It ain't over

Masters of malaprop and malfeasance: From left, former Mariners' manager and Yankees®™
star Lou Piniella, former Dodgers©® manager Tommy Lasorda, Hall of Famer Yogi Berra,
Reds superstar and Hall of Fame®™ reject Pete Rose, and Yankees®™ and Mets manager Casey Stengel.
Cover for a book collection of baseball quotes and stories.

My wife says I should write about Yogi Berra, and so I shall, late as usual to the eulogy.

The Associated Press' initial story of Berra's death last week referred to the Hall of Fame®™ Yankees©™catcher as "Yogi Bear."

The error makes perfect sense to me; I will not pass judgment. Having lugged around a Yogi Bear doll through toddlerhood, I was shocked in childhood to discover an actual human named Yogi Berra.

The human had to have been named after the cartoon bear, I reasoned, because cartoons were more real to me at that stage in my life.

In reality, Berra's representatives sued animators Hanna-Barbera unsuccessfully to stop its use of "Yogi Bear" for the porkpie wearing, pick-a-nick-basket-stealing cartoon denizen of Jellystone National Park.

Sued for what, defamation?

Yogi Berra died a cartoon, for all the good and awful that word implies.

For people my age who remember Berra, he was the old baseball manager known mostly for mangling English. He's one of those public figures who became magnets for unfortunate but funny twists of phrases, including those they didn't actually say.

What Berra did actually say:

• "You can observe a lot by watching."
• "When you come to a fork in the road, take it."
• "I can't think and hit at the same time."
• "I want to thank everybody for making this day necessary."

What Berra might have said, though probably not as we know it:

• "Ninety percent of the game is half mental." (or "Baseball is 90 percent mental. The other half is physical.")
• "It ain't over 'til it's over." (About his 1974 New York Mets rallying from fifth place to win the division). He might have said instead, "You're not out until you're out." 

What Berra probably didn't say, but seems so darn likely that it's tattooed into his mythos:

• “It’s déjà vu all over again!” 
• "Nobody goes there anymore (to a restaurant). It's too crowded."
• "It ain't over 'til the fat lady sings."

Berra appeared to have embraced this malapropping persona, which I and everyone else expected of this grandfatherly little guy with the big black beetly eyebrows behind giant glasses and a bulbous nose above a rubbery grin. He even authored a book subtitled, "I Really Didn't Say Everything I Said!"

Even the source of his nickname — Lawrence Peter Berra is his real name — is fuzzy, maybe or maybe not applied by a baseball teammate for the way he sat, like a yogi, waiting for his turn at bat.

But the gentle buffoonery masked the mastery of his baseball career. Wherever Berra was, championships were sure to follow. The New York Times reports he appeared in 21 World Series from 1946 to 1985 as a Yankees player and a Yankees and Mets coach and manager. Nobody has played in more World Series games, gotten more Series hits or whacked more Series doubles.

Newsreel footage made me think he was an unlikely baseball superstar, and his peers apparently thought likewise. His Yankees manager, Casey Stengel — master of accidental witticisms himself — said, “Mr. Berra is a very strange fellow of very remarkable abilities.”

He looks so tiny in the newsreels, so much smaller than the catchers I grew up watching, and still see today. His bat looked too big for him, but obviously appearances deceive: Berra hit .285 over 19 seasons, with 358 home runs, and was a 15-time All Star®™.

My image of him as a baseball player comes in black and white and gray, when he actually leaps like a little kid into the arms of pitcher Don Larsen after Larsen pitches a perfect Game 5 in the 1956 World Series.

God bless Yogi Berra. He's why I love baseball: Funny names, rich lore, humans playing a game.

I don't do numbers. Though I can tell by a batting average where a hitter stands in the pantheon of the day or of history, I still couldn't tell you with confidence what an earned run is. I am vaguely aware that  a low earned-run average tends to portend a good pitcher. All these other new stats? OPS? WHIP? I'm lost.

Give me a good story, any time. Give me Willie Mays turning a double into a single so the pitcher would be forced to give a good pitch or two to Willie McCovey, hitting next in the batting order. Give me Roberto Clemente, tortured soul on the field, gigantic bleeding heart and soul off it. Give me Coco Crisp, Rusty Staub, "Three Fingers" Brown, Shooty Babitt, Preacher Roe, Jarrod Saltalamacchia, Joe Garagiola and Buster Posey, just because.

