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Is This a Great Game, or What?: From A-Rod's Heart to Zim's Head--my 25 Years in Baseball - Hardcover

Kurkjian, Tim

 
9780312362232: Is This a Great Game, or What?: From A-Rod's Heart to Zim's Head--my 25 Years in Baseball
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0312362234 ISBN 13: 9780312362232
Verlag: St Martins Pr, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

The ESPN sports commentator describes his twenty-five-year career covering professional baseball, drawing on candid interviews with notable players, coaches, managers, and executives to furnish revealing insights into the game, the bizarre rituals and superstitions of some of the game's great players, what transpires in the clubhouse, and much more. 100,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

TIM KURKJIAN has spent his entire professional career covering baseball. He is an analyst/reporter for Baseball Tonight and SportsCenter, a senior writer at ESPN The Magazine, columnist for ESPN.com, and a frequent guest on ESPN radio.


TIM KURKJIAN has spent his entire professional career covering baseball. He is an analyst/reporter for Baseball Tonight and SportsCenter, a senior writer at ESPN The Magazine, columnist for ESPN.com, and a frequent guest on ESPN radio.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Is This a Great Game, Or What?
1
My Mom Was My Catcher
It is the best game. Ask anyone who follows it. Ask George Will; he says, "Baseball is the background music in my life." Ask Billy Crystal; he got chills the first time he met Ted Williams. Ask Jon Miller, the best broadcaster in the game today. I once went to his room at midnight in Minneapolis after he had called an Orioles-Twins game. He was playing Strat-O-Matic by himself. "I love the Blue Jays bullpen," he said. Ask the president of the United States. As I went through the receiving line at the White House in 2003, Mr. Bush whispered in my ear, "Who hit the home runs for the Yankees today? Did Ruben hit one?"
It is the best game because once it grabs you, it never lets go; it is so seductive, it really is important for some to know whether Ruben Sierra hit a home run today. I am so incurably hooked by my passion, I check Sierra's batting line first thing every day for a far more important reason: to see if he was hit by a pitch. He has not been hit by a pitch since 1990. How pathetic am I? The daily ritual of devouring box scores at the breakfast table is a rite reserved only for baseball, and intriguing box score lines don't just appear--such as Ben Petrick's 3-0-0-4 or Curtis Granderson's 5-0-5-0--they flyoff the page and hit me in the face. And to be sure I absorb them, I have cut out every box score from every game for the last seventeen years, like a seven-year-old doing a current events assignment with scissors and tape.
"You know you can get all that on the Internet," said my wife, Kathy.
"I know," I said, "but I remember it better when I do it by hand."
It is the best game because the players look like us. They are not seven feet tall, they don't weigh 350 pounds, and they don't bench-press 650. We can relate to them. We can see them--they're not obscured by some hideous face mask, and they don't play behind a wall of Plexiglas--we can touch them and we can feel them. I see Greg Maddux with his shirt off, with his concave chest and no discernible muscles, and I marvel: This is one of the six greatest pitchers in the history of the game? I see Tony Gwynn with his shirt off and I see a short, fat guy with the smallest hands I've ever seen on an athlete, and I wonder: "This is the best hitter since Ted Williams?" This game is open to all shapes and sizes, including the Cardinals' David Eckstein, who is five feet six; he can't throw, he gets hit by a pitch thirty times just to get on base, and he was the shortstop for the World Champion Angels in 2002 and the World Champion Cardinals in 2006. Pedro Martinez told me that when he was in the minor leagues, he weighed 138 pounds and threw 93 mph. How can that be? Mets reliever Billy Wagner is five feet nine and throws 100 mph. "The first time I met him," said six-ten pitcher Randy Johnson, "I thought, 'This guy is a foot shorter than me, and he throws harder than I do.'"
Phillies pitcher Jamie Moyer doesn't throw harder than anyone--about 83 mph--yet he has been one of the game's most consistent pitchers over the last ten years. On the ride home from the ballpark one night after a game he pitched, one of his young sons asked him, "Dad, can't you throw just one pitch 90 (mph) ? Justone?" To which, Jamie Moyer said, "Son, that's not how I pitch." As they drove on, Moyer's son noticed how fast his dad was driving. "Dad," he said, "you are driving the car faster than you throw a baseball."
