Daily Archives: January 23, 2004

Here is the second excerpt I promised from Geoffrey Stokes’ “Pinstripe Pandemonium.” This one involves hitting, and there was nobody on those old Yankee teams who thought, taught, talked, and lived hitting like Lou Pinella. (One of the greatest images I have of Pinella–and I don’t remember where I first read this–is of him standing up in his wife’s bed in the middle of the night, looking in the mirror, practicing his stance. I wonder if a cigarette was ever dangling from his lips as he inspected his form.) So without further ado, here is Sweet Lou:

In this league at least, the really successful hitters guess a lot. I know that once I’ve seen a pitcher three or four times–certainly once I’ve seen him for three or four games–I have a pretty good idea what he’s going to do in certain situations. That’s why a batter loves to see the count at two-and-oh or three-and-one. You know the guy out there’s gotta throw it over the plate, so you zone the ball. You decide ahead of time where he’s gonna put it–low, high, inside, outside–and what kind of pitch he’s going to throw, and you narrow your strike zone to that pitch. If it’s somewhere else, let it go by; he’s still gotta give you one or two more chances to hit the ball. But if it’s there, you’re ready for it. That’s when you get your extra-base hits, and that’s when you get pitchers in trouble, because once you’re on base, he’s got to pitch a little differently. He doesn’t want the big inning, so he’s going to pitch a little more cautiously. What you’ve done is you’ve taken some options away, made him a little more predictable, and if he gets behind the next batter, then he’s really in trouble.

There are a lot of good pitchers in the league–there aren’t any bad ones, that’s for sure–but there’s only a handful of great ones. Those are the guys who can either challenge you and get away with it–put it right in your zone and dare you to hit it–or the ones who consisntenly outguess you, who always have you lookin’ at the three-and-one strike. But even with them, you’ve gotta make your own guess and get ready for a ball in your zone, because once or twice a game, even those guys are gonna lose their rhythm or try to do too much with a ball, and if you’re not ready, that’s a real lost opportunity. The only real difference between the good pitchers and the great ones is that the great ones don’t yield to the situation around them. They’re kind of self-contained, and they’re gonna make you hit their pitch, not yours.

End of lesson. Thank you Mr. Stokes and Mr. Lou. Pitchers and catchers in three weeks.

Two years ago I roped my cousin Gabe into an idea I had for a book. He’s a Mets fan and of course, I root for the Yanks. We started to exchange e-mails during the 2001 season and I thought it would be great to compile a book of e-mails exchanged between a Met and Yankee fan over the course of a season. Well, I don’t know how good the book would have been, but by the middle of the summer in 2002, we realized it wasn’t going to fly.

The best thing that came out of the experience–other than being treated to Gabe’s almost daily e-mails–was that I got in the habit of writing about baseball every day. And that set me up to eventually start the blog you are now reading (incidentally, Gabe is editing the Curt Flood book I’m writing for Young Adults).

I really like the idea of a correspondence between a Met and Yankee fan, and now, there is a blog devoted to such an endeavor, called “Yankees, Mets and the Rest.” Head on over and see what Scott and Vinny have in store for us.

I don’t know if you’ve been over to Jay Jaffe’s site, The Futility Infielder this week, but if you haven’t, and are interested in the pending sale of the Los Angeles Dodgers, not to mention other Bud Selig-related items, make some time this weekend and check out the great work Jay has been doing.

Speaking of his Budness, Rob Neyer has an entertaining article that briefly touches on the legacy of all the baseball commisioners, from Landis to Selig.

And to finish off the subject of yesterday’s tryouts by El Duque and Maels Rodriguez, peep this article from The Miami Herald, as well as reports by Will Carroll and Bryan Smith. For what it’s worth, El Duque was one of my favorite Yankees ever. Even if he is broken-down and ornery, I sure would be happy to see him back, for the entertainment value alone. I don’t know if it makes good baseball sense, but since when do I have good baseball sense? I just want to see Posada and Duque drive each other nuts again.

As the sporting world awaits the Super Bowl, baseball news is squarely fixed on the back-burner. That will start to change in a few weeks, but for now, good baseball stories are hard to come by. (I know you are feelin’ my pain.) So I thought I’d share a couple of excerpts with you from a slept-on little gem called “Pinstripe Pandemonium.” Written by Geoffrey Stokes, a reporter from The Villiage Voice, the book follows the Bronx Bombers throughout the 1983 season. It is a slim, but shrewdly observed, and well-written book.

The Hall of Fame voters recently passed Goose Gossage over once again, but many Baseballists—a nifty phrase coined by Jay Jaffe—feel that if any reliever is qualified for induction, it is Gossage. Described by Stokes as “curiously shy,” the Colorado native talked about the stress that accompanies being a closer:

“Sometimes, after a bad loss, I’m amazed that I can go out there the next day and do anything at all. But fortunately,” he grinened, “there’s this gorilla in me that just takes over.

“Of course,” he added, returning to the subject of rhythm, “when it does, somebody’s gotta keep it on a leash. I don’t care how fast you throw; if you throw nothing but fastballs, there are hitters in this league that are gonna catch up to you. Somone’s gotta slow me down.

“But that’s hard for a cather to do. If I’m gonna get beat, I want to get beat on my best pitch, not on some off-speed thing that’s just supposed to set the fastball up. But what happens is, I get out there, and I throw a ball at ninety-five miles an hour easy, so I just gather up my strength and try humming the sombitch at a hundred. I’m out there, and I feel that with just a little more effort, I could throw the sucker right through the catcher–and maybe halfway through the umpire, too.

“The thing is, it doesn’t go as fast, ’cause my asshole’s tight. It’s pretty hard to throw a ball with one hand around your throat. And when that happens, even before everybody’s turning around to watch the fuckin’ home run, it affects the team. It’s like your kids; when they see fear in your face, they get afraid too, even if they don’t know why. In the clubhouse of at the hotel, everbody’s got his own personality. But when I’m out there with runners on second and third, one out, and a one-run lead, I’m responsible for the whole team.”

Gossage has become an arch-type for a certain kind of closer: snarling, physically imposing, flame-throwing. Dennis Eckersley, a control expert, who specialized in taunting and humiliating his opponent, is another. And now, so is Mariano Rivera, master of the single pitch, who is so cool that it barely looks like he’s awake out there sometimes. But no matter the personality, all succesful closers thrive off the responsibility of having the game in their hands. Gossage concludes:

“The only thing about [closing] is you can’t take it home with you. It’s not like I’m a starter and I have to think about it for five days, have to spend my time saying ‘Damn, that was a stupid pitch.’ Except for the playoffs or the Series, there’s always tomorrow. You know, it’s like hunting. ‘Some days you eat the bear, some days the bear eats you.'”

What’s that some sort of Eastern Philosophy? Far from it.

Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez threw 35 pitches in front of a group of scouts yesterday at the University of Miami. The headline in The Times today reads, “Hernandez’s Workout Hard to Rate,” which seems appropriate because so much about El Duque has always been hard to figure. The scouts were divided on what they saw. According to Charlie Nobles in The Times:

[El Duque’s] less-than-inspiring velocity left some teams wondering how to rate him.

“It’s tough to evaluate that performance,” said Mark Wiedemaier, a special assistant to the Los Angeles Dodgers’ general manager. “It looked like he was playing catch.”

Al Goldis, the recently hired talent assessor serving as a high-level assistant to Mets General Manager Jim Duquette, chose his words carefully in describing his reaction to Hern