Blog Archives

The Negro League election to the Hall of Fame was announced this afternoon and neither Minnie Minoso or Buck O’Neil made the cut. I am personally bummed for both of them, but don’t expect either to feel sorry for themselves.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have several encounters with O’Neil. The first was of the more memorable days of my life. Twelve years ago, I worked as a runner for Ken Burns as he and his team of editors mixed the sound for “Baseball.” It was my first job out of college and not only did it reunite me with the game (and the game’s history), it also introduced me to people and players I didn’t know anything about. Ken hipped me to Lester Young and Willie Morris. I learned about Curt Flood’s story–and found it so moving that now, after three years of work, am set to publish my first book this spring–and it’s all about Curt. I also got to meet Buck O’Neil. I had seen him on the mixing room screen for months, and heard much about him from the rest of the crew, so when he came to New York in May of ’94 for a screening I felt as if I already knew him.

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In addition to some of the cool new Yankee sites that Cliff has already added to our roll call, please g’head and check out the fresh Canyon of Heroes blog by long time Bronx Banter reader Mike Plugh. Mike lives in Japan and, no joke, he used to live in the same apartment building where I currently reside in the Bronx. We’ve never met, but he’s a great guy. Talk about a small world. Welcome him to the club, y’all.

The special Negro League Hall of Fame vote will be announced later today (this article in the Times is worth checking out for the photograph alone)–here’s hoping it’ll be a memorable day. In the meantime, the Yankees begin their exhibition season this Thursday. Randy Johnson threw another bp session yesterday; Joe Torre is pleased with what he’s seen from Al Leiter thus far. Tyler Kepner covers Carl Pavano in the Times:

Asked how important Pavano’s recovery was to the Yankees, Torre did not hesitate.

“Major,” Torre said. “I think he’s major for us, and the reason I say that is because of his youth, for one, where he can take a good portion of the workload. That about covers it, really. He just never got into a groove of any kind, just never got there. But he’s major for us.”

Bill Madden has a piece on Bernie Williams in the News:

“Last year was a wake-up call for me,” Williams said. “It seemed like I was breaking someone’s record or passing some milestone and that was not my focus. Given my situation, with my playing time being reduced, it was very frustrating for me. When they signed me this winter, they were expecting me to accept a certain role.

“Last year it was more confusing. Once you get used to playing every day and (suddenly) they’re bringing in this guy and that guy to see what happens. I wasn’t used to that. This year, it’s been made very clear to me: ‘You’re not gonna be the center fielder. That’s the offer, take it or leave it.'”

The Yanks will be in good shape if Pavano and Bernie are even reasonably productive this year, no?

Sheff riffs, Sheff and Cash talk, Sheff chills. Nothing to see here folks, move along.

Randy Johnson grazed Johnny Damon yesterday during live batting practice, but the more compelling tidbit is that 19-year old Phillip Hughes impressed the veteran Yankee hitters during his session. Jorge Posada said he hasn’t seen such a live arm since Mariano Rivera was a youngster. “He reminds me of Roger Clemens; that fastball is late,” Jason Giambi told the Post. Joe Torre added:

“The thing that is unusual for a kid as young as he is, the curveball is really impressive…It’s one of those real tight rotation breaking balls. He is not commanding it like he is going to after more experience, but his stuff is very real.”

Joel Sherman has a nice column praising Torre this morning as well:

For the 11th year, he had to deliver an introduction speech to the full Yankee squad on Wednesday. In the wrong hands, this could turn into a forum of rolled eyes and emotional disconnect. But according to the players who heard the words, Torre had not gone stale. As Mike Mussina explained, “He never says anything to give you reason to think, ‘oh shut up.’ When he speaks, you just realize it is a big deal.’ Alex Rodriguez added, “When it is manufactured and artificial, veteran players see through that [garbage]. He has that magic in his voice. It feels as if it is coming from a higher authority.”

