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Updated: May 26, 11:38 AM ET A seventh-inning classic By Jayson Stark ESPN.com | |||||||||||||||||
We always knew we covered the greatest sport ever invented, even before the National Endowment for the Arts and the Recording Association of America came along to prove it.
But now, there can be no doubt.
"That," said Diamondbacks song bird Curt Schilling, "depends on which version of the song they were ranking. Was it the New York version, which usually features two brawls and three arrests during the chorus? Or was it the L.A. version, which has 32,000 of the 40,000 fans singing as they walk out of the stadium during a 0-0 double-no-hitter?" Hmm. Sounds like Schilling has some other agendas working here. So we turn, for a second opinion, to former Angels GM Bill Bavasi. "First of all," Bavasi said, "I am shocked and dismayed that 'Shake Your Booty,' by KC and the Sunshine Band, didn't crack the top 125. The lyrics alone make it a classic. And where in the name of all that is holy is 'Freebird?' "Second, it doesn't seem like 'Take Me Out to the Ball Game' should be in the 'song' category. It might belong with themes. You know, like the themes from 'The Jetsons' or 'The Flintstones' or 'Car 54 Where Are You?' "But the fact that 'Take Me Out to the Ball Game' is considered a song and beat the likes of No. 16, 'Satisfaction,' No. 53, 'Stairway to Heaven,' and No. 57, 'Louie Louie,' is truly impressive," Bavasi said. "Demented ... but impressive." Dementia notwithstanding, though, this man never did answer our question. Neither, for that matter, did Braves first baseman Rico Brogna, who was shocked to see that "Yankee Doodle Dandy" was ranked as high as No. 70. "Haven't they had enough success the last few years?" Brogna wondered, apparently referring more to Joe Torre and his band than Vess Ossman and the band responsible for that ditty. So we thought maybe a distinguished Ivy Leaguer, like Penn alum Doug Glanville, could provide his usual worldly perspective. "It should be higher," the Phillies' loquacious centerfielder pronounced. "It should be seventh -- for seventh inning. They messed up there." Rather than look at this musically, see, Glanville took sort of an arithmetic approach. "The ranking should go with the number," he said. "Like 'Take Five,' by Dave Brubeck (unranked, by the way) -- that should be No. 5. What are they doing? "And a song like 'Georgia on My Mind' (No. 42) -- they've got to find out what number state (in the union) Georgia was and place it there. 'Hotel California' (No. 46) -- they've got to find the address of the hotel, and that's where that should go." Glanville is so convinced, in fact, that there's a numerical order to these matters that he proposed: "What baseball should do now is pair the song with the inning. In the first inning, play 'Over the Rainbow.' In the second inning, play 'White Christmas.' And if we happen to get to the 55th inning some night, play 'When You Wish Upon a Star' (which was No. 55)." Nah, if anybody ever gets to the 55th inning, they ought to play, "I Just Wanna Go Home." Because, at that point, if any living organisms were actually left in the stadium, they sure as heck would care if they ever got back. So perhaps we need to look at this from a slightly different tilt. As in ... What the Heck Were These Voters Thinking? How about we think about this question this way: In a world that has provided us with artists as brilliant and diverse as Weird Al Yankovic and Pearl Jam, and with songs as infectious and indelible as "La Vida Loca" and "Play that Funky Music White Boy," what on earth is "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" doing in the top 10 of any chart? "Hey, a lot of people know that song," said Astros broadcast-crooner Jim Deshaies. "I'm a sentimentalist when it comes to that song. Now I don't know, if you're a true artist and you're talking music, whether it should be up there. I don't know if it's a particularly difficult song to sing or what. But it paints a picture, by golly. "It's the only song, other than the national anthem, that people stand up for. That gives it pretty lofty status. Did you ever try to sit through that song? You can't do it. You can try and sit there for a little while. But pretty soon, you're saying, 'Aw, all right. I'd better get up.'" And this is true. This is a song that makes people rise up unlike any other, a song that literally halts the lives of everyone within range when it is played. "When you think that every game stops in the middle for people to sing a song," said Pirates musicologist Terry Mulholland, "how can it not be up there? It's a game-stopper." Therefore, Mulholland concluded, that No. 8 ranking is simply "too low. It should be No. 1 -- because it's the greatest game in the world." He'll get no argument from us on that point, naturally. But is this really about games? It's about songs. Right? So is this really a greater song than "Over the Rainbow," featuring Oz's cute little Dorothy and Toto and the Tin Man? "Hey, how many little kids went to bed and had nightmares because of that movie?" Mulholland retorted. All right. Maybe they did. But what about those other songs that finished ahead of it? How about "White Christmas?" What negatives could possibly be attached to "White Christmas?" "They've got elves and things in there," Mulholland said. "We don't have elves. We don't have munchkins. We don't have scary characters. We don't have houses falling on witches. And if something scary does show up in the game -- like Derek Bell's baggy pants -- someone in the commissioner's office says he can't wear them." Of course, we do occasionally have strikes in our game. And lockouts. And 20-year-old draft dodgers fleeing to the Northern League. But this isn't the time or place to talk about those minor glitches. The reason, clearly, that "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" ranked so high is more cultural than musical. Baseball is America. Those other sports aren't. You'll note there are no football, basketball, hockey, lacrosse, or curling tunes on this list. So either this says something about baseball's place in American life or there was some sort of Florida-like vote-counting procedure. "I don't see a hockey song," Glanville said. "There's no 'Buh-buh-ba-da, buh-buh-ba-da' on there. And I don't see a football song. Like 'Who Dat Trying to Beat Them Saints' -- I thought that would be in there someplace. "But 'Take Me Out to the Ball Game' -- that belongs. Baseball is an integral part of America. So it deserves its place -- in the seventh inning." Yup, it's official now. So next time, instead of heading for the men's room or one last beverage when you hear that inspirational melody, savor the greatness of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" -- No. 1 in our hearts, No. 7 in our innings and No. 8 on the ballot of Clinton, McCartney and the National Endowment for the Arts. Glove story of the week Since we're in a musical frame of mind, it's time to announce our "All You Need Is Glove" play of the week. The author: Cardinals pitcher Darryl Kile. The inspiration: Geoff Jenkins' groundball, which was helpful enough to stick in the webbing of Kile's glove Tuesday night and refused to exit. The chorus: Glove is in the air. The reason for the chorus: Kile couldn't figure out how to get the ball to first base -- so he jogged toward first baseman Albert Pujols, then flipped the glove -- with the baseball still lodged inside it -- to first. Pujols hauled it in. The ball was still in there. So Jenkins was out. Talk about your web gems. In St. Louis, of course, this play was advertised as the greatest innovation since the Clydesdales. But here at Week in Review, we know different. We know that in fact, Kile was merely copying an identical play made 15 years ago by Week in Review hero Terry Mulholland, then imitated by El Duque Hernandez in 1999. So what we had here, really, was simply glove at third sight. "Yeah," Mulholland told Week in Review. "It's getting to be a regular fielding technique these days." And if it is, shouldn't Mulholland be looked upon as the founding father of glove-flipping? The shocker these days isn't that other men have done it since. It's that it's taken so long for the rest of the pitching population to catch on. "The problem is, I did it so long ago," Mulholland said, "that that generation of kids is finally getting to the big leagues now." Exactly. Kile was at the impressionable age of 17 when Mulholland fired his glove to first base and directly into blooper-tape immortality. And El Duque was but a mere youth of, oh, anywhere from 14 to 22, depending on which birth certificate you want to believe. So when Kile and Hernandez did their glove-hurling acts, it was just their way of paying homage to the master. "They say that's the greatest form of flattery," Mulholland said. "Well, I'm flattered." The master himself hasn't duplicated this trick, you'll notice. But Mulholland says that's only because "I didn't want to make it look like it's routine. That takes away from the magic of play. I didn't want to tarnish the magic." Now, though, it seems to us, it's time for Mulholland to capitalize on the magic and make a few bucks. Now that we've had three of these plays, all preserved brilliantly through the miracle of videotape, shouldn't he pounce on the chance to start marketing some kind of "World's Greatest Glove Flips" video? "I'm just glad that when I did it, they had color television and videotape," he said. "Otherwise, it might have just ended up as a comic strip in Baseball Digest." But now, he figures, he might be able to compile as much as five minutes of video on these three plays -- if "we can throw in some slow-mo, some reverse angle." Then he could give some glove-flipping instructions at the end of the tape, and voila! Folks will be streaming down to the old Blockbuster. "I've gotta get with Tom Emanski," he said, "and see when he's bringing out his next tape." On the other hand, he worries, he doesn't want to be looked on as "the next Fred McGriff," whose association with the Emanski videos has made him quite the notorious character in those clubhouse video rooms. "I'm not the type of guy to fall into the commercial merchandising trap," Mulholland said. "I consider myself a ballplayer first -- and a pitch man last. Plus, don't you have to remember lines to make commercials? I hate that." So he prefers to just sit back and let this