Sports
Quotes of the Year, Sports Edition
From Defector’s Ray Ratto’s December 4th article “The 49ers Are Big Dom Now”:
But in whomping the Eagles and briefly incapacitating quarterback Jalen Hurts in to [sic] process, they also invoked the wrath of the Eagles' security chief, Big Dom DiSandro, a a restaurant refrigerator with ears who looks like he gets a royalty check every time someone says, “Philadelphia.”
Also from Ratto, in his “100 Wins Doesn’t Buy What It Used To”:
All playoffs must have a theme, no matter how flimsy–at least until a champion is crowned and everyone involved is promoted to Super Genius (trademark Wile E. Coyote). This postseason has its theme already: Because division winners are dropping like flies, the regular season has been reduced to six months of garbage and the character of baseball is destroyed. . .
The regular season doesn’t matter when you’re looking to define enduring excellence. This year was just its logical extreme–when 404 regular-season victories (Atlanta, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Tampa Bay) translated into one total victory in October. . . The mighty have sucked and the modest have been running the vacuum.
No sport has changed itself in the last decade more than baseball, and it will continue to do so in search of a younger generation that is abandoning sports in general as a viewing vehicle because all sports suck when watched on a phone. Increasingly expanded playoffs are just part of the price that must be paid in search of that dollar that can never be obtained. If this helps, think of the new format as a plunging neckline as established most assuredly by those trollops in Philadelphia. This isn’t the regular season being diminished, it’s just sexing up a game that used to be played in flannel.
One more Ratto, from “All Glory To The Beam":
Your time-honored allegiances are destroyed, and you are now Children of the Incarnate Beam.
I think that last one really captures what I love so much about reading Ray Ratto. No other writer made my laugh as consistently in 2023. It’s just a throwaway line in an intro about the wonderful story that was the Sacramento Kings, but it’s awesome.
Now for some non-Ratto sports quotes.
Many, many excellent quotes in Cody Stavenhagen’s run-down of Jim Leyland stories at The Athletic, published on the eve of Leyland’s induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Forgive me for quoting extensively, but this was probably my favorite article of the year in terms of the amount sheer joy received from its reading.
The man who met [Kirk] Gibson at the airport was the mustachioed 33-year old manager of the Class A Lakeland Tigers. Almost as soon as Gibson settled into the passenger seat, the manager about half his size starting tearing into him. “Gibson, you’re not s—!” the skipper said, and he was just getting going. “I don’t care what you’ve done. I don’t care how much they’re f—- paying you. You’re gonna be at the park at 8 every morning. You’re gonna get to work.”
The guy to call [for Leyland stories], outfielder Andy Van Slyke told [writer David O’Brien], was bench player Gary Varsho. “That was Jim’s voodoo doll,” Van Slyke said. Varsho had stories, all right. The first one he told was of the day he was traded to the Pirates in 1991. He was sitting at his new locker in the clubhouse when Leyland ran out of the manager’s office in his underwear. The coaching staff’s March Madness pool had been decided. “He’s got $20 and $50 bills hanging on his jockstrap,” Varsho told O’Brien. “He’s bouncing around saying, ‘Who won the basketball pool? Who won the pool, Varsh?’ I said, ‘Oh my god, this is our manager.'”
Here’s how Leyland tells the story of the day the Tigers signed him in 1964. Their scout came to the door in Perrysburg. Leyland’s father answered. “Mr. Leyland, we would like to sign your sogn for $1,000,” the scout said. “Sir,” Leyland’s father replied, “we don’t have that kind of money.”
A good Leyland tirade, Brandon Inge once said, could go 10 minutes. “He’d walk down the hallway still yelling, but you could hear his voice fading out down the hall. And then you’d hear him coming back and his voice getting louder. Everybody would go, ‘Sit back down. Here he comes again.'” Ryan Dempster tells a version in which Leyland came and went five times, then said, “I’m going to go into my office and have a whiskey and a cigar. If I come out in this locker room and there’s anybody sitting here when I come out, I’m calling the cops and having you arrested for impersonating a major league f–ing baseball player.”
