The biography of a fan, pt. 2: Pedro

In 1998 the Red Sox traded Carl Pavano and Tony Armas Jr. for Pedro Martinez. A new era for the Red Sox had dawned, and for me the central figure in my baseball life had emerged.



To watch Pedro in his pomp was to see pitching elevated to an art form. That's a cliche, but there are a few pitchers who seem to transcend the divide between sport and art and elevate their craft to that higher plane. Sandy Koufax is the archetypal artist-pitcher, left handed, tall, elegantly built, throwing 95 mph and partnering that with a curveball that seemed to be possessed by the furies. Vin Scully once remarked that Koufax was the only pitcher he had seen who received an applause upon walking to the bullpen before the game like the applause a symphony conductor receives, but Pedro got them too. Pedro was in that class of a distinguished artist emeritus. I saw him throw changeups against the Yankees that looked goofy: They were moving away from the left handed batter so drastically that one expected Carl Hubbell to appear with a slow hand clap. His curveball wasn't the equal of Koufax's, but it zipped in there, and often left hitters with the bat on their shoulder, unsure of what they had seen. And his fastball was his id, hard, riding in to the right-hander and often delivered with a certain resentment. It's said Al Simmons hated pitchers. I think Pedro hated hitters. If baseball's balance had tilted permanently towards pitchers, with 1968 being played out every year and hitters hitting .236 for eternity, I think Pedro would be happy. It certainly would have explained his inability to hit himself.

To go with his stuff was a personality that was more interesting than any other Hall of Famer of his era. Pedro was smart, very smart - English was his second language, yet he spoke it better than most American-born players. When he spoke English, he was insightful, occasionally prickly, and sometimes very funny. "Wake up the Bambino and I'll drill him in his ass," he once said after a writer mentioned the "Curse of the Bambino", and in that quote he deftly summarized the feeling of most Red Sox fans about the stupid idea that mystic forces held the Red Sox down rather than a lack of a union between good pitching and good hitting at any time since Ruth was in Boston. That sense of humor also bought us Nelson de la Cruz, Pedro's 3 foot tall Dominican friend who became the unofficial mascot of the 2004 Red Sox, a sort of modern day Lil' Rastus or the other oddballs who frequently were used as good luck charms by teams early in the 20th century.


1999 was Pedro's year. Although he had a better ERA and pitched more innings in 2000, 1999 was Pedro's year. His defense-independent ERA, which is normally higher than a pitcher's real ERA, was a ridiculous 1.32 - imagine in the high-offense 90s a pitcher even coming close to Bob Gibson's legendary 1968. He struck out 313 men in 213 innings, a ridiculous ratio 13.2 K/9 that no other American League has come close to. Wins and losses aren't particularly meaningful but he had the record consummate with his dominance as well, having 23 wins to just 4 losses (and he didn't pitch particularly badly in any of them, though he got lit up once and didn't receive a loss). He really could have won 25 or 26 games with just a little luck, and it's a shame he didn't, just because his year doesn't get quite the recognition it should, and because a 25-3 Pedro actually wins the MVP instead of a ridiculous pick like Ivan Rodriguez.



I've been lucky enough to see Pedro pitch six times in my career, and while he could be considered to have pitched poorly in two of those starts, he was an event. Going to watch Pedro pitch was like having tickets to a playoff game - you thought about it weeks in advance and tried your best to get there early and soak it all in. You made your best effort to focus all of your attention on the game. My favorite opportunity to see Pedro pitch was on August 6, 2003. I hadn't been to Fenway Park in two years - important since the John Henry group had bought the team since then and spent much needed attention on the park - and it was almost comically perfect. You couldn't have scripted a more perfect game at the park. I had an unbelievable seat in the loge, in the slot between the left hand batter and the catcher. The umpire sometimes uses this slot to call strikes, and you could have called strikes from my seat (several times during the game the crowd booed a close pitch that from this seat you could see had missed the corner). Nomar hit a home run, Johnny Damon made a sensational catch and I managed to go to the concession for a hot dog and Coke between innings and not miss a pitch - seriously. But the star was Pedro. He threw a complete game, and although that was probably the wrong idea since he was laboring in the 9th, seeing an in control Pedro shut down the Angels, striking out Tim Salmon to end the game, was incredible live viewing.

