I remember the 2000 Subway Series when Roger Clemens threw a shattered bat at Mike Piazza. The NY Post is a rag, but they’ve consistently had the best headlines. They called this the Rocket’s (Clemens’ nickname) Red Glare.
It was clear that a lot of players were on steroids or other performance enhancing drugs. Guys frequently broke bats over their knees when they struck out, and one second baseman in particular went from a slow, average hitter to hitting 50 home runs and flying around the bases.
Still, friends, jobs, and even family comes and goes, but baseball is always there.
There was also some argument about Tommy John surgery. A pitcher tears his elbow to pieces, and they go out and get a ligament from a corpse to fix it, and the guy comes back throwing harder than ever.
I like the NBA and NHL, but you can hide. If you’re pitching or at bat and you fuck up, you’re really alone out there. In other sports, you can blame the offensive line, a bad screen, or whatever. As a pitcher, the only person you can blame is the catcher, and while pitchers do this, it’s rarely public, as it just looks like an excuse.
Still, I think more kids should play baseball. If you can get by that kind of humiliation, it’s easier to accept rejection or failure and keep plugging away, and a participation trophy means nothing in baseball. You know you fucked up, and you want to jam that trophy up someone’s ass.
There have been a lot of injuries to starting pitchers the last few years, especially this one, and as a lousy pitcher, I’d say it’s because if a kid starts to show talent at 11 or 12, they’re encouraged to throw as hard as possible with as much torque as possible, which destroys your arm.
People are not built to throw 100 mph or even 90 mph A few with perfect mechanics can get away with it, but it still takes a toll.
A good fastball is the most important and difficult pitch to throw. Unless you’re a pure knuckle-ball pitcher, you’re going to get hammered if you don’t have a fastball.
When you’re young, sometimes that’s all you need, but you need at least one decent secondary pitch aside from a change-up.
An older and wiser Roger Clemens said a problem today is that if a guy is throwing a bit off the plate to the right, coaches will try to change his mechanics from top to bottom.
His solution was to take a step to the left, and it worked.
Love him or hate him, he was a great pitcher.
When Mariano Rivera was young he was a flamethrower. He would take hitters up the ladder, or throw the same four seam fastball, but move it up through the zone and punch hitters out.
In those days, the starting pitchers threw a lot more pitches, and there wasn’t as much emphasis on resting relievers. As a result, those guys were a bit craftier, or learned how to throw when their fastball was dying. They’d stick to fastballs and curve-balls, then drop their first slider of the game in the seventh inning, and it froze batters.
Some of the pitchers today are just as sneaky, and they’ve got a new take on going up the ladder. Instead of throwing the same fastball and raising it in the zone, they’ll start with a sinker, go outside with a slider to try to get a bite, and then go up into the zone with a fastball.
A two seam fastball has a little more motion, or doesn’t go straight down the pike, but most pitchers can throw a four seam fastball a little harder, but I didn’t have the stuff these guys do and the four seam fastball scared the hell out of me. It’s faster, but it has no lateral movement, and a good hitter will crush it unless you have them thinking about other pitches.
I feel like a dinosaur writing about baseball, so I would like to give some credit to the WNBA and women’s college basketball. 10 years ago, it was unwatchable, but now, they can play, and I enjoyed the women’s March Madness more than the men’s.
The world is fucked up and we have a lot of existential crises, but sports may be the last true meritocracy. It brings people of different backgrounds together, and one good decision the US made was to establish baseball diplomacy, which has spread to other sports, but not quite to the same extent.
The idea is that if you can play with people from other countries, you’ll learn how to get along, or that what you have in common is more important than your differences, and this appears to work better in baseball than in other sports because of the undiluted humiliation all baseball players have shared combined with the long schedule. There are teammates who hate each other, but there’s a shifting array of teammates who say it’s time to forget about that shit and just play.
There’s a Chinese saying that smart kids grow up into stupid adults, and as I get older, the more I wish I could have been a kid for a little bit longer.
No matter what you do, a day will come when you’re told you’re too old, and you’ll know that it’s true.
However old you are now, do what you can while you can still do it.
If you live long enough, you’ll look back to today and wish you had.
The good thing about writing is that there are no age limits as to who can do it, whereas sports always favors the young.
Hockey goalies can get humiliated, too, but at least they're wearing masks. They'll get pulled after giving up five goals on eight shots, and they'll leave their helmets on while sitting on the bench as far from their teammates as possible. It's like they're in their own little room.