[Sean] Casey had been traded from the Pirates to the Tigers the previous year. His first day with Detroit, Leyland pulled Casey into his office with assistant coaches Gene Lamont and Lloyd McClendon. Leyland went over some basics, then Lamont gave Casey a crash course on the team’s signs. At one point, Leyland interjected. “If you get on base, I don’t want you looking to third at Gen-o,” he told the slow-footed veteran. “I want you looking in the dugout. I want you to look at me. If I come to the top step of the dugout and we catch eyes, as soon as we catch eyes, if I jump up and never come back down, that means I want you to steal.”
Another of my favorite articles of the year was Drew Magary’s “Now That I Think About It, The Unwritten Rules of Baseball Are Actually Cool”, also at Defector.
I have complained about umps for the majority of my lifetime, to the point where the idea of replacing them with computers genuinely excited me. But sometime this fall, I realized that it’s the stupidity of baseball that makes it fun. I love seeing managers bump chests with umps. I love ejections. I love seeing batters give the home plate ump a dirty look after a bullshit called third strike. I live for the DRAMA.
And you know what? I even like all of the unwritten rules shit, too. That’s right. When I saw Adolis Garcia get beaned by Bryan Abreu in Game 5 of the ALCS, I was fucking riveted. Abreu plunked Garcia for having the temerity to spike his bat–also way cool–after homering off of Justin Verlander in his previous at-bat. Did tempers flare? Buddy, you know they did. Benches cleared. Stocky relievers came pouring out of the bullpens. Everyone got all up in everyone else’s business. I had stood against MLB’s bro code for so long that my opinion on it had become automatic: it was bad. All of the written rules should be written down. No one player should feel slighted because, in his mind and perhaps his alone, some other player lacked proper ethics.
But do I really want, like, a fucking discipline committee to legislate all this shit? The NFL already makes rules for everything. Do I want another sport to be like that? I don’t. We can keep the pitch clock, but otherwise, I’m all for anything that, justified or not, stokes visceral hatred between two teams and encourages frontier justice. I want more fake fights, more real fights, more beanings, more imaginary strike zones, more arguments, and more bases pulled out of the ground and thrown in anger. All of that is fun. All of that is baseball.
This year’s award for “Article Written Specifically to Align with Brett’s Personal Tastes and Interests” goes to Grant Brisbee, Rustin Dodd and Stephen Nesbitt of The Athletic in their August 21 entry entitled “MLB Power Rankings: Mariners, Dodgers see some gains; We make a team-themed ’90s playlist”, which included the following gem from Dodd.
Chicago White Sox
Record: 49-75 Last Power Ranking: 27
Track: “Undone (The Sweater Song)” by Weezer
There’s a history of clothing coming to pieces in Chicago. Not only that, Rivers Cuomo’s lyrics from this classic on Weezer’s debut album feel especially apt: “Oh no, it go, it gone, bye-bye.” In fact, as I type those lyrics, I feel like those lines could be repurposed into the greatest home run call in baseball history.
Let’s set the scene: It’s September in Chicago. Royals are in town for a series on the South Side. Dylan Cease throws a fastball to Bobby Witt Jr., who demolishes it to deep left. “Oh no,” Jason Benetti says, solemnly. “It go. It gone. Bye-bye.”
Steven Goldman at Baseball Prospectus wrote a fantastic article about baseball’s Opening Day with “Opening Day is Your Last Chance”.
As one who has struggled to control his weight for much of his life, I understand the potentiality and the pressure of Opening Day. When I was a child, every summer my parents would load me, my younger sister, and up to three cats into a mid-sized sedan and drive across America for more than a month, arriving home the night before my personal Opening Day, the first day of school–except for those years when something went wrong and we didn’t make it back in time. . .
Opening Day is your last chance. The first day is the last day. Initial impressions are often final impressions, and once your season has begun it’s usually too late.