Sunday, July 31, 2005

Baseball as Social Event Don't miss the always-reliable Larry Stone's piece in today's Seattle Times on the fine art of baseball chatting. Not chatter - the incessant "hey batta batta" that the outfielders keep up during the game - but chatting.  Conversation. "How's your wife?"  "Where's a guy get a good steak in this town?"  The constant conversations between umpire and outfielder, or first baseman and runner, or pitcher and coach, that permeate the game. It makes for fun reading. During a stint with Houston, [Tigers pitching coach Bob] Cluck racked his brains for the right thing to say to former Astros pitcher Mark Portugal after he gave up three home runs on three successive pitches against the Reds - each one setting off a pyrotechnics display at Riverfront Stadium. Houston manager Art Howe directed Cluck to go to the mound, so he came up with this mood lightener: "Hey, Porchie, the guy with the cannon called. He said, 'Slow down, I can't reload that fast.' " Concluded Cluck: "He laughed. It loosened him up, and he went on to win the game. Sometimes, one of the big things a pitching coach does is slow somebody down." Baseball is the only game that allows this kind of ... well, idle... chatter. There are lots of breaks in baseball. It's a slow game, a lazy game in the best possible sense of the word. Nobody's in much of a rush to get through the game. It's summer, everybody's out in the sun, why hurry things along? On the other hand, have you ever heard about Tracy McGrady and Kobe Bryant trading shopping tips or discussing restaurants during a foul shot? How about in football, witnessing the center and nose guard asking after each other's wives? Forget it - if they talk about each other's wife, it's a conversation that'll never get reprinted in a newspaper. Also in today's Seattle Times was a nice sidebar on the top ten moments in chatting history on the diamond. I'm a little disappointed, though, that they didn't see fit to mention Detroit semi-legend Mark "the Bird" Fidrych's conversations with the ball between pitches. They always seemed to have a warm relationship. 1:24:47 PM     Speak up!  []