Torre said his style works because “I’m not trying to sell them anything.” Players speak of feeling Torre cares about them and is honest with them…The idea that just anybody could have found the right chords to push [the 2005 team] or handle all that comes with managing the Yankees is silly. Yes, Torre gets to handle the most talent, but it comes with Steinbrenner, gigantic egos, Canyon of Heroes expectations and a media core to rival the White House. To survive, the manager better have thick skin and a soft heart, self-assurance and self-awareness.

This is nothing we don’t already know, but it is well put, don’t you think? Lastly, our boy Sheff was riffing some to Bob Klap yesterday. Well, what did you expect?

It seems as if all the big boys at Yankee camp are happy, confident and looking forward to a successful season. Tyler Kepner reports:

Looking for a laugh, one reporter quickly asked [manager, Joe] Torre, “Who’s the best owner in the major leagues?” [owner, George] Steinbrenner interjected: “Who’s the best manager in the major leagues?” Then he pointed vigorously at Torre, who returned the gesture, and sat on the couch next to reporters.

Steinbrenner was oddly playful. At one point, he grabbed a notebook from a veteran reporter and scrawled, “For my buddy, George Steinbrenner.” And before he entered the room, Steinbrenner had already told a small pack of reporters that the Yankees would win the World Series for the first time since 2000.

“In a while, we haven’t won it,” he said. “We’re going to win it this year. We’re going after it.”

Joe Torre addressed the team for the first time and his words evidentally had more urgency than usual. According to Bob Klapisch:

This is our world, Torre said. This is what it means to be a Yankee. You’ll be loved [and hated], respected [and despised]. Everyone will be watching from this moment on.

Torre insisted the message was meant for the full roster, including the minor-leaguers with no chance of making the team. But for [Johnny] Damon, the address was especially poignant: In Boston and everywhere else in the American League, he’d officially morphed into the enemy.

“I thought Joe’s introductory speech really hit home,” Damon said. “He talked about enjoying the game, not letting it pass you by, knowing we do have a good team. That’s why the goal here is getting to the World Series.”

Talk is cheap, of course, but in light of the debacle on 33rd street, it’s comforting to know that George’s collection of high-priced stars can actually deliver–if not a championship, then at least probably something close to it. As my friend Matt B said to me last week, the Bombers were awful for much of 2005 and they still won over 90 games and made the playoffs. Unless they are side-swiped by injuries–a very real possibility–we should be in for another entertaining season, don’t you think?

Growing up, I often confused Minnie Minoso with Manny Mota, even though I knew Mota played for the dreaded Dodger teams of the late ’70s. To be honest, I didn’t really know much at all about Minoso until I read Allen Barra’s collection of essays, “Clearing the Bases” a few years ago. But after reading Barra’s piece, I was hooked, and today, I’ve got my own tribute to Minoso up at SI.com.

In “Minnie Minoso: The New Latin Dynasty,” Barra wrote:

Isn’t it odd that at a time in sports history when we are more issue-conscious than ever, no one has a clue as to who the first Latin ballplayer was? Well, anyway, I didn’t ahve one, and I’ve been writing about this stuff for more than twenty years. Either I’m different from most fans in this regard, or the grumbling you sometimes hear from Latin ballplayers is legitimate.

Okay, so who is the Latin Jackie Robinson? First of all, we have to be specific about what we’re asking, and after some thought I decided that there was no point in trying to track the first white Latin player, as there would be no real issue regarding the bigotry even white Latinos must have endured, but there was no hard or fast barrier to break. The first dark-skinned Latin player, I was told by the Hall of Fame, was Cuban-born Saturino Orestes Arrieta Minoso, “The Cuban Comet,” better known to fans as Minnie. Minnie Minoso made his debut in 1949, two years after Jackie Robinson, playing for Bill Veeck’s Cleveland Indians. Larry Doby, who also made his debut in 1947, shortly after Jackie, is recognized as the AL’s first black player, but what about Minoso? What must it have been like for him, to be both black and Hispanic? There have been shelves full of material on Jackie Robinson, and in recent years baseball historians have started to catch up to Larry Doby, but who knows about Minnie Minoso?

