C - Mike Piazza - Team#1_The Favorites

The golden boy--a catcher. Handsome locks of hair, a barrel chest, chin carved from mahogany, all of it sadly hidden behind a dusty catcher's mask, pecs obscured by a chest protector that pads anyone with an awkward, mechanical stilt. All of that poster-boy potential wasted in the trenches, behind The Mask, wearing a grimace and forearms bruised and raspberried. Against better reason, career longevity, whispy dreams of popularity: it's almost as though he likes it back there.

Mike Piazza wasn't all that good a catcher, but his ability to hit the tar out of the ball bought him more time behind the plate than any chop-hitting, slowfoot ever would've earned. There is a luxury to filling a glove position with a slugger, even if he is too tall, too slow, and all-around a little wrong for the job. "Catching, boys, is the quickest way to the major leagues," every coach ever said and continues to ever say. Piazza, despite his touted late draft pick status, needed no shortcuts, for he had a long cut, a vicious, torqued-up hammer cut. I needed to catch in order to keep playing at all, up through the lowest levels of college. A little thick around the middle, slow, light-hitting, but a catcher, and good at catching. A coach must think several extra times to let go a player who will toil for incalculable hours in the bullpen sessions, who, rather than costing time for others, sustains an unwieldy staff of pitchers who clamor, endlessly, for their time with a catcher. Best just to keep him around.

Which is to say that Piazza's catching, given his other abilities, was a choice: as it should've been. Catching is the best way to experience a baseball game. It is utter immersion, the busiest, most engrossing escapism on the field. You don't stand on the bump and let the wise guys jeer and bellow at you like the pitchers do, but you manage the pitchers, live a little vicariously, share in successes. Why would anybody choose first base or--pardon my gag reflex--designated hitter, when a life of interest and escape is available?

Piazza is the opposite of Adam Everett: strong as an ox, swinging a bat the size of a roof beam, buggy-whipping the roof beam about his still center, straightening his back on the follow through like a sprung trap coming to rest. But the attributes that add distance to his home runs detract milliseconds from the timing of his throws to second. Those days are behind him, now, though, which isn't a bad place to be, if the knees still work.

stats, poster boy, info

Lineup - The Favorites

C - Mike Piazza
1B - Lance Berkman
2B - Craig Biggio
3B -
SS - Adam Everett
LF -
CF -
RF -

SP -
RP -

Manager -

SS - Adam Everett - Team#1_The Favorites

Baseball dichotomy: the bat and the glove. Find the tender equilibrium between the two, let not one collapse the other. Don't let the glove swallow the bat, nor the bat club unconscious the glove. The promise of the glove clubbed unconscious by the bat, is Adam Everett, who holds a baseball bat in the manner of an 11-year-old.

His work in the field is as a cloud moves across the sky: simple, deliberate, smooth and incomprehensible, appearing and disappearing, nebulous. He glances from toe to toe, squared to a hopping ground ball up the middle, transfers the ball from glove--glove!--to hand and a moment later, the sleight of hand complete, the ball arrives at first base, having traveled on a first class flight and arrived three parts of a second ahead of time.

His work in the batter's box recalls a time when skinny, awkward hitters could live in the major leagues, and hoard a respectable quantity of years on Olympus. Tragic, now, knowing that a fielding messiah will not last in the face of that oh-pee-essical sacrilege.

A tenuous thread--"I'm hanging on by a thread"--can render a moment--an inning--into an ache. "God, I hope that Adam Everett isn't canned for being such a shitty hitter, 'cause I don't know if I can stand to watch the Astros play without his play at short." I feel the same with every season goes by that instant replay stays out of the game.

stats (nsfw)

Lineup - The Favorites

C -
1B - Lance Berkman
2B - Craig Biggio
3B -
SS - Adam Everett
LF -
CF -
RF -

SP -
RP -

Manager -

2B - Craig Biggio - Team#1_The Favorites

Craig Biggio, Second Base, #7

The last milestone that means anything, that will be touched again but feels untouchable, that will be rubbed warm again like a lucky pocket stone - 3000. The 3000th is at once the most important and the least important hit of the run, the twilight single, the last word in the Bible. The Bible's last word: Amen.

And so it felt in the sold out house, when Bidge popped a line drive up the middle, flipped bat his bat away, and rounded first. Barreling towards second, the throw came in an hour early and Bidge hit the dirt, dead out. But it gave him time to bask and wave and forgo what was his expertise, the scored run, the being the run driven in. It was the finest night of baseball I've ever spent, and the luckiest. It was my first home Astros game of the season, having arrived earlier in the day for a wedding, gone a few days later, an utter crap shoot happy-go-lucky "well gee this could be the night but I'm just happy to see the run-up to it" baseball game.

The double that wouldn't quite was one of five hits accumulated on the evening of June 28th, ecstasy piled upon ecstasy even beyond 3000, when Biggio beat a two-out dribbler to first base to start the rally that became a Carlos Lee grand slam in extra innings: a walk-off extravaganza.

Hit 3000 was near to the Biggio paradigm, because it was a sharply struck line drive, with English, defined by a heavy, quick bat-head through the hitting zone, an efficient swing, a double-hitter's swing. A double-hitter's swing too conscientious to uppercut, and too strong-willed to chop a ground ball and bank on speed and the mistakes of others. The true paradigm hit is the Biggio line drive, grabbed from the inner part of the plate and caromed off of the bullpen bench in left field foul territory, sent off to make complementary angles of left fielder's ankles while the hitter rounds second base hard. Another double. Amen.

the career, the hit in question (third item down), the button.

Lineup - The Favorites

C -
1B - Lance Berkman
2B - Craig Biggio
3B -
SS -
LF -
CF -
RF -

SP -
RP -

Manager -

Logo - Team #1_The Favorites

1B - Lance Berkman - Team#1_The Favorites

Wayne Graham is a baseball coach. Knock-kneed, with his tight, short Bikes on and shin-length white socks, perched on a pair of sensible comfy trainers tied with the same care that a grunt makes his bed in the morning. He paced in front of us, from one end of the steel bleachers to the other. Ten-year-olds and up through high school players, all wearing our standard issue Rice University Baseball Camp sponsored by Powerade t-shirts. I still have the shirt. I just checked: I am wearing the shirt right now.

I don't remember much about Lance Berkman from when I saw him hit at Rice. I seem to recall a struck baseball traveling a great distance, sailing on wings of ping! towards the double Medical Center spires built like twin glowing syringes. I grew up running around the Rice University soccer fields, watching football games at Rice Stadium where the Dolphins bounced the Vikings in Superbowl VIII, 1974. I was not in attendance; I wasn't born.

The Houston Astros drafted Berkman in the first round, 1997, 15 spots behind his Rice teammate, first pick Matt Anderson, who never could figure out how to make due with his fucking ridiculous fastball. No better hitter--not even close--came from that draft (Chase Utley threatens, from afar).

The swing, from the left side, is level at the point of contact. Hands, relaxed, holding the bat like a hobo with a cane pole over his shoulder. There is a moment, during each pitch, when Berkman's hands stop being polite, and start being real. The bat head wavers, and then very quickly it is on a plane with its target.

stats. images. disturbing sumo.

Team #1_The Favorites

To start this exercise comes Team #1, a team comprised of my favorite players who are still playing today, or just finished playing today. This is all about bias, filled with Astros, with some other players that I enjoy watching.

Position by position, this is it; more than a list, less than a book.