Dr. Strasburg or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Hype

First, drop in over here for info on the August group break. Some really good teams have opened up.

There's been a lot of debate across the blogs as to whether Stephen Strasburg is good for the hobby, bad for the hobby, or terrible for the hobby. Wax has hit ridiculous, unsustainable prices. The stupid have thrown more money on Strasburg's cards than they'd put down on a new BMW. Beckett has been, well, Beckett. We all saw it coming. Those of us who were around for Van Poppel and Prior have seen it before. The proportions are larger, but that's as much due to media-driven psychosis in an age saturated with info as anything else. It's a mass delusion of the highest proportion.

And you know what? I like it.

My reasons are extremely personal, but I'll say it again: I like it. I imagine that I grew up like a lot of you and that, like a lot of you, there were years where baseball was about the only thing that sustained my relationship with my dad. My dad's fandom has never been quite what mine is, and now that I've gotten older I've come to the realization that he's really not much of a fan. He follows the game occasionally, he'll turn on the TV for a while, but he's never been THAT into it. In retrospect it seems like he introduced me to the game when I was younger as a means to give us something to do together, as guys. Now that I live about 10,000 miles away baseball no longer serves that need for him.

Fast forward to the week after I got back from Mexico. Stras-mania was in full effect and, oddly, the University of South Carolina was in the CWS. The phone rang on a Monday, I think, and my dad was on the other line. He wanted to make sure I knew that USC was in the CWS finals and might win it all on ESPN2, as well as tell me that some really hot new guy named Strasburg was pitching on ESPN. It was going to be a good night and I needed to watch.

I can probably count on one hand the number of times my father has called me on the phone. If Strasburg flames out after the AS Game and never pitches again I'll always remember him for having produced such excitement in my old man that he actually picked up the phone to connect with me. There's a lot NOT to like about the hype, but for that phone call I'll always be grateful.

Have a good one everybody and goodnight Pumpsie Green, wherever you are!

Dock Ellis: Part II

Like I alluded to in the other post, Ellis was essentially chased out of Pittsburgh. A lot of that had to do with race and racial politics. The fact that Dock wasn't winning, at least like Dock and everyone else THOUGHT he should have been winning, provided an opening. The book Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball ends with Ellis's trade to the Yankis.

Now, the book is one of the better baseball bios I've read, but it's most interesting for what it tells us about ourselves, as fans. Donald Hall, the former Poet Laureate, wrote the book, and for all the flowing prose it reads as though it were written by a talented school boy. Hall gives us fairly uncritical looks at Ellis and the Pirates of the early '70s behind that scenes which, while commendable insofar as he is "non-judgmental," teeters into a strange form of enabling. Hall, more than a reporter, more than a fan of the game, is someone enthralled by Dock Ellis. The portrait we get is more of a mis-understood anti-hero than the youth of a man who would go on to die of a "liver ailment" (also seen: cirrhosis). It's strange how, even in death, we clear the house of all the mirrors to keep our heroes from seeing themselves as they are: multifaceted and as flawed as the rest of us, as if our mutual non-recognition of who they are somehow made them who we want them to be.

In the early 1960's, an old man came in to my grandfather's barbershop lamenting that he'd never been to a MLB game even though he'd been a fan all his life. That Saturday my grandfather closed the shop so he, my dad, the old man, and another customer who'd been in the shop at the time could drive down to Atlanta to catch a Braves/Giants game. That's just the kind of guy my grandfather was. It was also my dad's first game and he still recalls that Juan Marichal was on the hill that day.

My grandfather, like Dock Ellis, was also an alcoholic most of his life, with everything that entailed. In fact, one of my father's earliest memories of my granddad is overhearing a conversation he was having on the phone with one of his "other women." He could also be spectacularly violent, so much so that on one one occasion my grandmother started shooting at him to get him out of the house.

And believe me when I say that all of these things had a profound effect on my dad, even though he never talks about any of it. It explains a lot about who he is. His struggles are his father's struggles, and if he has failed in different ways over the years I know, for a fact, that as his son I never went through what he went through.

At the point I'm sure you're asking what any of this has to do with baseball, much less Dock Ellis? Well, reading the book, and reading the silences Hall would interject about certain subjects like the undoing of Dock's first marriage (wife couldn't take 'it'), I couldn't help but wonder if they, the people most dependent on Dock, would have told a different story? One not about a pitcher always on the brink who loved the good life and was an important political activist, but about an absent father or unfaithful husband and the pain that comes from those relationships. Good people, even great people, can also be very bad people who make very poor decisions. There is no line, no contradiction.

It makes me wonder if, when our heroes are dead, how else are we to make sense of things other than by sanding off the jagged edges of their stories so they can RIP and the rest of us begin to forget what we can't forgive?