Outside of Chicago–where Minoso’s number is retired by the World Champion White Sox–and perhaps Cuba, not that many people talk about Minnie at all. Barra sparked my interest, and made a compelling case for Minoso as a Hall of Famer, comparing him to Doby and Enos Slaughter.

Both Doby and Slaughter were very good players but what I would rate as borderline Hall of Fame candidates. Both had a lot of people pulling for them and pleading special case arguments; Doby had virtually all the writers who had back the first Negro Leaguers, and Slaughter had fans such as Tom Wicker, who wrote a chapter advocating his HOF candidacy for Dan Okrent’s “The Ultimate Baseball Book.”

Minoso still doesn’t have a lot of people campaigning for him, though he has a chance to be elected to the Hall next Monday. I recently spoke with Tony Oliva, another Cuban-born star, and he thinks that Minoso compares well with Doby:

Look at the numbers. And Minoso was a guy who played outfield, he played infield, he played very, very hard. But he was a Cuban. You have to take care of your people first. That had to be the reason [he wasn’t elected to the HOF]. If you had the same situation in Cuba, they would try and take care of Cubans first, you know? For us to achieve something, we’ve got to do double of what the other people do…The name Minnie Minoso was everything if you followed sports in Cuba. He was the top of the line for me. He put up a lot of great numbers, especially in those days when it was very tough to play. In Cuba, man, everybody loved Minoso.

Peter Bjarkman, a Latin baseball historian, has an excellent chapter on Minoso in his book “Basball with a Latin Beat” (essential for any well-stocked baseball library). Minoso, he writes:

was the most colorful dark-skinned Cuban ballplayer of the post-Robinson integration years. Yet Minoso’s flashy style and dramatic flair translated into huge efforts at doing precisely what was needed to win ballgames for his team. He played with a reckless abandon aimed always at achieving nothign short of total victory; his was a flair with a clear work ethic. He stole bases with the game on the line, harassed pitchers with daring base-running ploys, took extra bases and made impossible wall-crashing catches.

…Lary Doby…possessed a stable temperament that made him far more like Jackie Robinson’s teammate Roy Campanella–a quiet revolutionary determined to lead by strong silent slugging and soft-spoken clubhouse diplomacy. Minoso…burned instead with Robinson’s dignified fire. The “Cuban Comet” also burned up the American League base paths with three consecutive stolen-base titles (1951-1953) in an age when base speed was of little premium and rarely an offensive strategy of preference. The flashy style he brought to the game was guaranteed to cement Minoso’s reputation with fair-minded fans, just as it would further fan the flames of hatred among those spectators and opponents who could not stand to see such a flashy black man uptaging everyone else on the field.

Here’s hoping that Minoso gets his due while he’s still alive to enjoy it. He’s certainly deserving.

Alex Rodriguez arrrived at the Yankees’ training camp yesterday. Reporters, eager for something juicy to write about, were ready and waiting. Meanwhile, Bernie Williams prepares for his new baseball life.

While the Yanks hope that Octavio Dotel will be an effective addition to their bullpen during the second half of the season, Joe Torre tells the New York Times that Kyle Farnsworth will share set-up duties with Tanyon Sturtze. That’s a whole lot of “doh!” for the money, no?

Dag, it got brick cold again in New York this weekend. Em and I watched “The Maltese Falcon” last night. “This is good,” she tells me (like I don’t know). I say, “Sure it is, honey” without trying to sound like a stuffed shirt. Today gives cooking–for me at least–a hearty soup, a pot of marinara sauce for whenver, and Emily’s weekly soy-nut-bulgar-surprise (hey, I don’t ask questions when it comes to her food, I just cook it, bro).

Breifly, crusing around the local papers, here are a few tidbits:

Tyler Kepner on Aaron Small; Bill Madden on Ron Guidry; Joe Torre on Mariano Rivera; Brian Cashman on Gary Sheffield, and finally, George Steinbrenner on Ozzie Guillen (and yeah, I purposely avoided Ozzie’s SI quotes earlier this week because the last thing we need is the comments section to spin out all day on another boring Alex Rodriguez-is-a-phony debate). For what it is worth, Guillen issued a public apology to Rodriguez.

