For Herb Carneal, please see the previous entry.

This entry written by Kurtis, who would like to take JD Salinger to a baseball game.

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you probably want to know is my PECOTA and my VORP, and how I did in the minors, and what I contributed to the World Series I won with the Marlins, and all that Bill James kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores the hell out of me, and in the second place, you have to do math. Anyway, I’m not going to tell you my whole goddamned life story. I’m just going to tell you about this madman stuff that happened the last week of Spring Training.

We were hanging out in the clubhouse in Fort Myers, a few days before we broke camp. The game was supposed to be a very big deal because the Mayor’s Cup was on the line, which goes to whoever wins more games between us and the Red Sox, and we were supposed to commit suicide or something if the old Twins didn’t win.

Johan was our starting pitcher. He was walking around saying "Happy Birthday" to everybody. Sometimes you meet a guy who says "Happy Birthday," all the time, like he's really sincere and everything, and maybe he is, but he knows it's not your goddamned birthday, and he says it anyway. Also, Torii was sitting there, playing cards with Joe Mauer, because Torii got hit in the head by a pitch a few weeks ago and for some reason he blames the lights, even though it was Kyle Lohse who smacked him in the head. Baseball players are funny like that. Joe was playing cards because he had a bum leg and was trying to get better. The entire team was ready to walk off the pier at Fort Myers Beach and drown in the Gulf if Joe didn’t get better in time for the home opener, and let me tell you, I would have led the charge. So that’s why I had to start the game instead of old Joe.

"Hey Joe," I said. "You know back in Minneapolis, how those geese are all over Nicollet island? What happens to those geese in the winter?"

He shrugged and kept playing his card game, like he didn’t care a bit about those geese on Nicollet island. Lately I’d just been kind of wondering about the geese and what happens to them in the winter. I thought I’d ask someone when I get back to Minneapolis.

The pitcher for them was Schilling, who only has one more World Series ring than me, and doesn’t even have a Cy Young yet. He’s one of those guys who takes himself very seriously, even a little bit too seriously, if you know what I mean. He did just fine, though, and we couldn’t do anything against him, and Johan was off his game and the umpires were a bunch of lousy bastards and we lost the game 5-4. We also lost that Mayor's Cup. It was pretty depressing.

Some of those other guys were looking pretty glum in the clubhouse, and they were starting to make me feel glum, if you know what I mean. I sort of went off to be myself, and thought about sending old Pudge Rodriquez an email, but I really wasn't in the mood. You have to be in the mood for that kind of thing. Instead, I took a quick shower, and came out wearing nothing but a smile and a little water, and went out to talk to those guys.

"Did you ever see that movie The Natural," I asked them. They all said they had except for LeCroy, who said he didn’t want to see it because it was rated PG and had mild profanity and adult themes.

"Well, what do you think that title means?" I asked those kids. "What do you think it means to be a Natural?" They just shook their heads, like they didn't know what I was talking about, and you know what? They didn't. They don't teach you any of the important stuff at school, even if you go to a great school like Gonzaga. They just teach you how to convert decimals to fractions, which is why I can tell you my batting average is 341 one hundredths, and a bunch of other crap you never use like the capital of Togo, which is Lomé, and the theme of Macbeth,;which is that vaulting ambition o'erleaps itself and falls on th'other.

"This is natural,” I told them, even though they wouldn't look at me. "Get natural," I told them. Eventually they get it, and they get natural too --even LeCroy, which wasn’t half as bad as you might think. A couple of minutes later, we were out taking BP, the natural way. Venafro pitched and the rest of us were batting, and I swear to God, every time somebody jacked one over the fence, there were explosions and lights, just like in the movie.

"See what I mean?" I told them. “This is what The Natural is all about.”

That was when the field lights snapped back on, and I remembered there was always fireworks after night games in Fort Myers, and there were all kinds of people in the stands. So were standing out there like a bunch of lunatics while all these rubes kind of gaped at us, and you could tell they were totally scandalized. God, I wish you could have been there.

That's all I’m going to tell you. If I wanted to, I could tell you how Gardy just about had a brain hemorrhage when he found out, and sent everyone down to the minors but me, but I don't feel like it right now. For one thing, it's boring, and for another, if I started talking about it, I'd get to missing everybody. I sort of miss everybody I used to play with. Even old Venafro and LeCroy. I think I even miss that goddamn Lyle. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

Posted by Batgirl at April 2, 2007 01:21 AM