The waist land

Jim Duquette remembers Dotel as an engaging kid with the most limber arm he had ever seen.

“I remember going down to the Dominican Republic with Eddy Toledo, the scout who signed him,” said Duquette, a Mets minor league executive at the time. When they met Dotel, Toledo asked him to show Duquette something. Dotel locked his hands behind his back and rotated his arms completely over his head to his waist, and back again.

“I’d never seen that before,” Duquette said. “It was like watching someone turn his head in a complete circle.” —NYT

(via Jane)

Winning streak

"When the Tigers' 12-game winning streak ended on Thursday, there was actually an air of relief in their clubhouse. That's because manager Jim Leyland and batting coach Lloyd McClendon were finally able to change their underwear. Superstition has always been a big part of baseball, but Leyland and McClendon may have taken it a little too far when they elected not to change their underwear as long as the Tigers kept on winning." (Source unknown)

(Via Jane)

Oh Kei

He has made some friends in New York, but not many, he said. In the five years he has maintained an online diary, he has rarely mentioned another person. The only photo on his personal blog is a picture of himself, jogging alone. —Bill Pennington, "Kei Igawa: The Lost Yankee," NYT

For whom the Ellsbury tolls

Nicknames that you can read all about on Baseball Reference but almost certainly never hear or use.
• Jacoby Ellsbury: Tacoby Bellsbury
Apparent origin: In 2007, Ellsbury stole a base during the World Series, winning a free taco for everybody in America who isn’t afraid to eat Taco Bell. A Boston Globe reader named Jeff Dockum submitted the nickname on Boston.com.
Frequency of use in respectable press: Nine instances on LexisNexis, most recently in July 2009."
—The Score

(via Jane)

Annals of punctuation

Bobby Valentine does air quotes with single fingers.



What does this mean?!? Is he saying that what he is quoting is a quote within a quote — and that his entire production of speech, everything he says, already has quote marks around it? Does he start the day with an open quotation mark, then end the day with a closed quotation mark, and in between he has to use single quotes for distinction? Probably, right.

—Getting Blanked

(Via Jane)

The pistachio prescription

Real press release:

This season, the folks at Paramount have put their “Wonderful Pistachios” in 11 ballparks, including Petco (Padres), Fenway (Red Sox), Citi (Mets), Citizens Bank (Phillies), Great American (Reds) and Dodger Stadium.

“A baseball fan is used to having a nut in his or her hand,” said Dominic Engels, vice president of global marketing for Paramount. “We’re presenting them with the pistachio, which they might not have thought of before.”

(From Jane)

"His noggin is more than two feet around"

Throughout his 14 years as a catcher in organized ball, [Earl] Bochy wore the same batting and catching helmets. "I had to," he says. "None of the teams I played for carried my size." Both helmets were specially made in 1975, his first year in A ball with the Covington Astros. The batting lid was so huge that when he made a game-winning hit late in the '86 season, his Padres teammates celebrated by filling it with ice and a six-pack.

"Whenever I got traded or played winter ball, my first priority was always to pack up my helmets," he says. "And before I arrived, I'd usually have to paint them. When I first got them in '75, they were Astros orange. They turned blue when I moved up to Columbus in '76, then back to orange later that summer when I got shipped to Dubuque. They stayed orange until '78, when I got sent back to Columbus. But midway through the season I made the big club in Houston, and they went from blue to orange. I played winter ball in Venezuela, where I had to paint them red. I added a coat of orange before the '79 season with Houston, and a coat of red before the next winter ball season, then two more coats—orange and red—in '80, a coat of blue when I went over to the Mets organization in '81, coats of red and brown when I came to San Diego in '83, and, finally, blue again in '90 when I played for the Orlando Juice in the Senior League. I'm not exactly sure where the helmets are now, but wherever they are, they've gotta be blue."

—Franz Lidz, Endgame, SI.com

(Via Jane)

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In other sports news: RIP Rick Martin:

(Via Arlo)

Los Angeles Times Book Award b/w "On Baseball"

I. The Los Angeles Times Book Award finalists have been announced! Fiction, biography, blah de blah...what you're really wondering is: Which artists are in the running for best graphic novel?! (Once again, I had the honor to judge, along with Douglas Wolk and Joel Rose.)

Here is the tantalizing list:

Graphic Novel
Adam Hines, "Duncan the Wonder Dog: Show One" (Adhouse Books)
Dash Shaw, "Bodyworld" (Pantheon)
Karl Stevens, "The Lodger" (KSA Publishing)
C. Tyler, "You'll Never Know, Book Two: Collateral Damage" (Fantagraphics)
Jim Woodring, "Weathercraft" (Fantagraphics)

Who will win? You need to wait till April 29...

*

(I might post, later, some thoughts on other really strong titles...or maybe just the names...there was a lot of good stuff...)



II. Poets Jane Yeh and H.L. Hix are featured on the site Like Starlings, going mano a mano, poetry-style! Here is the first part of her new poem, "On Baseball":

My mechanics are almost entirely self-taught.
Hawking and strutting, I hit my spots.

Nobody talks to me, they are all afraid.