The players, at least most of them, and their stories, are so human. Former pitcher Pete Harnisch helped work his way through Fordham University by appearing in police lineups. "Twenty-five bucks for a regular case," he said. "Fifty bucks for a murder case." Ex-Twins first baseman Kent Hrbek was the only player who showed up for World Series parties in 1987 and '91 because the food and beer were free. In 1990, he met White Sox rookie Craig Grebeck, who wore number 14, same number as Hrbek, and was roughly half his size: 280 pounds to 140 pounds. "You're too small to wear that number," Hrbek told him. "Put a slash between the 1 and the 4 and be 1/4." Hrbek went camping with Andy Van Slyke. "Around the campfire," Van Slyke said, "he played a tape recording of his favorite farts."
They are regular guys, at least most of them, who just happen to be really, really good at something that everyone else is not. Padres outfielder Ryan Klesko was a terrific high school pitcher. He had a mound in his backyard. His mother often caught him. "She wore a mask," Klesko said, "but no shin guards." The mother of former major-league infielder Casey Candaele played in the Women's Professional Baseball League, which was glorified in the movie A League of Their Own. "She had a better swing than mine," Candaele said with a smile. "She was the only mother ever to be banned from playing in father-son baseball games at school because she was too good." Orioles pitcher Mike Flanagan's seventy-two-year-old grandfather was his catcher in the backyard. "If I threw too far inside or too far outside, he couldn't reach it," Flanagan said. "And if he missed it, he would have to chase it. So I had to learn how to hit the target."
Normal guys? Rangers outfielder George Wright went three forfive on Opening Day 1982. "Did you have fun today?" I asked. He said, "Yeah, I'd never been to a major-league game before." Amazing: the first major-league game he had ever seen, he played in and got three hits. Former reliever Bob Patterson used to fix the gloves of teammates as he sat in the bullpen during the early innings. Teammate Gary Redus called him Dr. Glove. In the minor leagues, he was nicknamed Emmett after the fix-it man on The Andy Griffith Show. "He's coming over Saturday to upholster my couch," said Rich Donnelly, one of his coaches. The day Keith Hernandez left home after being drafted in 1975, he packed his Strat-O-Matic in his suitcase. "You're not taking that," his father said. "You're a professional ballplayer now.'" Hernandez said, "But, Dad, I'm halfway through the '72 season!"
Human? Brewers third baseman Jeff Cirillo made the 1997 All-Star team. As he was stowing his overhead luggage in the plane on his way to the game, a man behind him asked, "Aren't you Jeff Cirillo?" Cirillo was shocked that anyone recognized him. "Yes, I am," he said proudly. The man said, "Aren't you going to the All-Star game?" Cirillo said yes.
"This plane is going to Detroit," the man said.
Even the best players, at least some of them, are genuine. There is no finer person, no more unpretentious superstar, than Hall of Fame third baseman Brooks Robinson of the Orioles. When Robin Roberts came to Baltimore late in his career, he unsuccessfully tried to field a bunt down the third-base line, preventing Robinson from making his trademark barehand catch-and-throw play. Robinson patted Roberts on the butt and said, "Let me have that one the next time; I'm good on that play." In the late '70s, Gordon Beard, a sportswriter in Baltimore, made a speech at one of the retirement functions for Robinson. "In New York," Beard said, "they named a candy bar after Reggie Jackson. Here in Baltimore, we name our children after Brooks Robinson."
It is the best game because it's a romantic game. Our finest essayists write poetically about it, yet ultimately they're all wrong. In truth, it is a hard game played by hard men; the romance disappears when that ball is traveling at your face at an incomprehensible rate of speed. It is, without question, the hardest game in the world to play, yet it looks so easy on TV. It isn't. My wish is for everyone in America to get one at-bat in a major-league game against Randy Johnson, and to stand even with third base when Albert Pujols hits a rocket down the line. Then...

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Verlag
St Martins Pr
Erscheinungsdatum
2007
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0312362234
ISBN 13 
9780312362232
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
288
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