Get Ready For 132!

Summer is officially here, and for the next 3 months baseball will be every sports fan’s obsession as we grind through the dog days of summer. The great thing about baseball, and what makes it America’s Pastime (the NFL may be more popular but you can’t tell me that anything in football comes close to having the historical and cultural significance of a Sox/Yanks series), is that it brings together people of all different walks of life. If you put a preteen from Cleveland, an Anheuser Busch executive from St. Louis, and 70-year old Dominican all in a room together, they may not have a lot in common but what they will have is baseball.

What’s more, baseball also combines an overpowering physical component that can be seen in moments such as Junior’s mammoth second home run yesterday in his homecoming to Seattle with an innate mental aspect like knowing when to put on the hit-and-run or bringing in a left-handed reliever to face lefty swinging monsters like Barry Bonds and David Ortiz. For me, this combination of the physical and the mental make baseball a truly beautiful game. It’s the perfect blend to pique my intense competitiveness while also playing right into my ultra-geek side as well.

My inner geek (I use inner here because I like to live with the illusion that I’m not actually the huge nerd that I really am) is completely infatuated with baseball as a game of numbers. When I open a newspaper from April to September the first thing I look at is the Major League Baseball’s standings. I look for Boston and then see W-L, GB, Last 10. I see the Yankees’ same stats and hope that the Red Sox have a dash under their GB while the Yankees have a number, preferably very large. After the standings, I make my way through the previous nights box scores keeping track of who’s hot and who’s not. My obsession with tracking all these statistics may seem inane and a waste of time to most, but there’s a reason why I’m annually dominant in my fantasy baseball leagues. My mother would be so proud. Poring over common stats like HR, RBI, AVG., and ERA as well as Moneyball-era sabermetric stats such as WHIP and OPS, I update my vast baseball data banks daily over a cup of coffee and toast.

As much as the daily stats thrill me though, it’s the historical significance of some otherwise unimportant numbers that completely sets baseball apart from any other sport. .406 … 56 … 2,632 … 61 … 5,714 … 755 … 131, these are numbers that transcend the game and permeate into national history and popular culture. .406 for Teddy Ballgame in 1941. Probably the last guy that will ever hit over .400 for an entire season. 56-game hit streak for Joltin’ Joe Dimaggio. To put that in perspective, you would have thought Jimmy Rollins was a game or two from breaking that record the way the media was covering him last year … and he still had almost 20 games to go! The numbers keep on coming too. 2,632 consecutive games for Cal Ripken, Jr., baseballs true Ironman. 61 home runs for Roger Maris in 1961, arguably one of the most famous baseball records to be broken in recent history (although with the steroid era in full swing, I’m among the many who still consider that the single season record). 5,714 strikeouts for the immortal Nolan Ryan, a record that stands to last quite sometime considering the next closest active pitcher is soon-to-be 45-year old Roger Clemens who sits more than 1,000 K’s behind Ryan. 755 home runs, Hank Aaron’s recently imperiled career HR mark that’s under siege by the juiced-to-the-gills Barry Bonds (Wait, who said that? Of course Bonds doesn’t use any performance enhancing drugs knowingly and he’s never been caught for it so that must be true. A head bigger than a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day float isn’t at all suspitious.).

As Bonds’ assault on this most hallowed of baseball records continues with its requisite asterisk, true baseball fans will be getting treated to another record breaking performance in the near future as Bobby Cox makes what has now become his patented trot out from the Atlanta Braves’ dugout. No steroids necessary, Cox is just one game ejection away from breaking John McGraw’s all-time record for game ejections at 131. Cox, not necessarily the showman that some other managers such as Lou Piniella or Bobby Valentine are, has quietly assaulted umpires with accusations of incompetence and insinuations of foul play (pun very much intended) for nearly three decades. And even though he may lack a bit of flair in getting the thumb 131 times, he still has the uncanny ability to bring out the best in his organization. Just look at minor league affiliate the Mississippi Braves’ manager Phillip Wellman who put on one of the greatest tirades in baseball history including throwing the rosin bag like a grenade at the umpiring crew a la Sly Stallone in Rambo. With such great respect for the Braves’ managerial tradition, Wellman is just one more Cox disciple.

So, for the time being, let’s forget about Bonds’ juiced up chase. Let’s all just cross our fingers and hope that Major League Baseball puts some incompetent umpiring crew at Turner Field this week, so we can see Bobby Cox take over this record in style. As countless suckers float along in McCovey Cove anxiously awaiting catching an asterisked home run ball, I’ll be sitting in front of my TV catching every second of every Braves game. Fans in Atlanta will be on the edge of their seats as Cox gets ready to top the record. Who knows, maybe the normally understated manager will decide to enter the record books in style and throw a fit for the ages. Then some lucky fan can auction the displaced 3rd base bag that Cox unexpectedly launched into the stands on eBay. I know I’d pay more for that than Bonds’ 756th home run ball.