The face that launched 729 home runs (15 of them in World Series play)
Chris Gayle: Boxoffice Boffo
You may have read my (Martin’s) post about the relative merits of West Indian batsmen Shivnarine Chanderpaul and Chris Gayle. Well, their contrasting skills and chosen cricketing pathways were brought into the sharpest of reliefs a couple of days ago. Gayle slammed an astonishing 128 off only 62 balls for the Royal Challengers Bangalore in the slugfest that is the Indian Premier League. Meanwhile, in a much colder climate and in more challenging conditions, Shiv carved out a typically nuggety 87 not out to prevent the West Indies team from total humiliation on the first day of the first Test match against England at Lord’s. Gayle was all imperious brute strength and clean hitting; Shiv was all impervious chivvying and poking.
The crazy situation is that, as far as I’m concerned, Chris Gayle should be representing the West Indies in England and not playing in the IPL. Sure, Gayle likes playing the short boom-boom form of the game more than Test cricket. He prefers being paid a lot of money to entertain tens of millions of adoring fans in a warm climate more than being paid peanuts to stand around in front of thousands of murmuring spectators in the cold of an English spring. But, boy, the West Indies could use his style and skill right now.
Gayle isn’t wholly to blame. The West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) have been in a power struggle with Gayle and a number of West Indies players for a good while now. Several of them are playing in the IPL instead of representing their region in England. Once the IPL is over, Gayle may arrive for the one-day tournament that follows these Test matches and wow the crowds in England as he did in India. But I won’t be the only one that questions his priorities; just as I’m not the only one who recognizes that professional sportsmen are entertainers who are going to make decisions about where their market strengths lie.
On the anniversary of the start of baseball’s greatest hitting feat, a weird batting maneuver….
Today is 70 years and 366 days since Joe DiMaggio’s mind-bending 56-game hitting streak began: with a meager (though RBI) single against the Chicago White Sox. Right Off the Bat celebrated the seventieth anniversary with a podcast a year ago. For those with a morbid curiosity, click here.
Something odd happened on the actual anniversary last night, at Citi Field, in Flushing. Ryan Braun, about whom I (Evander) have also opined in this blog, was plunked. In a preemptive move that I do not ever recall having seen, Mets manager Terry Collins, fearing retaliation, removed his sore-pinkie, .400-hitting third baseman, David Wright—lest the Milwaukee brain-trust retaliate with a little chin music of their own.
The game had got out of hand just in terms of the score. But does anyone remember seeing such a late-inning benching before?
Trajectory of a true “Ballantine Blast”
Sandy Koufax, 1963: about to blow away the mighty New York Yankees. “Koo-foo” tipped the balance away from 1950s A.L. dominance.
The structure of the book borrows from the sport itself: chapters on Koufax’s unfolding life are interspersed, respectively, among nine chapters that chronicle the perfect game he threw versus the Chicago Cubs on a hot 1965 Saturday night in Chavez Ravine.
The lovely stories from Koufax’s Brooklyn childhood are a delightful book on their own. Leavy’s crystal prose targets the public side of Koufax: no gossip or innuendo. She hits this place as powerfully and accurately as Sandy got those corners of the strike zone. We see her subject’s integrity from boyhood; its deepening character becomes profoundly heroic when he skipped a World Series game for solemn Yom Kippur; the integrity of the man stands in high relief throughout his long retirement years.
I recall a non-perfect Cubs game from April 26, 1962—spring break, the Chicago public schools were not in session, and my mom took me to Wrigley Field for one of the first of many trips there. We sat in the freezing, wind-swept first-base-side bleachers. I can see the brilliant red-and-blue ink on the cover of the 15-cents scorecard. I learned how to put 18 “K’s” (a record Sandy tied with Bob Feller) next to names of the home team. Gosh, those Cubs were BAD! But Koufax was great in that (ultimately injury-shortened) season, fifty years ago, when he would come into his own. Thanks, Sandy.
Leavy’s earlier book, The Last Boy, leaves me with sadness. So much pain in Mickey Mantle’s life, and maybe the emotional pain, hidden by pranks and booze, eclipsed even the agonies of his injuries and his later liver disease. There was sexual abuse in his youth. This is another bio to read…carefully.
It was announced the other day that the games that constitute the 2012 Indian Premier League (IPL), a competition lasting six weeks and using the shortest form of the game of cricket, Twenty20, have been watched by more than a million people—and we’re only just over half way through the tournament. Now, when I (Martin) say “watched,” I’m talking about actual bums on seats at the grounds, and not the tens (perhaps hundreds) of millions of people around the world who are enjoying the games on TV or (like me) over the Internet. And when I say “bums on seats,” I mean mostly standing in nail-bitten excitement or jumping around in an ecstatic frenzy.
I was skeptical and not a little snobbish about the IPL: its rampant consumerism, its hype and brashness, and the money. It seemed to me, to use a timeworn phrase, not cricket. But for sheer entertainment value, the IPL is hard to beat. This year, a record number of games have been won off the last ball of the match; some astonishing batting has turned almost certain defeats to improbable victories; and Rahul Dravid, that most unlikely of barnstormers, has been reborn as a dasher. Yes, it’s sometimes not pretty; it’s awash with crassness and glitz; but the sheer vitality and energy the games possess (a feature of the sell-out crowds that turn up to watch each game) can’t be denied. You can get a feel of a typical game by going here.
Some magic in the air for the Bal’more Orioles
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