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Hidden-ball Trick (2)
Do the Hustle!
As noted, I (Evander) today lugged my ten-pound wooden-slatted seat, taken from the original Yankee Stadium, pre-1974-76 renovation, to be signed by Gene Michael. It was a pleasure to meet “The Stick,” who obliged me with his carefully written autograph.
There were three middle infielders, in all, at this card show. Michael had played shortstop for the Yankees, 1968 to 1974. During the same general era, the Mets featured Bud Harrelson at the same position, whereas Pete Rose began major-league life as a second-baseman with the Cincinnati Reds.
Rose has a certain “vibe.” Cricket fans ought to be aware Pete Rose, a.k.a. Charlie Hustle (to my friends and me known as the Electric Prune…don’t ask), has collected the most hits in big-league history, but has been banned from the sport for betting on ballgames. The year 2019 marks 100 since the notorious Chicago Black Sox scandal, a strange, unresolved precursor to the Roaring Twenties made into a superb film called Eight Men Out.
I have rarely had such a reaction to a sports figure in the flesh, or to anyone. The irony is Bud Harrelson had set up signature-shop two seats from the Electric Prune. Some will remember the ground-shaking altercation between the Mousterian Rose and the diminutive Harrelson, at Shea Stadium, during the third game of the 1973 NLCS.
I wondered if forty years had mellowed either. Following is footage of Rose taking Harrelson apart.
Great Stadiums (3): The Great American Ballpark, Cincinnati Reds
They named the whole city after this guy, here loafing in Paris
They don’t call the stadium “great” for nothing.
Now ten-years old—difficult in itself to believe—this is the third home field of the Reds with which I am familiar, the first being Crosley Field (1884, or 1912 in some sources, thro mid-1970), which featured the eccentric “slight incline” in left field—undoubtedly related to issues of drainage. (A famous photograph depicts Mill Creek after it had overrun its banks, submerging the stadium.)
Crosley Field was for many years a traditional site for N.L. opening day, chosen since the Cincinnati Red Stockings were the first professional-baseball team. (Their actual first home in 1869, a field with which I am unfamiliar, was an adjacent setting in Lincoln Park.)
By the end of its run, Crosley Field only held 29,603 fans. It was superseded by one of the multipurpose concrete donuts a.k.a. ashtrays: Riverfront Stadium. The “River” refers to the Ohio, which divides Kentucky from, well, Ohio. The place, since imploded, was later called Cinergy Field.
The Great American Ballpark, sun-drenched during stifling day games, is not everyone’s cuppa. But from everything I understand, there could hardly be a better place to watch a game.
At the 3-minute-16-second mark of this video is another person’s opinion (with typos along the way) and ranking of the Great American Ballpark.
England Win the Ashes!
Alastair Cook. The winning captain.
England has beaten Australia at cricket! In recent years, this formulation—once so rare a sentence that it could be considered a typographical error—has become common, even a commonplace. Australia’s cricket team is simply not as good as England’s, even though England’s team is not as good as it should be, or has been over the last twenty months. In the ongoing Ashes series, the heroes for the home team have been the flourishing Ian Bell; the mercurial, frustrating, but occasionally devastating Stuart Broad; and the brilliant Jimmy Anderson—who, in this last game, looked tired, and should be rested for the last match in the series, which England lead 3–0. Apart from the solid Peter Siddle and the indefatigable Ryan Harris (who nonetheless gives every impression of being absolutely knackered), Australia’s bowlers have underperformed. Their batsmen—aside from Michael Clarke, David Warner, and Chris Rogers—have failed to light up the English summer.
It was widely mooted that England could sweep the Aussies 5–0, thus revenging themselves on the drubbing they received on the 2006–7 tour. This was always unlikely, and is now impossible, given the drawn third Test. But 4–0 is not out of the question, even though the Australian team hasn’t played as badly or the English team as well as such a scoreline would suggest. Sometimes, cricket just ain’t fair.
