Hey, Mickey, you’re so….gross

Baseball shows up on feminist blogs about as frequently as feminism shows up on baseball blogs—so when it does, it’s worth a mention, even when the subject matter is a frankly revolting anecdote straight from the mouth (well, okay, not so much the mouth) of Mickey Mantle.

Jeez. I knew he was “the fastest man to first base,” but clearly he didn’t stop there.

Ain’t that a kick in the head

This T-shirt was in all the sports-gear shops when I went home to St. Louis for the holidays. If you can’t see the image, it’s a graphic of Johnny Cueto with feet and dreadlocks flying, with the text “Cueto fights like a girl”—an homage to the Cincinnati pitcher’s role in the August brouhaha between the Cards and the Reds.

Call me a humorless feminist, but when I envision a girl or woman pinned against a wall and kicking frantically, it’s generally in the context of something a lot more dire than a quaint diss on the baseball field.

Besides, since when is kicking by definition unmanly? I looked in vain for the “Cueto fights like Jet Li” T-shirts—they must have been sold out—and resisted the urge to remind a store employee (who questioned why I was taking photos of the shirt and asked why I didn’t want one) that girls were not the ones forced to invent Mixed Martial Arts and Ultimate Fighting to remedy the sad and unmasculine lack of kicking in the formerly dude-approved sport of boxing.

Seventh-inning stretch

Just for fun: The single best thing about blogging isn’t the opportunity to share your Constitutionally-protected thoughts and ideas with a wide audience at no cost. It’s the site-statistics report that lists the search terms people have used to find your blog. Check out some of the most common phrases that have led websurfers this way…..

• mel gibson kiss
• football gay kiss
• gay kiss world record!!! –in hd!!
• dustin hoffman naked
• jason bateman naked
• angel gay kiss
• hot gay kiss
• jodie foster gay kiss
• dustin hoffman gay kiss
• jason bateman gay kiss
• jason bateman in drag
• dude where’s my car gay kiss
• white sox manager gay kiss
• jesus gay kiss
• lips of bear gay kiss
• sears tower gay cruising
• glory hole locker men
• nuns playing football
• nuns in agony

In the spirit of increasing traffic to the blog, therefore, I will henceforth be writing a lot about famous Hollywood nuns sharing gay kisses atop the Sears Tower. In HD!!!

What would you pay for this future Hall of Famer?

Clearly, the blog’s been quiet lately, and there’s a good—or at least straightforward—reason for that: I’m not enjoying this off-season much. By this time last year, Matt Holliday had put us all out of our anxious misery by rejecting lucrative offers from zero other teams and signing with the Cardinals, and I’d fallen madly and co-dependently in love with MLB Network. This year, MLBN is phoning it in (I turned on the channel this morning just in time to catch B.J. Surhoff’s first-round at-bat in the 1999 Home Run Derby—whew! almost missed it!), and the Cards’ contract talks with Albert Pujols are ominously quiet and uncomfortably tense, thanks to the spring-training deadline Pujols has imposed, wisely or not, upon the negotiations.

Obsessive superfan that I am, I devote a little time each day to checking the news for updates on the process, and to doing some mental Pilates in effort to wrap my brain around the numbers at stake. Common wisdom tells us that Pujols wants “A-Rod money”—that is, a contract comparable to A-Rod’s 10-year, $275 million deal with the Yankees. Like any decent human being, I’m appropriately appalled by figures like that. You can do a lot with $275 million. That’s as much as the U.S. spent on rain-forest preservation last year. It’s enough to buy an entire hockey team. It’s the annual cost to the United States of software piracy in Vietnam, for heaven’s sake!

On the other hand, it’s only 1/236th of the total amount Bernie Madoff swindled from his clients, and I think we can all agree that one Albert Pujols is worth at least as much as one million Bob Mackie collectible dolls. Heck, Michael Jackson made $275 million last year alone, and he’s dead.