Hey, any fans out there planning on going to spring training this year? I’ve never been myself, but if you are gunna go, or if you’ve been in the past, I’d love to hear what it is like. Might help keep us all warm on a cold day in the Big Apple.

There was a brief George Steinbrenner sighting yesterday. The Yankee owner barked off a couple of words to a pack of reporters and then tooled off in his golf cart. Nothing surprising but naturally enough to make the back pages on a slow sports day in New York.

Yesterday, Bill Madden had a piece on Randy Johnson. This morning, he has one on Mariano Rivera:

No one in the Yankee universe is prepared to think about life after Mo, even though, at age 36 and his place in the Hall of Fame assured, it’s agreed these now are all gravy seasons.

Good as he feels, even Rivera concedes the inevitable could happen at any time. A pitcher’s arm can withstand just so much toil and stress. In his case, his durability has been almost as remarkable as his dominance.

“The last few years I’ve been feeling good,” Rivera said after completing his physical. “Last year (in which he posted a 1.38 ERA with 43 saves and finished second in the Cy Young Award voting to Angels starter Bartolo Colon) I felt especially good. But only God knows where I’ll be next year. I’ll pitch as long as God lets me.”

We can only hope it is for another few seasons.

Meanwhile, there are a couple of puff pieces about Mike Mussina and the possbility of his signing an extension, and, in a move that is bound to unleash wisecracks galore, the Bombers signed the hunky, and by now, clunky, starting pitcher Scott Erickson to a minor league contract. Thank you, Mr. Giambi, you old bird dog you.

Hip–hip…Jorge! Oh, and of course Derek Jeter is just itching to get things rolling as well. Ever notice that he’s always one of the first guys ready to go round this time of year? SI’s Tom Verducci thinks Jeter, not Johnny Damon, should be the team’s lead off hitter. No arguments here.

Man, the snow was tremendous yesterday. But the sky is blue and the sun is shinning this morning as New Yorkers attempt to dig their way to work. Just a couple of items today…

The Yanks claimed right-handed picther Darrell Rasner off waivers from the Washingon Nationals the other day. As a result, Jason Anderson was designated for assingment. Cliff, anyone, got a vibe on this minor move? And what about this Luis Garcia cat?

Traditionally, the mainstream media tends to portray Black and Latin players in two extremes: they are either a threat (Cepeda, Clemente, and then later, Reggie Jackson), or the clown (Minoso, Ortiz). Over the course of his Hall of Fame career Henderson has found himself in both camps. The older he’s gotten, the more he’s become the clown, with his Casey-like language, and seemingly pure love of the game. Anyhow, it’s kind of embarassing to those of us who have admired his greatness (and his sesne of style and humor) throughout. Regardless, it’s nice to see that Henderson is being welcomed back into the big league game, even if it is in the small role of spring training instructor. Good for the Mets. But nevermind getting Rickey to try and teach Reyes how to steal bases, have him learn Reyes how to take a walk and he could really be of some good use.

Oh, and in case you missed the latest on Carl Pavano’s creaky back by Madden and McCarron yesterday in the News, here it be.

Yeah, so we’re under a mound of snow here in New York this morning, but Mother Nature can’t fool us, there’s still only a couple of days left ’til pitchers and catchers. Dump all the snow you want on us you old bag, spring is a-coming.

Two days ago, Emily and I were downtown and we grabbed a bite at an old greasy spoon restaurant on 6th avenue and 12 or 13th street (I forget which). It’s a coffee shop on the corner of the street and what makes it stand out is simply the fact that it is still standing. In a neighborhood that is changing all the time it is a comforting to see an old place like that holding its own. They don’t sell $15 eggs, they sell it for $2.50. Students, professors, doctors and rent-stablized old timers make up the crowd, and you can tell some folks come in several times a day. It’s a real neighborhood place.

