Casey at the Bat - Release 2.0

"Casey at the Bat" was always my favorite poem as a youngster, but now I am beginning to wonder why. In trying to memorize the baseball poem as a mental exercise, I've had occasion to read it over several times as an adult, and I can only shake my head in disappointment.

Consider this: Mudville's opponent was leading 4-3 in the ninth inning. After two outs ("...when Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the same"), Casey's team then suddenly placed runners at second base and third base ("There was Jimmy safe at second and Flynn a-hugging third").

With the tying and winning runs already in scoring position, two outs, and first base open, why on earth would the opponent pitch to Casey? Obviously, they would not: they would walk Casey intentionally and take their chances with the next (and presumably weaker) hitter. Of course, that might not make for a very interesting poem.

At the very least, the poem needs to be re-written with Casey as the sixth batter in the inning, not the fifth. The batter immediately ahead of Casey then needs to get hit by a pitch or draw a base on balls to load the bases with two outs. Only then would the opponent have to pitch to Casey in a bases loaded, two-out, all-or-nothing, do-or-die situation.

As it stands, "Casey at the Bat" simply has no credibility with regard to baseball strategy. Alas: another childhood icon shattered.

Any aspiring poets out there able to compose some extra lines? The following is my first attempt at a proposed new stanza to be inserted between verses 4 and 5:

"But wait! There's more!" as the TV ads would say.
There's one more noxious batter coming into play.
But contemplating Casey, the pitcher lost control.
He plunked that batter with a pitch and cringed within his soul.

Move over, Ernest Lawrence Thayer.

O Come, All Ye Faithful

As a militant agnostic (it must be true: it says so on my Facebook profile), I have always been wary of anyone who wears their religion on their sleeves. Allow me to quote one of my favorite writers (namely, myself) from a previous blog article that I wrote in April 2010:

Ardent religionists have perpetrated as much evil as any other class of miscreant. From the Crusades to the Inquisition to the Protestant-Catholic strife in Northern Ireland to Al-Qaeda, religious extremism has wreaked havoc throughout history. We in the United States are certainly not exempt: the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, and misguided individuals like Timothy McVeigh all claimed to be "doing God’s work."

Upon further reflection, however, I have come to a painful realization: I, too, am a religionist. The Green Bay Packers are in fact my religion. Consider the following:

• We have a patron saint: St. Vincent, as in Vincent Thomas Lombardi.
  
• We have a sacred shrine: our Mecca, if you will, located at 1265 Lombardi Avenue in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Its Anglicized name is Lambeau Field. Just as with Muslims, all true fans must make a pilgrimage to that shrine least once in their lives.
  
• We have a doctrinal theology: namely, "Run to Daylight."
  
• We have 11 disciples of that doctrine, not Christianity's 12, but that's only because football rules allow only 11 offensive players on the field at any one time. Just think how the course of religious history might have changed if Judas Iscariot had been excluded from supper by a similar 11-man rule.
  
• We had a wayward prodigal son who was forgiven his sins and ultimately welcomed home: Paul Hornung, who was suspended for the 1963 season for gambling but resumed playing in 1964.
  
• We had our own traitorous Judas Iscariot aka Brett Favre, who betrayed Packer nation by cavorting with arch-rival satans, the Minnesota Vikings. Favre then descended into purgatory when his refusal to cooperate prolonged the league's investigation into his lustful misdeeds just long enough so that his eventual (supposed) retirement rendered a suspension moot.
  
• Like almost every religion, we dress in special garments on Sundays before visiting our places of worship. Unfortunately, blasphemous worshipers in several other major cities like Detroit, Minneapolis, and especially Chicago, are misguided heathens who worship false gods and idols in the form of Lions, Viking Norsemen, and Bears. And, of course, everyone would do well to heed Willie Nelson's fateful warning: "Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be Cowboys."
  

As you can see, we do have all of the trappings of a formal religion. On the other hand, our religion has never executed anyone; never physically tortured anyone (I exclude the agony inflicted on Packer fans themselves by a starvation diet of just five winning seasons while roaming the desert wastelands during the 25-year-period from 1968 to 1992—and one of those winning seasons ocurred during the strike-shortened winter of 1982); and never started a major war. The only neighborhood invasions we have committed were to fill stadiums (stadia?) on road games to the point of having almost as many fans present as the home team's own fans. And the only territorial claim we have ever made is the following:

Q: What separates the best team in the NFL from all of the other teams?

A: The Wisconsin border.

So, there you have it: it turns out that I am a religionist after all. And though I and my fellow believers are as ardent as those of any other religion, my religion remains far more innocuous than most.

In that spirit of religious tolerance, one final note to the apostates who worship any team with the audacity to defeat the Packers in the upcoming playoffs: you may take comfort in the fact that there will be no fatwa issued—at least, not until after the Super Bowl.

Journalistic Excess

In an article in the 9 June 2010 edition the Chester [Virginia] Village News, sports columnist John Hall wrote the following:

The NBA is famous for its lottery busts, as well. Sam Bowie was quickly out of basketball, but not before the Portland Trailblazers chose him over the great Michael Jordan in 1984.

