Hats

What is a life?

It is a book consisting of chapters, each ending with some sort of emotion, each beginning with a sense of uncertainty about what comes next.

It is the people that come into it, some staying if you are lucky or fated to have them remain.

It is the many hats you wear, sometimes quite literally, as in the case of Carlos Beltran.

It is the body you are born with, the one that is always changing, the one that aches and ails and ages no matter what you do to stop it, the one that ends and disappears.

Imagine rising to the top of your field, one of the greatest to ever do what you do, having to fight off decline until you can no longer fight. At some point, a life ceases to be about beginnings and becomes about endings. Memories are mere attempts to relive what has already ended. But we are blessed to have them.

Imagine a kid in Puerto Rico hitting bottlecaps with a stick, a life not much more than dreams of future greatness. Imagine the joy of a new beginning, a lucid dream, the start of a new chapter with a brand new Major League uniform and a life defined by what it could be. Imagine standing before tens of thousands of people, bat in hand, ready for your first chance to star in that dream.

The hits came, the homers, the stolen bases, the All Star games, the changing uniforms and failed postseasons and the fading star, and then, that one glorious feeling, the purpose of all of this, a World Series Championship, all subchapters in a life.

What is a life?

It is all of those joys and those sorrows and this one, the end of another chapter, a long, prosperous one. It is all the people, the teammates and the fans with all the different hats, and me, too, one who had the good fortune to watch the entirety of a Hall of Fame career, the one who for some reason at this very moment in this life finds herself overcome by emotion in coming to the end of the chapter of a life not mine, if only because it is not a part of a life, but of all life.

Next chapter: Cooperstown. But what hat will he wear?

Fed up

The Nationals - and Dusty Baker - are on the verge of another failed post season, and I don't even want to watch the game tonight.

I don't want to watch the same failed lineup make out upon out. I don't want to watch the same failed relievers be put into situations they shouldn't be in. I don't want to watch Dusty Baker mismanage another team out of the postseason.

Moreover, I don't want to watch the same fans and media make excuses and defend the manager and players as if they can do no wrong. I wonder if some of these people have ever watched a non-Nationals baseball game. I know some of them aren't watching the rest of the postseason games.

It wasn't a bloop that lost the game yesterday. It was putting Solis in the situation to give up the bloop. It was starting a .226 hitter over a .315 hitter in the outfield. It was failing to drop a clueless Trea Turner down in the order and bat one of the few successful hitters, Michael A. Taylor, at leadoff.

It was constructing the exact lineup three games in a row, one that, save for one glorious inning, has produced a single run in the entire series.

And now they turn their hopes to a mediocre Tanner Roark, who can be hit or miss, and when he misses, he misses badly.

This is a five game series played over the course of a week. The games are not like the regular season. There is no tomorrow. There is no "we'll get 'em next time." There is no miraculous recovery from a slump...that can take weeks. The World Series champs will be crowned by then. There is only changing things up, being creative, and approaching the games with a sense of urgency. And we get none of that.

I watch these other managers do extraordinary things like pitching Chris Sale on three days rest when he is supposed to start the next game and struggle to recall any postseason decision by Dusty that was beneficial to the outcome of a game or series.

I lived in California and followed the Giants in 2002. I walked out of Pac Bell Park after World Series Game 5 thinking there was no way the Giants could lose. With a 5-0 lead and eight outs to go to a World Series championship the next game, Dusty made the controversial decision to pull Russ Ortiz and hand control to his bullpen. They lost that game and the next and the World Series.

I didn't follow the Cubs in 2003, but we all know about Mark Prior and Kerry Wood, and Dusty's propensity to leave Wood in too long cost the team a trip to the World Series, that and pitching to Alex Gonzalez with the pitcher on deck.

But the Reds. I watch the current postseason littered with former players from a dismantled team, a team that was good enough to win it all, just as this Nationals team is, and I feel the despair all over again. I watch them scattered across baseball fields other than the one in Cincinnati and I see the same kind of decisions being made here in Washington with the same kind of results, like batting Shin-Soo Choo leadoff against Francisco Liriano in the 2013 Wild Card game despite Choo's .215 average against lefthanders. Or keeping Cueto in with a 2-0 deficit, then 3-0, then when a fourth run scored putting in Hoover and Ondrusek instead of the best pitcher, Chapman, leading to two more runs. It was one of most grossly mismanaged postseason games in memory. Chapman was never used at all.

