Bengie Molina Post - The Word Cloud

The Bengie Molina rosterization, as word cloud.

C - Bengie Molina - Team #3_The Fatal Flaw

I recall from some far off, long ago TV broadcast, hearing about how Bengie Molina was the slowest ever. Laughing, jocularity, surrounding the reliable World Series champ and his footspeed. A little research uncovered an article in the Hardball Times: "Run Slowly and Carry a Big Bat." Craig Burley writes " I suppose I have always known that Bengie Molina was slow." Exactly. We all know, through some trick of the collective unconscious, that this third of the Molina catchers is quicksand.

Bengie is a good ballplayer, renowned, even, for his catching skills. He's got a good bat, overlooking a few sabermetric short comings. But The Slow. Every ball that I've watched Molina put in play is coated with The Slow, because there is the question of the ball itself (a hit, a homer??) and then there is the question of the The Slow. A slow, slow dribbler down the line means one thing with an average runner, but with Molina it is like reading a long poem: a familiar language made the more interesting for a slightly altered vocabulary. The third baseman can hesitate for a hair longer and set his feet, unrushed. Molina's barely two-thirds of the way down.

(This is the flaw's role. It changes the rules when that player steps in.)

[Catchers get a bad rap for being slow (it's a bad rap but an accurate one, according to Burley's tabulations). When I was in high school, I enjoyed challenging middle infielders to on-the-spot sprint races. "To that fence post, Go!" I'd pace them if not beat them and notch a small victory for catchers. That was a good little trick until my junior year or so, when I got a little bigger and I guess slower, and the middle infielders got quicker. In youth, I could bend expectation, but as we neared maturity, the roles were solidified. That I could keep up, a lead-footed catcher, became a comical notion, a farce.]

Molina has stolen 3 bases in 10 years in the league. That is 12 seconds of the highest drama, when the farcical hits the e-break, locks up and spins the heads of all present.

stats, the bros., a tear in the space-time fabric

Lineup - The Fatal Flaw

C - Bengie Molina
1B -
2B -
3B -
SS -
LF -
CF -
RF -

SP -
RP -

Manager -

Memo: Team #3_The Fatal Flaw

Your third team in the Rosterized library, as dictated by the Rosterized Board of Directors: The Fatal Flaw.

This team is made up of those players who, despite any manner of impressive baseball abilities, possess one or several obvious on-the-field deficiencies. This isn't a bash, though. This is a celebration of the fatal flaw. Finely honed skills are nice and all, but there are as many instances in which the fatal flaw is as compelling and endearing as any beneficial trait. On this team, I sing the imperfect, the rough edged, the flawed.

Most of these players are current. One of them, a player to be named later, is done in the major leagues, and in the Mexican Leagues and the Korean League. His flaws were numerous, but for a moment in timed he had only one: he couldn't pitch away from home.

Most of these players are also very good. Keep in mind that a single flaw does not always portend an unsuccessful career. Instead, the flawed player attunes the other facets of his game to compensate, and takes the shit from the media and punks like me and spins it into gold.

Decisions - Team#2_The Movies

The movies have been done for a while, my mind dragged off to elsewheres, mostly to the baseball season itself. Team #2 The Movies was a tough haul. I thought, in the beginning, that it was a home run team, full of colorful characters, easy-to-use personae and plot companionship. In the end, though, it was a bit of a chore. There aren't, after all, very many good baseball movies. A list of the top five will get you far, and you'll miss nothing good beyond that.

That is the point, though: movies about baseball will never--with the exception, perhaps, of Field of Dreams--be as good and as moving as baseball itself. One nine-pitch postseason at-bat has more dramatic tension than any--any--cinematic, simulated pitch and hit, no matter the bursting orchestral score.

So ultimately I kept going back to the same wells, self-consciously mining only a few of the exceptional sources. They are great movies, but give me an afternoon in Chicago, with a long view of the lake over the right-field bleachers. I won't need a plot but for the one unfolding on the green.

Lineup - The Movies

C - John Kinsella
1B - Jack Elliot
2B - Ken Burns
3B - Roger Dorn
SS - Nicky Rogan
LF - Terence Mann
CF - Kelly Leak
RF - Shoeless Joe Jackson

SP - Bugs "Baseball Bugs" Bunny
RP - Ricky Vaughn

Manager - Morris Buttermaker