Chuck

I wrote this piece for The Kansas City Star on November 25, 2001. I have edited it for clarity. All the best on this Memorial Day.

* * *

This would be a good weekend for some Kansas pheasant hunting. Not that Chuck would need to shoot anything. No, he and Kent Kraus might just walk the Wichita farm, talk about things, uncle to nephew, hero to admirer. See, Chuck didn't need to shoot any guns. To Kent, to everybody, he was already so much bigger than life.

Man, every kid should have an uncle like Chuck Jones. That's what Kent thought, anyway. First clear memory he has of Chuck was a summer day, one of those bright days when everything looks yellow, you know? And Chuck came out of the sunlight, driving in his Dodge Charger, dirt spitting behind, looking like he had driven off the set of "Starsky and Hutch." He was the essence of cool. An Air Force Lieutenant. Not an ounce of body fat. Was doing all sorts of secret military things.

It was like having a superhero in the family.

"Hey," Chuck said through the window, "let's go get some fireworks."

The Three Toughest Outs

Does Robertson have the guts to get the last three outs? (AP) 

The other day, I heard an announcer call the ninth inning "The toughest three outs to get in baseball." I will not name the announcer for a variety of reasons, the main one being that I could probably turn on the television tonight, scan the DirecTV baseball package and within a few minutes hear another announcer say the same thing, almost word for word. This "toughest three outs to get are the last three outs" is pretty well engrained into the grand baseball conversation.

Before I get into this, though -- and, yes, we are going to go pretty deep into this -- I would like to say a few words about how baseball's immenseness and complications seem to lead people to just say stuff that sounds right in their minds. I thought I might have mentioned this a couple of weeks ago, but maybe I didn't: I was watching a game on television and Yankees second baseman Robinson Cano struck out looking. Tim McCarver was doing the game, and he immediately said something like: "We just saw an extremely rare thing. Robinson Cano almost never strikes out looking."

A Toast to Kerry Wood

Wood called it quits at 34. (US Presswire)

Here’s the thing about expectations: They can dampen some of the joys of life. Shame, that. Good things don’t feel quite as good as you had hoped. Christmas morning is not quite as perfect as Christmas Eve promised. Vacations don’t turn out quite as relaxing or refreshing or energizing as all the optimism and anticipation leading up.

If you had told the Chicago Cubs when they made Kerry Wood the fourth pick in the 1995 draft that he would pitch in two All-Star games, lead the league in strikeouts one year, help carry the Cubs to the brink of the World Series, get to 1,000 strikeouts faster than any pitcher in baseball history, throw one of the greatest individual games ever and have a fine 14-year career with a 117 career ERA+ … I suspect they would have happily taken that. The fourth pick in the draft the year before was a third baseman named Antone Williamson who barely made the big leagues The year before that it was a somewhat middling reliever Wayne Gomes. The year after Wood, the pick was the mercurial Bill Koch. All in all, Kerry Wood was probably the best fourth pick of the 1990s.*

*Well, either Wood or Alex Fernandez. It’s pretty close. Fernandez’s 1996 season is probably better than any year Wood had, and his 1993 season was really good too, and he did win 17 games in 1997 as the Marlins won the World Series. But Fernandez got hurt and did not really pitch much after he turned 27.

Bobblehead Dreams

Yes, I was there.

Yes, I want to be one of those first 20,000 fans.

The only thing missing is Barry Bonds in the background after making the weak throw that should have forced him to give back at least two of his Gold Glove awards.

Last Dance

I did not like Donna Summer's music. And I loved it. This is one of the contradictions of my childhood. There were many.

