April 1, and we’re already a day into the season. Clearly the time has come to take stock of baseball for 2011. It’s the hundredth anniversary of Shoeless Joe Jackson’s first full season in the majors, with the Indians, when he hit .408, and also the hundredth anniversary of Tiger slugger Hank Greenberg’s birth to Romanian Jewish immigrant parents in New York’s Lower East Side. Seventy years ago this season, Joe DiMaggio hit safely in 56 games and etched himself into the public psyche as the last pure memory before Pearl Harbor’s apocalypse. A mere ten years ago, a heavy-legged infielder/outfielder one season removed from junior college debuted with the St. Louis Cardinals as a surprise Spring Training roster addition, and Albert Pujols has proceeded to have the most dominant first decade by any hitter in the history of the game. So, we could call this a special anniversary edition, though I won’t summon the 1981 strike season (with the Yankees unable to vanquish the Dodgers in the absence of my beloved and grieved Thurman Munson), nor the 1991 worst-to-first Braves-Twins clash, with all its nail-biting pitcher’s duels and plays at the plate, nor the 1971 All-Star Game, with Reggie Jackson hitting a shot off the right-field light-stanchions that glowed only slightly less than his garish neon green A’s uniform. But we have enough anniversaries to comment upon, even without these, and recent books about the odd triumvirate of Greenberg, DiMaggio, and Pujols will lead the way toward our “out of the gate” 2011 predictions.
Hank Greenberg: The Hero Who Didn't Want To Be One (Jewish Lives)
Yale University Press
192 pages
$20.50
Mark Kurlansky’s volume in the Jewish Lives Series from Yale UP bears the full title Hank Greenberg: The Hero Who Didn’t Want to Be One, and that querulous subtitle could fit Joe DiMaggio from a certain angle, and Albert Pujols as well, from another angle. None of our three transcendent hitters could be called comfortable with superstardom. For each, comfort evolved on the greensward of the baseball field, especially in the geometric constraint of the right-handed batter’s box. But for Hyman “Hank” Greenberg, the weight of expectations of the millions of American Jews of the 1930s and ’40s would always weigh upon his broad shoulders.
Kurlansky begins his volume with the much-embellished story of Greenberg’s decision not to play on Yom Kippur, 1934, even though he was not an observant Jew and his Tigers were in the midst of a pennant-race, and even though he’d played on Rosh Hashanah nine days earlier, when the Yankees were a few games closer. As Kurlansky portrays it, “In baseball terms, he had played the game when he was needed and sat out the game when he was not. But the story is remembered, even by non-Jews, in Jewish terms: he would not play on Yom Kippur. For all his history of timely hits winning games at the last moment, this day on which he did not play is one of the most remembered moments of his career.”
Indeed, this sort of gentle irony seems to have followed Greenberg throughout his quietly, consistently excellent career as a baseball player and later baseball executive. He wanted only to hone his craft as a player while going to high school in the Bronx, and did so perhaps because he was so tall and large that he was embarrassed to interact with other kids socially. He was great, to some extent, because he was shy. He was the first bona-fide Jewish superstar, but Judaism as a belief system played little or no role in his life. He became a famous Jew by choosing a route to escape Jewish identity, the suspicious realm of baseball. He was a giant of a man, muscle-bound and fearless, but he mostly ignored and responded passively to the constant stream of anti-Semitic heckling from fans and opposing players. Kurlansky does report that “He did once walk over to the Yankee dugout and challenge the entire team to a fight. The entire bench looked away.” This points to perhaps the deepest paradox about Hank: “Gentleman is another word used regularly to describe Greenberg—along with tough.” And because he was also “the first active major leaguer to enlist after the Pearl Harbor attack,” the lore grew around Hank that he signed up to fight Hitler for the sake of his Jewish kinfolk. As it turns out, he joined the Army Air Corps and served in a relatively pleasant role in the Pacific Theater. He was, from start to finish, a dutiful man, not a crusader.
