Daily Archives: February 25, 2010

Breakfast in Bed, by Mary Cassatt (1897)

Eastward, Ha!  Enter The Cradle of Love.

For John Schulian, Jay Jaffe and Matt B:

I must admit, the Yankees caught me completely off guard when they signed Chan Ho Park Sunday night. I figured their bullpen was pretty much set with the loser of the fifth-starter battle between Joba Chamberlain and Phil Hughes working the eighth inning, Damaso Marte the lefty, David Robertson as the secondary righty, Alfredo Aceves and Chad Gaudin as long/swing men, and Mark Melancon hoping to make his way into the final spot and force the Yankees to bounce Sergio Mitre from the 40-man roster. So where does Park fit?

Toward the top. Park’s 2009 season doesn’t look that impressive on its face because he was awful in seven starts for the Phillies, but after moving to the bullpen, he posted a 2.52 ERA and struck out 52 men in 50 innings. Over the final three months of the season, that ERA shrank to 1.52. Park wasn’t as sharp in the postseason, but one could blame that on the hamstring pull that cost him a month and kept him out of the NLDS. In his career, Park has posted a 3.95 ERA in relief, nearly a half run better than his career mark as a starter, along with an 8.7 K/9. Indeed, though Park signed so late because he was hoping to catch on elsewhere as a starter, it has been his move to the bullpen over the past two seasons that has salvaged his career in his late 30s (he’ll be 37 in early June).

The first Korean-born major leaguer, Park emerged as the Dodgers’ second-best starter (behind Kevin Brown) around the turn of the millennium and hit the free agent market at the age of 28 with a 80-54 career record and a 3.80 career ERA. The Rangers, who had given Alex Rodriguez the biggest contract in major league history the previous year, signed Park to a five-year deal worth $65 million only to watch him completely fall apart.

The move from the pitcher-friendly Dodger Stadium to the homer-happy Ballpark at Arlington did him no favors , but one could have seen that coming (Park’s home ERA during his Dodger years was 3.19, but his road ERA was 4.72). More alarmingly, after averaging 213 2/3 innings a year in his last five seasons in L.A., Park suddenly couldn’t stay healthy.

A hamstring injury limited Park to 25 starts in 2002, and that was the most he would make in any one season for the Rangers. Meanwhile, while his 6.84 home ERA that season would prove to be sadly typical. Park made just 23 more starts for the Rangers over the next two seasons combined due to a back injury which surely contributed to his 5.96 ERA in those outings. Park’s contract quickly proved to be a major albatross for the Rangers, leading some to speculate that it was part of the team’s motivation for shipping Rodriguez to the Bronx in February 2004.

Park finally stayed healthy in 2005 but was no more effective. When the trading deadline came, the soon-to-be-NL-West-champion Padres, perhaps wagering on the effects of their new pitchers’ haven, Petco, took Park and $13 million of his 2006 salary off the Rangers’ hands for the remains of Phil Nevin. Despite the friendlier home environment, Park’s struggles continued. He posted a 5.91 ERA down the stretch in ’05, and made just 21 starts in ’06, missing time when it was discovered that he suffered from an intestinal defect known as Meckel’s diverticulum. When able to pitch, he posted a 5.45 ERA on the road.

With his contract finally expired, Park didn’t find an employer for 2007 until Valentine’s Day. He signed with the Mets, but failed to make the team out of spring training and wound up making just one appearance for the big club, giving up seven runs in four innings in a late-April spot start before being released. The Astros signed him to a minor-league deal, but declined to call him up as he posted a 6.21 ERA and allowed 18 home runs in 15 starts for Triple-A Round Rock of the Pacific Coast League.

Seemingly out of chances, Park went home again in 2008, catching on with the Dodgers as a non-roster invitee on a minor league deal. Having made just five relief appearances over the previous ten seasons, Park made the Dodgers as a reliever and pitched well out of the pen (3.84 ERA), well enough, at least, for the Phillies, who beat Park’s Dodgers in the NLCS in ’08, to sign him to a $2.5 million deal and bring him in as a fifth-starter candidate the next spring.

As stated above, Park was a disaster as a starter for the Phillies, but he continued to gain momentum as a reliever suggesting that, after six years in the wilderness, he has finally found away to recapture the major league success he had in his twenties, doing so in a hitter-friendly home park, no less.

Despite that success, Park isn’t going to take the eighth-inning job away from the fifth-starter loser, but he could well bounce Robertson down a rung. His presence also all but guarantees that Sergio Mitre will not make the roster, which is worth Park’s $1.2 million salary alone. Park, despite his struggles in the Phillies rotation, also gives the Yankees another potential swing man should Gaudin or Aceves, the former of whom is on a non-guaranteed contract like Mitre and the latter of whom has options remaining, struggle. If Park struggles and Melancon continues to dominate at Triple-A, the $1.2 million the Yankees owe Park is small enough that they could eat the remainder.

Ultimately what Park gives the team is another option, one that had a fair amount of success working out of the pen for playoff teams in each of the last two seasons and thus brings a fair amount of upside to the table, but who also came cheap enough to be discarded if he fails to realize that upside, which means there’s very little downside to the deal. Well done.

