Earlier this offseason, Melvin Emanuel “Bossman Junior” Upton decided to take his talents to Atlanta. Now his brother, Justin Irvin Upton, appears to have done the same. For those of you keeping score, that amounts to two Uptons on the same team. What adventures and/or misadventures will ensue? Stay tuned…
Like the dark and mysterious stranger in a film about a young French woman’s sexual awakening, the reader has by now made love to the video footage provided earlier today by Eno Sarris of myriad Japanese hitters practicing the sacred art of the bat flip.
Now, like the reader of a blog post in which a metaphor is mixed almost immediately after being introduced, the reader finds himself reliving — via his mind’s eye — the ecstasies of that earlier encounter.
Why the mind is a cyclops, we’ll never know. Despite its lack of depth perception, however, it remains one of the best ways to relive ecstasies.
Still, in certain cases, an animated GIF is required. Like this animated GIF of, first, a hitter flipping his bat, and then, second, of a pitcher slamming his glove with Maximum Anger:
“Cincinnati will get baseball’s All-Star Game in 2015”
— USA TODAY
Future All-Star Game Locations:
2016: Baltimore
2017: San Diego
2018: Monterrey
2019: Northern New Jersey
2020: California Island
2021: New Beijing
2022: Old Beijing
2023: Melted North Pole
2024: LOL Tweetville
2025: Moon East
2026: Moon West
2027: !%!
2028: [unintelligible alien squawking sound #416]
2029: [unintelligible alien squawking sound #627]
2030: Miami
Jeff Sullivan wrote a great post — as he is wont to do — about putting Hiroyuki Nakajima in context. He mentioned Nakajima’s bat flip. Carson Cistulli posted it. It was grand.
But then I saw video of Norihiro Nakamura, he of the .051 ISO and the 41 plate appearances for the Dodgers in 2005. Doing this.
Where Nakajima had a sort of panache, maybe with an easy grace, Nakamura is an explosion, a cannonball, a rocket going off. Could just be some sort of coincidence? Many men have bat flips, after all.
Unless…
The author, because he is on nodding terms with danger, has recently re-read T.S. Eliot’s four-part uberpoem — or four-poem book, if you’d prefer — Four Quartets.
Now the author, because he is combination litterateur and issue of Seventeen magazine from 1996, presents the following quiz, in which he invites the reader to discern the difference between the section titles from Eliot’s poem and long-dead base-ballists.
This is an essay about Stan Musial, sort of.
This is not an essay about team fandom. I certainly have thoughts on the matter, and though they apply here somewhat, they aren’t the crux the discussion. Pledging allegiance to a team is an act separate from what I’m discussing, though I may dig into that later in time.
This is not an essay about death. Stan Musial lived to be 92, and while the passing of anyone of note can be seen a tragic or sad, I find little mourning in my heart for a famous person who lived so long. I am more interested in celebrating his life, but again, that is not what this is about.
As I do each night before soiling my bedclothes, I was thinking about what Bud Selig thinks about — and says — when he’s smoking wholesome, nutritious cigarettes.
In particular, what was Bud Selig muttering through his thinly parted, cig-impeded lips at this moment? Doubtless, he was all up in the grill of a cowed underling, but what was he saying? This, it turns out …
Stanley Frank Musial’s ancestors in the Polish peasantry were so used to being trodden on that their very name meant “he had to do it.” His immigrant father slaved away in Rust Belt mills until he was killed, at 58, by their poisonous emissions. As for little Stashu, with his stammer, his four big sisters, and his homemade yarnballs, he grew up to be one of the greatest legends in American sports. He died on Saturday; I found myself turning to YouTube to get a feel for his cultural impact.
I awoke last Saturday to a phosphorescent glow pouring through the windows, the mixture of weak sunlight and stale white fog, a weather grown tired of itself and everything. It was a dead morning, a morning for weak instant coffee and textbooks, the kind Roy Hobbs would see out of a train window, the kind where even a boy in a Bradbury story grows old.
It was on such a sickly January morning that I stared out into the wilderness of my own uncut lawn and thought: “Yes, today. Today is the day. I shall go and carve life out of this lingering low pressure front, and drink from its sap.” I would go, I decided, on a baseball pilgrimage.
I already knew my destination: the old Sick’s Stadium, nestled in the heart of South Seattle. It was the home of the Seattle Rainiers of the Pacific Coast League and, for one magical season, the Seattle Pilots. I took my copy of Ball Four, a camera, a can of Rainier Beer to pour out for my baseball ancestors, and some mittens.
The voyage was a treacherous one, and like the pilgrims of misspelled British sagas of yore, I endured innumerable hardships. I had to scrape the ice off my car windows and got caught at no less than five consecutive red lights. My soul was tested, and I turned from Dearborn Avenue onto Rainier stronger, wiser, and somewhat colder than ever before. The check-cashing places and sausage outlet stores rolled past my vision until finally my destination crept above the horizon.
Sick’s Stadium.
1. Bily Butler
2. Aaron Hil
3. Tod Helton
4. Clif Floyd
5. Adam Dun
6. Brandon Wod
7. Shin-So Cho
8. Aron Bone
[Photo: Actual Crowd @ Rays Game]