| ESPN Network: ESPN | NBA.com | NHL.com | ABC | Radio | EXPN | Insider | Shop | Fantasy |
| |
|
|
| |||||||||||||||||
Friday, June 1 Updated: June 4, 1:42 PM ET What really is in the unwritten rulebook By Jayson Stark ESPN.com | |||||||||||||||||
We actually found somebody who's read the book!!
All week long, ever since this Curt Schilling-Ben Davis bunt faux pas, we've been looking for "the book."
Couldn't find it at Barnes and Noble.
Couldn't find it at amazon.com.
There were so many zeroes on the board, it looked like the display case at Dunkin' Donuts. They played so long, there were almost as many innings as fans. It was one of the longest nights of, well, nothingness, in modern times. And that, of course, made it a Week in Review kind of night. It was Diamondbacks 1, Giants 0 -- in 18 interminable innings Tuesday, over 5 hours and 53 minutes crammed with LOBs, 1-2-3s and 00000000000000000s all over the scorecard. "It was a pitcher's dream," Arizona outfield quotesmith Luis Gonzalez told Week in Review, "and a hitter's nightmare." Here's our complete report: The totals OK, here goes. This game featured 477 pitches total, 245 pitches by the Giants, 232 pitches by the Diamondbacks, 139 hitters marching toward that batter's box, 104 of those hitters marching back to the dugout after making an out, 30 runners left on base, two more runners thrown out at the plate (both of them Giants -- 16 innings apart), two more runners thrown out at third, 12 1-2-3 half-innings, 12 relief pitchers, 11 relief pitchers who didn't give up a run, two relief pitchers who got the first hits of their careers (Chad Zerbe and Ryan Vogelsong of the Giants), eight pinch hitters, one pinch hitter who once started his career by going 0 for 40 (Arizona pitcher Miguel Batista -- who struck out), no pinch hitters who actually got a hit, one catcher who caught all 18 innings (Benito Santiago) and as many streakers as runs scored (one). The manager As this affair staggered on, Diamondbacks manager Bob Brenly was obviously so anxious to get back to the hotel before room service closed, he started making promises he may not be able to keep. At one point in extra innings, he told his players he would cancel infield for the rest of the year if they won. By the 18th, he swore he'd cancel spring training next year. Well, spring training is still set for Tucson next February, as scheduled. But Gonzalez said Brenly could have trouble reneging on his other offer. "We're already holding him to that no-infield-for-the-rest-of-the-year thing," Gonzalez said. "Hey, this is a veteran team. We know infield is overrated. We don't need to go out there and impress any scouts. We don't need to show them our arms are two on a scale of nine." The replacements In a game in which the two teams combined to use 40 players, you began to wonder what might happen if this game kept going? Randy Johnson playing first base? Barry Bonds catching? Gonzalez pitching? Almost anything might have been possible. "I didn't want that game to end with me out there," Gonzalez said. "That's for sure. I'm not Desi Relaford, throwing 92." Then again, the Giants' pitching options didn't exactly include Juan Marichal or Gaylord Perry, either. "I think over on their side, I saw one of those old ball guys warming up," Gonzalez reported. "I think he was coming in the game next for them." The hunger Let's get down to basics here. When guys play baseball until 1 a.m., their problems go beyond figuring out how they're ever going to score another run. They also have to figure out what to do about those gurgles of despair coming from their stomachs, which had last been filled about 10 hours earlier. "We were getting ready to bring the spread out in the dugout," Gonzalez said. Meanwhile, though, the players who were already out of the game had the opposite problem: Too much time on their hands, too much food and drink available in the clubhouse and not enough men to consume it. "I think I had about nine beers," Arizona's Mark Grace, who had departed in the seventh with a hamstring tweak, told the San Francisco Chronicle's Gwen Knapp. "We almost ran out." The mystery hitters It isn't every day you see two relief pitchers on the same team get a hit. But Zerbe got one for the Giants in the 12th -- 15 hitters after he'd first shown up to pitch. Then, many hours later, Vogelsong doubled to lead off the bottom of the 18th. And that made him the first pitcher to get a hit in the 18th inning of any game (or later) since July 4, 1985, when Braves reliever Rick Camp hit a legendary 18th-inning homer off the Mets' Tom Gorman to tie their game at 11-11 and send it to the 19th, where the Mets ultimately won it, 16-13. But we digress. How about that setting for Ryan Vogelsong's first career hit? "He didn't swing like a pitcher," Gonzalez said. "The first pitch, he fouled a 93-mile-an-hour fastball straight back. And we all went, 'Uh-ooooh.' " So Batista had to come back with a breaking ball. And Vogelsong pounded that one up the gap. But since he wound up stranded at third, with a loss next to his name in the box score, he wasn't that excited about the hit. "He hung a breaking pitch to me," Vogelsong said afterward. "Anyone in this clubhouse could have hit it." The next day, his teammates were much more worked up by Zerbe's hit. "If you've ever seen him in our pitchers' BP games," Sean Estes told the Chronicle, "you'd know how shocking that is." The closer You know you've been involved in a very strange game when the winning pitcher (Batista) entered