After we picked our way through a lousy lunch I chatted up the guy running the place, a 26-year old Greek kid named Chris. His old man opened the shop back in the mid-1970s. I started talking to him because he was wearing a Yankee cap. We bs’d some about the team–I asked him who is favorite players were, and DJ was at the top of the list. When I brought up Alex Rodriguez he told me how much he hated him, and we proceeded to get into the well-worn Alex Rodiguez debate.

“All that money he’s taking from them, bro, and the guy can’t get a hit in the ninth inning.”

I told him he was being too hard on Rodriguez and then listed all of A-Rod’s accomplishments–from his home run records, to his playoff performances, all to no avail. Finally, as the conversation was clearly going nowhere, Emily said, “Enough, let’s go.”

Fair enough. Chris was a nice guy, but it never fails to amaze me how some fans cling to their impressions regardless of the facts. Which is not to say that I think my opinions are the end all be all, but I try to balance my emotional reactions with reality.

Anyhow, I was reminded of “I Know Best” mentality that fans–including myself–often have last night as I was leafing through an old Sports Illustrated magazine (October 7, 1974–Catfish Hunter on the cover). In the “They Said It” quote section toward the front of the issue, I found this bit:

Danny Murtaugh, Pittsburgh Pirates manager: “Why, certainly I’d like to have a fellow who hits a home run every time at bat, who strikes out every opposing batter when he’s pitching and who is always thinking about two innings ahead. The only trouble is to get him to put down his cup of beer, come down out of the stands and do those things.”

The snow is coming down so hard here in the Bronx that I can’t even see clear down to the subway. But my mind is on green fields and warm climates, guys stretching and smiling, shagging fly balls, taking grounders, grabbing their crotches, spitting, and their turn in the cage. It seems like a pipe dream given the conditions up here, but in reality, it’s only moments away.

Meanwhile, I’m going to make something delicious to eat and Em and I are going to watch “The Godfather II.” Hope everyone is having a good weekend.

Yankee general manager Brian Cashman was in the heart of Washington Heights yesterday and he told reporters that he’ll keep Roger Clemens on his radar this spring, though it’s unlikely that the future Hall of Famer will return to New York. However, as Bob Klapisch notes:

It made for good conversation on a chilly February afternoon. Cashman seemed at peace with the Yankees’ pitching staff – he still professes faith in Carl Pavano – and in the bench, where Andy Phillips won a landslide victory over Mike Piazza during an internal poll of the organization’s scouts. The Yankees might be hard-pressed to win 95 games again, especially with the on-paper surge of the Blue Jays, but on balance, it was a good winter for Cashman.

Now he was enjoying the dividend, sitting down to a dish named after him. It’s La Nueva Caridad’s specialty, dedicating special meals to the restaurant’s special guests. Virtually every Spanish-speaking player who visits New York eventually heads uptown for lunch, and now Cashman was officially part of the Dominican Hall of Fame.

Ben Kabak considers the pros and cons of the Andy Pettitte coming back to the Bronx as well. Want some more wishful thinking? How about this report on Ramiro Mendoza. Hey, you’ve got to love pre-season optimism, right?

Ahhh, the comfort of pre-spring training puff pieces sure are a sight for sore eyes. The Daily News has a few of ’em today, including a bit featuring the latest from Joe Torre, and another detailing Octavio Dotel’s rapid recovery from Tommy John surgery. According to Anthony McCarron:

“I don’t want to say I’m 100% now, but I’m feeling really good,” Dotel said.

He hopes he can be ready by April, but he says he won’t rush, either. “The Yankees are the people who decide,” he said. “As far as I feel, I could be there in April, but I’ll let them decide when I’ll be in New York with the team.”

Following up on Bob Klapisch’s piece for ESPN last week, Christian Red has an article on Jason Giambi, who says that he expects to play first more than DH this year. I liked this bit:

“I was always the guy, in the beginning, that took over for Tino,” Giambi said. “Even though I had great years (in Oakland), we hadn’t won that World Series.

“I think every New Yorker, they love to see somebody face adversity and still stand tall. And not fall by the wayside. They like to see you man up, take your beating. You just keep going and clicking and keep working hard.