I did not like Cleveland Municipal Stadium. Like it? How could anyone like it? The wind whipped in off the lake and made summer evenings in July feel like that fruits and vegetables room at Costco, and winter afternoons in December feel like Stalingrad. The view from every seat, every single seat, was blocked by a metal beam -- it was an architectural marvel in that way, the ballpark equivalent of that pool table where no matter where you aim the cue ball it ends up in the same place. The floor was covered in some kind of remarkable and ambiguous tacky substance that I'm entirely sure was later patented and used for the Sticky Buddy. Asbestos seemed to be leaking out of the walls, there were exposed wires everywhere, the place smelled of the kind of gasoline beer that could get you drunk if you were within a 500-foot radius. My father, of course, would buy the cheapest tickets available, which meant that even though there were countless empty seats in front of us in that cavernous place, we would sit far back, because to move up would be cheating*, so it would feel like we were a half mile away from the game. The place was so big and, except on the Fourth of July, so empty and so filled with ghosts that to go in there was like walking into an instant sadness machine; it felt like the place was crawling with dementors from Harry Potter.

*A habit I never lost; I sit in assigned seats no matter how many empty seats happen to be available down low.

Thoughts on the Triple Crown

Health is the key for Hamilton. (US Presswire)

Josh Hamilton’s impossibly great start has some people talking triple crowns -- and why not? -- so let’s talk a bit about them. Let’s start with the surprise: How many times since 1967 -- the year Carl Yastrzemski won the last triple crown -- do you think a player has led his league in home runs and RBIs? Take a guess. You know that no player in those 44 seasons has won a Triple Crown, well, how often do you think a player has captured the two power-hitting jewels of the Triple Crown?

You ready for this?

LeBron in the Last Minute

Is James simply following the narrative? (US Presswire)

Here is today’s question: Do some people start to believe the narrative that others create for them? I ask this because we hear an awful lot in sports about “proving everybody wrong” and “playing for respect,” and such things. I believe there are some athletes who do feed off this kind of negative energy. Tom Brady seems to be one of those guys who needs the doubters; he seemed to use that low draft pick thing to spark his fury and brilliance. Albert Pujols seems to one of those guys too; he has had nothing but success in the major leagues (at least until the start this year) and yet has never stopped pointing to those who doubted him along the way.

I would say the clearest example is Michael Jordan, of course. He needed those doubters so badly that he sort of invented the whole “I got cut from my high school basketball team” narrative to keep him angry and hungry and edgy.

There’s a story a friend told me about Jordan, I probably won’t get all the details right, so I’ll keep it general. The story was about how a player lit him up for a bunch of points in a game. After the game, Jordan grumbled angrily about how the other guy trash-talked him all night, and how the next game Jordan would personally make sure that guy suffered. Well, the next game happened, and sure enough Jordan scored like 40 and held the guy to something like 2-of-17 shooting, blocked a few of his shots, kind of humiliated him.

After that game, my friend went over to the other guy and found that he was a pretty good sport about it all. “I guess I had it coming,” he said laughing. But then, quietly, he said something else: “You know, I never said a single word to Jordan in that last game. Not one word.”

“Really? So why did Jordan say that?”

The guy shrugged and said: “I guess he needs it.”

Pujols: The Good News

Pujols can still salvage his season. (US Presswire)

Albert Pujols is hitting .160 in May. Obviously, that’s not the good news … well, part of it is the good. The “May” part. I have been fascinated -- probably to the point of obsession -- with Pujols’ early-season struggles, even while I have always tried to keep in mind that it is early. Very early. Very, very early.

Very, very, very early.

How early? Well, here’s what I decided to do … I took Pujols’ numbers so far this year (.197/.235/.275 with 1 homer) and added it to every single season of Pujols’ career, post-May 15. So I added those numbers to the numbers he had May 15 and after last year, and two years and three years ago, all the way back to his 2001 rookie season.

My Daughter's Favorite Sport

Elizabeth, our oldest daughter, has never shown much interest in sports. By this, of course, I mean she has shown no interest in sports. When she was 4 or 5 years old, she used to climb into my lap when I was watching baseball games and ask, with complete seriousness, “Daddy, when will the commercials be on again?” When she got a little bit older, when we would take her to various sporting events, she would always bring a book along and always read during the boring parts, which for her meant the “game action.” She would enjoy it when people threw T-shirts into the crowd or the mascot performed. She liked fireworks. Double plays meant too much noise when she was trying to read.

