Author Archives: Ted Berg

Inappropriate angle of large statue

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I was going to piece together a whole From the Wikipedia post about the Vulcan statue in Birmingham, which I visited a couple days ago. But I’m in New Orleans now and I’ve got important things to not do.

So in lieu of that, here’s a picture of the Vulcan statue’s backside. For some reason, the sculptors provided the city of Birmingham (well, initially the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, but you can check the Wikipedia for that) with tons of gratuitous buttcrack. I really don’t know why Vulcan is apparently naked under his blacksmithing apron, but I guess maybe he’s freaky like that.

Birmingham Barons’ bullpen committed to making 2008 Mets crew seem reasonable

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Thanks to the whims of our road-trip schedule combined with the storm that ravaged the South earlier this week, I have seen the last three Birmingham Barons games. In all three games, the Barons took the lead early, squandered it when their starting pitcher started to tire in middle innings, and fell behind for good in their opponent’s final at-bat. Check it out.

Smart money says I won’t see any other Birmingham Barons games this season, so thanks to the caprices of small samples, I will conclude that the Barons’ bullpen is a big bunch of choking chokers who ruin everything for their offense and starters in every single game.

Not the type of stuff that will make Barons alumni like Razor Shines, Robin Ventura or Michael Jordan proud.

Thinking out loud

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Outside of Historic Grayson Stadium on Friday night, a group of Lexington Legends stood near their team bus talking on cell phones. I didn’t linger as I walked by them toward my rental car, but I overheard one sentence’s worth of conversation: “I love you.”

The opportunity to play baseball professionally is a pretty amazing one, and something I’m sure few of those guys would willingly trade for the cramped college dorm rooms enjoyed by many of their contemporaries. But the Minor League life is a difficult one.

That night or sometime shortly thereafter, the Legends’ players and coaches would endure the 9 1/2-hour trip back to Lexington in that bus. They will spend this season riding the bus to Delmarva and Lakewood and Charleston and all the far reaches of the South Atlantic League. And if any of them are lucky enough to advance to the next level at any point, they’ll have to adjust to a new home city and a new bus and a whole slew of new destinations.

It’s all part of the game, of course, and it has been a long time. Still, I wonder if there’s a way the system could be improved. If the Minor Leagues are aimed at maximizing the potential of prospective Major League baseball players, is that best accomplished by forcing 19-to-22-year-old kids into nomadic lifestyles?

Here’s a half-baked thought: As far as I understand, there are teams in the Sally League that draw as well as some International League teams. And there’s some overlap in the areas covered by the Class A South Atlantic League, Class A Advanced Carolina League, Double-A Eastern League and Triple-A International League.

Not many Major League teams own a lot of their own Minor League affiliates. But, in theory, could a big-market club purchase Minor League franchises in four strategically located markets and switch around each team’s level every season?

In other words: Could a team start a crop of prospects in the Sally League, then keep them together and in the same city the next season, but have them play in the Carolina League? They could move to the Eastern League the next year and the International League the next, but stay in the same home city the entire time. That way, prospects get a full slate of Minor League experience, but can maintain some degree of normalcy.

For what it’s worth, it would benefit the various Minor League fanbases, too. Fans in each city would have a chance to get to know their particular group of players before the best ones moved onto the Majors.

There are logistical problems, of course: For one, I’m not certain there are enough appropriate markets to make it work, nor do I know if Minor League Baseball would permit clubs to so rapidly jump levels. Plus I’m near-certain there’s some minimum stadium capacity required for the different levels, even if the higher levels aren’t necessarily drawing more fans.

And it doesn’t all make sense from a development standpoint: A team that endeavored that plan would lose a lot of the flexibility afforded by the current system, since it would likely try its best to keep players in the same place for as long as possible. Certainly there would still be players who moved too quickly to be held back and players who demonstrated they had no business jumping a level, so some guys would still have to move every year. But likely the players at the margins would be socially promoted with the rest of their guys in their “class” every offseason.

Plus the system breaks down for Quadruple-A types, since presumably a city will only host the Triple-A team once before the whole system shuffles again. So any player entering his second season in Triple-A would finally be forced to move, and he’d have to move again every season until he cracked the Show.

Are all the logistical problems and hangups worth it to give developing players a rooted home base for the several years they spend in a system? I have no idea. Hell, maybe the going thinking is that they’re better off not getting too comfortable in any one city, since comfort probably leads to girlfriends and social lives and all sorts of non-baseball distractions.

