Dig this coolness (fresh direct from Marilyn Johnson).

Another classic routine from the one and only Lenny Bruce. Man, this is one of my favorites.

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach begins in the middle of a streak. Scrawny shortstop Henry Skrimshander has never made an error. Not in Little League, not in high school. And when he matriculates at a small, venerable, liberal arts school called Westish College, he remains perfect.

The streak exists not only during games but in between as well. He’s never made a bad throw in practice; a ball has never hit a pebble and skipped past his glove during drills; never lost a ball in the sun while having a catch. He’s been flawless for fifteen straight years.

Henry works hard at the game, perhaps harder than anybody, since nothing else matters to him besides playing baseball. He’s memorized Hall of Famer and personal hero Aparicio Rodriguez’s book, The Art of Fielding and internalized the practical advice on positioning, balance, and physical preparation. The meaning of the more philosophical passages has eluded him as he starts college, but he’s memorized those too.

The book starts percolating when scouts and agents descend on Henry as he scoots up the draft board towards the first round. In the game he’s set to match his idol’s college errorless streak his errant throw sails into the dugout and shatters his roommate’s eye socket.

The first bad throw of Henry’s life spawns others and he unravels. By the time a ballplayer counts 15 years experience, he’s learned the humbling nature of the sport. The paltry rates of success that stand for excellence and the failure to constantly replicate even the most routine gestures bend a player’s expectations. But since Henry’s never made an error, he’s never had to confront this essential truth about the game and his identity collapses when he fianlly does.

The meat of the book is about how Henry and his estranged mentor, catcher Mike Schwartz, the guy responsible for bringing him to Westish in the first place, attempt to overcome the errors. But Mike, distracted by his new girlfriend Pella and brimming with resentment from Henry’s lurking draft day success, offers only warmed-over platitudes for Henry’s soul and countless sets of stadium stairs for his legs.

The inadequacy of their response is obvious to any baseball fan. How can they recover magic that they made no attempt to understand in the first place?

Unfortunately, not one character in the book is in the least bit curious about the source of Henry’s supernatural fielding ability. And anyone that has played one season of baseball at any level would instantly recognize 15 years of perfection as supernatural.

In The Art of Fielding however, even die-hard ballplayers accept the perfection without comment. And when Henry’s first error touches off a crisis of confidence and eventually a total systemic failure, the other players treat him like a player in a bad slump, expecting hard work or the right attitude adjustment will eliminate the errors and restore his factory settings.

But he’s already the hardest worker and already has the best possible attitude. So how’s that supposed to fix the problem? Perfection at this absurd length cannot be earned through practice. And if his ability is indeed supernatural, with all the hard work running parallel at best, then the sudden loss of his ability requires a different treatment than this book imagines.

A ballplayer could react to a terrible slump in a number of ways. But all of them should be vastly different to a person reacting to the loss of a supernatural gift. A slump usually begins with the wrong mix of flawed mechanics and dumb luck and spirals into Adam Dunn-level tragedy when the player gets trapped inside his own head. Henry’s situation is closer to Prometheus and his gift of fire than it is to Adam Dunn and his buck-fifty batting average.

Because all of the characters ignore this essential difference, the baseball in the book loses integrity – a distraction that I could not tolerate.

I’m sure Harbach has loftier intentions than examining Henry’s fielding ability, but he wrote a book around a baseball team – and from what I can tell, nobody’s been shy promoting it as a baseball book. At the very least, the context of the baseball season should serve as the binder of the story, but since the author doesn’t get the baseball right, the binder dissolves. What’s left is still good enough to carry your interest for a while, but since the baseball is palpably unreal, it taints the other stuff too.

And what was gained by Henry’s lifetime of perfection if the source of that gift is not an element of the story? So that his error can be an original sin? An expulsion from his Diamond of Eden? The extreme nature of Henry’s predicament lends itself more easily to that metaphor, but for me, a similar construct was still achievable without involving the miraculous.

Harbach would have been better served if he had taken Henry to the natural limits of baseball. An outstanding fielder in the midst of a record-tying streak. And when that guy flubs a throw and falls into a bottomless slump, Henry’s story could play out as it does without the necessity of an eye roll.

It’s not just the unspoken presence and sudden disappearance of magic that serves to dislodge the baseball fan from making an intimate connection with this book. Henry’s teammate (and roommate) Owen Dunne gets away with reading books on the bench until such time as their red-ass Coach Cox tells him to pinch-hit.