Greenberg’s story goes from quietly good to quietly better, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that he found that most elusive prize of the ballplayer—success and satisfaction after retiring from the playing field. Indeed, when he joined the ownership team of the Indians in the late ’40s, with the quirky and brilliant Bill Veeck, not only did his work ethic transpose to the new setting, but also his defiance of the bigotry that he’d faced down throughout his career: “Veeck and Greenberg had been partners in a grand plan to integrate baseball. While Veeck, the general manager and part owner, signed top Negro Leagues players, Greenberg, also a part owner, directed the farm system and signed many young black players. In the early 1950’s, as major league teams were finally starting to acquire black players, Greenberg signed more than anyone else in baseball.” One senses the enduring purpose in a man who, late in life, “almost never talked about baseball anymore,” but not because of bitterness or fecklessness. Instead, “he was more interested in the ideas stimulated by the history books and biographies he was constantly reading. He and Mary Jo became close to Karl Fleming, a Newsweek journalist noted for his coverage of the civil rights movement.” Here was a man who, if not entirely comfortable with his symbolic image, was nevertheless always comfortable in his own skin.
Kurlansky’s observation about Greenberg’s active intellectual life as a retiree is given on the heels of an observation that he rarely interacted with old baseball people, with this specific instance: “Mary Jo said that she once asked him why he didn’t stay in touch with his old friend Joe DiMaggio, and Hank said, ‘If you said hello to him, he was stuck for an answer.’ ” This offhand contrast between the two men points a deep and fundamental difference. If Greenberg was always the steady plodder, tough but affable, and able to get along in spite of adverse experiences at every point in his journey to, through, and after his playing career, well, DiMaggio was none of the above. In fact, to read another 2011 Yale UP offering, Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil (part of the Icons of America series), is to discover a man more fully embodied on the diamond than any other player ever, and yet more fully disembodied off the diamond than anyone. The novelist Jerome Charyn, raised in the Bronx and bearing witness, in boyhood, to DiMaggio’s uber-presence in centerfield at Yankee Stadium, sets out to counter many of the scathing exposés written about the “Yankee Clipper” over the years. Charyn isn’t here to sanitize or obfuscate—that is emphatically not his modus operandi—but rather seeks to parse the startling dualism of the man who left so much on the field and so little off it: “He lived long enough to become the grand old man of baseball who could share his wisdom with his fans and younger players. What was there about the Yankee Clipper’s inner torment that never allowed him to do so? Why did he disappear inside himself, like a living ghost?”
Charyn’s tone and phrasing are those of an artist, a re-imaginer of lost lives such as he creates in his novel about George Washington (Johnny One-Eye) and in The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson. If he seems a bit impressionistic about DiMaggio, that is the pleasure of it. Charyn’s DiMaggio “was a lonely practitioner of some lost American art—America’s one and only prince, who happened to have been a baseball player.” Or he was “like an idiot savant whose magic was born on a baseball field and abandoned him once he left it.” And after baseball? “A lack of education had left him stranded, distrustful, frightened of other people, a man without curiosity.”
One imagines in the DiMaggios’ immigrant fisherman’s household in San Francisco a very different dynamic from that in the Greenbergs’ immigrant garment manufacturer’s home in the Bronx. But if DiMaggio was less whole as a person than Greenberg, both before and after their almost overlapping careers, in centerfield and at the plate he transcended Greenberg and everyone else. And Charyn points out over and over again that the two conditions were related: “He was a man who had no language outside the lyricism of his own body. He danced for us on a playing field with a terrifying power, in spite of his bone spurs in his heel. Part of this fire came from the deep insecurity of a man who had a fear of words.”