I was mildly surprised by that example because I vaguely recalled Sam Bowie as a fairly adequate big man for several years, so I looked up his career statistics on Basketball-Reference.com.

It turns out that Sam Bowie averaged a solid 7.5 rebounds and 10.9 points per game over a ten-year NBA career. Those statistics certainly do not rise to the level of a superstar like Michael Jordan, but they far exceed any reasonable person's definition of a "lottery bust." I would also contend that surviving the rigors of the NBA for ten years hardly qualifies as being "quickly out of basketball."

This is rhetorical excess at best, and shoddy journalism at worst. Mr. Hall's apparent ignorance led him to mistakenly disparage a solid if not spectacular player. Mr. Hall's basic premise—that number 1 draft selections do not always meet expectations—might be correct, but that does not in any way justify denigrating a decent player in such harsh terms.

Mr. Hall has never before come across as a mean-spirited person. In this case, however, he has clearly dropped the ball. Or perhaps he merely stepped out of bounds. Feel free to choose your own sports metaphor.

Begone, Human Element

The world of baseball is still buzzing over the bad call at first base by umpire Jim Joyce that cost pitcher Armando Galarraga of the Detroit Tigers a perfect game on 2 June 2010. We should all commend Mr. Joyce for his forthright honesty in quickly admitting his monumental mistake. Even more noteworthy is the exemplary class and dignity with which Mr. Galarraga responded.

What trips my chain, however, is the reason cited by numerous players and managers to explain why major league baseball (MLB) should not expand instant replay beyond present guidelines (i.e., determining if a fly ball is a home run or not). Almost to a man, they invariably state that the "human element" is an inextricable part of baseball.

Oh, please. Results on the field should be determined by player performance, not officiating blunders. On the day in question, the pitcher was perfect, but the umpire was not. There is no justice in penalizing players for the mistakes of umpires.

If there were a cost-free system that could guarantee correct calls 100% of the time, you can bet that MLB would adopt such a system in a heartbeat, and rightfully so. The human element involving players is indeed unavoidable and sometimes even grimly fascinating. However, the fate of players should not be determined by unrelated external forces like umpiring foibles. The human element with regard to umpiring should be minimized or eliminated altogether whenever possible. Expanded instant replay is a reasonable means to that end.

The only legitimate issue is what price people are willing to pay to make the correct calls, particularly if they might affect the outcome of a playoff or a World Series game. Mr. Joyce has been circumspect in his public statements about leaving it up to the commissioner's office to decide on any rule changes governing instant replay. However, given his obvious distress at having made the wrong call, I strongly suspect that Mr. Joyce would have welcomed the opportunity to pause an additional 60 or 90 seconds to review TV replays and insure the correct call.

You know that Mr. Galarraga would have welcomed that.

Double Play: Baseball Classic & Pop Psychology

I do not usually take kindly to blog sites that fill their pages with a virtually unlimited quantity of really large photos. Those sites take seemingly forever to load, so I almost always bypass them. However, I am departing from my usual practice of no photos for this one singular exception.

I stumbled on this marvelous rare photo of a young Henry Aaron at bat in an empty stadium. It is exceptional not only because of the subject (my favorite athlete of all time, along with Sandy Koufax) but because it is an electronic color image rare for that era (the late 1950s or early 1960s) and because the original image is large enough (4117 x 4077 pixels) to crop for an exact fit to any possible computer screen dimension. I have collected over 1,200 baseball wallpaper images and over 19,000 wallpaper images overall, but this became my instant favorite. That is why I chose to post it — that, and because I was looking for an excuse to see how both Wordpress and Blogger handle imported images.

By the way, those of you who know our family history might think that I became a fan of both the Milwaukee Braves/Milwaukee Brewers and the Green Bay Packers because we lived in Madison, Wisconsin for over three years when I was a youngster. Well, you would be wrong.

The real reason is much simpler. Soon after we moved to our first apartment in Wilmington, Delaware, I walked into the living room one day to discover my father watching a baseball game on television. Now, my father almost never watched baseball on TV, so I asked him who was playing. It so happened that he was watching either the 1957 or 1958 World Series between the New York Yankees and the Milwaukee Braves. I then asked for whom he was rooting, and he — a native New Yorker born in the Bronx — naturally answered, The Yankees. Contrarian that I was, even at that young age (and, of course, still am today), I became an instant fan of the Milwaukee Braves. I shudder to think what would have happened had the Yankees been playing, say, the Chicago Cubs!

Fittingly enough, the same thing happened three or four years later. I again walked through the living room one day when lo and behold: I encountered my father watching a football game on TV. I was even more surprised this time because my father watched football even less often than he watched baseball. On this occasion, he was watching the 1961 NFL championship game between the New York Giants and the Green Bay Packers. I again asked for whom he was rooting, and he naturally replied, The Giants. Voilà! I instantly became a Green Bay Packers fan. Once again, the possibility that under different circumstances I might have become a Chicago Bears fan makes be nauseous even to contemplate.

So, for all of you amateur psychologists out there, have fun with this one...