Owen’s homosexuality is accepted by the team without the slightest hesitation. That’s probably not plausible at a college in a state that elected Scott Walker Governor; even the most enlightened eighteen year olds are prone to confusion and snickering when they find themselves spending a lot of time in cramped locker rooms.

But let it slide in the interest of progress. Still, there’s not a competitive baseball team in the country that’s allowing a bench warmer to clip a reading lamp to the brim of his cap so he can curl up in the corner of the dugout with a steaming cup of herbal tea and the latest Barbara Kingsolver novel.

That’s not Division III college baseball. That’s not even the Amherst English Department’s softball team. Perhaps Tanner Boyle lacked the SAT scores to play at Westish, but he’d have that reading lamp sticking out of Owen’s ear before the end of the first inning. Or he’d end up in the garbage can trying.

These things could have transpired in a different kind of book. In a funnier book. In a book that was candid about its alternate, enhanced reality. In science fiction, perhaps. But this story takes place in a crafted, hyper-reality, a reality that breaks with ours for effect only before darting back under a mutual cover. The physics of this world are the same as ours, and under those rules, we know that baseball players can’t be perfect for long.

If W.P. Kinsella conceived of a shortstop that didn’t make an error for 15 straight years, someone else in the story would have noticed.

Over at the Captain’s Blog, our man William looks at how lousy the starting pitching has been for the Rangers and Cardinals this October.

I’m not sure I get this but it sure is interesting.

[Photo via Jhalal Drut]

Tex Avery is the bomb.

One of the great routines ever put on vinyl:

Dig.

Wish for a Boxer, Get a Warrior Princess

By John Schulian

By the time I got to “Hercules,” I’d all but given up on the best idea I ever had for a TV series. There was a boxer at the heart of it, naturally, but there was more to his life than left hooks and roadwork. He was part of a family that embodied the yearnings and diminished dreams of blue-collar America. His old man worked in a tannery in Chicago and had a gambling problem. His mother was ready to walk out after holding things together for as long as she could. His sister was trying to distance herself from the quagmire at home after becoming the only member of the family to graduate from college. His kid brother was in and out of trouble with the law. And the fighter would come to know every up and down in the brutal sport that might or might not be his salvation. His name was Nick Pafko and I called his story “The Ring.” If there was anything I did in Hollywood that touched my soul, that made me feel the way I did when I wrote about Muhammad Ali or Josh Gibson or Pete Maravich, this was it.

I can even tell you where I was when inspiration struck in 1989: on Mulholland Drive, heading toward another day at “Wiseguy.” I called my agent of the moment, Elliot Webb, as soon as I got to my office in that pre-cellphone era. “This is your million-dollar idea,” he said. Unfortunately, nobody I tried to sell it to for the next five years agreed with him. The networks, infatuated by glitz and glamour, wanted no part of a drama about people with broken noses and callused hands. So I put it in a drawer and concentrated on a world as unreal as “The Ring” was real.

Toward the end of our initial 13-episode order for “Hercules,” just as I prepared to introduce a warrior princess named Xena to the show, I got a call from the latest in my procession of agents, Nancy Jones. She said the Fox Network was curious. I told her curious wasn’t enough, not when I spent every waking moment writing scripts with one hand and fending off Rob Tapert’s serial treachery with the other. Nancy turned on her best stern-mommy voice and said, “John, go pitch it.” So I did, and when Fox said no, I thought “The Ring” was done for good. But the network had a new president, a bookish gent named John Matoian, and something about it caught his attention when he sifted through the discard pile. The next thing I knew, I had a deal to write a pilot script for “The Ring.”

Ah, but I still had “Hercules” and the warrior princess to deal with, didn’t I? I told Tapert and my would-be staff that I was all theirs from 9 a.m. until 4 p.m. After that, my door would be closed and I would be working on a long-shot script that might save me from cleaning out the Augean Stables they created daily. High-handed? You bet. But I knew “The Ring” might be my last best chance to do a serious drama, and I’d be damned if I would waste it for the sake a show I’d never imagined doing when I came to Hollywood. Besides, I had already worked out the story that would introduce Xena, and I had promised to write it as soon as I finished my pilot. Tapert, in a rare moment of grace, acquiesced.