Charyn connects this trait with Marilyn Monroe’s insecurities, and much of the second half of the book is tied in with DiMaggio’s obsession with Marilyn, the only thing outside baseball that fully captured him. It’s a fascinating, tawdry, very depressing story (and one comes away thinking Joe D. a saint compared to the likes of Robert Kennedy and Frank Sinatra). But I was transfixed by the book’s first half, with Charyn’s paean to the player DiMaggio—I couldn’t get enough of the attempts by the novelist to capture in prose what this consummate baseball player meant. The key word might be “concentration,” but that doesn’t have enough depth and heat in it: “It’s not his hitting streak that haunts us, but what that streak represents—his fierce concentration, his fierce will. Gay Talese wasn’t wrong to compare him to a matador. There are no bulls on a baseball diamond, yet there might have been. DiMaggio lived in that constant danger zone where a bull might gore a man. He took us with him into that realm of the absolute. It was a ride we would never forget.”
Charyn quotes Hank Greenberg’s observation on DiMaggio’s difficult rookie year, 1936: “They threw at his head a lot, especially when he broke in. He would just move his head back out of the pitch and never move his body …. He was absolutely fearless.” For Charyn, DiMaggio was the one figure who could live up to the unlivable pressure of the Yankee fans: “He was the Jolter, who always had to shake and rouse, to stir something in us that no one else could. And he did.” Even in his waning years, with his damaged heel, “somehow he could carry a team with his concentration alone, with his fierce will, until his own powers began to fade and he was like a husk in center field with his clawless right shoe.”
When Charyn moves to the second part of his book, he begins with the immediate and key contrast in the first line: “Hammerin’ Hank Greenberg hardly suffered when he retired from baseball after the 1947 season. He walked right out of the batter’s box and into his own kind of aristocracy.” But DiMaggio, if anything more well-connected and certainly more famous and universally beloved than Greenberg, was a diminished being off the field. “He was driven by pride,” Charyn writes, “and money was the means of soothing him, of covering up the need never to make a mistake, to live in his own narrow world of perfection.” It was an impossible life to lead, and he did it for more than 50 years of retirement—a long hollow time, a “long vigil,” driven by a yearning for wholeness: “His panoramic Stations of the Cross in center field were utterly his own, and that’s what he clung to after Marilyn was gone. The only role left was the Greatest Living Player.” He had sacrificed himself over and over for Marilyn, and “with her and her alone he recaptured at least a little of that mysterious grace he had on the field, a grace beyond any notion of grandeur, as natural and divine as a man in a woolen shirt racing like an antelope into the endless reach of a stadium in the Bronx.”
The sacramental power of Charyn’s imagery can’t mask the tragedy at the root of DiMaggio’s greatness, and yet somehow the language invigorates the dark tale. A much more hopeful tale is offered in Scott Lamb and Tim Ellsworth’s Pujols: More Than the Game, from Thomas Nelson. If the story lacks the imaginative force of Charyn’s chronicle, its straightforward evangelical prose is nevertheless true to Albert Pujols own single-minded approach to life and faith—and to baseball as well, for that matter.
The greatest pure hitter of our generation, and maybe the greatest ever, with numbers only matched by the likes of Ted Williams and Lou Gehrig, Pujols is just entering his thirties. In his approach to the game, he resembles Hank Greenberg: like Kurlansky, Lamb and Ellsworth recount the deliberate, single-minded development of a seemingly unorthodox physique into a hitting machine. Yet, in the context of this review, if might be more illuminating to call Pujols something like the antipode of DiMaggio. In his life off the field, in Christian service and open expressions of faith in Christ, in devotion to wife, family and friends, in unlimited time and energy for fans, especially children, in every area of “private” life, Pujols seems remarkably at ease. He is a full person off the field, and Lamb and Ellsworth document innumerable testimonials from others of his genuine godliness and sincerity—any single season of his ten thus far seems more full of geniality than DiMaggio’s whole life. Pujol’s means exactly what he said to USA Today last year: “It isn’t only about being a baseball player. It’s about having the opportunity to change lives.”