I don’t know. I’m just thinking out loud, and thinking that as awesome as playing Minor League baseball certainly is, it probably doesn’t always feel that way. And maybe a system that makes life a little easier for the athletes would pay off for teams down the road.

Decree

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I don’t make a lot of sweeping declarative statements, here or anywhere.

But here’s one: The front of all Major and Minor League road uniforms should feature the team’s city name, and decidedly not the team’s nickname.

For some reason I cannot determine, this bothered me in particular on Sunday when the Mets, in Philadelphia, showed up at Citizen’s Bank Park with “Mets” on their shirts.

This is culled from baseball history, or something: The Mets represent New York. They have traveled to Philadelphia to measure their talents against the team that plays in that city, and so should be obligated to the Philadelphia fans to make clear, via uniform top, where they’ve come from.

Maybe this isn’t the best example, because I don’t believe anyone owes Philadelphia fans anything. But other fans, maybe.

Even as our allegiances to baseball teams become less necessarily dictated by geography, the league should dictate that teams prominently display their own. I could care less if a team has three regular home jerseys and two alternates and seven varieties of road uniforms as long as all the road jerseys say the city name.

And I recognize there’s no actual good reason. I’m just sayin’s all.

From the Wikipedia: Stone Mountain

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I seen it! From the Wikipedia: Stone Mountain.

Stone Mountain is a quartz monzonite dome monadnock in Georgia. If you care to learn what any of that means, geologically, I recommend the Wikipedia. If you need to be reminded that the word “monadnock” is funny, here’s that: Monadnock.

I’m pretty sure “quartz monzonite dome monadnock” means, roughly, “big, big rock.” Thing stands 1,686 feet high, and since it’s on reasonably flat ground, it looms pretty huge over the outskirts of Atlanta.

The rare fairy shrimp may breed on the mountain’s summit, but it may not if it is extinct, as many scientists now believe. In either case, “fairy shrimp” is a terrible name to call any of the mountain’s many school-aged tourists.

The chiefly notable thing about Stone Mountain, beyond its huge rock qualities and the debatable presence of fairy shrimp, is that it features the largest bas-relief sculpture in the world.

The subjects? Why, Confederate heroes Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee.

As a total yankee, my first reaction to seeing something like that falls somewhere between abject terror and sarcastic, holier-than-thou bemusement, especially when I read about how the Ku Klux Klan was revived at the base of Stone Mountain — before the bas-relief even started — in 1915.

Then I think about it more and try to write the whole thing off as history. The Civil War happened a long time ago now, and the sculpture was commissioned a long time ago too, even if it wasn’t finished until 1972 (!). While the men memorialized on the side of that rock fought on behalf of despicable things, I couldn’t exactly ask the people of Georgia to blow the whole thing up and erase it. Besides, as long as Andrew Jackson’s on the 20-dollar bill no one should pretend the U.S. is above commemorating guys who did atrocious things.

Then I go see the laser light and fireworks show projected on Stone Mountain on Saturday night and I just get really confused. The spectacle, mostly a tribute to Georgian music, includes a segment on the Civil War that glorifies Lee, Jackson and Davis and concludes with the trio apparently deciding its foolish to continue fighting and that unification is in the nation’s best interest. It’s a bit weird, especially since, you know, that’s not how it happened.

A few of my buddies were pretty freaked out by the whole affair, and I’ll grant that there’s something unsettling about flagrantly rewriting history in 100-foot tall laser beams.

But judging by the crowd, no one was there for a history lesson anyway, and the “Devil Went Down to Georgia” segment drew a way more enthusiastic reaction than the Civil War nonsense. Plus the whole thing ended, predictably, with a politically correct and syrupy-sweet laser-light tribute to patriotism and, of course, explosives.

And fighter pilots. A whole lot of fighter pilots.

It was a good show, really. They played Ray Charles and James Brown and OutKast. Like I said, it was a tribute to Georgian music. It just so happened to be projected on a monument to three leaders of the Confederacy. It sure didn’t seem like anyone in the crowd was there to foster hatred or forward revisionist history. They wanted to witness an awesome onslaught of lights and fireworks, and this huge rock provided a really striking natural amphitheater.

Things like Stone Mountain used to get me so upset. I don’t really know why they did, and I don’t really know why that stopped happening. Maybe I’m losing my edge.

Or maybe I’m coming to grips with the knowledge that inexplicably awful things are near-universal in history, ignoring them is dangerous, all the information anyone needs to inform an opinion on them is pretty readily available, and failing any better ideas, we might as well use their monuments for laser light spectaculars.