trend unfold on its own, secure in the knowledge of where it's started. It's true that he, Kile and El Duque now form an official glove triangle. But it will take more than that before we know glove-flipping has truly caught on. "When Wilson and Rawlings start coming out with aerodynamic gloves, I'll know we've caught someone's attention," Mulholland said. "When they start coming out with drag-coefficient models, we're there." And what's the next stage -- when we know glove-flipping has gone too far? "When we hear people saying, 'The glove's juiced,'" Mulholland warned. "When they say, 'That glove and ball got to first a lot quicker than they used to,' that would be a sign of trouble." Swinging non-single of the week Yeah, sure. We know Barry Bonds is kind of hot right now. Yeah, right. He hits a home run every darned night. OK, fine. He's on a pace to hit 86 homers. But the guy can't hit a single. He has fewer singles this year than Terry Shumpert, Craig Counsell or Juan Castro. Of course, he's also outhomered those fellows, 25-6. But when we were kids, we can distinctly recall our Little League coaches yelling: "You don't need to hit a home run here. Just hit a single." Well, Barry Bonds can't do it. He had two multihomer games in one weekend last week. But it took him 46 games just to accumulate two multi-single games for the whole season. Twice already, he's homered in six games in a row. But only once has he singled in two games in a row. Matter, of fact, last time he singled in six games in a row, it was May 29-June 3, 1998 -- almost 400 games ago. "He hits the ball too far to hit singles," Giants broadcaster Mike Krukow told Week in Review. "You could take one of his hits and cut it up and make 10 singles. Right now the ballparks are just too small for him. So he can't hit a single. "In fact, three of the singles he did hit were balls that hit the wall so hard, he couldn't go to second. Those are the only singles he can hit now." With 25 homers and 10 singles, Bonds is heading for the weirdest season of all time. He's on a pace to hit 34 singles all year. Which would give him a shot to blow away the record -- at least in the post-Bambino era -- for fewest singles by a home-run champ in a non-strike year: 58, by Mark McGwire in 1999. But how bad does Bonds want that record? That's the question. "He's always got an automatic single he could take, by laying a little bunt right down the line," Krukow said. "They're playing him so deep, he could bunt for a single any time. But the guy driving all the way in from Fresno isn't driving in to watch him bunt." Yeah, and those guys floating around in McCovey Cove, waving their fishing nets from their motorboats, aren't too big on singles, either. But at least one segment of the population is, Krukow says. "I guarantee you the guy on the mound ain't thinking about him hitting any singles," Krukow said. "If he holds him to a single, guys are saying, 'Hey, good job, man. Way to go.' I know that's how I used to feel when I pitched against Andre Dawson, who was the best player I ever saw until Barry came along. If I held Andre Dawson to a single, I'd go out to dinner afterward." So fascinating as it is, we're going to stop focusing on Bonds' singles and just remain in awe of all those baseballs he's sending flying toward Saturn every night. "It's electric," Krukow said. "It goes in. It goes out. It's like a pitch-back machine. Pitch it in. It comes back. That's Barry." Debut of the week Everybody has to start his big-league career somehow. But nobody ever started it like Padres pitcher Wascar Serrano. In his first start, May 12 against the Marlins, his team got no-hit by A.J. Burnett. In his second start, last Saturday against the Expos, his team scored 20 runs. How nuts is that? "Boy," Padres manager Bruce Bochy told Week in Review, "I don't think you could have two more bizarre starts to start your big-league career." Well, we suppose he could have thrown a no-hitter and then given up 20 runs. But that might be about it. After all, look at those first two starts this way: The Padres were averaging 10 runs a game for him -- and they were getting no-hit in half his starts. Think they could keep that up for the rest of his career? "I don't think so," Bochy said. "You'd have a better chance of hitting the lottery than of keeping that up." But that's the great thing about baseball. It makes no sense whatsoever. Not that Wascar Serrano would rather be back in Rancho Cucamonga or anything. He just didn't realize he would get to bungee-jump from lows so low to highs so high this fast. "I don't think anything like this will happen again soon to anybody else," he predicted to Week in Review, through Eduardo Ortega, the Padres' fabulous Spanish-language broadcaster. "Not that way." Right he is. He arrived in the big leagues at age 22. That was good. Then, according to Padres media-relations assistant John Dever, he became the first pitcher in history to have his team get no-hit in his first start ever. That was bad. Or was it? Serrano said he felt sorry that it happened to his team. But he called it "an honor" to be the first pitcher ever to do, well, anything. "You know," Bochy said, when informed of this historic development, "I gave the lineup