I was grateful for Lamb and Ellsworth’s account of Pujols’s early life, when things were not so clear and decisive, and he was scratching and clawing just to get up to the platform he’s now ascended. Though the Cardinals had scouted him at Maple Woods Community College in Kansas City (the city he’d emigrated to with his grandmother from the Dominican Republic), the scouting reports were full of worries, with terms like “heavy-hipped” and “a lunger in the batter’s box.” This sure-fire Hall of Famer was not drafted until the thirteenth round, a situation that ignited in Pujols an uncharacteristic enmity for the all-too-fallible Cardinals scout, Dave Karaff, now employed at a Wal-Mart and longing for reconciliation. The anecdote humanizes Pujols. We also get insight into the gritty determination that took him from community college to the big leagues in only one season. I reveled in reading that, “Coming to bat for the first time as a professional baseball player, Pujols doubled on the first pitch from Josh Beckett.” Whoa! Two perennial All-Stars, on a chilly spring in Kane County, Illinois, trying to bring their crafts to life! That Albert Pujols has progressed from there to the pinnacle, and that he has done so as an unequivocal witness of Christ’s goodness and his own humanness, is a story to savor. Like a good expository sermon, this book lays it out thoroughly and well.
Now, to the season at hand, with only the slightest pause at the plate and a twirl of my metaphorical bat as I recall that last year, for the first time in almost a decade of previews for Books & Culture, I actually picked the World Series champs correctly, and I even had the Giants beating Cliff Lee in a pivotal World Series match-up (okay, I had Seattle as the AL champs, but if I’d known Lee would be traded to the Rangers, I would have changed it). But that’s all last year’s news, and there’s forecasting to be done—and I have found a new formula which I believe will bear fruit.
The key word for this 2011 forecast is “intergenerational,” and hence I’ve pored over the Spring Training rosters to see the sort of players each team has been looking at, and particularly to gauge the age-ranges on each team. Seeing a mix of veteran players and rising youth as optimum, I decided to set as ideal parameters the presence of at least one player born in the 1960s and one player born in the 1990s—the true bridging of a generation gap! Alas, I’ve been forced to tighten things up a bit, though, so instead of my own birth and my graduation from college (’69 and ’90, I confess), I’ve had to move towards the Bicentennial celebration of 1976 and the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, depersonalizing the process a bit, but bolstering the definition of “veteran” substantially.
Hence, when I turn to the AL East, the immediate stomping ground of my childhood memories as a Yankee fan and Red Sox hater, I receive a bit of a shock to see that Boston actually comes closest to meeting my draconian original qualifications: the presence of eternal knuckleballer Tim Wakefield (born Aug. 2, 1966) and the brief appearance in camp of INF Oscar Tejada (Dec. 26, 1989) create a secretly powerful dynamic, which the addition of All-Stars Adrian Gonzalez and Carl Crawford, and the enduring presence of Josh Beckett and Jonathan Papelbon (all bland early 1980s birthdates) cannot trump. So, the Red Sox, gulp, will take the division. The Yankees roster is hoary-headed enough, with Jeter, A-Rod, Posada, and Mo Rivera (another 1969 birthdate!) all pre-Bicentennial, and the “youth movement” barely evident. Add to this a rather disconcerting newspaper sidebar I read last week, that the Yankees have brought in aged starter Kevin Millwood to compete with graybeards Freddy Garcia and Bartolo Colon for the fifth starter slot, and I vote that the imbalance towards the Nixon era will stump the Yankees in the heat of August. Tampa Bay has barely any old guys, and though the two qualifiers, Johnny Damon and Manny Ramirez, seem already destined for Cooperstown, there’s too much 1980s birth-vibe on this team. The Blue Jays have home run power and some young starting pitching, but more important is the presence of an aging closer, Octavio Dotel (Nov. 25, 1973), throwing to a creaky-kneed catcher, Jose Molina (June 3, 1975)—that will keep them in the race until late August. If only the ancient patriarch Cito Gaston hadn’t retired! Then there’s Baltimore, and here’s my surprise in the East—simply having Adrian Rosario (Sep. 30, 1989) in camp wouldn’t have been enough, though there’re plenty of late ’80s birthdates among the pitchers. But the addition of two key representatives from the Gerald Ford era—Derrek Lee at first base and Vladimir Guerrero at DH—gives the Orioles enough pop to vie for a wildcard well into September. Buck Showalter will make a believer out of George F. Will once more.