Things an ace does

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I missed Johan Santana’s meltdown last night. I saw the David Wright and Rod Barajas home runs, and I watched the last five boring innings, after the game had already been decided. But the big blows — the unconscionable walk to Jamie Moyer with the bases loaded and the Shane Victorino — came while my friends and I were traveling from our hotel to an Atlanta bar to watch the rest of the game. And obviously I have no access to DVR or anything.

So I can’t answer for sure what happened to Johan Santana last night, as everyone seems to be asking this morning. He said he couldn’t command his fastball, and that seems a reasonable explanation. It happens.

His 2010 season lines, including last night’s brutal start, reflect some alarming trends: steadily increasing H/9 and BB/9 with a steadily declining K/9. Of course, that’s all in a very small sample, and Santana’s likely still building up strength off elbow surgery.

What I hope, though, — and the reason I’m writing this from a rainy Interstate between Atlanta and Birmingham — is that this one performance doesn’t give any Mets fan with a short memory enough fodder to wrongfully deem Santana “unclutch.”

It’s one game, for one thing. One regular season game. And yeah, it’s a rubber match of a series with the division rival when the Mets are playing well, but despite all the hype around it, one game just really doesn’t mean all that much. It doesn’t matter who’s in first place by a half game on May 3.

I’ve seen people write in various spots already that a performance like Santana’s last night simply is “not something an ace does.” My response? Apparently it is.

Because Santana is awesome, in all situations. Until we have more evidence that he’s anything but that, we must assume he still is. In the biggest game the Mets have ever asked Santana to pitch, he gave them a shutout on three days’ rest with a torn meniscus in his knee. One crappy start in early May shouldn’t make anyone forget about that, unless you think guys who are clutch can magically go unclutch.

He had a terrible start. It happens. It happened to happen at a bad time. Given how well Santana was pitching coming into the game, and given the fact that he’s Johan Santana, it’d be smart to wait until it happens again before deeming him anything but an ace.

Wilmer Flores: Nice kid, good hitter, swings a lot

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The day Ike Davis came up, Jerry Manuel lauded his “easy power.” I liked that.

I don’t know if it matters a ton whether a guy’s power appears easy or hard-fought. Gary Sheffield’s power never looked like it came easy. Dude swung the hell out of the bat, but he sure made it work for him. And I remember watching Mark Johnson take batting practice, and seeing him park ball after ball into Shea Stadium’s mezzanine without looking like it took much work at all. But he only hit 38 Major League home runs in his career.

S0 for all I know it doesn’t make the tiniest bit of difference, in terms of ultimate results, how much apparent exertion goes into hitting a home run.

All I can say for certain is that when Wilmer Flores drove an 0-1 fastball at his knees about 350 feet and over the left field fence here in Savannah on Thursday night, it looked entirely effortless. Almost nonchalant. That such a skinny kid with such a smooth swing could drive a ball so far almost seemed an optical illusion, yet there was no doubt the ball would exit the yard as soon as he struck it. Easy power.

Flores swung at the first pitch he saw in his next at bat and lifted a lazy fly ball to center. He struck out on a wild pitch in the dirt in his third at-bat, and grounded out weakly on the first pitch he saw in his final at-bat.

He swings a lot. It’s hard to blame him, really, since swinging the bat has been such a massively rewarding activity for him so far this season. He was hitting .352 entering tonight’s game, with a .394 on-base percentage and a .580 slugging.

And he’s 18 years old. Who could fault a teenager for jumping at any sign of a fastball, knowing what he’s capable of doing to them?

I met Flores today. He told me he’s working on his defensive footwork, which he feels is his biggest weakness. He said the difference between how he hit last year and how he’s hitting this year is experience, and growing comfortable with the level. And he said the team’s long bus rides are tough, but worth it for the opportunity to improve as a baseball player.

Twice, actually. Due to some technical difficulties I failed to successfully record the audio of my first interview with Flores, but Flores happily repeated the entire conversation. Nice kid. Funny kid.

And kid, for sure. It feels like we’ve been hearing about Flores for so long that from afar it’s hard to believe he’s still so young, even if his youth is a huge part of what has made him so notable. But watch him take infield before a game or stand close to him and there’s no doubt. Knobby knees, gawky limbs, sparse hairs on his chin. He carries himself with confidence and his coaches rave about his makeup, but he looks his age.

Until he connects with one, of course.

In his first at-bat tonight, Flores worked a 3-1 count before smoking a line drive right at the Lexington shortstop. Not the greatest result, but a promising approach for certain. In his second plate appearance, he worked the count full, fouled a couple pitches off, then walked on a low fastball. Wilmer Flores is growing up.