card to A.J. Burnett. I guess I should have given it to Wascar." Hardly anybody seemed to notice that Serrano gave up just one earned run himself in that no-hitter. But his teammates felt the need to console him, all the same. "Everyone said, 'Don't worry. You did great. Next time we'll be better. We'll score some runs for you,'" Serrano reported. "I didn't expect them to score 20." "They said they'd score some runs for him," Bochy said. "I guess that showed they can keep a promise. If they were apologizing, that was a great way to do it." All they did that night was score in eight different innings -- one start after they got a hit in no innings. Is this a goofy sport, or what? Asked which was harder to believe -- the no-hitter or the 20 runs -- Serrano replied, eloquently: "Both things were very difficult to assimilate." No kidding. But we're all about assimilation here at Week in Review. We just worry what Serrano must think of life in the big leagues. Man, it's nuttier than "Malcolm in the Middle." "I don't know what he was thinking that first start," Bochy said. "But it was such a crazy game, and we had so many chances, I don't know if he even realized we were getting no-hit. Then we went out and scored 20, and I saw a smile on his face. "I think," guessed the manager, "he likes it up here now." Name game of the week The International League announced its player of the week the other day: Mark Johnson. One paragraph later, the International League also announced its pitcher of the week: Mark Johnson. Two awards. Two Mark Johnsons. Kind of restores your faith in the random beauty of the world, doesn't it? And any time something this tremendous happens, you know how Week in Review will, uh, mark the occasion. "I guess it's time to throw the name game out there again, huh?" said Mark Johnson. Right you are, pal. By the way, that was Norfolk's Mark P. Johnson, the former Pirates and Mets first baseman who won that player-of-the-week award by hitting .407 with three homers. "When my teammates told me about this, I didn't know whether to believe them," said the pitching Mark Johnson. "So I checked the internet just to make sure." That would be Mark J. Johnson, the Toledo pitcher who won the pitcher-of-the-week award after throwing the first shutout of his pro career, the first nine-inning complete game of his pro career and, in fact, the first game of his career in which he even pitched into the ninth inning. These two men aren't twins. They aren't related. They've never even spoken. But they've combined to make this the greatest week for Mark Johnsons since ... well, since when? "Somehow," said Mark (Player of the Week) Johnson, 'I've got a feeling that when Mark Johnson, the hockey player, won that gold medal in 1980, that might top this week." Good point, actually. But there was only one of that Mark Johnson. Here in the International League, we've got Mark Johnsons in stereo. Matter of fact, we've actually got Mark Johnsons in triplicate, because in Charlotte, there's a catcher named Mark Johnson who didn't win any kind of award, for reasons no one can understand. "They should have had a tie somewhere," said Mark (Pitcher of the Week) Johnson, "so they could have put all three of us in there." We regret to announce that this award is so prestigious that, as far as Mark (Hitter of the Week) Johnson knows, there's not even a trophy or plaque to honor it. Or at least he never got one when he won this thing twice last season. "So that and a hamburger," he said, "will get you a hamburger." But now, we'll have to make that two hamburgers, since we're dealing here with the biggest Johnson & Johnson development since the invention of the first Tylenol. As fate would have it, Norfolk and Toledo even played each other this weekend in Norfolk, where we could have had a dramatic confrontation for the Mark Johnson championship of the world -- except for one minor problem: Mark J. Johnson wasn't scheduled to pitch in the series, because he started in Scranton the game before. "I'm hurt," Mark P. Johnson deadpanned. "It would be pretty cool to face your namesake." But if we were in charge, we still would have made this the spectacular event it deserves to be. We'd have let anybody named Mark or Johnson in free. And we definitely would have brought the Mark Johnson from Charlotte in to throw out the first ball. "We might as well bring Mark Johnson the hockey player in, too," said Mark (Player of the Week) Johnson. "Throw them all in there." So what do these guys do for an encore? Well, one place to start would be to try to duplicate their big Mark Johnson moment of last year -- when all three Mark Johnsons were in the big leagues at the same time. For one day. "We've got to try to get back there," said Mark (Player) Johnson, "and win this again in the big leagues. Then we'll see what happens." But in the meantime, they'll have to bask in this particular glory -- and, come to think of it, check the fine print. "I'm going to have to look again," said Mark (Pitcher of the Week) Johnson, "and make sure that when they gave me this, they got the right Mark Johnson." Jayson Stark is a Senior Writer at ESPN.com. Week in Review appears each Friday. |
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