makes it a lot easier to put a jersey on every day and play (or sit in the bullpen and…watch).  It really is living a dream, even though at certain times the dream turns into somewhat of a nightmare, which I think showed through in the blog a little bit!

Your comments, support, and encouragement made the blog and the season a really good time for me.  Thank you all, take care, and throw strikes!

Good luck,

Adam Gardner

gardner.adam@gmail.com

Our season ended four days ago and it feels like I haven’t picked up a baseball in three years.  Playing every day blurs time and skews one’s perception of how days, weeks, and months pass by.  The last six months have been tedious but quick, difficult but simple, and both boring and exciting—all at the same time.

No other job could combine feelings of boredom and excitement.  After your first few extra-inning games, you’re just rooting for offense—from either team—so you can get back home or to the hotel and go to sleep.  I’m convinced that when I was on the mound pitching innings 12 through 14 at Stockton two weeks ago, the team wasn’t necessarily rooting for me, they were hoping for something else—resolution.  It could be a vital part of the game—men in scoring position, two outs, and a struggling pitcher on the mound, but because you’re there every day, and see those moments every day, you’re not really moved by it.  We’re not necessarily jaded, we just play a lot of games…

I’ve always been a competitive player, intense on the mound—sometimes too intense, and willing to grit it out in tough situations.  This year, though, really tested that.  After a few bad outings in a row, with nothing else to take my mind off of baseball, it was really hard to keep it all together.  I can’t imagine the added pressure that some guys have on them in the big leagues—contracts, media scrutiny, or crazy fans—and yet they still slump, break out, and streak over and over again, season after season.  What comforted me the most after bad games was not that ‘the game didn’t matter’ because we had so many more, or that I was on a winning team and they would pick me up, it was that I had other things I could do with my life.  I could walk away from baseball and still be ok.  Not everyone could.  Some of the players on my team are playing baseball because there’s nothing else they can do.  Knowing that I could get a good job or go back to school helped me keep a level head when I wanted to ram it into something after giving up back to back home runs…

The first two weeks of the season dragged on—we had rainouts, injuries, commuter road trips—it seemed like the season would go on forever.  Then we took a trip down south to play
Lake Elsinore and High Desert, hit Bakersfield on the way back up, and the games flew by until the All-Star Break.  At the break, we all got a few days off (except the guys who went out to Virginia to play in the all-star game), and came back feeling good and ready to finish the season out.  The problem was, we were only halfway through.  July took forever.  We didn’t have many road trips, but the ones we took were to Visalia (where it was 119 degrees before one game, with no AC in the clubhouse and only scalding hot water in the showers) and Bakersfield.  We’d then come home and split series with Stockton and Modesto, alternating between home and away games.  We were playing well, but the days wore on everyone.  August picked up, and then the last two weeks of the season felt like two days.  Before anyone really realized it, we were packing up and taking off.

So we’re all done.  Municipal Stadium in San Jose is quiet now, and most of the vendors, interns, mascots, and bar-b-que crew have found new jobs or are back in school.  And for the players, too, life is quieter.  Nobody will hound us for autographs, ask for balls, or care what we’re doing every night from 7 to 10 pm.  Until we all come back next March, we fade back into lives of normalcy.  Like the old timers who all came back and played on the ‘Field of Dreams’ in that great movie, at the end we all sort of walk into the cornfield, slapping each other on the back, laughing and thinking about next year.  Because in everyone’s mind, next year means “I’ll hit .350 with 100 RBIs and move up to Fresno.”  Or “Next year they want me to be a closer so I’ll do well and get a September call-up to the big leagues.”  Next year is all that matters.

It took about 6 months, but I’ve figured out how to use the photo function on the blog, and put a few pictures in.  There are a couple more, which I’ll do later because it’s late and uploading takes a while. 

To pull them up, click on ‘Some Pictures’ under the ‘Albums’ list on the right.

We’re two deep in our first playoff series—locked up with
Visalia at 1-1.  We leave tomorrow morning for their place.  I think this will be the 5^th time we’ve been down there, which means it’s maybe our 33^rd game against them this year?  After playing us so many times, their coaches know our hitters pretty well—we had two hits tonight.  Both were home runs, but I feel like their guys have our guys pretty nailed down.  That being said, we know who hits well in their lineup and where not to throw the ball to each hitter.  At this point in the season, it really becomes a battle to see who messes up and misses a spot first.  They had two home runs as well, and only two other hits.

We were talking in the bullpen today about why our stands were looking thin today.  It seemed like nobody in San Jose knew we were playing, much less in the heat of a playoff battle for the Northern Division Title (haha…no really).  Anyway, I came up with a theory, called the “Seasonal Sports Theorem.”  I don’t know the difference between a ‘theory’ and a ‘theorem,’ but the latter sounds a whole lot cooler, so we’ll use it instead.