Pedro, while an immortal, is no longer an immortal, and there lingers some doubt whether he will find a job next year, though he likely will. He's coming to the end of his career, and there will be precious few chances for me or anyone else to see him in the flesh.

It's not cricket

Word came out yesterday that the Pittsburgh Pirates signed two Indian pitchers. Big deal, right? Well, these guys aren't ex-Cleveland farmhands, and they're not even like Kyle Lohse or Chief Bender. They're from India.



Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel got signed by the Pirates yesterday, reaching the pinnacle of a long strange journey that involved both a reality TV show and Tom House. Jeff Bernstein, Barry Bonds' marketing agent, apparently started a reality TV show with Zee Sports in India to find and train talented athletes and turn them into major league pitchers. Pretty wild, but also quite prudent. What's a few million bucks when you could potentially turn a kid into a marketing bonanza worth several times that? India is one of the better countries going at one of baseball's father games, cricket. Combined with that, India's not exactly a sporting powerhouse outside of cricket, and with the exploding Indian economy there's good reason to think that successful Indian athletes in any sport would add millions of new fans and millions of dollars into the pockets of a league. Hell, Pirates GM Neal Huntington all but admitted that: "By adding these two young men, we are pleased to not only add two prospects to our system but also hope to open a pathway to an untapped market."

But the only way they'll tap a market is if these kids can actually play. While it's obvious they can't really play - their baseball knowledge is pretty basic, and there's no doubt these kids are going to spend days, if not months in instructional baseball learning to play the game - it sure seems like they can throw. Singh seems to be the better talent. He's 6'2", left handed, and throws about 90 miles an hour, and actually possesses a rather graceful delivery (though he finishes high, meaning he'll be leaving the ball up until he and a coach work to fix that). Patel's shorter (about 5'10" I'd guess) and stockier, but apparently can throw up to 93 mph. For a pair of kids no older than 20 who haven't done much weight training and are still raw as can be, that's promising, even more so when you consider they've already been able to throw changeups for strikes (Singh with a forkball, Patel with a more conventional circle change).

The biggest challenges are going to be the aforementioned total lack of baseball experience allied with a lack of English fluency (both Singh and Patel grew up poor in Uttar Pradesh, and their English is still shaky). Hopefully the Pirates realize this is a long term investment and bring these kids on slowly - time is most definitely on their side, and the returns could be very good, especially with Singh, since you can't understate how lefties who throw 90 don't grow on trees. Get the kids working with a coach every day on their deliveries, get them to work on fielding drills, and I wouldn't hesitate to just sit them with a coach for a month during instructional league games in order to explain baseball to them. Singh once asked Jeff Bernstein what the shortstop had done wrong since he didn't have a base to defend, proving how raw these guys are.

The two guys also have a blog, endearingly written in their still improving English. It reminds me a little bit of Eddie Murphy's Coming to America as they get their heads around some of the things Americans take for granted (comfortable movie theatre seats!) with the result of some hilarious unintentional comedy. But it's mean to make fun of them for it, as they really are living in fantasyland right now.

USA Today report (with video of the kids throwing)
Hindustan Times report (the Pirates are prestigious?)
Million Dollar Arm blog

The biography of a baseball fan, pt. 1

Hi, my name is Flynn, and I'm a baseball fan. I've been one all my life, actually. I can remember playing it in my parents' backyard, and my secret shame is that every now and then when I'm back at my dad's house, I'll still take the wiffleball and throw curveballs and sliders against the door to the backyard. When I was a kid, baseball cards were still affordable, and I've got two large boxes full of them stored in my mom's basement. Fortunately this was the golden age of card collecting when the general public knew (or considering the contraction in the card market, thought) cards were tremendously valuable (and they hadn't become $6 a pack either), so my Mike Greenwell rookies and mint Rick Reuschel cards didn't end up in the spokes of my bike or thrown out by my mom. Of course, they didn't end up worth $5000 either, but that's a story for another time. I had a filling a few months ago, which I'm going to attribute to a sugar addiction started by the free stick of gum you got in old baseball card packs. Too bad I couldn't have paid with a Topps Joey Meyer card.