I’m not sure I ever had a better time writing anything than I did “The Ring.” I was dealing with characters I could practically hear breathing, in a sport that clamped its gnarled hands around my heart the first time I walked into a gym full of broken dreams. And the amazing thing – the truly once-in-my-lifetime thing – was that Fox loved the script. I’m not talking about a version of it that had been tinkered with by well-meaning young know-nothings from the studio and network. I’m talking about the script as I delivered it on the Monday after Thanksgiving 1994. Somehow it had bypassed the usual gauntlet of prying eyes and half-baked ideas and landed on the desk of the head of the network himself. And John Matoian called it “impeccable” with me sitting there in his office. He said it was one of his two favorite scripts in that development season. He embraced it as much as someone in his position could, but not so much that he didn’t have two problems with it. He thought it was too bleak and – you guessed it – too blue collar.

So much for my euphoria. I didn’t know how to address either of his concerns. “The Ring” by its very nature had to be blue-collar–rich kids don’t take up prizefighting. As for being bleak, I didn’t understand that at all. “The Ring” was about a working-class kid chasing his dream, which seemed to me the polar opposite of bleak. I was optimistic enough to think the show might even send a message to kids like my fighter that it was all right to seek a better tomorrow.

But there was too much at stake for me not to try to bend the script to Matoian’s liking. I’d given the fighter a rich girlfriend in my original script, so I added a party scene where he met her mother, who disapproved of him instantly. I moved the location of a fight from the dowdy old Aragon Ballroom to the sparkling new United Center, too. I must have made other changes, too, but they are lost to time, just like “The Ring.”

It died before it could ever go in front of a camera, at the same time I was part of the team bringing Xena into the world and unknowingly establishing the only cash cow I’ve ever had. Some might call that a better than fair trade. If “The Ring” had been like most TV series, it might not have lasted six episodes. “Xena: Warrior Princess” ran for six seasons and spawned a cultural icon. But when I tote up my own scorecard, I find myself thinking I would rather have seen “The Ring” die of bad ratings than have had a moment’s success with Xena. No, I’m not giving back the money the old girl made me. I’m just saying it would have been nice to see if I really could have spent my last years in Hollywood doing work I was proud of instead of work that usually made me want to change the subject.

But I still have my memories of “The Ring” to console me, and sometimes someone else tells me they remember it, too. When I was making my last stand in TV on a show called “Tremors,” I ran into a guy who’d been a young executive at 20th Century Fox TV when “The Ring” had its moment in the sun. He pulled me aside after a meeting and said he’d been talking with the man who’d been his boss then, and that “The Ring” had come up. “We agreed it was the best pilot we never did,” he said. I suppose I could have gotten angry. Instead, I damn near wept.

Click here for the full “From Ali to Xena” archives.

When you play baseball in New York City, you cannot spend too much time dwelling on postseason failures. It’s simply time to move on quickly, to think about what changes need to be made to improve the team, so as to avoid future playoff disappointment. That is the situation the Yankees face these days, even as four other major league teams continue their pursuit of a world championship.

The first priority is determining the future of CC Sabathia. Everyone in the free world expects Sabathia to opt out of his current contract, which has four years remaining. The Yankees will obviously try to re-sign their ace, but they also need to be careful. Before they bestow a five or six-year deal on Sabathia, they need to remember that they are already stuck with two ridiculously long contracts in Alex Rodriguez and Mark Teixeira. Giving Sabathia more money per year would be acceptable, but lengthening the contract of a pitcher with weight problems and a recent past of postseason failure should come with several caution flags.

Sabathia is 31. A five-year contract brings him to age 36. A six-year deal extends him to age 37. I’d be very careful about going that deep with any pitcher, especially a pitcher who put on weight during the season.

If the Yankees can re-sign Sabathia at a reasonable length, they will still need to add pitching. That’s why free agent C.J. Wilson, whose outgoing personality looks to be a good fit for New York, should be the No. 1 target. If the Yankees cannot bring back Sabathia, then they really need to sign two free agent pitchers: Wilson and either the durable Mark Buehrle (with 11 straight seasons of 200-plus innings) or the underrated Edwin Jackson. The Yankees’ staff needs to become more left-handed in 2012, making Wilson and Buehrle especially appealing targets. Ideally, the Yankees’ 2012 rotation would look like this: Sabathia and Wilson followed by Ivan Nova, Phil Hughes, and A.J. Burnett. As FBI Special Agent Johnson said in Die Hard, “I can live with that.” Indeed, that’s the kind of rotation that should put the Yankees back in the postseason mix.