The AL Central is the territory I live in now, and I’ve followed the Tigers pretty closely for several years now, so it’s hard to pick against them (plus, I have to face my office-mate Michael Pasquale and his little boys, who utter the names Aurelio Rodriguez and Lou Whittaker with something like awe), so I’ll wait on Detroit and start with the hated rivals, the Twins. Their homogenous ’80s birthdate roster seems to sink them immediately—never mind the outlandish talent of catcher Joe Mauer and first-baseman Justin Morneau. Half the team seems to have been born in 1983! This just can’t work … until one realizes that Deolis Guerra (Apr. 17, 1989) was in camp, and may have actually thrown BP once or twice to the Gehrig-like man-myth in the batting cage, Jim Thome (Aug. 27, 1970)—rats, the Twins have a chance at a wildcard run after all! As for the Indians, they barely have a ten-year span from tacit veteran DH Travis Hafner (June 3, 1977) to the likely Double-A bound Hector Rondon (Feb. 26, 1988). And you’ve been wondering what was wrong with Cleveland lately—now you know! One point of interest that I must count in the Indians favor—the coolest name for the team’s best player, Shin-Soo Choo, who by the way led the team in every significant offensive category last season (HR, RBI, Avg., Doubles, Hits, Runs, even SB), the only player in MLB to do so. The White Sox, of course, are loaded with power throughout the lineup, quality starters, and a strangely effective manager in Ozzie Guillen. But the key combination won’t be Paul Konerko driving in Juan Pierre 150 times this year (although they are 1976 and 1977 respectively, almost enough for a mystical edge). No, the key is the presence of lefty pitcher Chris Sale in camp (Mar. 30, 1989—and a beanpole to boot, at 6’5″, 170 lbs!) alongside the Dorian Gray of the league right now, Omar Vizquel (Apr. 24, 1967). That’s enough to give them the division crown! Yet the Tigers will have their say, if only because the arthritic knees in their infield, Brandon Inge (May 19, 1977) and Carlos Guillen (Sep. 30, 1975), now make sense alongside the hottest pitching prospect in the organization, teenager Jacob Turner (May 21, 1991), who spent a brief spell last summer down the road from me at the West Michigan Whitecaps Low-A franchise, throwing 99 mph with late movement. The problem will be the Tigers star, 1B Miguel Cabrera, who will be hard pressed to duplicate last season’s outlandish string of clutch late-inning homeruns that almost captured the MVP trophy. His offseason arrest and ongoing struggles with alcohol abuse are no laughing matter, and everyone hopes he can right the ship of his life, but my main problem with him at this moment is that he’s too young! The birthdate of Apr. 18, 1983 places him firmly in the homogenous mid-’80s zone, a bad vibe for this forecast. But Magglio Ordonez is at least pre-Watergate trial (Jan. 28, 1974), so I place the Tigers in the wildcard mix late, but only if they call up Jacob Turner in August. As for Kansas City, when the only qualifying veteran is the starting catcher, Jason Kendall (June 26, 1974, same birthdate as Derek Jeter), this does not bode well. And one feels that lefty Noel Arguelles (Jan. 12, 1990) is not yet ready to turn things around for the Royals single-handedly. One can only hope that back-up infielder Kila Ka’aihue can channel some of the Shin-soo Choo cool name vibe and emerge as an offensive powerhouse alongside the under-appreciated Billy Butler. Wait until next year, KC!
