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| Saturday, October 6 Looking back on 2001 By Jayson Stark ESPN.com |
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Freeze frames of the year "I think you'll see a lot of football players taking BP now in the offseason," Reds teammate Sean Casey predicts afterward, "and a lot of baseball players start returning punts."
Just as Week in Review investigators are asking the Cubs' Ron Coomer what he knew about those 1887 Washington Nationals, Cubs coach Rene Lachemann walks by. "Did Lachemann play on that team?" Coomer quips. "I'll have to ask him about it."
"I called that phone number today," Astros broadcast-quipmaster Jim Deshaies reports. "But there's no 263 area code. I was a little disappointed. I was hoping I was going to dial this number and hear, 'You've reached Barnum & Bailey Circus.' "
"I actually saw Jay Leno last night," coach Rich Donnelly says the next day. "He's still on. That was the first time in Coors history I saw Jay Leno. He comes on every night. That's what they tell me. He does a monologue. Then he has guests. It's gonna be neat. I think that show could catch on. "I even had dinner with my wife -- a candle-lit dinner. She's had candles in the house for 12 years, and the only time we ever used them was when lightning hit."
"We were getting ready to bring the spread out in the dugout," Luis Gonzalez reports.
"Actually, I thought there were about three of them," Glanville says later, "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."
"You've got to give him credit for ingenuity," pitcher Terry Mulholland says. "Everyone's done the water cooler, throwing the bats on the field, throwing the hat, kicking dirt. I can't recall ever seeing a manager take an integral part of the game with him."
Piazza's numbers in 69 games before going platinum: .265 average, .332 on-base percentage, .518 slugging. Over the next 69 games post-platinum, he hikes those to .336, .434 and .622 respectively, according to loyal reader David Hallstrom. But long before he could compute those numbers, Piazza discovers that very night how much excitement his new hair color could bring to the American sporting scene. He flips off his mask to chase a pitch in the dirt -- and is stunned to hear the crowd buzzing. "I thought, 'Is someone running somewhere? Is the batboy stealing third?' " Piazza says afterward. "I was a little perplexed. I was in a little bit of a quandary, and I didn't know why. Then I realized they were admiring my hair. When you see a quality hairdo like this, I guess the reaction is overwhelming."
"Normally, I'd say the hardest thing to do in sports is to hit a breaking ball," McDonald grumbles. "But that day, I'd say the hardest thing to do was race a horse."
"They finally threw him a 3-2 pitch he couldn't swing at," says manager Tony Muser, "and it hit him in the rear."
Asked if he could clear up this mystery, Braves GM John Schuerholz quips: "He's older than Danny Almonte, although maybe not by much."
Box score lines of the year
5 IP, 12 H, 11 R, 11 ER, 1 BB, 5 K and 5 -- count 'em, 5 -- home runs.
5 IP, 5 H, 5 R, 5 ER, 5 BB, 5 K -- and the score when he left the game was (what else?) 5-5. "He should have done it," said Rockies coach Rich Donnelly, "on Cinco de Mayo." Schizophrenia dept.: Were they unhittable, or were they too hittable? That was the question for Curt Schilling and Jose Nunez.
7 IP, 13 H, 7 R, 7 ER, 0 BB, 12 K, 3 HR. But he still won, inspiring manager Bob Brenly to quip: "I guess that nifty 13-hitter will work."
1 2/3 IP, 6 H, 9 R, 5 ER, 5 BB, 5 K, 1 HR, 1 throwing error, 69 pitches to get 5 outs. If you'll peruse that carefully, you'll notice that all five outs Nunez got were strikeouts -- but he still gave up nine runs in 1 2/3 innings (plus two more charged to Terry Adams). The script for this one went: strikeout, homer, strikeout, strikeout, strikeout, four straight Cubs reach, strikeout, seven straight Cubs reach. Hard to do. Minor-league dept.: On Aug. 8, reliever Keith Brandon, of the Gulf Coast League Tigers, spun off the bullpen box-score line of the millennium against the Gulf Coast Royals: 4 IP 17 H 9 R 9 ER 0 BB 2 K. Brandon gave up as many hits in four innings as he'd allowed all season (in 14 appearances) before that. Try that on your Play Station sometime. No line dept.: On April 15, Yankees reliever Randy Choate showed how to leave his mark in the box-score annals despite the absence of just about any numbers. Here's the line from his first Fenway Park outing ever: 0 IP, 0 H, 0 R, 0 ER, 0 BB, 0 K, 1 HBP, 5 pitches, 0 strikes. Choate wasn't around long. But he had time enough to throw two warm-up pitches to the screen, another warm-up that catcher Jorge Posada could only deflect on the way by, two straight balls with his first two real pitches, a third pitch that drilled Trot Nixon and two more balls -- before he got yanked with a 2-and-0 count on Darren Lewis. Asked what he was thinking as he watched Choate weave his way around the strike zone, Nixon replied: "Was this his first Yankee-Red Sox game?" Mystery pitcher dept.: In a season in which the last five position players who were dragged in to pitch threw a total of 4 1/3 shutout innings (in games in which the real pitchers on their team gave up 78 runs), nobody outdid Brewers infielder Mark Loretta. Check out this epic line from a June 20 emergency outing in Cincinnati:
1 IP, 1 H, 0 R, 0 ER, 1 BB, 2 K. Yep. You read that correctly. Two strikeouts in one inning. For an infielder. Which gave Loretta a better strikeout ratio for the year (12.0 per 9 innings) than Kerry Wood (11.2). Who'd have thunk it? "I think he should have to come to the pitcher's meetings from now on," said closer Curtis Leskanic.
Inspiration of the year For the Angels, it isn't about the money. It's about the monkey. Or, to be more specific, the one, the only Rally Monkey -- which appears, via the miracle of videotape, on the Edison Field Jumbotron during late-inning pressure situations when it's clear the Angels' only hope is, to be quite honest, a primate. Of course, you'd expect a team owned by Disney to raise the bar on ballpark entertainment. Little did anyone know it would be a monkey bar. But by now the monkey has clearly supplanted the likes of Goofy and Pluto as one of Southern California's most beloved creatures. Kids now go to games carrying their glove and their stuffed Rally Monkey. The Monkey has done a guest shot on ESPN's "Up Close" set. And there's no cooler moment in any "Baseball Tonight" than another cameo appearance by The Monkey. After a hot start, the Angels' record in games when they'd called on The Monkey had fallen to 18-22 going into the weekend. But at least one high-ranking Angel thinks his team's problem isn't too much monkey business. It's too little. "For me," said hitting coach Mickey Hatcher, "it's not about winning and losing. It's about The Monkey. We've got 5,000 monkeys in the stands. And the nights we don't put it up there, people are saying, 'Where's The Monkey?' So break it out, man." All we know is that The Monkey has done such fine work that if the Angels ever get to the playoffs, he deserves a ring, at the very least. "Well, he ought to get something," Hatcher said. "Maybe a bushel of bananas." Jayson Stark is a Senior Writer at ESPN.com. Week in Review appeared each week during the baseball season. |
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