The nature of perfection is half fluke, half
Fiction, like the mighty appaloosa

That haunts the hometown lake. I'm from one of those states
That never got finished, that just sort of unravelled, like the sound

Speed makes as it blows right past you.

(Jane is a die-hard Yankees fan.)

Weird Wilsons

[C.J.] Wilson is also an expert in finger care, thanks to the occupational hazards of his day job, pitching for the Rangers. Over the last year, Wilson has developed a comprehensive routine to manage a blister on his left middle finger, which opened and started bleeding during the seventh inning of Game 2, knocking him out with the Rangers trailing San Francisco, 1-0.

“The amount of finger care I do on a weekly basis is about 10 to 15 hours,” Wilson said.

On game days, the process involves about 10 steps. It includes shaving the blister, sealing it with medical-grade glue, softening it with Stan’s Rodeo Ointment, filing it down with an emery board and dunking it in a low-pH acidic solution. He also carries around a needle, which he can use to drain the blister between innings if a pool of blood forms. —NYT

(Via Jane)

*

There are the bright orange spikes, for which [Brian Wilson] was fined $1,000 by Major League Baseball because they failed to conform to the standard of being at least 50 percent black. (He brought them up to code with a marker.)

And there is his preternaturally black beard — dyed several shades darker than the rest of his hair with what appears to be industrial-grade shoe polish — which has inspired five Facebook pages and a marketing campaign. The slogan “Fear the Beard” adorns any number of T-shirts in Giants souvenir stands.

It is what is behind the beard, however, that gives Wilson his edge.

He is an entertaining interview: on Jim Rome’s radio show this summer he claimed to be a certified ninja and a mental assassin.[...] —NYT

(Via Theo)

Two great stories in one article

The headline says it all: "Seagulls Help Indians Beat Royals and MLB Catcher Nearly Trampled by Chorizo."

Bonus: "Indians Right Fielder, South Korean native, Shin Soo Choo lined up the middle to Royal’s Center Fielder Coco Crisp..."

(From Jane)

Yer out!

Levi Stahl, proprietor of I've Been Reading Lately, has a piece on poetry and baseball up at the PF site...a warm-up for tonight's World Series opener.

The Omen, Part 557

Also wanted to point out this totally insane piece in the sports section today, "For Yankees, Squirrel's Visit May Be Omen (A Bad One)":

But more significant, perhaps, was the pesky and distracting squirrel that scampered up and down the right-field foul pole during the game and that, according to Norse mythology, just might have foretold that the Yankees will not prevail over the Red Sox this season.

Believe it or not, the squirrel’s actions closely resembled those of Ratatosk, or “gnawing tooth,” a squirrel in Norse mythology that climbed up and down a tree that represented the world. Snorri Sturluson, an Icelandic scholar and poet, recorded the story in his 13th-century work “Prose Edda.”

It goes on! The reporter talks to a Yale professor of Old Norse and Old English (who's also a Yankees fan)...and then:

Are the Red Sox destined to beat the Yankees in the American League Championship Series, as they did in 2004? Is that what the squirrel was trying to tell everybody? Who knows? Right Field Ratatosk was not available for interviews last evening.

* * *

I have to stop posting for a while. (Can you tell that this week I started drinking coffee again?!) Next week, the Dizzies will be renamed "My thoughts on picking up the newspaper this morning."

Framing the face of the umpire

Our baseball correspondent Jane sends us some more odd news:

The Mississippi Braves manager [Wellman] went wild Friday during his team's 7-6 loss at Chattanooga. His tirade took him on a tour of the diamond as he covered home plate with dirt, threw a base and crawled on his belly...Wellman came storming out of the dugout after the plate umpire ejected pitcher Kelvin Villa for apparently using a foreign substance.

Wellman threw his hat, then began shouting and framing the face of the umpire with his hands about 6 inches apart.

After that, he got down on one knee, piled dirt on home plate and used a finger to outline the shape of the plate. He stalked to third base, pulled up the bag and walked toward second, then tossed third base into the outfield.

Then he dropped on his belly and pantomimed a military crawl to the edge of pitcher's mound, where he picked up the rosin bag. He pretended it was a grenade, pulled an imaginary pin with his teeth and launched it toward the plate umpire, hitting his left foot.

Wellman motioned that he was ejecting the umpire, picked up second base, walked into the outfield and picked up the bag he'd tossed. He walked toward the outfield gate with both bases.

(The YouTube clip is pretty entertaining...)

Coming soon—an extract from a "baseballers behaving badly" book I wrote some years back!

Obsess completely

More baseball weirdness from Jane:

Attention to detail to the Nth degree, finding comfort in neatness, straight lines, symmetry and routine or "being anal" is pervasive in the game. From Blue Jays shortstop John McDonald repeatedly straightening the remaining cards in a deck during clubhouse game of hearts to the visiting clubhouse attendant at Chase Field refilling a cooler when only one bottle had been removed so as to restore symmetry -- anal-retentive behavior is everywhere.

Magazines and newspapers resting atop a counter in the same Chase clubhouse are not merely resting, they are arranged. The top two inches of five copies of the Arizona Republic are displayed. USA Today and other periodicals lie next to them as if glued in place. God forbid someone open one and disturb the symmetry -- and the people responsible for it.