Still, there are other areas to address. The Yankees’ offense is aging and showing some decline. The easy solution–and the sensible one at that–is to promote Jesus Montero to the DH role and let him bat behind A-Rod and Teixeira. The Yankees need to stop shopping Montero for pitching and realize what they have: a young, difference-making hitter who can change the complexion of an old lineup.

The next step is to pick up the option on Nick Swisher’s contract and then begin shopping him around both leagues. Swisher has trade value; his power, his patience, and his defensive improvement in right field make him an attractive player. A number of hitting-starved teams could use Swisher, including the Angels, the A’s (his former team), the Braves, the Cubs, the Dodgers, the Padres, and the Giants. If any of them can offer a solid No. 4 starter or a top left-handed reliever, or a couple of good prospects, then the Yankees should make the deal.

If Swisher is traded, he’ll have to be replaced. The Yankees can do that with free agents like Mike Cuddyer (a .338 hitter in the postseason) or Brooklyn native David DeJesus (a superior defender in right field). I particularly like the versatile Cuddyer, who would also give the Yankees a potential backup at third base for the increasingly fragile Rodriguez.

As with Swisher, the Yankees need to make a decision with Russell Martin, whose contract is up. Martin looked terrible at the plate in the playoff series with the Tigers, but his defensive play is just too good to surrender. He blocks everything in sight, frames pitches skillfully, throws well, and basically does everything he can to make the pitcher’s job easier. I’d like to see Martin return as the No. 1 receiver, backed up by Montero and perhaps a veteran backup from the free agent list. The Yankees shouldn’t count on Francisco Cervelli, in part because of his concussion problems and in part because he simply cannot throw out opposing baserunners.

So that’s my off-season plan for the Yankees. Like all plans, it’s one that will change based on free agent wishes and the availability of certain players in trades. But it’s a starting point for what figures to be an interesting winter of comings and goings in the Bronx.

Bruce Markusen writes “Cooperstown Confidential” for The Hardball Times.

Ah, the Old Days…

I remember it well.

Recognize most all of these spots. This one here (below) was on 49th street between Broadway and 7th Avenue. When I first worked as a messenger in the Brill Building, summer of ’88, you couldn’t walk a city block without running into a porno theater. I remember making runs from 49th and Broadway down to the Technicolor lab which was on 44th street between 8th and 9th, seeing the viles of crack cocaine scattered along the sidewalk, and being propositioned by the hookers with bruises on their legs and arms. I moved fast in those days.

This trip down memory lane has been brought to you by Mitch O’Connell. In six parts: one, two, three, four, five, and six.

Coolness.

The Brew Crew looks to stay alive tonight at home. Won’t be easy, but let’s hope they can stretch the NLCS to a Seventh Game.

Let’s Go Brat-Wurst.

[Photo Credit: The Most Incredible Comic Book Artwork site]

Congrats to the Rangers but man, I’m pulling for the Brewers now because the Rangers and Cards, well, that’s just too damn much red.

It is sunny but cool in the Bronx: the fall is here. This picture, and the final games of the baseball season, is an attempt to hang on to summer for just a few more moments.

So’s this:

[Photo Credit: Neal Craver]

The Tigers are up against it, man. Lose tonight and their season is over. Here’s rooting for Game 7.

Let’s go Baseball!

[Photo Credit: Christian Rosa]

Summer ain’t over just yet. Willie…

[Photo Credit: Oyl in Tokyo]

Baseball, that is. Should be a good one, Game Five of the NLCS: Cards vs. the Brew Crew.

Sit back, relax, enjoy the show!

[Photo Credit: Negroni]

Curt Schilling lowers the boom on the Bosox.

Here’s Dave Kindred on Walter Payton. Good read.

Tony Dorsett was my favorite offensive football player when I was a kid. I had his jersey. My friend Matt was a Sweetness guy and had Payton’s jersey. We wore those jerseys out, man. I was really into the NFL during the 1980s and think that Walter Payton and Lawrence Taylor were the greatest football players I ever saw.

What to do on another rainy day in New York? Oh, yeah. Count down the hours ’til quittin’ time.

[Photo Credit: Cuba Gallery]