Yes, every now and again she showed signs of paying more attention to these games than I expected. I have written before about the time that friends of ours came over with their son, who was just about Elizabeth’s age. They had grown up together. He began telling her about baseball games. He was -- and remains -- an extremely talented young baseball player and Elizabeth asked him what position he played. He said he was a shortstop and a pitcher. And she said, “What kind of pitcher are you? Are you a starter or a closer?”

He asked: “What’s a closer?”

She said: “A closer is someone who comes into the game at the end to finish off the other team.”

He said: “Oh.”

She said: “Of course, managers tend to misuse their best pitchers by turning them into conventional closers, pitching them for one inning at the end of games, often with a two- or three-run lead, when they would be much better suited for high leverage situations earlier in games.”

OK, she did not say that last part. But the rest of it is true.

Capital T Rhymes With P Stands For Pujols

There are so many things that are hard to see in sports, at least for me, at least in real time. Balks.* Hockey goals. Key lead blocks. And so on. This is why replays matter so much … I want to see what REALLY happened. I want to see why LeBron got so open underneath, what Jay Cutler was looking at when he threw the ball right into the linebacker’s hands, how much did Luke Hochevar’s slider really hang?

*There is a movement, apparently, to make the fake-throw-to-third, throw-to-first play in baseball a balk. I am totally, 100% behind this movement. For one, it would be nice for there to be a balk that I could actually recognize without the help of twenty-two slow motion replays (“OH, he hitched his belt or something!”). For another, I have no idea why it’s NOT a balk, and I’ve never known. There are, best I can tell, at least fifteen different ways a balk can be called, and the purpose of all these balk violations s so pitchers are not allowed to unfairly entrap or trick base runners. That fake third-to-first play is clearly in that category and should have been called a balk from the start.

The fake throw to second should also be a balk, I think, but mainly because I’m tired of fans in every stadium screaming “balk!” whenever it happens.

Days Off and Josh Beckett

Few things irritate fans more than wasted talent. Well, that’s probably not true. I could probably come up with a pretty long list of things that irritate fans more than wasted talent. Mosquitoes. Traffic. Dumb movie remakes. Whitney. Spam. Gruden. Books with lousy endings. Those automated operators who tell you that your call will be answered in the order it was received. Computer freezes. Jammed parking lots. Slow restaurant service. Power failures. Lots more. So, yeah, let me take that back. Wasted talent wouldn’t be high on anybody’s list.

But wasted talent is still irritating … and by “wasted” I don’t necessarily mean talent squandered. That’s one form. But another form, the one that is more irritating, is when talent is wasted on some kind of unlikable personality, someone who doesn’t act like they appreciate the talent. The latest saga of this kind of wasted talent is, of course, Josh Beckett.

Scotty Carson

OK, well, things have cleared up a bit. So to celebrate … well, it’s been way too long since there’s been a curiously long post about something nobody on earth should care about. So here we go.

Seems to me that one of the great questions in the history of sports movies -- and, so, one of the great questions in all of life -- was whether or not Scott Carson purposely double-crossed the Judge when he sent Roy Hobbs to the New York Knights.

I’ve written about this before, but I think it’s time to decide this definitively. You will remember the scene from “The Natural.” Roy Hobbs shows up to play for the New York Knights. He’s old and broken down. Hobbs was supposed to be 34, though Redford was 46 or so when he played the role. Anyway, Hobbs walks in, and the Knights manager Pop Fisher, despite having the lousiest team imaginable, is outraged. He apparently was not informed about the Hobbs signing. The conversation goes like this:

Pop: What do we got here? The Salvation Army band?
Hobbs: Pop Fisher?
Pop: Who wants to know?
Hobbs: I’m Roy Hobbs, your new right fielder.
Pop: My what?
Hobbs (showing him a letter): It’s right here.
Pop: Scotty Carson sent you here?
Hobbs: That’s right.
Pop: He must be nuts.