The Seasonal Sports Theorem first assumes that there are only two major American sports:  football and baseball.  Both basketball and hockey are secondary, but still play a role.  Both football and baseball are able to coexist because they respect each other’s seasons—baseball starts in March with Spring Training, and ends in October, before football season heats up.  NFL Sundays start in September and culminate in a now early-February Super Bowl, just in time for pitchers and catchers to report around Valentine’s Day.  It is a living, breathing, symbiotic relationship—and should it fall apart, would surely cause a disruption in the space time continuum.  Whatever that is.

So, in short (people always use ‘in short’ after a long explanation of something…why is that?), nobody was at the game today because we are heading into ‘football’ time.  People feel the weather getting colder, and except for New York and Boston, where they are used to watching baseball in overcoats, most places have mentally switched from baseball mode to football mode.  Look at media coverage—sure, there are wild card races and stuff, but most of it on the weekends is football.  The major exception is the ALCS, NLCS, and the World Series, when sports fans must budget their time—I don’t know how I’ll be able to manage three fantasy football teams, keep track of the Skins, AND pay attention to the Series.

Of course, throwing a wrench in this theory are places like Miami (Dolphins and Marlins), and Southern California (Padres, Angels and D&d%e$rs (it’s a curse word up here I think), and the SD Chargers too), and other places where the weather doesn’t really change.  They find ways to remind people of the seasons, though (I walked through this outdoor mall called “The Grove” in West LA last year in December, and although it was 65 degrees and people were in shorts, they had snowflakes up on lampposts to remind customers that in other places, snow falls during winter).  I don’t know.

All things being equal, people start to focus more on football once September hits.  See what you think.  When you show up to work tomorrow and someone asks about ‘the game’ this weekend, he’s not talking about the no hitter Anibal Sanchez threw the other night for the Marlins—he’s talking about football.  I’ll bet on it.

As you flip through the TVs channels this weekend, watching college football and NFL previews, remember that there is still some great baseball being played in minor league stadiums around the country.  The summer’s not over yet!

Be that as it may,  tomorrow is the last game of the regular season.  Tomorrow will be the 140^th we stand listening to the National Anthem before the game, the 140^th time some lucky kid gets to yell out ‘play ball’ before the game, and the 140^th time we sit out in the bullpen and pontificate on the finer points of life.

140 is a lot of games.  We’ve been playing since April.  Since April 6, we’ve had 11 days off, counting the all-star break.  Without the break, it’s only 8.  So with the exception of a few rainouts early on and 11 off days, we’ve played baseball every night since early spring.  It’s late summer now.

Much has changed.  We’ve had an especially ‘transient’ team this year—guys moving up and down, and people getting hurt.  It sort of hacks away at the team’s identity, but I think we got good guys and have a good core of players from the beginning.  

Personally, I think a few things about me change throughout the season.  After going through two full seasons, I’ve noticed some weird stuff that changes about me as the season goes on.  Let’s make another numbered list.

1. I get a lot worse at writing, and a lot better at talking.  During the season, I’m always talking to other guys during games, with my roommate at home, or in the clubhouse.  So it becomes easier to speak and express myself.  My writing, however, (and I’ve looked back at previous blog posts—just look at how many times I use the word ‘weird’ in this post…hello?!) suffers.  Starting work in the fall usually helps me get back in writing shape, but sitting in a cube all day not speaking to anyone makes talking harder too.  Is that weird?
2. I shower more and more frequently.  At this point, I take like three showers a day.  In the morning, after the gym, after running at the field but before the game, then after the game again.  I’m not saying that I live in filth in the off-season, but my showering schedule changes…
3. Relating to (no—talking at all to) girls gets awkward.  Again—playing baseball, you’re always around guys, so when you’re forced to interact with the ‘fairer’ sex, it gets awkward.  During the season, Ellen is extremely forgiving as I stumble through weird stories about the team during the season.  Remember—140 games—11 off days.  I live with guys.
4. I think I wrote a post about this before, but you start to feel when games are going to turn, or when weird stuff is going to happen on the field.  Last night we played 16 innings, and everyone in the bullpen knew we were in for a long game around the 5^th inning.  I don’t know why, but we were sure we’d be there forever.  Watching that many games, you see that games turn on several key 5 to 10 minute stretches over 9 innings—a couple hits strung together, or a pitcher striking out the side in a key late inning.
5. Signing autographs feels normal.  I don’t care what happens, but at the beginning of each season, I’ve felt really weird about just signing people’s belongings.  Now it’s like, “Hey, your glove?  Cool.  A car wash advertisement?  No problem.  Your neck?  Sure, bud.”  Kinda weird, again, but now it’s standard operating procedure.

Anyway, it’s coming down to the wire.  The playoffs start next Friday, where we’ll face either
Visalia or Stockton (hopefully Stockton since Visalia has OWNED us lately) in a five game series for the Northern Division title.

Go Giants.

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.