The San Francisco Giants this week are trying hard not to break my heart. Barring a miracle, they will. They're five games out of first with five games left in the regular season, fielding a starting lineup half of whom were in the minor leagues a month ago. The Giants have to win all five, and the first-place Dodgers, whom the Giants are playing right now, have to lose all five for the Giants to get a chance at winning the division.

It would make quite a story, the Giants flopping into the playoffs on kids and fumes. The odds are not in their favor. It ain't over, though.

Win or lose, the Giants always manage to make new rich memories of the people who played the game, not their statistics.

As Yogi said — or didn't — "The future ain't what it used to be."

Be careful what I wish for

Don't say I didn't warn me:

I know I said I didn't care if the Giants didn't win the World Series again, because they'd won two in the last three years. But I didn't realize how hard it would be watch them play like mortals.

— Shawn C Turner, June 4, 2013

Still true.  But even I couldn't imagine, a month later, how horribly true.

Here's how bad the Giants are: When the July 4 game in Cincinnati was rained out, Giants and their fans were happy.

That's right. The 2012 World Series champions now look poised to lose any game. Maybe poised isn't the word.

Though thousands of little crying kids were deprived of the most American of spectacles — baseball on the Fourth of July in Middle America on the banks of the Ohio River, with baseball's first professional ballclub, a century of rivalry, $14 hot dog in one hand, $4 glove in the other — Giants fans were ecstatic.

Imagine that.

Just hours ago — this morning, in fact — the Giants lost to the New York Mets 4-3 in 16 innings. Except for its length, the game was a tableau of Giants woes stretching back to the last time the Giants showed their championship mettle …

(Cue flashback sequence …)

That was May 26, when Angel Pagan won the game on a walk-off, inside-the-park homerun.

The crowd went, you know, wild.

Then Pagan went lame, injuring his hamstring so badly in that play he needed surgery and will be out for the season, depriving the team of his leadoff strength and rangy centerfield.

Except.

His centerfield play wasn't all that spectacular before he got hurt. At times he played as if he was on the visiting team, unaware of the quirks of AT&T Park's jagged outfield walls. He was prone to diving for fly balls that squirted past him, and overthrowing the cutoff man to try for the big putout, giving up runs instead when the ball rolled away.

Replacement outfielders inherited these horrid habits, as last night's game attests.

In quick time injuries plagued Giants starters, keeping one, then another, then several out for weeks. Though defense tightened up for a while, ineptitude bubbled up again and the Giants resumed making plays champions wouldn't make, much less professional players who train every day to account for every possibility on the field of play.
(An aside: I cannot possibly imagine what it's like to fail in front of 41,644 people  counting on you not to fail. I solemnly acknowledge I'm taking for granted how difficult it is to do what these players do. Not that I think they should be paid so highly for it, but that's another post for another day …)

It was as if Pagan's departure cast a spell — a curse! — on the Giants …

This morning's 16-inning game showcased the most curious of the Giants' problems: Somehow, almost all of the Giants hitters have gone cold.

Not just one or two hitters … almost all the hitters have gone into a slump. The exception is catcher Buster Posey, who got five hits in eight trips to the plate, including a two-run homer in the first inning. But the Giants didn't score again until the seventh, and couldn't push a run across the plate for nine more innings.

First baseman Brandon Belt, dubbed the Baby Giraffe for his limber galumph, went 0 for 8 with five strikeouts.

(I've been scrambling to compile the stats that would lay out in grand panoply just how bad the Giants have been, but that's really all that need be said: Posey keeps on hitting, but everyone else is woeful.)

Pitching is not as bad. The late-inning loss masked Tim Lincecum's surprisingly strong performance as he kept the team in the game; fans and analysts have been wondering for a couple of seasons what happened to Lincecum's ever-slowing fastball, and whether his small frame and wildly gymnastic pitching motion have worn him down.

But too many times the Giants' starters have been surprisingly bad, pitching impressively in the first inning, but then doing everything but announcing their pitches to the batters by megaphone in the succeeding innings.

