Tatenda Taibu, the captain and wicketkeeper for the semi-resurgent Zimbabwean cricket team, has announced that he will no longer be stumping batsmen but will be stumping for the Lord instead. He’s retiring from cricket (in his prime, we may add) to become a priest. Taibu is not the first man to move from pavilion to pulpit. David Sheppard played 22 Test matches for England between 1950 and 1963, scoring three centuries, before he was ordained as a minister of the Church of England, rose to become Bishop of Liverpool, and was made a life peer in 1998. Any equivalent sportsmen in baseball who’ve left the game to become preachers, rabbis, or imams—especially in the middle of their career?
One in his eye: Mark Boucher is hit by a ball off the stumps.
A couple of days ago, Mark Boucher, the South African wicketkeeper, was injured when a ball ricocheted after hitting the stumps behind which he was standing and caromed into his left eye. Boucher was taken to hospital and the wound was serious enough that he’s now announced his retirement from international cricket. It’s a bitter blow to South Africa, on the verge of their fascinating series with England. It’s also a reminder that the hand of fate has no interest in statistical purity. Boucher was forced to retire with 999 international dismissals (555 of them in Test matches), a record that is unlikely to be matched anytime soon. One is inevitably reminded of the final innings of the greatest batsman who ever lived, Don Bradman. Needing only 4 runs to record an unprecedented average of 100 in Test cricket, Bradman strolled out in his last innings (at-bat) at the Oval cricket ground in south London in 1948 and was bowled for 0, leaving him with a still-mindnumbingly magnificent average of 99.94.
Boucher is also not the first man whose international cricket career has been ended by an eye injury. The English cricketer Colin Milburn was involved in a car crash in 1969 and lost the use of his left eye, which curtailed a promising career. Any similar victims of statistical and physical cruelty in baseball?
Cricket is alive and well in the the Boston area. (Aram Boghostan for the Boston Globe)
This Thursday, July 12, Right Off the Bat celebrates its first birthday as a regular book as well as an e-book. We thank all our readers of the book: in either format as well as via this blog. But there is more work to be done—and we’re doing it!
This fascinating article, from the Boston Globe and courtesy of Dr. William Van Ornum—from time to time guest blogger, mostly (but not exclusively) reporting on the National League and Chicago Cubs scenes—has much to offer. But we reject one interjected claim in the story: viz., that all that cricket and baseball have in common would be bat and ball. (Uh-hunhh.)
When Mitchell Johnson, the Australian left-arm fast bowler, is good, he is very, very good. Unplayably good. Fiersomely, multiple-wicket-takingly good. He can also hit clean and hard and score runs very quickly. When he is bad, though, which is (to the great misfortune of the Australian team) more often than not, he’s wretched: spraying the ball all over the place, bowling wides and no balls, and generally serving up dreck that opponents can whack all over the park. He also (and we have no proof to back this assertion up) seems psychologically vulnerable to barracking from the crowd. In other words, he’s a nice guy who can’t take the pressure; and when he’s bowling poorly, the crowd gets under his skin, which will make him bowl even worse. His mercurial nature must drive Australian captains mad—you never know which Mitch will show up to play for your team! Any baseball equivalents past and present that those of you reading this care to mention? While you’re thinking about it, here’s Mitchell Johnson when he’s on song—and not the subject of one:
James Dean could play baseball. As a behind-the-scenes TV-show stuntman, he was considered the best-coordinated and conditioned individual the producers ever encountered.
Their fans were accustomed to losing, and the 1952 Pittsburgh Pirates didn’t disappoint: They had one of the worst seasons in Major League Baseball history. The Buccaneers finished with 42 wins and 112 losses—an execrable 54.5 games behind the National League Pennant-winning Brooklyn Dodgers.
From the same general era and in this downtrodden spirit, longshoreman Timothy J. Dugan would part with his coat in On the Waterfront: “Mine’s more full of holes than the Pittsburgh infield.” Even Hollywood knew how bad the Pirates were.
Hall of Famer Ralph Kiner, about whom we’ve written in this blog, skidded to a still-most-impressive total of 37 home runs for Pittsburgh. When he asked for a raise, management is purported to have responded with this wheeze: “Ralph, we could finish in last place just as well without you.” In fact, Kiner would be traded to the Chicago Cubs in 1953.
About the only spot of light on the 1952 Pirates was Joe Garagiola. Better known for his colorful announcing and television work in the 1960s and 1970s, Garagiola batted a respectable .273 and played 105 games at backstop. It was his best season.
Garagiola’s backstop backup was Clyde McCullough. Like Kiner, McCullough would find himself with the Cubs in 1953. Altogether, McCullough had a fifteen-season career, catching all but four of his 1,098 games when not inserted as a pinch runner or pinch hitter. He was a solid if unspectacular ballplayer.
According to James Dean’s biographer David Dalton, between the disastrous finish of 1952 and Cactus League 1953 (the Cubs would have just relocated training to Mesa, Arizona) McCullough was tooling down a highway—either in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, in a Nash Rambler—when three bohemian hitchhikers caught his attention. Improbably, one would catapult to legend fewer than three years later.