the game as a pinch-hitter (riding a two-year 0-fer, incidentally) and wound up pitching four innings. But when Batista then pitched himself into two-on, no-out trouble in the 18th, with Bonds up next, Brenly made the first 1 a.m. pitching change of his managerial career. In strolled left-hander Greg Swindell, who already had warmed up four times earlier. As he arrived on the mound, the scoreboard clock, fittingly, struck 1 a.m. Swindell then scrambled out of this mess, on a Bonds ground ball, an intentional walk to Jeff Kent (that moved the winning run to second base) and two fly balls. Asked afterward, by the East Valley Tribune's Ed Price, if he'd ever come into a game at 1 a.m. before, Swindell replied: "Yeah -- in a 24-hour softball tournament." The trivia All Adam Eaton wanted to do was watch a movie. Next thing he knew, he was in the emergency room. Because he stabbed himself in the stomach with a paring knife. While opening a DVD. So he missed his start Thursday against the Astros, because he spent all night in the emergency room. But he should look on the up side: This will get him into the baseball-injury hall of fame. Eaton himself called this fiasco "a bonehead move." And all us boneheads out in the real world are happy to welcome him to the club. But at Week in Review, we try to take a more practical view of events like this. We may chuckle temporarily, or even semi-permanently. But we also want to help make sure calamities like this never happen again -- to Adam Eaton or anyone else in our great game. So we checked in with corporate headquarters at Blockbuster Inc. to find out just how common this DVD injury is -- and what can be done to prevent it. "We've certainly heard of video players getting the best of our tapes," said Randy Hargrove, director of corporate communications at Blockbuster. "But we've never heard of our tapes getting the best of our video players before. That's a first." It appears that Eaton's first problem was using a paring knife. Way too dangerous, particularly if you point them at yourself and then attack those pesky plastic wrappers. "I'd recommend maybe a letter opener," Hargrove said, "so he could just get down in there and open it, but it's dull enough to prevent any DL stint. "Scissors and knives are OK," Hargrove went on, "but only if you're the correct age to use them. Unfortunately, our store personnel hasn't been trained on how to teach that to the customers. We'll certainly have to look into some new techniques." That, of course, is the problem. No one has ever figured out an effective technique for opening those DVDs. So us innocent consumers, even trained professional athletes, are left to wing it. And look what happens. So maybe what Blockbuster needs is to look into those techniques, then demonstrate them on an official instructional Blockbuster DVD on DVD opening. Except then we'd be forced to try to open that DVD without proper instruction. And that could be just as dangerous. We've often suspected, by the way, that certain DVDs are more dangerous than others. There have been times, for example, we swore those Schwarzenegger DVDs tried to fight back if you attempted to pull them off the shelves. But Hargrove assured us there was nothing to that rumor. "Interactive DVDs are not something I've seen in our stores yet," he said. "We've got interactive games, but not interactive DVDs." But it's time to stop pretending that DVD injuries are more rare than, say, David Cone getting bitten on the pitching hand by his mother's dog. They happen all the time. They just don't normally result in two stitches in the stomach of a major-league baseball player. "Stomachs are usually a safe, guarded area for DVD injuries," Hargrove said. "Oh, we've seen some broken nails, stuff like that. But usually, when you have a DVD injury, you go for a manicure, not to the emergency room." So rather than chuckle at Adam Eaton, we should be thanking him. This injury could make this a safer world for home movie watchers everywhere -- by alerting them to three very important words to remember in the future: Pay per view. Cyber-war of the week The heck with Curt Schilling and Ben Davis. That isn't even Schilling's longest-running "feud" of the week. It's now three weeks since Phillies leadoff man Doug Glanville took him deep twice, handing Schilling his first loss of the season, and then said it all had to do with the day Schilling killed one of his men in the computer game, Everquest. They've been cyber-haggling about this ever since, with Glanville complaining that Schilling's character, Cylc, abandoned him and allowed him to be slaughtered by a flock of mad birds. But this week, Schilling launched into his most detailed defense yet of his computerized actions that fateful day. So Week in Review dutifully returns for another session of The Baseball People's Cyber-Court. Here goes. The defense speaks All right, Mr. Schilling. Your witness. First off, Schilling said, his guy, Cylc, was so "honorable, noble and prideful," that no one had ever uttered one disparaging word about him until Glanville came along. What happened to Glanville, Schilling claimed, was that he was a "newbie" -- which is an Everquest term for a rookie who is "prone to screw-ups -- and likely to get anyone hanging around him killed in the blink of an eye, through sheer stupidity." So on the day in question, Schilling recalled, Cylc and Glanville's character, Billabong, were teaming up. And Cylc -- a gentle sort whose only job was to "help others and keep