And he wasn't used for the tenth inning in Game 3 of the 2012 NLDS after a scoreless 15 pitch ninth. No, instead Dusty put in Jonathan Broxton, who promptly gave up three runs to lose the game. And he allowed Mat Latos to continue to pitch as he gave up six runs in the fifth inning of Game 5 of that series, as if there were going to be a game the next day. No, instead, the Reds went home after having a two games to none lead and the Giants went on to win the World Series.

That 2012 division series was a textbook case on how not to manage in the postseason.

This is a guy who famously said baserunners who got on by walks are "clogging up the bases." His disdain for on base percentage is well-known and caused conflict with his GM and with his OBP star Joey Votto. During his five years with the Reds, batters in the second spot in the order slashed .228/.281/.350.

Dusty Baker is one of the nicest, classiest people in baseball and probably on Earth. But class doesn't win championships. I am fed up with the bad decisions.

I am fed up with being disappointed.

So I don't want to watch tonight. I don't want to watch, but I will, because I am a fan of the great game of baseball, even if it is not a fan of me.

What do you do when you're sick of the internet?

Hall of Blame

The Hall of Fame has become a disgrace.

But it's an interesting case study in the creation of historical records.

Herodotus is widely credited with writing the first history book when he wrote about the wars between the Greeks and the Persians in The Histories, but it was Thucydides who wrote the first account of history in which an author attempted to verify facts. His History of the Peloponnesian War is the best account we have of Greece destroying itself (it's actually a pretty good read, too.) He described incessant warfare, greed and the concept of profits over people, people thinking they can interpret religion any way they want, yada yada...same shit that's happening in America as we see our nation fall.

The fact is, before Herodotus and Thucydides, no one ever thought of writing down what happened in their world, and when the two historians did write something down, there was nothing before them to show them how to write it. These were thoughts that had never been thought before, ideas never ideated, processes never processed.

For some people, the concept of this is too much for them - they can't imagine what it was like when it didn't occur to people to write things down. Even though it did occur to Thucydides, he still wrote as too many do today, without thoroughly reading and citing other documents, which is the foundation of all modern historical writing. He did quote a few books, and he interviewed people, which were novel ideas at the time, but although he was aware of the value of documentary evidence, he did not take full advantage of it. We are left with having to rely on what he wrote, with all his personal biases; therefore, we cannot take his text and his history as gospel.

When hotel owner Stephen Carlton Clark conceived the baseball Hall of Fame, the country was still reeling from the Great Depression, and Prohibition had wiped out the hops industry, devastating the local economy (who cares who you hurt as long as you're moral, amirite?) The civil-war-hero-Abner-Doubleday-invented-baseball-in-Cooperstown propaganda was essential to the cause (you know, the story Albert Spalding made up so the Spalding Company could sell baseball equipment?), and the baseball Hall of Fame was born. Clark and company decided to give the Baseball Writers Association of America the vote, because back then, baseball writers were scholars of a sort. You had to know how to write to be employed as a baseball writer, rather than simply purchasing a journalism (or worse, a communications) degree.

A free and fair press is essential to a stable democracy. You absolutely cannot be a stable country if you are oppressing journalists. This is not debatable. We are not living in the era of Thucydides. We have the researched and true historical records to back it up. We have seen oppression. We have seen what the most heinous of rulers have done to journalists who have done nothing but report the truth. Journalists who report the news should be held with a degree of reverence. I should mention that I hold journalists in the highest regard, as I have worked with journos from across the globe who are risking their lives to report the news. (I supported CPJ before Meryl Streep made it cool.) Journalist is one of the most dangerous jobs in the world.

That being said, a sportswriter is not part of this class. Sports are entertainment. They don't matter.

Well, that's not true, either. Writing is part of the humanities, of humanity. Reading - the act of processing writing - is essential to a healthy human spirit, and healthy human spirits are necessary for stable communities. Writing is vital. It keeps our perspective in check. Perhaps it could be described as the guardian of our humanity. People who don't read aren't healthy people, and healthy people do unhealthy things. If you have a bunch of mentally ill people running around, they're going to do bad things, like shoot up schools and nightclubs or lynch people based on skin color or religious differences and other evils of that nature. As Herodotus said, If a man insisted always on being serious, and never allowed himself a bit of fun and relaxation, he would go mad or become unstable without knowing it. Sports ARE important to a healthy community, and good sportswriting is important, just not in the same way as reporting global events.