I was lucky enough to born in a bona-fide major league city, San Francisco, and even luckier to have been born in a place which has been rarely uninteresting to follow baseball in. I was 4 years old when the Giants and the Athletics played a cross-bay World Series, the home plates being a mere 10.247 miles away from each other (I had to estimate that myself). Of course the most interesting thing about that World Series was the fact only an enormous earthquake could stop the unholy ass-whipping the overmatched Giants received that year, an event that regrettably did not happen while I was watching the game (I was watching Alanis Morrissette get slimed on You Can't Do That On Television). Four years later the Giants seemingly were mere days from being moved to Tampa - ironic that just a few years after a World Series appearance in a dilapidated stadium built for baseball but better for football that a team would move (hello angry New Yorkers) - when Peter Magowan and Friends saved the team and oh, just happened to sign the best player in baseball... and WHOSE GODFATHER WAS WILLIE MAYS.


That 1993 Giants team probably had as much effect on me as any baseball event of my lifetime, at least before the 2004 Red Sox. My dad was going back to school after his business failed, and so for the summer he was doing decoration for previous clients, which still left him quite a bit of free time. Giants tickets were pretty cheap at the ol' Stick, and so pop and I ended up going to a lot of baseball games that year, mostly in the upper deck or bleachers, which wasn't too bad at Candlestick, especially since Magowan had wisely decided to schedule as many day games as feasible in order to neutralize the awful weather for night games. So I was going to be going to a lot of games anyway; what made it even better was that the Giants had one of the best one year turnarounds ever, winning a mere 31 more games than they had the previous season. That they did so in one of the greatest pennant races of all time against a team in the middle of what at a minimum is one of the best year to year runs of form and results in the history of the game was icing on the cake. San Francisco was at the tail end of football mania in 1993, and to see baseball of that quality and excitement in front of your eyes would make any kid love baseball.


But I'm not a Giants fan. Or, more accurately, the Giants aren't my favorite team. My parents are from New England, and the scarlet letter my dad wore before 2004 was that he was a Red Sox fan. I'll try and keep the sob stories to a minimum, but my dad lived in Boston in 1978 and in San Francisco in 1993, and he was young in '78 and in school in '93, so quite simply he had the time to get wrapped up in baseball. To see two epic collapses like that basically first-hand must have been a baseball version of just happening to have been at Dealey Plaza and the Ambassador Hotel, and no doubt this heavily influenced the epic pessimism he had about both teams before 2004. To top it all off, I'm pretty sure he had tickets for himself and me for the one-game playoff at Candlestick Park that was to happen had the Giants won. At least Rafael Belliard didn't lift one into the famous wind and see it creep over the left field wall...

But he imparted his love to the Red Sox to me. It's fair to say I was still a Giants fan as a kid, and in some ways I remain a Giants fan - I never had the pessimism some Red Sox fans had (I remember getting yelled at by a guy for saying "It's in the bag!" when Pedro was getting smacked around in Game 7 in '04). But I cherished my Wade Boggs cards just as much as my Kevin Mitchell cards, and the Rocket was on the pantheon of Flynn's sporting Gods with Larry Bird and Joe Montana. Add that basic understanding with a good press by some other family members (including a book containing a buildable model of Fenway Park - I trace my stadium love to here) and annual summer trips as a kid to New England, which invariably took in a game at Fenway and often one at McCoy or Beehive Field as well and the habit grew on me.



This love was no doubt influenced by Fenway Park, which as a stadium is only mere light years ahead of the dump that was Candlestick. I've always been a fan of the game's history, and the comparatively light history of the Giants (at least in their San Francisco incarnation) pales in comparison to the oodles of Red Sox history. And the arrival of a guy named Pedro sure helped.

That's the start of my story, and the start of this blog. The reason I have this blog is to indulge myself in writing about all the things about baseball (and on occasion another sport) that I like, particularly things like its tradition, its culture, and its current events. It's therapeutic as well, living overseas and being..well, maybe not homesick, but wanting to just soak up the Americana for a while. And I've written all my life, and could use an outlet for more writing beyond posting on the Sons of Sam Horn all the time. I'll also use this blog to focus on the attempts by baseball to grow overseas, particularly in the UK, where I live. Baseball is very much to British people what cricket is to America - the sport that no one understands - and the ones who have developed a passion are frequently pretty interesting people! I also live in the epicenter of UK baseball - London, naturally - and will report on the goings on of London's two baseball teams, the Mets and the Croydon Pirates. I'll also explore the stadiums of baseball, the uniforms of baseball, and the what I like to call the soap opera of baseball, the hubbub of talk radio, blogs and the printed press that really feed the 24/7 fascination with the game for the average fan. I hope you come along.