Posted in Australia, Cricket, England
Tagged Chris Rogers, David Warner, Ian Bell, Jimmy Anderson, Michael Clarke, Peter Siddle, Ryan Harris, Stuart Broad, The Ashes
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Amish Baseball
“Witness” baseball: in Lancaster County (photo by Kurt Wilson)
To the question whether baseball is played in all corners of America, I (Evander) submit this article from the March 22, 2013, issue of the New Republic as a Yes!
As the essay notes, whereas TV-viewership has flagged, in part due to all the hoohah (that’s a technical term) over PED, injuries to big stars (the full extent of these, on the big-leagues level, could not have been fathomed when the article was published), and the so-called slow pace of the game itself (the latter, a notion dismissed in Right Off the Bat), the national pastime flourishes among a portion of the Amish community, wherein once, in the 1940s and 1950s—as the article divulges—semipro players used assumed names.
No one is going to confuse these boys—and girls—of summer (there is no such thing as “Pennsylvania Dutch”: the term comes from the more accurate Deutsch) with the reigning World Champion San Francisco Giants. But as the article indicates, it is “The Mental Game” that rules players, even as well as their fans. There is a certain unique purity and sense of redemption, even beyond the field-of-dreams shibboleths, to baseball as enjoyed in and around Intercourse.
Posted in Baseball, Right Off the Bat Book
Tagged Major League Baseball, San Francisco Giants, Steroids
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Hidden-ball Trick
Even the Amazing Criswell would be…amazed
On the major-league level, this sleight of hand is rarely attempted and even more rarely succeeds. One of the keys to the deception is the location of the pitcher, who cannot be on the rubber: if he were, a balk would be called. In the video, one finds the pitcher well off the rubber, near the catcher.
Back in the day of Shadow Ball and other phantom shenanigans, as well as even in the present-day minor leagues, the hidden-ball trick would be (and is) seen somewhat more often, and likewise a baserunner is caught napping.
One of the past masters of the hidden-ball trick is current Yankees executive and former shortstop Gene Michael. I (Evander) plan to haunt the Westchester County Center next week in quest of Michael’s autograph on my pre-1974, wooden-slat Yankee Stadium-seat bottom. I already have thirty-three signatures on this unusual bit of equipment.
Posted in Baseball, Yankees
Tagged Evan Longoria, Gene Michael, Juan Uribe, Los Angeles Dodgers, Tamp Bay Rays, Yankee Stadium
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Baseball Will Never Be the Same
A-Rod, lightning rod
There are so many dimensions to this historic day, which include the suspension of eleven other players in the Major League Baseball firmament—a few of the names almost as big as Rodriguez’s—that I (Evander) hardly even know where to begin. On January 29, 2013, A-Rod (since his 1994 debut one of the brightest stars in the history of baseball) was tied to a Miami, Florida, laboratory connected with steroids, HGH, and testosterone-boosterism. What followed were denials, coverups, lawyers, and, oh yes, recovery/rehab from surgery on a formerly “good hip.”
We have already detailed the bizarre FedEx mis-delivery of blood (or urine?) samples of Ryan Braun, one of the newer talents in the game. Braun finally has taken his suspension of 65 games, and issued last month, like a man. The others, both brand names and lesser talents, were handed 50-game suspensions.
Only Alex Rodriguez, tonight in Chicago playing his opening day of the 2013 season, has filed an appeal, backed by the Players Association under standard-arbitration rules, to run out the season-clock. Alex is taking a chance that he will not be injured. Suspended players on the DL have those games that they miss count toward their respective detentions. One can assume A-Rod mostly seeks to postpone the inevitable due to his present age. After 211 games away from The Game, he would be forty-years old.
He also will lose a ton of salary, by some estimates $34 million. I again assume Rodriguez is gambling that his suspension, on appeal, will be reduced; and, in the meantime, well…he is doing a Liberace. (The pre-game press conference stopped just short of “striking the lacrimae rerum note.”)