This is the essence of why sportswriter egos drive me crazy. They're writing about sports, not saving the world. Yet many think that as journalists they are somehow better than others, more enlightened, that they are part of the fourth estate and therefore perform a vital democratic function. It's this kind of egoism that is destroying the sanctity of the Hall of Fame. Too many baseball writers make it about them and their "morals." The accomplishments of the players are secondary. Sometimes they are lost entirely. I can't stand it. I just can't stand the whole process. It's like watching pigeons fight over scraps of food, all puffed up, pretty feathers shining in the sun, when they're really just big poop bags. If you've ever been to Venice, you've been to St. Mark's Square, and you know about the pigeons and the big beautiful church, the sacred church, and how it's just covered with pigeon poop. The Hall of Fame selection process is like that.

St. Mark's - Not my photo, as mine were taken with a film camera and are not in a digital file.

I don't like this new "transparent" ballot process at all, because it just gives them another stage to self aggrandize. Oh look, here's MY ballot, and this is why EYE chose/did not choose these players.

Look, not every baseball writer is like this. I apologize to the good writers and those with whom I am friendly. But too many are, and they are, unfortunately, the loudest.

Great deeds are usually wrought at great risks, said Herodotus. Barry Bonds was the best baseball player in history, and you're writing like Herodotus if you're ignoring everything but PED use.


What you're doing is basing everything on "what if." How many homers would Bonds have if he hadn't taken PEDs. How many strikeouts would Clemens have had he not taken PEDs. How much shorter would Barry's career have been had he not taken PEDs.

But you don't ask What if PEDs had been available in Babe Ruth's era? Would he have taken them? The answer is most likely yes.

What if Ruth had faced pitchers like Clemens? How many bases would Ty Cobb have stolen if he faced catchers like today? Would Walter Johnson have been a third or fourth starter if he played today? What if Honus Wagner had access to weight training and video like players today? How many more seasons would Sandy Koufax have pitched had Tommy John surgery been available to him, or Don Gullet, or Mark Fidrych. What if Bonds had faced the lower level of pitching that Ruth faced?

We don't even know if performance enhancing drugs are even performance enhancing. We can see they probably prolong careers, but if you're going to punish guys for that, then you should punish guys for getting Tommy John surgery, too, because that heals guys and prolongs their careers.

What PED HOF omissions really boil down to is keeping guys out for character flaws. If you're going to do that, you're going to have to take out most of the players, and sure as hell don't vote for that racist asshole Curt Schilling.

What started as a tourist site and a marketing gimmick has become a part of our nation's history, a history that we are supposed to hold sacred. It was sacred once. The hallowed Hall. But, like the country itself, narcissism has destroyed it.

What isn't sacred is profane by definition.

The fact is, Bud Selig, who permitted steroids for profits, is in the Hall. I hate double standards. I hate hypocrisy. I hate self-aggrandizing egos. I hate that these narcissists are willfully destroying my childhood memories because some players wanted to be the best they could be. These players weren't kicked out of baseball for their deeds. They went to court and there wasn't enough to punish them, either. So we're left with the biases of the sportswriters and their subjective opinions, without any documentary evidence to back up their thoughts. You might as well be telling me about the golden ants the size of foxes in Persia or the gold hoarding cyclopes and griffins that Herodotus wrote about.

I don't even care anymore. I'm not going to bother making a trip to Cooperstown until the best players are enshrined and the era of moralizing bullshit is over.

I might never make it there.

Herodotus was full of it, too.

Sandbagger

I began to play Little League in second grade. We were the green team, sponsored by a local landscaping service in Englewood, Ohio. As a girl, I had to play softball rather than baseball. I'm not sure what I thought of that back then. I think it's BS now.

I remember one moment of the tryouts - I was at second base and I missed a popup. Soon, one of the coaches moved me to the outfield. I asked, "is it because I missed that popup?" He laughed and assured me it was not.

He was telling the truth. I turned out to be one of the best players in the league. Maybe the best. When it was time to move up to the older league, everyone knew I would be the top pick. But I wanted to play on the best team, and they wanted me to play for them, too. That's why they told me to sandbag the tryouts.

I remember it pretty well, balls going through my legs, popups bouncing out of my glove, throws going well wide of the bases...at one point one of my future coaches ran by me and whispered, "don't make it so obvious."

It worked. The coach of the red team, who had the first pick, wondered what had happened to me, according to my new green team coaches, who told me about it after the draft. We never lost a game that year.

I played third base then, and pitched on occasion. When I got to junior high, we had no catcher, so I volunteered, never having played there before. Two years later, I was starting varsity as a freshman, catching one of the top pitchers in the state and winning our conference.

We had moved. The coach of the Northmont High School team was upset that her catcher of the future was playing at a rival school. If we had stayed at Northmont, I probably would have played in college, because she cared about her players and worked to get them on college teams. My high school coach did not.