“They love those stories. It’s a tough town out here. It really is. I don’t know how many people I get that pull me aside and just, ‘We appreciate the way you handled it and the way you went about it.'”

Meanwhile, over at SI.com, Tom Verducci believes that Chien-Ming Wang could have a breakout season in ’06:

The cool right-hander is a strike- and groundball-throwing machine, getting through his average inning as an AL rookie with only 13.7 pitches. Pitching for a team loaded with offense, Wang is a near lock to win 15 games — but only if he stays healthy, which is still a concern among the New York executives.

No earth-shattering news, but hey, it’s a start. Dig in.

Okay, since there isn’t much news a-shakin’, how about taking pot shots at Murray Chass’ examination of Michael Lewis’ “Moneyball.” Chass, the highly respected columnist for the New York Times has been a frequent target of criticism on this blog over the past several seasons. This one should be fun for practically everyone.

Whatta ho-hum game last night, huh? Seattle sure picked a cruddy time to have a less than stellar performance; the refs only added insult to injury for ’em. The Stones did little to improve my mood at half-time. I thought they were all about to keel over as they plodded through “Start Me Up.” (You make a dead man, what?) They did get better though, and “Satisfaction” was a more convincing production. Anyhow, good deal for the Bus and company, and now back to the business at hand…

I got an e-mail from Bronx Banter regular, Mike Plugh, a guy who grew up in and around New York and is now teaching high school in Japan. Dig:

I enjoyed the piece about your day in Inwood and it got me thinking. I see that kind of thing everyday here in Japan and it amazes me. Baseball has been played as an organized game since the late 1800s in Japan, and I can’t imagine a greater love for the sport anywhere other than the Carribbean and some pockets of the US. To paint a picture in as few words as possible, I see junior high school kids riding their bicycles in the dead of winter to go to practice. I live in the Siberian snow country of Japan and I swear these kids are dedicated to the sport beyond sane proportion.

In Japan, you choose one sport and you play it year round. When I tell my high school students that I played soccer, basketball, and baseball in my salad days they nearly fall over. They spend 2 hours after school every day practicing in the fieldhouse during the winter. They practice on the weekends for more hours. They run the hallways of the school building to get their calisthenics in…..and we’re a top academic school…not a sports powerhouse.

Not too far from us are the Prefectural champions who will be representing us in the Koshien National High School Baseball Invitational held in Spring and then again in Summer for the more famous 2nd round. People stop working to watch the game. I’m telling you…..if you go into a doctor’s office the doctors, nurses, and patients will all be sitting around watching a little 1980s looking TV. Same in the bank, or at the restaurant…..

This country is baseball crazy and it’s one of the reasons I knew early on that I had a kind of soulmate relationship with the culture. Parts of daily life here are baffling and hard to digest, but when it comes to baseball it’s all love.

Reading Mike’s letter made me appreciate why a guy like Bobby Valentine is thriving in Japan. It’s not simply a detour from his MLB career–though I believe he’ll return one day–but a end onto itself. I’d love to visit one day, wouldn’t you?

The Yankees new mouthpiece Johnny Damon (dubbed in the comments section the other day as “Johnny Talk Show”) met with George Steinbrenner yesterday in Tampa to say “hi.” Bob Klapisch has a piece on Damon’s good pal, Jason Giambi over at ESPN. Otherwise, all is quiet. However, thanks to Baseball Think Factory, I came across an interesting article by Mike Green at Batter’s Box, making a strong case for Mike Mussina (class of ’68) being a Hall of Famer. Check it out and let’s discuss.

