Sports in Hell (20 page)

In Sheffield's case, that's exactly the problem.

There's no bigger gap in any sport than the one between misty-eyed Jack Kerouac–quoting baseball writers and red-eyed Jack Daniel's–drinking baseball players. Press-box poets like George Will are always waxing nostalgic about the game; everything is roses and sepia tones and tearstained “catches” with Dad. They'll see some rookie standing with some old vet in the outfield and say, “Imagine the lessons being handed down.” And having been around the game my whole life, having played it, I can tell you the lessons. The old vet is saying, “You see the blonde with the rack sitting behind the dugout? She likes power tools.”

In baseball, it takes only three strikes and you're out, whereas it takes four balls for a walk. This is why the very best hitters fail two times out of three, making baseball mostly all about disappointment. There is nothing in life more boring than a one-hitter.

If a ball hits the foul pole, it's fair.

In the National League, there is no designated-hitter rule, which means fans get the thrill of seeing a pitcher swing a bat at a ball the way Paris Hilton swings a shoe at a moth.

The infield fly rule states that—aww, forget it. It's understood by only three people—two of them in China. It's nearly as incomprehensible as the balk rule, which is simple compared to the rule that forces fans to wait up to three hours in the rain before the home manager has to call the game a rainout, thus allowing his owner to sell three more hours' worth of those little ice cream helmets while people wait. Bastards.

That is why I've developed my own new set of baseball rules, effective beginning tonight at midnight:

1. If you're 0-for-4 for the day, you no longer get to pick your own at-bat music. The crowd picks it for you. Is it our fault they choose “Tiny Dancer”?
   

2. You have fifteen seconds to get back in the box or back on the mound. If you're late, we bring out John Rocker to throw fastballs at your groin.
   

3. Three balls for a walk.
   

4. Every home run gets you an extra out.
   

5. Two outfielders.
   

6. If you're the dweeb on the cell phone waving at the camera, the rest of the people in your section get to pour Budweiser down your pants.
   

7. Any baseball player who wants to renegotiate his deal upward can do so. But that automatically clears the way for his mortgage company, his agent, and his ex-wife to renegotiate their deals up, too.
   

8. Every player will hang around for five minutes after batting practice and sign autographs before going into the clubhouse. This is not an original idea. One time, the Chicago White Sox tried to make it a club policy and Frank Thomas pitched a XXXL fit. “We have schedules,” he said.
   

Oh, please. I've been with Frank Thomas before games. Here is his unbendable and demanding schedule for a 7:30
P.M
. start:

So, Frank, you think you could spare five out of that?

Just a few:

• Forget what the rule book says about “knees to the letters,” the strike zone is an inch above the belt to the bottom of the knees. In the National League, it's even lower than that.
  

• The second baseman does not have to touch the bag on a double play. Also, the first baseman can yank his foot off the bag if it's only a fraction of a second. Apparently, it's like one of those MapQuest pins. Anywhere in the vicinity is good enough.
  

• If you celebrate even a tiny bit at home plate after hitting a home run, we will throw a ninety-mile-per-hour fastball at the head of your team's next batter. The hitter is supposed
  to bury his eyes into the ground and run the bases as though he was on a run with General Patton. This has been going on for decades, but it was particularly stupid in the 2009 World Baseball Classic. The Netherlands was beating the U.S.A. when a nobody named Brian Englehart hit a dinger and apparently took one crow hop too many watching it fly out of the yard—perhaps because it was the first Dutch home run in WBC history and the greatest moment in Englehart's life. The American team decided he'd disrespected them. Decided he'd cleaned his toes with the American flag. Naturally, they threw the next pitch at the following hitter's earhole. This has killed people before, by the way, and blinded a couple others. A brawl nearly ensued, which would've been interesting, since the entire Dutch team was on speed skates.
  

