Hitting The Cutoff Man

SI.com’s Joe Lemire had a fun piece the other day about ballplayers’ at-bat music that naturally got me to daydreaming about my own hypothetical walkup tune for my professional baseball career. It’s a no-doubter for me:



Just one great song in a brilliant catalogue, which is why yesterday’s news is such a disappointment.

But this is a baseball blog, not a music blog, so in honor of The White Stripes, here is a little something on duos in baseball.

Duos in history
There are so many good ones. Gehrig and Ruth. Koufax and Drysdale. Mays and McCovey. Trammell and Whitaker. Bagwell and Biggio. Those are just a handful. And then there were the pairs whose actions went above and beyond the game, like Pee Wee Reese and Jackie Robinson.

That new/old duo down in Florida
The Rays recently signed former Red Sox Johnny Damon and Manny Ramirez. You may remember them from such hits as, “Unnecessary but oh-so-awesome diving cutoff of a throw from left field.” Their introductory press conference indicated this could be a fun year to follow the Rays, for reasons other than the AL East pennant race.

The duo that makes the mute button your best friend
There are lots of terrible baseball announcers out there, but there is something special about Joe Buck’s mayonnaisesque style combined with Tim McCarver’s complete lack of insight and special ability to talk to you like this is your first baseball game.



The double duo
The 1-2 starting rotation punch is a valued commodity, and the Phillies got one at the 2009 trade deadline when they acquired Cliff Lee to pair with Cole Hamels. Then in the offseason they changed duos, swapping Lee for Roy Halladay. The duo became a trio at the 2010 deadline with the acquisition of Roy Oswalt, and then in this offseason, the team resigned Lee as a free agent. Most franchises would be thrilled to have a duo made up of any two of those four pitchers, but the Phillies don’t have to chose. Much has been made about where this rotation will stack up historically, and it’s certainly one of the big storylines of the upcoming season.

The duo that thankfully does not exist
Vin Scully and …. anyone else. The one-man broadcast booth is a thing of the past, but fortunately not in LA, where Scully continues to be the best. And he doesn’t need some mouth-breathing former player to sit next to him reliving his glory days and criticizing the guys today for not being “gamers.”

The duo that should be readily available in every baseball stadium
There are certain distasteful truths you must accept when attending a baseball game. You are going to have to take out a second mortgage if you want to buy a beer. At some point, the PA is going to start blasting Ke$ha or some other form of lyrical diarrhea. There might be some idiot behind you yelling in your ear, and he might even blow chunks all over you. I don’t like it, obviously, but it’s the price of spending a day at the ballpark. But I don’t think it’s too much to ask for every stadium to carry grilled Hebrew National hot dogs (the best) and deli-style brown mustard (not that neon yellow crap). If I’ve got a quality, appropriately condiment-topped meal, I can deal with everything else -- except maybe the vomiting.

The most entertaining duo in baseball
This is a tie between Ozzie Guillen and a microphone, Ozzie Guillen and a video camera, and Ozzie Guillen and a tape recorder.

A duo that doesn’t make much sense
It’s a famous one from the famous song that happens during every seventh-inning stretch. But why do you say, “Buy me some peanuts and cracker jack,” when cracker jack already include peanuts? Why would you want both? This has always puzzled me.

The duo that is a godsend for any baseball fan
An RSS feed and Twitter. No more having to filter through junk looking for pearls of baseball wisdom. Technology gives the baseball hype a needle of the pure stuff straight into the veins.

Duo that needs to shut up and go away The McCourts. We’ll let the Stripes speak for Los Angeles … play ‘em out, guys.



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So I finally got around to seeing Inception. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but since this isn't a movie blog, I'll leave an in-depth review to the professionals.

For anyone who doesn't know, the movie's title refers to the act (a critical plot point) of planting an idea deep within a person's subconscious, through dream manipulation. The goal is to have the person then produce that idea in a seemingly natural way, as if it is their own.

If I somehow came into possession of such an ability, like Leonardo DiCaprio's Dom Cobb, I probably would turn it on something closer to my heart than corporate espionage. If you haven't guessed already, that would be baseball. Let's face it -- there are some concepts in baseball that people within the game cannot seem to get through their skulls, no matter how logical. But what if, with your cliched heist team, you could invade the dreams of GMs, managers, writers, etc., and plant the seed that would make them realize (for example) that wins are a terrible way of evaluating pitcher performance? It wouldn't be as cool as, say, fighting a dude in an anti-gravity hotel hallway. But it would still be satisfying.

