The Worst Pitch I Ever Threw
Hi. My name is Matthew. This spring and summer, I’m going to spend every Sunday talking to you about baseball and sorta-related-to-baseball things. Well, most Sundays. Probably at least three or four Sundays.
Shawn has been gracious enough to provide me with this column space; very much appreciating internet real estate on a rather fine and classy website. I’m told Shawn pays in ballpark franks, but we have to provide our own condiments. What kind of Commie joint is this place?
I’m uniquely qualified to talk to you people about baseball. When I was 12-years-old I played Little League baseball, and I own a used copy of Bill James’ 2003 Historical Baseball Abstract which is an excellent coffee table book for people who don’t have tables or drink coffee. Excusing the latter, let’s talk about the former for a second.
Little League was a very interesting time for me. When I was 12, being a middle class white boy in Little League was still a great thing in America. That was 17 years ago. Is it still a great time now? I don’t know. Parents didn’t (as often) yell obscenities at the umpires and coaches. I think there were fewer steroids in the poultry because none of us were built like Gumby-legged goofy-looking 6-foot-3, 14-pound Great Dane puppies as are the heathen monsters I see on the LLWS these days.
After each game (and many a pick-up game) we sang songs from “The Lion King”, referenced “Space Jam” and walked single file, like a pack of wild but exceptionally organized little sweat glands to the pizza place down the street. This was my life every Friday and Saturday, for the entirety of the best summer I can remember. I hope Little League is still a great time for little boys and girls in the sepia-toned way I am able to look back and remember it. I hope people my age — who are now becoming those parents — remember what it was all about. It was a great time then.
It was the time when I fell in love with the game in a way that surpassed a boy’s curiosity and crossed into a boy’s obsession. The time when I discovered and began analyzing every baseball stat there was, when I created and lived-out real “fantasy” baseball players in my childhood bedroom, utilizing Strat-O-Matic cards and invented teams I had made up on my own.
It was also the time when a 16-year-old boy, Jose, who played upper division ball, showed up during an unsupervised pick-up game between us 12-year-old midgets and pulled off his jersey to reveal a screen-printed tee-shirt of goatse. If you were around on the internet in the late 90s or early 2000s, something in the very bottom of your gut just perked up a bit. And if you weren’t, well, consider yourself lucky.
You see, goatse was a troll image — kind of an early “Rick Roll” — which directed you to a picture of a man’s enormous, spread-cheeked anus. It is a picture of a man prying open his ass cheeks, and you’re just looking at it because it’s there, right there, this man’s humongous, absurd, reddish-pinkish butthole. I’ll go ahead and wait for you to finish your Google search. Very good.
So in the picture this man — whomever he is — has pulled his butt cheeks so far apart as to fit a small watercraft or sports utility vehicle in there. You could see up past this man’s kidneys. You could see Uruguay up there. You could see so far into this butthole it became a vortex. You could see Pete Rose’s soul in that gaping, bottomless red void of an ass.
Two of my fellow Little Leaguers immediately threw up, another ran home. I stood there, frozen, half-horrified and half-confused about what I was witnessing. What was Jose doing? Why was he wearing a man’s? A man’s? I didn’t even know what that was. Why was he wearing that on a t-shirt?
“Don’t you bitches want to play some baseball?” Jose asked, then threw a ball up for himself, easily knocking a shot over our considerably-smaller outfield fence. “How about if I hit a dinger off of one of you bitches you buy me pizza. But if you strike me out, I buy alllll of you bitches pizza instead? Well? Huh? How about it?”
But nobody could respond as Jose tossed himself meatball after meatball, knocking one shot after another over the fence, again and again, over and over, on and on, like we were paralyzed in this purgatory of teenage shock humor and gratuitous home-run smashing.
“Bitches.” he said. “Little Bitches.”
All around the field, 12-year-old boys were hurling and curled over, clutching their stomachs or running home….like little bitches. But I. I was going to face down this man. I was going to stare into the face of evil and laugh. So what if he had soft, thin stubble protruding from his cheek bones? So what if his voice had already crossed over into the raspy man-boy hybrid common to the full throes of puberty? So what. I was going to pitch to him and I was going to strike him out.
