Harmon Killebrew (1936-2011)

There is an evolution in the enthusiasms of a baseball fan as he grows up and then grows old. I now enjoy baseball as a more cerebral game than I did 40 years ago. I appreciate the good decisions (and excoriate the bad decisions) of managers in a way I never took the trouble to do in my youth, before I appreciated how central those judgments are to the outcome of a game. I never paid much attention to pitchers when I was young either, because just throwing the ball never seemed as interesting to me as hitting the ball. I've changed my mind about that too, now that I understand more about how the way the ball gets thrown affects the way the ball gets hit.

Above all, baseball gives us a chance to revel in the particular physical endowments we most lack ourselves. I now admire the speed and mobility of shortstops more than I ever did when I was young (and not quite so conscious of how fleeting speed and mobility are). And as a scrawny little 12- and 13- and 14- (etc., etc.,) year old, it was big brawny sluggers that I idolized more than anybody else in the game -- Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, and above all during those years of the early 1960s, Harmon Killebrew. I checked the stats today, and he did not in fact hit a home run every time he came to the plate, but it sure seemed that way to me at the time. On August 3, 1962, he hit a home run over the left field roof of Tiger Stadium. Years later, recalling the feat in an interview, he said matter-of-factly, "I'd never seen anybody do that before."  That's because nobody had ever done that before.

And that one statement of his shows just how thoroughly he combined the complementary virtues that nothing can foster better than sports: the opportunity to be supremely good at something and humble about it all at the same time. Harmon Killebrew was the consummate sportsman, even in an era when sportsmanship had not yet become the rare commodity it is today. It is not recorded that he ever feuded publicly with a manager, or spoke ill of a teammate, or yelled an obscenity at an umpire. He simply went out every day and played baseball; and he played it very, very well. This passage from The Ballplayers, an indispensable reference now incredibly lacking an update and out of print, shows how much of Harmon Killebrew's vision of the game is missing in this age of temperamental baseball divas.

Throughout his career, Killebrew changed positions frequently. He came up as a second baseman, was soon moved to third, then to left field for a few seasons, over to first base for a while, then back to third, back to first, and finally off the field altogether to DH. He would often shift between two positions in the same game. But he never groused, and his lack of a permanent defensive spot never seemed to affect his power.

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord. And let perpetual light shine upon him.

The Rangers Win It!

And now we get to play the Yankees for the pennant.

Does it get any better than this?

Rangers-Rays Series Tied at 2 Games Each

Philosophy must take over at this point. On its face, it's a disappointment to Texas Rangers fans to see their team drop two games in a row and blow a chance to close out the series at home. But here are three considerations that might present themselves to the fan who thinks about it a little more deeply.

SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE:
Sweeping the Rays might have been a near occasion of the sin of pride. Narrowly winning  a hard-fought nerve-racker will make it easier for us to "walk humbly with our God."

ALTRUISM:
Game 5 will give the Rays a second chance at the privilege and pleasure of seeing the great Cliff Lee in action.

RIGHTEOUS VENGEANCE:
A fifth game is necessary if we want to humiliate the Rays by winning the series from them on their home field.

Troublingly, it's the third consideration that appeals to me the most....

Stealing Home

My daughter and I attended our last baseball game of the regular season last night. The Rangers did not win, but it was an exciting game nonetheless -- in part because Josh Hamilton was back in the outfield, diving for fly balls with the same abandon that put him on the DL for most of the month of September; and partly because of this thrilling bit of base running that tied the game for us in the bottom of the ninth.

It was the first time my daughter -- a new baseball fan this season -- had ever seen anyone steal home, and she was impressed. I'll have to show her that it can be even more impressive than that...regardless of what Yogi thought.

The Rangers Clinch!

No one with a shred of human compassion will begrudge Texas Rangers fans their moment of triumph today. This is beyond question the best Rangers team ever to make it into the absurdly expanded major league baseball post-season ( in which the world championship is now decided in a combined best-of-nineteen-game playoff).

The Woodwards will be attending the first home game of the division series, against either the Yankees or the Rays, and we're pretty keyed up about it. The last post-season game I attended in person was the legendary third game of the 1975 World Series. Surely I'm entitled to a little excitement once every 35 years....

Youth and Age and Tommy John Surgery

I guess like most baseball fans, I find this story exceptionally heartbreaking. No major league baseball player's debut in recent years was hyped more than Stephen Strasburg's; and no rookie ever lived up to his hype more convincingly than Strasburg did. Now Strasburg finds himself, at age 22, a man on whom time has already taken its toll. The ironies need no annotation.