The AL West presents an intriguing landscape for generational roster assessment, and hence the work of prediction is made difficult. How, for instance, does one judge the Angels outfield, with all three starters born in the mid-to-late 1970s (Bobby Abreu, Torii Hunter, and Vernon Wells) and all bona-fide All Stars? All well and good, but when three pitchers on the roster carry pre-Jimmy Carter’s inauguration birthdates, maybe the tip toward archaism is too strong. The Angels will suffer multiple hamstring pulls in mid-summer, I predict, and limp to the finish. Seattle might have more of an upside—Ichiro (Oct. 22, 1973) is closing in on twenty years as a star-player (the first 8 in Japan) and perpetual trade-bait SS Jack Wilson is a 1977 guy, plus there were eight pitchers in camp born 1986 or later, including last year’s Cy Young winner Felix Hernandez (Apr. 8, 1986)—so youth is there as well. I see a wildcard run here (of course, I saw a World Series run for the Mariners last year, but I’m a slow-learner). Oakland has Hideki Matsui (June 12, 1974), perhaps my favorite pure batter in the league and a producer wherever he’s played, but the rest of the lineup has that 1983 look. Not so the Rangers, AL pennant-winners last year—one need only see Wilmer Font (May 24, 1990) running pitcher fielding drills in camp alongside Darren Oliver (Oct. 6, 1970) and the ace-in-the-hole Arthur Rhodes (Oct. 24, 1969) to realize this teams potential to climb the mountain again. And they have Adrian Beltre now to protect Josh Hamilton (reigning MVP), and Elvis Andrus is almost a Berlin Wall qualifier (Aug. 26, 1988) at SS—but I think last year Skipper Ron Washington caught lightning in a bottle, and so I say Texas fades late. I’ll give Seattle the nod for one more year.
Now to the senior circuit, and the NL East, where the Phillies’ reign of terror shows every sign of continuing with a murderer’s row-tation (forgive the slip to neo-logism) of Halladay, Lee, Oswalt, Hamels, with Lidge in the pen. Indeed, all five of them are mid-1970s guys, veterans and proven stars all, and if you throw in Jose Contreras (Dec. 6, 1971), you have one half of the formula in place. And then one notes that two infielders in camp this spring give a glimpse of the other half, with Freddy Galvis (Nov. 14, 1989) and Cesar Hernandez (May 23, 1990) injecting youthful presence. But they are likely minor leaguers for the foreseeable future, and among the positional starters, Howard, Utley, Rollins and Polanco are all 1970s guys, and Raul Ibanez (June 2, 1972) is a grand old man. Methinks the Phillies are too old to avoid the two or three big injuries that sink a season. Will the surprising Braves of last year be able to fill the void? Well, veteran presence isn’t a problem in Atlanta either—one of their best hitters and one of their best pitchers, Chipper Jones and Derek Lowe, both boast Nixon-administration birthdates, which means pushing 40, and besides Lowe there are five other pitchers born in the ’70s. Sure, their star slugger Jason Heyward (Aug. 9, 1989) will be joined by Freddie Freeman in the lineup (Sep. 12, 1989), and I think that will be enough for wildcard contention, but will the old arms be able to carry them through to October? Sketchy. The Mets, well, they’re also sketchy. Their only pre-Bicentennial veterans are knuckleballer R.A. Dickey and weak-stick INF Luis Castillo. In a nutshell (and with apologies to my wife, who grew up a Mets fan on Long Island), the season looks as bland as the 1984 median birthdate. Which leaves the Nationals and the Marlins, two intriguing teams on the cusp of some interesting seasons, I believe. For now, Washington has the youngest player (and likely one of the best pure hitters) in any camp, last year’s top pick Bryce Harper (Oct. 16, 1992) and perhaps the best young pitcher in a generation, Stephen Strasburg (July 20, 1988—but in the midst of recovery from Tommy John surgery) anchoring the future. And they have two aged stars of past Marlins glory, Ivan Rodriguez (Nov. 30, 1971) and Livan Hernandez (Feb. 20, 1975) holding down the fort. They are solid this year, contenders next year. And what of the Marlins of the present day? Their best player is arguably rookie slugger Mike Stanton (Nov. 8, 1989), the youngest guy on the roster. Indeed, this roster is strong on late 1980s birthdates, a good sign for the future, but Florida lacks the veteran anchors to complete the intergenerational loop. Randy Choate (Sep. 5, 1975) and Wes Helms (May 12, 1976) are the oldest players, and the only real 1970s representatives—not good for the formula! I guess I need to pick the Phillies for the division after all.