Jimmy was discouraged by two things that fall of 1952: no roles outside of commercials and the turn-down of his marriage proposal to modern-dancer Liz “Dizzy” Sheridan—who would attain some fame forty years later as Jerry Seinfeld’s TV-mom. The third hitchhiker was a budding screenwriter and Dean’s best friend, Bill Bast, who narrates the story that Dalton picked up.
At Dean’s instigation, the three struggling and half-starving showbiz-bitten youths were returning to his hometown, Fairmount, Indiana, and his immediate-adoptive family, the Winslows (along with other relatives), for home cookin’…seasoned with Hoosier-commonsense.
As far as McCullough transported his motley crew, Bast sat next to McCullough. Dean and Sheridan—sans engagement-ring—cuddled in the backseat. Regarding the arts, McCullough displayed a welcome-sensitivity toward his passengers. It’s reported he offered money, which was declined.
So this story ends. There’s no additional record of this encounter between a largely forgotten major-leaguer and a mercurial, soon-to-be-silver-screen superstar.
One could only imagine.
(Postscript: James Dean’s first supporting-stage role, in See the Jaguar, was announced via a long-distance, person-to-person call or telegram to the Winslows’ farm. Dean was summoned to tread the boards on Broadway. An ill-rated play it would be, even if Dean’s notices were encouraging. Regardless, the three tyros would return to New York—likely not hitchhiking this time in the Heartland, for pick-up by, say, Ralph Kiner chasing dreams of his own, in that famous home-run hitters’ Cadillac of his.)
Nonetheless, the Australia v. England match-up has a certain interest. The Australians are out for blood. Having been trounced by the English in the last two Ashes series (2009 and 2011), the Australians (who typically like to take revenge by slaughtering the English in the one-day internationals that follow) will want to beat the English up, in preparation for the Ashes series of 2013. The English, meanwhile, will want to show the Australians that they’re a much-improved one-day side (they are) and that they are on their way to becoming the number one side in the 50-over form of the game (as they are in the Test and Twenty20 forms).
Tim Byrdak (with the hat) and Little Jerry Seinfeld
Because it’s a truth widely acknowledged that consequentialist thinking is not necessarily a strength of jocks, one doesn’t need to wonder just what Mets reliever Tim Byrdak thought might happen next when he bought a live chicken from a market in Chinatown to surprise a teammate who’d famously called the Yankees “chickens” in an interview. The answer is, he didn’t. In short, he was a knucklehead.
Thankfully, another little bird—Twitter—came to the rescue. When Byrdak took to his account to ask for help in finding a good home for the chicken, whom he named “Little Jerry Seinfeld” for reasons we won’t bore you with, Farm Sanctuary stepped up to the plate (the metaphor is ludic and not gastronomic, you understand) to adopt the bird.
Farm Sanctuary thus allowed a very relieved reliever (and even more relieved chicken) to flip the bird on Sunday at Citi Field, thus providing the chicken, who’d become an overnight celebrity and unofficial mascot, with a much better outcome than the nine billion other such birds who are killed and eaten in the U.S. each year. Can I hear you say “serenity now“?
The Subway before there was a regular-season Series: from the days when a Yankee Stadium home run meant something.
The suddenly hot Mets, as hot as the weather this first day of summer (which is when I, Evander, always feel the season truly starts—in fact, the season doesn’t really take shape till mid-August), and the suddenly not-so-hot Yankees (unlike the Mets, who swept the non-rival Baltimore Orioles, the Yanks lost two of three, at home, to the semi-rival Atlanta Braves) will meet in more reasonable and seasonable temperatures starting tomorrow night. Yet, Citi Field still ought to be hot and rockin’. The ESPN Game, on Sunday night, matches aces R. A. Dickey, winningest pitcher in Major League Baseball and author, against American League ace CC Sabathia.
Incidentally, there were nine home runs hit in the Yankees latest loss, some kind of record for a 10-5 game in New York City. New Yankee Stadium plays like a phone booth; a bandbox. I detest hearing these five words, “Cheap Yankee Stadium home run,” from rival announcers. How different it was then, at the old place, pre-1976 preferably, when even DiMaggio and Mantle had a hard time jerking one out from the right side.
Ecclesiastical jokes aside, as if to prove our point that one of the greater glories of cricket and baseball is that they’re three parts purity to one part sleaze (or should that be three parts sleaze to one part purity?), more news from the judiciary. As cricket fan, Texan billionaire, and convicted fraudster Allen Stanford enjoys his first few days in prison, pitching great Roger Clemens (left) has been found not guilty on all counts of lying about his drug use before Congress—thus avoiding potentially thirty years in the slammer. This is as it should be, because we all know that Roger Clemens is as pure as the driven snow. Never touched a drop of The Juice. Oh no. Not him. Others, maybe. But, absolutely and categorically not Roger. Just look at that face—innocence written all over it. And because we always bring you more at Right Off the Bat, here is one of Clemens’ best: “Ego Flos Campi” sung by Stile Antico.
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