  This is typical baseball crud. Take the New York Yankees' emotional and big-hearted pitcher, Joba Chamberlain. He got a big strikeout in Cleveland one night and indulged himself in a joyous fist pump, à la Tiger Woods. You'd have thought he'd shot the White House dog. Yankees Hall of Famer Goose Gossage sniffed: “There's no place for it … That's just not the Yankee way. Let everyone else do that stuff, but not a Yankee.”
  

  Can you imagine this in any other sport?
  After Woods made a huge putt on 13 and celebrated, Mickelson hit a retaliatory driver directly into Woods's stomach
  .
  

• Players like Gossage get into the Hall of Fame if they moan long enough. For nine voting years, he and his 3.01 ERA weren't good enough—and they weren't—and suddenly, just like that, they were. Jim Rice wasn't good enough for fifteen years, and suddenly he was. In baseball, the whiney wheel gets the plaque.
  

• No media type may ask any manager or player an honest question. It must be couched in globs of puffery and doublespeak. For instance, if the Megaliths' first baseman
  boots an easy grounder to lose the game in the bottom of the ninth, the last thing a writer can say to the alcoholic manager is, “What happened at first?”
  

  He'd get a snap of the neck, a bulled chest, and a screaming, “What happened at first? What kind of bullshit question is that? What did you think happened at first? Get the fuck out is what happened! Get the fuck out of my office!”
  

  No, there has to be a long period of brooding silence—even though the room is full of reporters on deadline—and finally the senior newspaper beat guy is supposed to clear his throat and say, at last, “Brutal hop at first base, Skip. Just brutal.”
  

  And the manager is supposed to digest that for a minute, pull his hat back a little, and go, “Ahh, I couldn't see it. Hell, I thought the boys played their dicks off. What are you gonna do?”
  

  One time, I purposely broke this rule, just to see what would happen. It was before an All-Star game, and Frank Robinson was an assistant coach for the American League. The Oakland A's' Jose Canseco was on the team and he was the most controversial figure in the game—sleeping with Madonna, looking like the roided-up Godzilla that he was, having balls bounce off his head and over the fence—so I said to Robinson, “What do you think of Jose Canseco?”
  

  And he turned to me with eyes big as coconuts and a vein in his neck started throbbing and he said, “What do I think of Jose Canseco? WHAT DO I THINK OF JOSE CANSECO? Take a hike. Take a motherfucking hike.”
  

  Swear to God.
  

  One day a few years ago, Cincinnati Reds starter Kent Mercker was knocked out of the box in a loss to the Mets. When reporters arrived at his locker, there hung this note:
  

  “I waited fifteen minutes and had to go. I would like to answer any question with the standard good-guy answer:
  

  1. Bad location with fastball
     

  2. Fell behind too many hitters.
     

  3. (bleep)ed
     

  4. (bleed)ed
     

  5. (bleep)ed again.”
     

  I always felt like Mercker hit on a very good idea there.
  

  Since the whole give-and-take between players/managers and the baseball media is such bull, “standard answers” could save everybody a lot of time. Why should reporters go to a locker to take notes when they can go there to
  read
  one.
  

  When the cleanup man strikes out five times in a crucial pennant-stretch game, he could simply leave this note:
  

  1. Real nice park. When do the motocross guys get it back?
     

  2. Yeah, well, you'd go oh-for-five, too, if you had Sarah Jessica Parker hitting behind you. No wonder I never see a damn decent pitch.
     

  3. I told you. I'm not in a slump, I'm just hitting shitty.
     

  4. Screw these fans. Does this town even HAVE an orthodontist?
     

  5. (Bleep) their (bleep)ing shift.
     