Strasburg is handling his misfortune gracefully and with an introspective courage that is rare among people born in 1988. Rare, frankly, among people of any age who must face disappointment on the scale he is facing it. Earlier this season, he realized an ambition that must have occupied him, more or less exclusively, for at least 75 percent of his life. And now the fulfillment of that ambition is in serious jeopardy.

I can't help thinking about the experience of seeing something you've worked 15 years for suddenly taken away from you -- at least temporarily, and perhaps forever. How much harder must the experience be when those 15 years represent pretty much your whole conscious existence. For a person my age, the frustration of "long-term" dreams is something that has probably happened at least a few times in one's life. Eventually we learn that things we once thought represented our one and only chance of happiness--getting this girl or that job--usually aren't as defining a goal as we thought. When we don't get the thing we were certain we had to have, we usually find some other way of being happy and fulfilled. And even more importantly, we find that there are other ways of being happy and fulfilled, knowledge that will be a source of repeated consolation to us as the years and the disappointments roll by.

Mentally and emotionally, Stephen Strasburg seems to be fine. Every baseball lover has to hope that sometime next year he will be fine physically as well. (And, frankly, I know a few hundred thousand people in north Texas who also hope that he ends up in a Rangers uniform someday.)  But how hard a lesson it must be, at age 22, to learn that no merely human aspiration, regardless of how well supported it may be with talent and hard work and desire, can guarantee happiness. People my age often say--to the well-deserved scorn of their juniors--that youth is wasted on the young. But when I reflect back on the way in which disappointment and anxiety loomed unrealistically large for me when I was a young man--because of what I did not yet know--I sometimes think that the wisdom and perspective of age is wasted on the old.

Bobby Thompson R.I.P.

He died yesterday at the age of 86.

The 1951 Major League season ended with the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants tied in the pennant race, each with a 96-58 record. It was decided that the league championship would be settled in a three-game series. The Giants won the first game, the Dodgers won the second. In the third and deciding game, the Dodgers led 4-2 in the bottom of the ninth when Bobby Thompson, the Giants' third baseman, came to bat with two men on base. He took the first pitch, a fastball, for a strike. Then:



It's called "the shot heard 'round the world," lending immortality to a very un-immortal poem by that self-important hack Ralph Waldo Emerson; and of course to Bobby Thompson, who became the protagonist in what is quite possibly the most dramatic moment in baseball history; and to Russ Hodges, the voice of the Giants' radio broadcasts, whose famous quadruple announcement that the Giants did indeed "WIN THE PENNANT" reminds us all of baseball's power to turn a grown man into a little boy.

* * * * *

One final note -- and it's a cautionary note to any of my fellow Texas Rangers fans who may be reading this. In mid-August 1951, the Dodgers were leading the Giants by 13 games; by the end of September, that 13-game lead was gone, and the Dodgers ended up losing the pennant. The Rangers currently hold first place in the American League West division by eight games (although we're losing to Tampa Bay as I type these words). An eight-game lead is a nice thing to have. But in the long run -- and baseball is all about the long run -- it is no guarantee of earthly happiness.

The Beautiful Game

No, not soccer. (Boy, do you have the wrong blog.) I'm talking about what Babe Ruth called "the only real game, I think, in the world." Baseball.

Looking back over the 50 or so years that I have been a fan, I guess I thought that baseball had already afforded me just about every kind of pleasure and excitement the game offers. But this season, baseball has given me a new reason to love it. My kids have finally become fans -- baseball fans in general and Texas Rangers fans specifically. (It doesn't hurt that the Rangers are playing very, very well.)

And they're  not just the "go-to-a-game-and-buy-a-cap" kind of fan. I'm talking about the "memorize-batting-averages-and check-the-box-scores-daily" kind of fan. In fact, it's even better than that: My daughters are now the "score-the-game" kind of fan. They will sit, score sheet and pencil in hand, diligently recording 6-4-3s and F7s and HBPs -- maybe even an occasional CI or IFR. (Okay, I had to look up the notation for those last two myself.) The point is that scoring makes you pay attention to the game, and paying attention to the game is what will make you love the game. Very seldom do my girls have to record a play with Phil Rizzuto's famous WW (wasn't watching).

Maybe baseball isn't "the only real game in the world" (I say maybe because I'm a little nervous disagreeing with the Babe). But, more than any other, it's still the game that fathers play with their kids. It is supremely the game that ties American generations together. (Watch Field of Dreams if you don't know what I mean.) And this season, to my delight, it's tying two Woodward generations even closer together.

Now if only I could get my 10-year-old son to quit rooting for Tampa Bay....