NL Central machinations have created a few conundrums for this forecast. The Pirates have an ’80s-centric lineup and only two players from the 1970s, both post-Bicentennial. Looks like another long year for Clint Hurdle’s boys. The Astros have a similar profile, with a few 1979 birthdates thrown in and an elder statesman in Nelson Figueroa (May 18, 1974), but that will only do to finish five games up on the Pirates. The Brewers are next, winners of the Zach Greinke sweepstakes last year, but the key numbers that I see are on the birth certificates of LaTroy Hawkins (Dec. 21, 1972) and the ageless practitioner of batter’s-box-yoga, Craig Counsell (Aug. 21, 1970), alongside righty power-arm Wily Peralta (May 8, 1989). The presence of early ’80s birthdate sluggers Ryan Braun, Corey Hart, Casey McGehee, and Prince Fielder will certainly help, but only because the formula is satisfied—and a wildcard run a strong possibility! What about the Cardinals? Well, Albert Pujols is right on the cusp of decades (Jan. 16, 1980), and hence, my formula may be the one place where his numbers don’t quite work to assure success. Only OF Lance Berkman (Feb. 10, 1976) and ace Chris Carpenter (Apr. 27, 1975) fit my qualification for veteran-hood, and there’s a “middle-aged” aura here—I think the Cardinals struggle out of the gate and never quite catch up. So, will it be last year’s surprise Cincinnati, or the perpetual possibilities, the Cubs? The Reds have a rising star in Joey Votto, but the 1983 birthdate is too middle of the road to sustain the formula. Luckily, he shares the infield with Edgar Renteria (Aug. 7, 1975), Scott Rolen (Apr. 4, 1975), and Miguel Cairo (May 4, 1974). That’s enough to be in contention in September, but only Francisco Cordero qualifies on the pitching staff (May 11, 1975), so the last two weeks of the season could get ugly. And hence the Cubs look to be the front-runners for the divisional crown—but why? Key players as the polestars of the intergenerational formula! With Alfonso Soriano sneaking in under the veteran boundary (Jan. 7, 1976), and shortstop Starlin Castro building on rookie success (Mar. 24, 1990), the pieces are in place. As an intangible, Chicago has what I’ll call the Jimmy Carter Effect, with two key pitchers—Ryan Dempster and Kerry Wood—and two key hitters—Marlon Byrd and Kosuke Fukudome—all born in 1977. So much for the curse of the goat.