  And since a lot of baseball players have the moral compass of AIG and often find themselves a little sideways with the gendarmes, they could simply leave the standard “bad guy” answers on a note at the sergeant's desk at police headquarters:
  

  1. Hey, I only punched the cop because he disrespected:
     

     1. me
        

     2. my peeps
        

     3. my new Suburban
        

  2. It was profiling. They just think anybody doing 110 is
     automatically
     causing trouble!
     

  3. I wasn't drunk. Those parked cars sideswiped
     me
     !
     

     Someday, I may even try it. I'll leave the press box early for the local adult-beverage dispensary, simply pinning a note to the pitcher's locker with my standard questions and a blank for his answers:
  

  1. The one Pujols hit off your forehead, did that hurt?
     

  2. Do you think the eight walks in the third inning hurt your cause?
     

  3. Where exactly should I go on my motherfucking hike?
     

This is not news. It's like saying, “Wolves like meat.” We all know it now: Many, if not most, baseball players cheated in some fashion in the Small Testicles Era, 1985–2005.

But unlike the Dead Ball Era, the Whites-Only Era, and the High Mound Era, the Small Testicles Era didn't apply to every player across the board. There was nothing Lou Gehrig could do to face black pitchers. It's not like he could suddenly sign with the Baltimore Black Sox. He was stuck playing a less-than-what-it-could-have-been game. It wasn't Denny McLain's fault he pitched in the High Mound Era. Every mound in the league was like that. But Derek Jeter competed against and faced teams full of juicers every game and he says he was on nothing. “I hear people say ‘Everybody was doing it,'” Jeter said in the aftermath of teammate Alex Rodriguez admitting he binged on the syringe. “No, that's not true. Everybody wasn't doing it.”

That's why I've never stopped pounding on the seamheads to keep Bonds, Clemens, Palmeiro, Sosa, and all the other cheaters out of the Hall of Fame. That's why I believe baseball should do what the Olympics do. When a player is caught cheating, his
records from that year should be expunged from the record books, never happened, Wite-Out, like a Russian czar who suddenly never existed.

So why should all these phony career records be allowed to stay in the record book, with no asterisks? Because we need little tiny syringes next to them, that's why. Much more effective.

Sometime in the last twenty years, baseball parks became some kind of Knott's Berry Farm attraction: Centerfields that rise suddenly for no reason (Houston). Fences that are eight feet high and then, a foot to the right, thirty-five feet high (Florida). Unneeded pylons that pretend to support your outfield fence (Arlington).

There was a time when ballparks were shoehorned into odd places and
needed
centerfields that rose (Crosley), green monsters that jutted (Fenway), simply because there wasn't enough land. But now it's just faux charm, like a waiter in some Vegas jousting restaurant going, “And perchance Milady would be pleased with Bac*O's?” What these new architects don't get is, those places were not all that charming in the first place. Guys broke their leg on that stupid rise in centerfield. Pitching careers were ruined in Boston.
Hey, I know! Let's bring back polio!

It was all right at first. Camden Yards was pretty cool with the old train building behind right field. Coors Field had a nice nostalgia to it, I suppose, with all its exposed iron beams and old-timey scoreboards. And SkyDome, in Toronto, with its hotel rooms overlooking centerfield—well, how can you argue with a place that allows you to watch a game and people screw at the same time?

But then it all got so terminally cute. The swimming pool in right field at Chase Field in Phoenix. Really? A swimming pool? There's no swimming in baseball! Maybe all the architects can go drown themselves in it. And did Houston's Minute Maid Park really want to put an outfield flagpole in play? Did they really
mean to re-create the old monument feel of Yankee Stadium when guys had to find balls behind the Babe Ruth monument and relay it back to the infield? It was stupid then. It's stupider now. Oh—and get this—it has a train that runs along the top of the stadium. Why the train? Who the train? What the train?

Consider San Francisco's Whatever Park (three names in its first six years). Its outfield wall is made of four (4!) different substances: everything from brick here to Cyclone fence there to, I don't know, Velveeta over there. An outfielder could get a facial tic trying to figure out how a ball is going to bounce. It also has a myriad of different heights, giving it more angles than Bernie Madoff. What is this, pachinko?