You know it doesn’t much matter if the groundhog sees his shadow this morning or not, according to what I read in the paper this morning, there’s only 14 more days until pitchers and catchers report to spring training. Hey, New York native John Perricone would be happy to know that in his home town, sometimes if feels as if only baseball really does matter. Yesterday, a friend of mine showed me a poll on WFAN’s website that had more New Yorkers amped about spring training than the Super Bowl or the Final Four. Granted, hockey has a limited audience, the Knicks are awful, and there aren’t any local teams playing in the big game this Sunday, but still…

Yo, I forgot to tell you guys the sight for sore eyes I caught last Saturday up in Inwood. It was another unseasonably warm day and I went to visit my brother. On the way over, I was walking up 207th street and saw an older guy standing in the sun, filling out a lotto card outside of a Bodega. He was earing a Red Sox hat, not an uncommon site uptown. I thought to myself, I wonder if there have ever been as many Sox fans in New York as we see these days? Not only do you have a lot of transplanted New Englanders living here, proudly showing their colors, but the Latin communities uptown–especially the Dominicans–have been rockin’ Boston caps ever since Manny signed with the Sox, and they got Pedro. Formerly, you’d see a lot of Indians hats, but even with Pedro gone, Manny is a hometown hero in these parts. Add in Ortiz, and the fact that the Sox are just a good team, you see that Boston has become almost like a third team in New York, next to the Yankees and Mets.

It was so nice out, that we took Ben’s little boy Lucas (all of a year-and-a-half) out to Inwood park to tool around. The park is right across the street from their apartment. There are basketball courts, tennis courts and a huge green field with at least five baseball diamonds. Inwood is still a predominately Dominican neighborhood, so it didnt’ come as a major surprise that there, in the middle of winter, were kids playing baseball. A warm day? Quick, let’s get out and play. Now, this may not seem like a big deal for those of you who live in California or Florida, but in up here in the Northeast, where we’re always bemoaning the fact that kids don’t care about baseball anymore, it sure is a warming scene.

We passed the first diamond where seven kids–must of been 8th or 9th graders–were playing: two dudes on the left side of the infield, a guy in center, another in left, a pitcher, a batter, and a lone kid on the right side of the infield. They were using muddied old baseballs, were dressed like scrubs in sweats, and playing some kind of game of round robin. As we walked by, the kid at bat swung and missed at a pitch, and then popped one up to second base. The fat kid who was stuck on that side of the field because he was probably the worst of the lot made a futile stab for the ball, which landed with a thud about five feet away from him. Immediately, the rest of the guys started laughing, busting on him, including the batter. A wave of anger shot through me and I remembered being that age, taking pick-up games like this so seriously that I lost any sense of humor I may have had at the time. I wanted to defend the poor kid who wasn’t much good and who was laughing at himself along with the other guys. I imagined that I was him, humiliated, directing my anger at the hitter. I wanted to yell, “Yo dog, what the hell are you laughing about, why don’t you try hitting something besides a cheap-ass pop-up, you fuggin toy?”

My brother carried his son on his shoulders. We were approaching the playground. But before we got there we passed a second diamond that was occupied by a girl’s softball team. The girls were roughly the same age as the boys, but this was an official, or semi-official workout. They too were dressed in scrubs, but they had helmets, and looked altogether more organized than the boys. A middle age man stood on the mound, and a thick, middle aged woman, yelled out instructions from behind third base. It didn’t look as if there were enough girls for two teams, but it appeared as if a game was in progress. There was an intensity in the air that was almost palpable. I stopped and watched as the batter swung and missed at a pitch and then fouled the next one into the backstop. The coach was not just lobbing the ball in there. There was a runner on third, and the batter grounded the next pitch to short. The runner came home but the batter didn’t move out of the box. The third base coach came out onto the field, pointed around, gave some specific intstructions, clapped her hands and returned to her position. Soon, it became evident that they weren’t playing a game, but running through game situations.

I was almost besides myself. I mean, how cool is this, I thought. It’s January, and these girls are out here working on game situations, at full tilt. They cut right to the chase: bottom of the ninth, tying run on third, here’s what we’re going to do. The girls were focused, attentive, fierce.

After cooling our at playground for a while we made our way back. It was getting late and sky was grey. Three of the boys had taken a seat and only four kids were left on the first diamond. I’m sure at least one of them was a competitive red ass like I had been at that age, wanting to win whatever competition they were having, pissed at the fat asses sitting out. One thing was sure, though, a couple of them were going to keep playing until it got too dark to see anymore. Yup, in some parts of the country, even our city, it’s true: only baseball matters.