I know the difference because my high school soccer coach did care, and I did visit colleges who were interested in having me play soccer for them because of his efforts. I hit .420 in league games and .360 something during my senior year - you'd think colleges would have been interested.

In the end, I guess things worked out, as I was able to study abroad for a year, which put me on a career path in international affairs. That wouldn't have happened had I been playing college sports. Every approaching spring during college, however, I contemplated walking on and trying out.

Funny, this thing called life.

New Year, New Blog Post

Of course, it won't last long, but I'm going to try to write a post a day, either on this blog or my other one, From Beirut to Jupiter. http://frombeiruttojupiter.blogspot.com

I'm not doing it for readers or revenue. I'm only doing it for myself, for the exercise of writing, so I can revisit the books I've started but never finished. Or something like that. I turn forty in a week, something that doesn't seem real to me. Except for a few more aches and pains and maybe something resembling cynicism, I don't feel that old. I know a lot more than I did ten years ago, but I think collective knowledge has gotten a lot less. So that's something. Or nothing.

When I turned thirty, there was no social media to distract me, just this blog and my other one under a different name. The Reds had won a World Series only sixteen seasons earlier, not twenty-six, which seems more respectable. We were in the midst of a disastrous presidency that has been forgotten in the last decade as we head towards one that will make Bush seem like George Washington or Abe Lincoln. I had yet to visit or live in Beirut then, and though I'd been working in the Mideast field for a few years, I had not yet developed a real expertise in the area. I went to protests as if they actually did anything, not yet understanding they were a waste of time. It's funny how naive you are at thirty. I suppose I will say the same thing about forty in another decade.

The Reds were in the midst of being dreadful back then, dreadful in a different way than they are now. I always had hope, though, not like now when I can only muster fleeting moments of "maybe they'll surprise us." At least the Storen signing was something. How many wins did that disaster of a pen cost us last year? Has to be ten. The difference between horrendous and respectable, anyway.

I have mentioned that Chris is sick and is on the liver transplant list. He was in the hospital for a week at the beginning of last month, as the toxins had built up in his brain to dangerous levels. It was only then that I really started to think about what death is and the utter devastation I will feel if he doesn't make it through the transplant. I've never really known anybody who died before, aside from two grandfathers when I was barely old enough to grasp the finality of it all, meaning college aged. I just didn't get it. Of course, I was sad when they died, but it was in a different way. Maybe because they were both so sudden and unexpected. I had a grandmother who passed, too, but she was older and I was away and I really didn't get that, either. I guess death just didn't seem real.

I was drawn to war when I learned what it was. Rather, peace. I was drawn to the end of wars, studied international relations in college, stayed in Europe a year, went to all the war museums and memorials and that kind of thing and just couldn't believe that it could even happen, like it was all just a movie. Sure, we had some civil war battlefields in Ohio, but they were just fields now, the blood long dried and forgotten, so when we went to the American Cemetery in Luxembourg and saw Patton's grave, it was really my first contact with something war related. My father had been a Marine but the only war he saw was what he started in his own home.  I ended up joining the US Army when its stated mission was as a peacekeeping force, not an invasion force. The Clinton years were a fabulous time for peace on he surface. You had the fall of the Berlin Wall and the USSR at the start of the decade and the Irish peace accords near the end, and though there were some spectacular failures in the middle (Rwanda being the worst,) for the most part the Clinton administration had taken some giant steps towards a more peaceful world. I suppose Death took a holiday somewhere in that decade. Even with my personal losses I never felt his full effects.

But the nineties ended and a violent decade began. I started working with Arab activists and I was introduced to Death. Like everyone I meet, I forgot his name and had to pretend like I knew it every time he was around. I have met many people who had suffered from his cruel hand. I saw the scars of war both physical and mental when I lived in Beirut and they remind you that history isn't something in the past but it is living, we are living it now, when even the word now is then and we can't know what will happen in the next second. Most likely we will forget it, but every now and then one second changes everything.

One second. One sip of beer and I was talking to the obnoxious guy next to me at the bar and nearly five years later he is in my living room that is also his. I lock the door because Death could be roaming the neighborhood and I finally understand that he is devastation. I made it nearly four decades before I remembered his name after hospital machines whispered it. I sat in that room every night in desperate angst only to come home to an empty house. That's when it was the worst.

And you know what I longed for in those nights, other than Chris's healthy return? Baseball. It was a genuine, desperate longing and a soul crushing absence. Baseball can be a crutch, a pill, a healer. But it just wasn't there.

Winter is the cousin of Death.