William Faulkner on the origins of The Sound and the Fury, one of his most acclaimed novels:

It began with a mental picture. I didn’t realize at the time it was symbolical. The picture was of the muddy seat of a little girl’s drawers in a pear tree, where she could see through a window where her grandmother’s funeral was taking place and report what was happening to her brothers on the ground below. By the time I explained who they were and what they were doing and how her pants got muddy, I realized it would be impossible to get all of it into a short story and that it would have to be a book. And then I realized the symbolism of the soiled pants, and that image was replaced by the one of the fatherless and motherless girls climbing down the rainpipe to escape from the only home she had, where she had never been offered love or affection or understanding.

I had already begun to tell the story through the eyes of the idiot child, since I felt that it would be more effective as told by someone capable only of knowing what happened, but not why. I saw that I had not told the story that time. I tried to tell it again, the same story through the eyes of another brother. That was still not it. I told it for a third time through the eyes of the third brother. That was still not it. I tried to gather the pieces together and fill in the gaps by making myself the spokesman. It was still not complete, not until fifteen years after the book was published, when I wrote as an appendix to another book the final effort to get the story told and off my mind, so that I myself could have some peace from it. It’s the book I feel tenderest towards. I couldn’t leave it alone, and I never could tell it right, though I tried hard and would like to try again, though I’d probably fail again.

I read this passage almost twenty years ago and am still fascinated by it. The idea that Faulkner created an enduring work of art and yet felt that he failed is amazing. Can a great work of art be a failure? Why not? Nothing is ever that simple. Apocalypse Now comes to mind as a brilliant movie that is also a mess. So does Raging Bull.

Martin Scorsese once said, “Raging Bull is a about a man who loses everything and then regains it spiritually.” Based on this statement, I think the movie fails as a story because I don’t think that DeNiro’s Jake LaMotta ever reaches that kind of grace, or I don’t think it was conveyed by the filmmakers in a convincing way. That said, if this is a failure, sign me up! Because Raging Bull features some of the most hypnotic, brilliant filmmaking–especially the editing and the sound editing–of any American movie. It is often very funny, though on some level, it is also turgid and humorless.

Raging Bull was DeNiro’s pet project. He had to talk Scorsese into making it and they, in turn, had to talk Paul Schrader (who wrote Taxi Driver) into revising the script. In the book, Martin Scorsese: A Journey, the director talked about what hooked him into the project:

The motive became to achieve an understanding of a self-destructive lifestyle–of a person who was destructive to the people around him and to himself–who finally eased up on himself and on those other people, and somehow made peace with life.

I used Raging Bull as a kind of rehabilitation, thinking all the time it was pretty much my last picture in L.A., or America.

It’s not really a boxing movie. It’s about Scorsese saving his own life and finding some kind of redemptive thread in LaMotta’s story. It’s about DeNiro getting so deep inside of a character–Scorsese said that he played LaMotta like a brick wall–it didn’t matter how much of a creep the character was, there was a sliver of humanity there and that was worth exploring. It is about the obsessions of both men.

Which brings me back to Faulkner, in a letter written to the editor Malcolm Cowley in November of 1944:

As regards any specific book, I’m trying primarily to tell a story, in the most effective way I can think of, the most moving, the most exhaustive. But I think even that is incidental to what I am trying to do, taking my output (the course of it) as a whole. I am telling the same story over and over, which is myself and the world…I’m trying to say it all in one sentence, between one Cap and one period. I’m still trying to put it all, if possible, on one pinhead. I don’t know how to do it. All I know to do is to keep trying in a new way. I’m inclined to think that my material, the South, is not very important to me. I just happen to know it, and don’t have time in one life to learn another one and write at the same time. Though the one I know is probably as good as another, life is a phenomenon but not a novelty, the same frantic steeplechase toward nothing everywhere and man stinks the same stink no matter where in time.

Scorsese was an emotional mess when he made Raging Bull. I think that comes across in the movie. It is a stunning work, brilliant and flawed.

For a good behind-the-scenes take, check out this long Vanity Fair piece by Richard Schickel.

This update is powered by an amazing mathematician:

• How many records with Jeter and A-Rod set in Yankees unis?:

. . . If he stays healthy, Rodriguez, who turns 35 in July, is an overwhelming favorite to shatter Barry Bonds’s career record of 762 home runs. Sometime near the 2011 All-Star Game break, Jeter, who currently has 2,747 hits, is projected to get his 3,000th.

. . . Only eight players have amassed more than 3,400, and only five have reached the 3,500 mark, beginning with Tris Speaker at 3,514.

Whether ranking in the top five will mean something to Jeter and motivate him to keep playing remains to be seen.  . . .

Rodriguez, meanwhile, begins this season with 583 home runs and should surpass 600 sometime in late June or early July, reach 700 in 2013 and overtake Bonds in late 2015 or early 2016, when he will be 40 years old.

. . . The most crucial variable is health. Rodriguez missed 38 games last season following hip surgery. Jeter is a remarkably durable player — he has played at least 148 games in all but one of his 14 full seasons — but shortstop is a demanding position. If he continues to play there and perform at a high level, he would buck the trend.

• Curtis Granderson, on Jeter possibly NOT retiring as a Yankee:

“It’d be tough,” said Curtis Granderson, the Yankees’ new center fielder. “But it’d kind of be like Ken Griffey Jr. Everybody in here who’s a baseball fan knows Ken Griffey Jr. as a Seattle Mariner. Then he goes to Cincinnati and Chicago and back to Seattle. Jeter’s definitely in that category. If Ken Griffey can move teams, you never know.”

(more…)