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Wild Pitches By Jayson Stark ESPN.com | |||||||||||||||||
| Cliche drought of the week How bad are the Mets going? Here's how bad: Mike Piazza pounded three monstrous home runs in four days this week -- and the Mets lost every game. Thursday, he hit one of his all-time bombs -- a 469-foot moon shot that came down in the third deck. It landed just above the name of that fabled Florida baseball personality, Don Shula, whose placard hangs on the facing in Pro Player Stadium's ring of honor. But Piazza said he was aiming for other legends. "I thought I hit Nick Buoniconti," Piazza told the Newark Star Ledger's Lawrence Rocca. "It felt good for the moment." Then, in a moment that summed up life among the Mets, he let out a not very Italian "oy vey." "I'm out of cliches," Piazza said. "It's June first, and I'm out of cliches. Is that some kind of record?" Big orb of the week A shocking thing happened to the Mets and Phillies on Wednesday, when they played one of those popular weekday afternoon games at Shea Stadium. The fog, smog and 767s all cleared out of the normally cluttered ozone above Shea to reveal a bright, previously unidentified golden object. What do they call that thing again? Oh yeah. The sun. It was so big and so bright and so omnipresent that Phillies center fielder Doug Glanville, Phillies left fielder Pat Burrell and Mets left fielder Darren Bragg all lost high fly balls that disappeared into a giant celestial orb. So how big a problem was that sun? "Actually, I thought there were about three of them," Glanville told Week in Review, "although they tell me there was really just one. If there had been three, that would have meant we were in some other galaxy. So I'm pretty sure there was actually only one. But for a while there, I thought I'd gone to Jupiter or something." So many outfielders had so many sun crises, Glanville suggested it might have called for new special emergency ground rules. "We should have played a whole different game: If it hits any part of your body, that's an out," he said. "If we'd have gone with that, I'd have probably borrowed some catcher's gear and gone out there and just tried to crash into everything." One-upsmanship of the week The Cubs haven't thrown a no-hitter for 344 consecutive months (since Burt Hooton twirled one in 1972). But they sure have this one-hitter thing down. Last weekend, they became just the third team since World War I to throw back-to-back one-hit complete-game shutouts -- with Jon Lieber and Kerry Wood doing the honors. What nobody thought about in all that was how much pressure those one-hitters dumped on Kevin Tapani, the guy who pitched the next game. What do you do for an encore after the two pitchers before you both gave up one hit?
Tigers first baseman Tony Clark bashed his first triple since Aug. 25, 1997 on Tuesday, and even he found it slightly incomprehensible. "For me to get a triple," he told Booth Newspapers' Danny Knobler, "the ball has to be hit in the right place and I need one, maybe two outfielders to fall down." All it took was one to fall down for this triple to unfurl -- Indians center fielder Jacob Cruz taking the tumble. But Knobler then asked Clark: "If two outfielders have to fall down for you to hit a triple, what would it take for you to hit an inside-the-park homer?" "Two outfielders would have to fall down," Clark replied. "And when they throw the ball in, the guy catching it has to lose it in the sun, and then I need a generous call from the official scorer." Quintuple threat of the week Putting together a five-man rotation won't be a challenge pretty soon for the Orioles' Melvin Mora. His wife is expecting quintuplets. "I told my agent, 'I need a commercial with some company that can get me diapers,' " Mora told Bloomberg's Jerry Crasnick. "I'm going to need about 30,000 a week." Box score line of the week This is one of those questions you can't avoid after starts like the one the Cardinals' Andy Benes made Wednesday against Milwaukee: Was he unhittable or hittable? The line 3 2/3 IP, 10 H, 9 R, 9 ER, 2 BB, 8 K, 2 HR Stat of the day Benes gave up more hits than he had in any start since May 27, 2000. But eight of his 11 outs were strikeouts -- his biggest strikeout day since last July 4. Figure that out. Quote of the day "I either made good pitches and they swung and missed," Benes said. "Or I made bad pitches and they got hits on them." Well, summed that up nicely. Hot line of the week One of our favorite people in baseball, Todd Jones, may have had a rough week (3 2/3 innings, 9 runs). But to be one of the world's great closers, the requirement is: You can't lose your sense of humor at times like that. So Monday, Jones threw a shutout inning in a 12-6 win over the Indians, then announced: "The president just called. I talked to him." Swingaholics of the week Talk about pressure games. Last Sunday in the International League, Richmond and Scranton had a 5:30 p.m. curfew on an afternoon game -- because both teams, and the umpiring crew, had a 6:45 p.m. flight to catch. Naturally, there was a 62-minute rain delay to add to the festivities. But they made it, finishing a 2-1 Richmond win at 5:34 p.m., then went scrambling for the airport. Line of the day, from Scranton GM Rick Muntean before the game: "If both teams are going to be swinging at the first pitch," he told the Wilkes Barre Times-Leader's Steve Bennett, "I hope we're the ones who hit it." Obstacle course of the week It's so tough to hit at Comerica Park, the Indians now are accusing the Tigers of planting oversized ball boys around the field to help make sure any balls the Tigers do hit aren't caught. Well, kind of. On Monday, Tigers left fielder Wendell Magee Jr. stroked a leadoff double past third baseman Russell Branyan. The ball then hopped into foul territory, right toward the left-field ball boy. Hard as he tried to get out of the way, the ball still plunked him -- preventing left fielder Marty Cordova from scooping it up and allowing Magee to go to third. So out marched Indians manager Charlie Manuel to argue with umpire Jerry Layne. "The ball boy's in play," Layne told Manuel. To which Manuel replied (really): "He's too damn fat to be in play." Call-up of the week The Pirates called up first baseman Andy Barkett this week, that .244 average he had at Triple-A Nashville notwithstanding. But we're glad to have him in the big leagues. Why? Because this man has stories to tell. After a disappointing injury-riddled season last year, Barkett couldn't find work as a six-year free agent this winter. So he went to winter ball, where he amazingly found himself leading the Dominican winter league in home runs, with 11. How good was he going? One day he was intentionally walked -- to get to Raul Mondesi. "I'm walking down to first base," he told the Beaver County Times' John Perrotto, "and I hand my batting gloves to the bat boy. And while I'm taking my batting gloves off, it starts to hit me what just happened. I start thinking that I made $3,000 a month in Triple-A last year while Mondesi made something like $12 million in Toronto. What was wrong with that picture?" Barkett also kicked off his career with the then-independent Butte Copper Kings of the Pioneer League -- a team that had to play its games on the campus at Montana Tech and had to share the locker room with anybody and anything else that was happening on campus. One day, that included a boys' summer swimming camp. "I walked into the locker room and started to get dressed," Barkett said. "All of a sudden, these 7-year-old boys come in and start taking off their wet swimsuits and you have all these kids running around naked. I'm just standing there stunned and thinking, 'This is professional baseball?' Geez, at least at N.C. State, we had our own locker room and got to stay at places like the Radisson when we made road trips." Jayson Stark is a Senior Writer at ESPN.com. Wild Pitches appears each Friday. |
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