Though I'm not experienced enough to remember another championship team that suddenly went so wholesale cold, I doubt there are many.

A guy I work with sometimes, who slips me Giants' scores when I can't be near a radio to get updates, told me he's no longer following the Giants because they didn't make the crucial changes before the season to strengthen the team.

Wait a minute: The Giants have kept almost all of the players from the World Series team. Sounds like a good plan to me, as it did to the general manager and the fans. Who expected almost the entire team to go bad at once?

Even the managers and coaches fell down, accidentally batting Posey out of order against the Los Angeles Dodgers Sunday. His run-scoring double was negated, the batter for whom he was wrongly batting was called out, and Posey then batted next in his proper order — to hit a grounder for the final out instead. No score.

The Giants' announcers have fallen into an annoying habit of wishful broadcasting. With the Giants down four runs in a late game, for example, a Giants batter would get hit by a pitch.

"And the rally started with a fastball to the ribcage …" announcer Mike Krukow would say.

I feel their pain. They're trying to keep an even but upbeat tone. They want to broadcast wins. For now, fans still fill the beautiful ballpark, entertained by their loveable losers. They're just waiting for the Giants to do whatever it is to realize their talent and play like it.

So are we all.

Where have you gone, Andres Torres?

Old sap doodling about a time before
his time, a time that never was …

Baseball is myth, and myth is humans trying to make sense. Baseball is childhood, fun at the heart of grief. Baseball is story.

About this, I'm in the naive minority.

To most, baseball is math. Statistics drive dollars, dollars fuel victories, though not necessarily the victories we naifs expect, namely the World Series. Money rules; baseball is business. I realize now, so late, that Albert Pujols, the St. Louis Cardinals' too-good-to-be-true first baseman, is duty-bound to expect and accept the highest salary in history, so that some future Pujols can do likewise, ad infinitum.

Were I Albert Pujols, I would have realized long, long ago that I made more than I could possibly need, and would seek a lesser salary now as Free Agent No. 1. But to do so would cause the market for professional athletes everywhere to implode, and the math-driven dreams to dry up forever.

[Pujols fulfilled his role in grand style today, taking a 10-year deal with the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim; it means two things: (1) he doesn't mind playing for the most awkwardly named team in U.S. pro sports and (2) he will demonstrate the baseball law of diminishing returns as his power recedes drastically by year three of his contract.]

When legend becomes fact,
sketch the legend.

Math trumped myth, as it always will, once again this week: the San Francisco Giants traded Andres Torres. Had he played for the Giants a decade or so ago, he might have been called one of the Fighting Hydrants — small-statured, amazingly athletic, relentless, old-school crowd favorites.

Torres is among my all-time favorites who lives a wonderful story, which includes finally finding a way to control his attention deficit hyperactivity disorder so he could focus on playing centerfield and hitting home runs. Hit or miss, Torres play full out. He even lets errant pitches go by with great energy, snapping back like a torero taunting the bull.

Torres broke through the season before last, the Giants' championship season, and well deserved the Willie Mac Award he earned for exemplifying spirit and leadership, after Giants Hall of Famer Willie McCovey. Last season Torres was lousy. Many say the championship year, Torres especially, was a fluke. I wanted so badly for Torres to prove the real fluke was last year. I still do, even as he moves to the Mets.

Salary aside, Torres is the ideal athlete. Triumphantly gifted, he sometimes performs game-saving feats. But he frequently fails spectacularly, too, in front of 42,000 paying fans and hundreds of thousands on the other side of the cameras. Often the harder he tries, the more likely he fails, flailing at pitches one would think he had learned by now to lay off. But Torres charges into the next new day, hoping, planning for better.

[Also, the Giants traded a good pitcher, Ramon Ramirez, to the Mets, and gave up on signing outfielders Cody Ross and Carlos Beltran. The wheel in the sky keeps on turnin'; I don't know where I'll be tomorrow …]

Now I do as before, make myth out of majority rule. New promising players whom I should know, but don't, will fill the roster, and I'll look for the stories among the numbers, and hang onto the stories until they break my heart again. It took me years to return to the Giants after Will Clark and Matt Williams left.

I'm not so stubborn as before.