“I’ll pitch to you.” I uttered gently, and Jose responded with a curious smile. He must have known something I didn’t. But that was okay. My stuff was great that day.
So there I went, wobbling to the mound and trying with all my might to prevent my gut from turning over. Thing was, I was a pretty good pitcher…for a 12-year-old. Lending to local Little League rules I pitched every-other-game, as was the allowed maximum. And I did and won and struck out a lot of other little assholes, whom I’m sure all grew up to be really nice guys.
Anyway, so I’m up there on the mound with the Omaha Beach of lost innocence around me, and a cackling Jose digging into his batting stance several feet in front.
“Okay, little bitch,” he said, clearly mistaking me for someone else he knew. “See if you can strike me out.”
Oh, I was going to strike him out, alright. I was going to strike him out so bad he’d cry and have to run all the way home sporting a reverse Ron Jeremy for everyone to see. Yeah, that’d teach him. In fact, my first toss was going to be so good, he wouldn’t even wait to see how the second and third would look. He’d quit right there. Yeah. I was going to give him some high cheddar. Some real stinky stuff. Cut into him, make him chase. Right up over that big, red, screen-printed ass. Oh yeah. The wind up. The pitch.
Clank. The unmistakable sound of refined metal hitting stitched-sphere, juuuuuust right.
Over the course of the next few years I’d play with some pretty talented ball players. I played with at least one who got some serious looks from scouts and whose game was so above-the-pack and smooth that it seemed almost like artwork. But I never — before or since — have seen a ball hit as hard as Jose hit the pitch I threw on that field on that day.
It flew so high and so far that I am reasonably certain it entered international airspace. It flew so far that I think it even surprised Jose, who had stopped saying “little bitch” long enough to observe his handiwork as it flew and flew and flew and flew and flew and…
And flew…
And then, a curious thing happened. That ball was hit so far that it became a sort of mythical thing; some spell cast down from the Baseball Gods to heal the ailing Little Leaguers below. And the many bedraggled tykes suffering from goatseobservance trauma climbed to their feet, editorializing Jose’s blast with the sharpness and wit of a veteran heckler, translated for adolescent ears.
“Jeez Matt,” one tiny voice called out, his mouth still moving but speaking no other words.
“That’s the most awesome dinger I’ve ever seen.” Said another. “And the worst pitch?”
A couple boys just stared beyond the outfield wall and laughed.
“That should be in the newspaper!” Came another.
Again and again, the children rose, sharing their account of how I gave up the greatest pick-up baseball home-run in the history of man–and boy. It is said among the hill people that a baseball from that day still remains in flight, blotting out the sun, held up by some purer, greater power.
Jose put his jersey back on, satisfied with himself.
And then, as the sun touched the trees, with our bellies settled and our minds…still kinda scrambled… we walked down the road in single-file, singing Lion King songs and heading for pizza, safe from the perils of goatse for all time, or at least until their parents got them a computer two years later.
“What is this?” Jose asked, by our sides. “You little bitches sing the Lion King?”
In a way, you can say for those Little Leaguers in that little town on that little day, I kind of saved baseball for them…. in a way, just like my hero Hideki Irabu saved the Yankees. Right? Right? Well I don’t care what you think anyway.
As for Jose? We never saw him around after that summer. His family must have moved. Nobody I’ve ever talked to knows what became of him. My guess? Congressman.
Have Some Fun Out There — But Not Too Much – Wait, No, Have More Fun Than That
Recently Bryce Harper made some headlines because he said something kinda-sorta like, “Who really gives a shit how baseball players celebrate and why do they give a shit?” to which Goose Gossage replied, “I still have a funny mustache.”
Goose Gossage kind of looks like the dad from, “Orange County Choppers”. Remember that show? It featured a father-son duo of custom motorcycle manufacturers — both kind of portrayed as blithering idiots — struggling to understand the cultural and creative differences between generations. The same story as Goose and Bryce, really. Perhaps this winter Goose and Bryce can star in their own reality show called, uh…“Goose and Bryce”, where they get into all sorts of fun-loving odd-couple type situations. Goose gives Bryce a fatherly talk after Bryce wears a ball cap to his neighbor’s funeral. Bryce lectures Goose on climate change because Goose does a bad job separating canned goods for recycling. Rafael Palmeiro cameos, but no one invited him and it gets really awkward. And so on.