them alive" -- was merely "hanging back while Billabong goes off into the woods to kill a few birds." "Douggie," Schilling contended, "runs this little fat dwarf (Billabong) out into the woods in search of fame, only to get pounced upon by a whole flock of ticked off birds. I see his health bar dropping faster than my batting average in May, and I know it's trouble. Death is pretty likely if we don't run now." So Schilling admits he bailed, screaming the term, "Train." That's more Ever-speak -- for what Schilling described as "some young dope, a newbie, who goes running off full of testosterone, thinking he's gonna slay the world, only to come screaming by you five minutes later with 90 percent of the known monsters in the world chasing him down to skin him alive." Once Glanville got himself into this mess, Schilling said, "the situation was hopeless, regardless of how much help we got." So Schilling opted to stay out of it -- knowing, he contended, that Glanville's character was a "paladin," a selfless type who is "supposed to lay his life down for his friends." Schilling's recollection, therefore, is that Glanville's poor Billabong "became bird food due to his own reckless behavior, endangering the lives of all those that sought his protection." What that means, Schilling claimed, was that he and Cylc should be "cleared of all slander" -- "and Doug should come forth and tell you the real reason he took me deep twice in one game, which is real simple: "I threw eye-high fastballs to a high fastball hitter, and the jet stream at Bank One took them out. Period." Phew. This is complicated stuff, especially to those of us who wouldn't know a paladin from a palimony suit. But not surprisingly, Glanville has a different memory of these events. So we'll bring him back to the stand for ... The re-direct A clearly disturbed Glanville used terms such as "crock" and "insanity" to describe Schilling's story. And apparently he didn't like it much, either. For one thing, Glanville claimed, he'd already played the game long enough that he was no longer a "newbie." For another thing, he said, it was appropriate that Schilling's character be known as Cylc because "he silkily slides away whenever there's trouble." Sure, being a "cleric" or a healer, Schilling's character had a great reputation as a good guy. But basically, Glanville contended, Cylc mostly hung around at the back of the pack, "never swung a blade and every once in a while just gave you a back massage. But that's about it." And while Schilling may accuse his guy of being a "train," Glanville said it's ironic that, "in the Everquest world, Schill's nickname is actually 'Amtrak.' " So when Schilling says he yelled, "train," Glanville testified, that was just "to give himself an alibi. He says he had to warn the others, but he neglects to tell you there were only two in our party -- he and I. So he just did that to give himself an out. By the time I knew I was in trouble, he was already chilling with the guards, having a couple of cocktails." Meanwhile, there's one more thing Glanville claims that Schilling forgot to mention: "He was the one who said, 'Let's attack this bird.' " So who was really being reckless here? That's what Glanville wonders. "I was reckless in no way," he said. "My character was the one slain. His character was just chilling, having soup and salad with the guards." So Schilling can chalk those home runs up to jet streams if he wants, Glanville said. But "Billabong needed to be avenged," because "I know the truth of the situation." "Remember his nickname -- Amtrak," Glanville said. "Maybe that's what was going on. Those home-run balls symbolized the departure of a train. I was trying to show him what the meaning of 'train' really was. I think it's appropriate that he get traded now to the Houston Astros, where they actually have a train, so he can be among the trains he represents." Glanville also vows that the next time these two meet, in Philadelphia in August, "it could be very interesting." Real Everquest characters may even be in the stands for that game, he hinted. At this point, our court will adjourn. But will Schilling cross-examine? Stay tuned. Video theory of the week Wait. We're not done with this stuff quite yet. You may recall it's Doug Glanville's theory that video-game and computer-game atrocities from players' past can often explain why they have so much success now against other players (a la Glanville-Schilling). Since this week, Glanville's Phillies teammate, Pat Burrell, hit his third career homer off Mets closer Armando Benitez -- in three career at-bats -- it was clear to at least one deep thinker that there was a cyber-history to this duel. Glanville theorizes that whatever happened between these two guys, it was clearly "a very, very serious infraction of the human soul." "If I were to guess at what happened," he said, "it would no doubt be on the order of Benitez somehow reprogramming Burrell's Barney video game to have the loveable dinosaur mysteriously end up in Duke Nukem's game of doom and destruction. "Nothing," Glanville concluded, "is more traumatic than seeing our warm and fuzzy purple carnivore end up fragmented into hairballs by shards of shrapnel. That would create a grudge that would last for a long time." Of course, it's also possible this Burell-Benitez deal is pure coincidence. But we'll vote for fuzzy-purple-carnivore theories any day. Jayson Stark is a Senior Writer at ESPN.com. Week in Review appears each Friday. |
| ||||||||||||||||
|
|