RIP Maurice Sendak

“And sailed back over a year
and in and out of weeks
and through a day
and into the night of his very own room
where he found his supper waiting for him
and it was still hot”
-- Where The Wild Things Are

As brilliant reader Jay points out, it is all but impossible to be of a certain age, to read those words, and to not feel like what follows is the closing of a book, the tucking of a blanket, and a kiss followed by the words, “I love you.” RIP Maurice Sendak.

National Cartoonists Day

Saturday, apparently, was National Cartoonists day. My good friend, Rick McKee, is the editorial cartoonist for The Augusta Chronicle, and so to bust his chops I told him that would celebrate the day by standing silently until someone put a pithy caption beneath me.

Here’s the thing, though. You don’t want to mock a cartoonist. Because, you know, they can draw things.

Here’s Rick’s response:

Pujols Slump Update

When I was a young reporter, a veteran baseball writer gave me some advice I haven’t forgotten. He said that one of the things he despised was when somebody wrote that a player “ended a slump” when he got a hit. For instance: “Buddy Bell ended a three-week slump when he singled up the middle and drove in two runs to lead Cleveland to a 6-4 victory.”

The writer said: “It’s just one hit. If he was two for his previous 31, he’s now only three for his previous 32. That’s still lousy.”

I bring this up because the theme today seems to be that Albert Pujols ended his slump yesterday by finally hitting first first home run for the Angels. It may be that the home run will spur Pujols to return to his machine-like ways. It also may be that Pujols was always going to return to his machine-like ways and that the small-sample-size concerns of the first month were misguided. Bill James has Pujols finishing .312 with 34 homers, and Bill tends to be the most level-headed guy in the room.

That said, it always struck me that the problem with Albert Pujols’ start was not the home run drought. Yes, that was interesting and baffling and the easiest thing to talk about. But if Pujols was hitting .274/.364/.456 with no homers, despite all those numbers being way, way down from his career totals, I don’t think it would have mattered much. You could have said: OK the home runs will come and then he’ll be back to normal. Pujols has had home run droughts before.

The problem is Pujols has never, ever gone a month where he looked so hopeless at the plate. Forget the lack of homers. He’s had more than 100 plate appearances, and he’s hitting .196/.237/.295. He has not had more strikeouts than walks in a season since he was a rookie -- this year he has 16 strikeouts and only six walks, two of those intentional. He’s swinging out of the zone more often and putting those balls in play more often -- this tends to be a bad, bad combination. Pitchers are changing speeds fearlessly against him now and, until he starts crushing those pitches, they will keep on feeding him change ups and curveballs and sliders that break and move out of the zone. So far it doesn’t really matter because Pujols isn’t hitting the fastball yet either.

Even Sunday, when Pujols hit the home run on an 84-mph slider that hung just a bit, he only went one for four, he struck out on an at-bat where he faced six fastballs and in his last at-bat, the one after the homer, he flew out to right on a fastball.

So, yes, the home run was nice. But I don’t see how anyone can say the slump is over and only good things are ahead. Maybe we should wait for a day when Pujols gets five at-bats, crushes three balls hard and walks twice. My baseball writer friend would say, even then, you could not call the slump over. But, it would be a nice start.

Willie Mays Turns 81

I wrote this blog post -- Willie Mays turns 80 -- exactly a year ago. I hope to be back blogging like mad in the next week or week and a half, but for now, here is one-year-later rerun as Willie Mays Turns 81.

The Machine (Pujols Edition)

What has made Albert Pujols utterly amazing, of course, is that he has been a machine. This is so true that people call him "The Machine." Until his sorta-psuedo-semi struggles last year -- where he only ended up fifth in the MVP voting and hit less than .300 for the first time in his life -- you could not even IMAGINE him struggling.

Yes, of course, if you looked deeper, he had his struggles now and again. No man is a machine. He had his power outages. He had his injuries. He had his months where he stumbled. For instance there was July 2001, when he hit .241 with little power.

*But that little fact might kind of prove the point: If you don't include last year, I had to go back to his ROOKIE SEASON to find a month when he hit less than .250. Even last year, he only had one month when he did it -- he hit .245 in April.