I don’t really get the big hubbub about players celebrating after they do something cool, frankly. I fist pump, Jeter-style, if I make it all the way to the refrigerator without stopping at the cupboard halfway for a snack. *spits gum, catches it* Sorry Players’ Tribune, this legend is already under contract.
But seriously: What difference does it make? Are there really a group of stodgy baseball purists so evangelically dedicated to clutching their pearls that they insist on forbidding the ways young ballplayers celebrate because it is insufficientlyrespectful? News flash: It is a baseball game. There is an anthropomorphic uniformed animal on ecstasy dancing on top of the dugout. In the seventh frame of every game you stand up and sing a children’s song so that you don’t fall asleep before the game is over. Carl Everett once played baseball professionally. Carl Everett!!!!
The truth is, modern players celebrating and viewing “respect” in a completely different way than say, Goose Gossage, is not about respecting your opponent, or the game, or sending the wrong message to kids, or whatever it is that Goose Gossage types say as they drool dip down their chins into a cup. It’s about fear. Just like ever generational thing, as time changes so does the meaning of things, and the meaning of actions, and the way people — especially young people — interact. So too, then, does the way ballplayers respect one another change, and so too does the way sportsmanship AND gamesmanship change. What Goose Gossage and purists are really saying is they are afraid. They’re afraid that the thing they love and know has changed into something different and partially unrecognizable; something that couldn’t stand under the weight of whatever was happening way back in 19-whenever.
But it’s not 19-whenever. It’s a different time, with different players, who have different backgrounds and motivations, who faced different obstacles, and who ought to do what they want to do, not what Goose, or the purists, or the media (who are by-in-large just as stodgy), want them to do. Baseball is supposed to be fun. And fun can mean many different things. But I won’t begrudge people for having fun, especially when they’re hurting no one save for perhaps a few especially delicate individual’s feelings. How does it send kids the wrong message that they ought to find ways to have a little fun, to be creative, and hey, to toughen up in the process?
Occasionally when playing baseball I didn’t wear a cup, because that is one of those lessons some boys have to learn the hard way. And I learned. And what did my coach say? It’ll hurt. Then it won’t. Toughen up. If a bat flip hurts your feelings, it’ll hurt. Then it won’t. Toughen up. Throw a better pitch next time and have your own fun, kid.
If baseball can’t be fun for the players playing it — and if it can’t teach us the value of knowing success and failure and perseverance — what the hell are we even doing here?
Out of the Park Baseball
Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that this week is the official release of Out of the Park Baseball 17; and Friday was the release for pre-order customers. Not to sound to commercial-y, but since “OOTP” — as we in the ‘biz’ like to call it — is the closest I will ever get to being a big league General Manager or re-building baseball in my own Godlike image, I just thought I’d mention for anyone still (somehow?) unfamiliar with the game that I give it my certified, bona fide, RINGING ENDORSEMENT!
Play this game. Share this game with your friends. Play this game some more.
This year, OOTP is unveiling, for the first time, a simple 3D animation engine to accompany its text-based play-by-play. I’ve been waiting for this feature for like thirteen years. It might not mean much to anyone reading, but finally getting to see my tiny little second basemen on screen as represented by something vaguely approximate to the “Men’s Room” sign man hover over to the ball and proceed to throw it thirty seven rows into the stands (E-4, I am so trading his ass) is a welcome addition.
OOTP has always had the capacity to power my imagination; creating the details and outcomes of the world I created in my head. But this first step into graphical replay of the game for what was previously strictly filed under the “Text-Sim” genre is a real revelation, and the first in what is hopefully a series of bountiful steps toward resembling Football Manager’s strong graphics engine. My brain is always looking for new ways to be lazy, and with this graphical advancement, it doesn’t even have to imagine as many things. Yes!
For baseball fans of all stripes, this is just a tremendously rich and always-improving user experience. I am half-confident that even those who swear off immature pursuits like sports gaming could still find something redeeming about OOTP, because its capabilities are so vast, and its ability to create so limitless.
And you can enjoy baseball without even having to see Jose Bautista flip his bat. Well, for a few more versions, anyway.
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