So everyone sit back, relax and make sure your totems are handy. Here is our dossier with a list of preliminary objectives:

Target: Producers at media outlets, such as MLB Network
Idea: Let's stop giving a pitcher's stats against a specific opposing team as if that's important information.
Background: I watch MLB Network a lot, and I love it. For one thing, there is 100 percent less John Kruk. On the other hand, there is 100 percent more Dan Plesac, but life is full of trade-offs. Anyway, in reference to a game the next day, you often the host say something like, "Freddy Garcia has owned the Tigers in his career, compiling an 18-6 mark against them." While true, this tells us almost nothing about what we can expect from Garcia in this start. This is not difficult to grasp. For one thing, Garcia in 2010 is a different pitcher than in any other year of his career. For another thing, rosters change so much these days that the Tigers as we know them now are wildly different from the Tigers even a few years ago. The Tigers of April 28, 1999, (Garcia's first career start against Detroit) featured no players still with the organization and only one (Brad Ausmus) who is still even an active MLB player. Even if the roster was the same, all of the Detroit players would be totally different than they were in 1999 anyways. So considering that game as part of a group of games through which to evaluate the White Sox' chances against the Tigers on Thursday is insane. And in most cases when people do this, the sample size of innings is small enough to be largely meaningless. Let's save our breath.

Target: Baseball fans
Idea: "The Wave" is dumb.
Background: There are many ways to be entertained, cheer and support your team at a baseball game. The Wave is one of the worst. It has no meaning and only serves to annoy when it comes around just as a pitch is being thrown, leaving you with the choice to either miss the action or take part in a ridiculous ritual just so you can see. Figure out some other way to achieve whatever it is The Wave does for you.

Target: Albert Pujols
Idea: I should remain with the St. Louis Cardinals for the rest of my career, in return for a fair salary that is affordable for the team without preventing its front office from acquiring other talented players.
Background: Pujols' contract expires after this season (St. Louis holds a 2011 team option for $16 million, which even a complete lunatic would exercise). If he does not sign a new deal with the Cards, a certain blogger who occasionally uses popular movies as a gimmick for posts might throw himself off a bridge. He undoubtedly wouldn't be the only one.

There are so many other potential targets for inception out there: Frank and Jamie McCourt, any number of mostly incompetent general managers, people in charge of the music and concessions at stadiums, members of the Baseball Writers Association of America who base their MVP voting largely on RBI totals, and announcers who use the term "fisted" to describe a weak hit off the handle of a bat. But an architect can design only so many realistic dreamscapes at a time, so we'll have to pace ourselves.

In the meantime, any other suggestions?

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On Oct. 2, 2004, I experienced one of the most thrilling moments I've been a part of in years of attending sporting events.

That was the afternoon, on the second-to-last day of the regular season, that Steve Finley hit a walkoff grand slam that lifted the Dodgers to a victory over the Giants and allowed them to clinch their first playoff berth in eight years.

Little did I know that the enormous homer that left Dodger Stadium rocking was the result of a mystical force known as "V Energy."

According to this terrific article by Bill Shaikin of the Los Angeles Times, owners Frank and Jamie McCourt hired a Russian physicist named Vladimir Shpunt to sit at his home in the Boston area, watch Dodgers games on TV and send positive energy their way. Shpunt apparently held this position for five years, probably making at least six figures per year.

First of all, I would strongly encourage you to read the whole article, because it is truly bizarre. But here is a taste:

Shpunt lives in suburban Boston, in a community he insisted not be named. He sits uneasily for an interview, joined by his wife Sofya and Barry Cohen, an executive leadership consultant who worked with the McCourts and who introduced Shpunt to Jamie.

Shpunt is wary of publicity, disappointed in the loss of his anonymity, concerned about being caricatured. He speaks reluctantly, in halting English, about a commitment to the Dodgers that he said often required up to four hours a day.

"It's very big work. My blood pressure may be 200," Shpunt said, with a hint of a smile. "I like this team to win."

Shpunt could not transform a bad team into a good one, Cohen said, but his energy could increase the chance of winning by 10% to 15%.

"The team has some level of capacity," Cohen said. "What we're talking about is optimizing that capacity."