PED is one of those nefarious, textbook euphemisms in circulation today, like “ethnic cleansing.” That one sounds so…germ-free, doesn’t it? What could be wrong with performance-enhancement? Doesn’t medication improve health? For decades, MLB, all of it, from the Commissioner to the Players Association to the coaches and probably even down to the medical staff, has buried their/its Lernaean Hydra heads.
Reverse: the Curse
It’s now time to talk about reverse swing. No, it’s not the latest dance craze from California. It’s a relatively new phenomenon in cricket that entails the ball doing funky things previous unknown in the laws of physics. Unlike in baseball, the fielding team gets to keep the ball, even if it gets hit into the crowd. What this means is that the bowlers (pitchers) can “work” on it.
When you first get a cricket ball it’s shiny on both sides of the seam (a seam on a cricket ball, like the Equator around Earth, runs straight and not crooked). Conventional swing can be obtained by allowing one side of the ball to be roughened up naturally through hitting the bat or abrading on the grass and dirt, while you polish the other. Naturally, air would move more evenly over the smoother side of the ball, causing the ball to curve through the air in the direction of the smooth side. Here’s an example of the incomparable South African Dale Steyn manipulating the ball in the air and off the pitch:
However, recent bowlers have discovered that by making the rough side even rougher, and keeping that side particularly free of sweat or any other moisture, and holding the ball slightly differently, the sphere after a while may do something very strange: it bends in the opposite direction. This is reverse swing and it’s driving batsmen crazy. Now they don’t know whether to play the ball for normal swing or not. The result, as Australia discovered against Pakistanis Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis in 1995, can be embarrassing:
Nobody’s yet quite sure how it works, or what combination of the relative age of the ball, its scuffed-up-ness, the skill of the bowler, humid conditions of the ground, or abrasiveness of the pitch can make it do these magic things in the air. But it does, adding further mystery to the art of fast bowling.
Posted in Australia, Cricket, Pakistan, South Africa
Tagged Dale Steyn, Waqar Younis, Wasim Akram
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Oh, Jimmy, Jimmy! Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy Anderson
True, it’s not a Schubert Lied, but the above song, which resounds around Test cricket grounds wherever England play these days, contains (almost) as much feeling and conjures up as strong a sensation of wonder and mastery of composition as a tune from the Austrian genius. For James Anderson is quietly rising up the rankings of all-time great English bowlers. His stats don’t show it—mainly because of a disastrous few years when coaches tried to change his action—but Anderson over the last three years has been virtually unplayable. He can move the ball both ways in the air and off the pitch. He has an uncanny ability to get the sphere to land on the pitch exactly where he wants it to. He is phenomenally fit, and just shy of 32 years old, which means he could easily become England’s greatest ever wicket-taker. He just took 10 wickets against the Australians in the first Ashes Test match, and is widely regarded as the essential difference between the two sides.
Here for your delight is his dismissal of Michael Clarke: a ball that moves through the air, straightens off the seam, and gently persuades the left bail to leave its position on top of the stumps and point the Australian captain in the direction of the pavilion.
Posted in Australia, Cricket, England
Tagged Franz Schubert, Jimmy Anderson, Michael Clarke, The Ashes
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Ian Bell: Ring-a-Ding-Ding at Last
Sound as a bell
Everybody knows that England’s Ian Bell has the kind of talent and ability that should propel him to greatness. He can play every kind of shot and has excellent and enduring technique. However, some have felt that he gets himself out too easily and that he’s never fulfilled the considerable expectations that have always rested on his shoulders.
Until now. Surely. In the first Ashes Test match just concluded, Bell scored a vital 109 in England’s second innings total of 375. Not only was the century his eighteenth—a number that truly makes him a very superior batsman—but he posted it in the second innings, usually a symbol of a player’s concentration, discipline, and importance to the side. Bell has now passed 6000 runs in Test cricket and has a very healthy average of 45.90. He still has four or five years in him at the highest level. Hopefully, this essential, match-winning knock against the Australians will give him the confidence to be as punishing and dominant a middle-order batsman—and as precious a wicket—as Michael Hussey was to the Australians.
Right Off the Bat 