I always find it hard to get excited about the NL West, though my favorite player of all time, Don Mattingly, has taken over the helm of the Dodgers—and wait, that’s just the problem. Why are you wearing Dodger blue, Donnie Baseball?! Why do you have to hurt me? Indeed, the Dodgers have an aging roster, with ten players with 1970s birthdates populating the team, the elder statesman being former Indian and Tiger-tormentor Casey Blake (Aug. 23, 1973). Too much enmity flowing—the Dodgers finish under .500 and get sold to Donald Trump. The Padres, meanwhile, have lost their best hitter, Adrian Gonzalez, and are in the post-Jake Peavy era on their pitching staff. No one on the roster qualifies for my formula. The veteran of the squad is journeyman righty Heath Bell. It’s sunny all summer in San Diego, but my baseball forecast is gloomy. The Diamondbacks are a team with young pitching, but unproven and not sensational. As for veterans, they have fortyish players at catcher —Henry Blanco (Aug. 29, 1971)—and on the left side of the infield—Geoff Blum (Apr. 26, 1973) and Melvin Mora (Feb. 7, 1972)—maybe the places that you least want your old-timers? As with San Diego, look for sunshine everyday in Arizona, and a team around .500. The Rockies are a team on the rise, and the formula smiles upon the presence of key veteran Todd Helton (Aug. 20, 1973) and a ton of mid-late ’80s pitching prospects. I read into the dual-MVP threats of Troy Tulowitzki and Carlos Gonzalez (both in their mid-twenties prime), and I see a wildcard run with division crown aspirations. But the San Francisco Giants will not be easily unseated from the pinnacle of baseball, and I see them as the division winner, not based on past glory, but rather on the grounds of obeying my formula. Forget the triple pitching punch of Lincecum, Cain. and Sanchez—the appearance in camp of Madison Bumgarner (Aug. 1, 1989) and Jose Casilla (May 21, 1989) as the Berlin Wall Boys answers one half of the necessary criteria, and stalwarts Aubrey Huff and Pat Burrell (1976) and Miguel Tejada (May 25, 1974) fulfill the other half. This is the stuff of divisional dominance.
Where does all this brooding over birthdates leave the postseason? Well, if we take the ALDS match-ups as Red Sox vs. Mariners and White Sox vs. Orioles, I’m sorely tempted to leave both sets of Sox on the drying rack out of age-old disdain, but I must push that aside and predict a Boston vs. Chicago ALCS tilt, with the home team winning the first six games in unseasonably warm environs, then a Game 7 in Beantown with windchills dipping and those two vestiges of the Lyndon Johnson era, Tim Wakefield and Omar Vizquel, facing off in a scoreless game, with Vizquel craftily slapping a Wakefield floater over the Green Monster for a White Sox victory.
In the NL races, I’ll posit the Phillies vs. Rockies and Cubs vs. Giants for the NLDS games, with the Rockies drawing out the lifeblood of the aged Phillies staff in the mile-high chill, and taking the series in 5 games. Likewise, the Cubs will take down the champion Phillies in a series of one-run thriller games that begins to make at least agnostics of the Cubs Nation. Then, a whirlwind sweep of the Rockies will put the Cubs in the Series against the cross-town rivals—a Series to be played amidst sleet, snow, fog, and locusts, with political chicanery in the background. In other words, Chicago as it should be! And this series will be known ever after as the Jimmy Carter Series, because only players born during his administration will be able to do anything positive. This bodes well for the Cubs, as Ryan Dempster becomes unhittable, and Kerry Wood saves three games with the dominance of his early promise. And have I mentioned Fukudome hitting .667 for the series, or Aramis Ramirez driving in ten runs? But alas, the Southsiders have their own Carterite warriors: A.J. Pierzynski will send three balls out in a single game, and Juan Pierre will steal home not once but twice—in the same inning! Of game seven! A game where Mark Buehrle will pitch 14 innings! But, when all is done, in the bottom of the fourteenth at Wrigley (oh yeah, the NL will win the All-Star Game too), the redoubtable Carlos Pena, who has lived below the Mendoza line for a few seasons, but who can still hit the deep-ball, will rise up and make May 17, 1978 a birthdate to live in Chicagoan glory (or infamy, if you’re a Sox fan) forever, driving a fastball off of closer Jesse Crain out onto Waveland Ave. to bring the Cubs back to the century-plus-delayed ecstasy of the world championship. If only Ozzie Guillen had checked out Crain’s birth certificate, he would have known: July 5, 1981—a Reagan-era baby!!!!
Michael R. Stevens is professor of English at Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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