What’s Albert Pujols worth? Well, here’s the paradox: The biggest reason that otherwise thrifty and intelligent St. Louisans think Pujols is worth big money is the precise reason that they think he shouldn’t want it so much. He’s one of us—a family man, a proud Midwesterner, a good-for-the-game mensch who sees beyond the paycheck and into the soul of the best baseball town in America. We’re willing to pay him $275 million because we don’t want to find out if he’s the kind of guy who’d walk away if he were offered less. We’re willing to shell out the piles of cash because he’s the sort of player who transcends the piles-of-cash mentality that has our favorite sport in its death-grip.

It doesn’t make much sense, but that’s baseball—a game of running in endless circles. Meanwhile, spring training, wonderfully and agonizingly, is just around the corner, and I’d like to see Pujols and the Cards get a deal done, not least of all because MLB Network is having a little too much fratty fun photoshopping his face into other teams’ uniforms. Pujols as a Cub? I’ll pay $275 million never to have to see that again.

The blog-post equivalent of a game of pepper

It’s been ages since I’ve updated the blog, and now I’m in the midst of the same guilty quandary that happens when you let a friendship go too long between correspondences: There’s so much to catch up on that the thought of doing so is totally overwhelming, and the problem only gets worse the longer you wait.

Solution: Bullet points! Bullet points solve everything, and they’ll allow me to do cursory justice to a few of the stories that have intrigued me this week. Without further delay…..

• Bye-bye, Brendan Ryan. There’s a certain kind of Cardinal fan that takes a lot of flak for loving ultra-high-effort, middling-yield players like Rex Hudler and Brendan Ryan. We can’t help ourselves. We love their enthusiasm and their occasional ding-a-linginess. We give them nicknames that involve dogs. And we get deeply nostalgic when they’re packed off to other teams, as Brendan Ryan was to the Mariners this week. All of Cardinal Nation will miss his show-stopping defense; we may also grow to miss his bat—or what could have been his bat, anyway—if he relocates his swing under the tutelage of someone whose name isn’t Mark McGwire. I’ll miss his goofiness, too; the last time I saw him up close, he was boarding the team bus in San Diego, balancing a plate of cookies in one hand and yelling excitedly about (who else?) his mom to some guy in the crowd, and come on, who wouldn’t love a guy who would shoot an ad like this for the team that always treated him like an annoying kid brother? Have yourself a merry old time in Seattle, Brendan. While spinning.
• From the <headdesk> files: Heaven knows we need to encourage any kind of crossover between the world of sports and the world of gay. But what are we supposed to make of this quotation from Kenji Yoshino’s otherwise respectable Slate article on the fallacy of arguments against same-sex marriage?: “….if a prerequisite of marriage is procreative capacity, then are the marriages of infertile opposite-sex couples not called into question? [Anti-gay scholar Robert P.] George and his co-authors are quick to reassure with another sports analogy: ‘A baseball team has its characteristic structure largely because of its orientation to winning games; it involves developing and sharing one’s athletic skills in the way best suited for honorably winning. … But such development and sharing are possible and inherently valuable for teammates even when they lose their games.’ In other words, infertile couples are still playing ball, even if they never win a game. They are the Phillies, except that they have no hope of ever improving.” Oh, Kenji. Did you fail to notice the part where the Phillies have won a World Series, a pennant, and another division title in the last three years? Did you fail to notice that as of today, their starting rotation consists of Jesus, Zeus, Thor, Jesus again, and Cole Hamels? If you’re going to go for the sporting reference, make sure you don’t screw it up….especially if you’re representing for the gays, and especially if your flub forces me to type complimentary things about the Phillies that make me want to hurl.
• Feller not felled: In college, we used to read the Lorain Morning Journal when we needed a media fix that was worldlier than our campus rag but not as big and scary as the Cleveland Plain-Dealer. The Morning Journal made its own headlines the other day by announcing the death of Bob “The Heater from Van Meter” Feller. As you probably know by now, Feller isn’t dead. I would make some joke here about the  fact that what’s dead is the Morning Journal‘s standard of integrity, except 1) it wasn’t all that great to begin with, and 2) I’d rather use the space to wish Feller peace and comfort, since he’s awesome.

There’ll be more to come, friends, because of the felicitous confluence of the end of the semester and the resurgence of my own jonesing for baseball. Thanks for your patience!

Flying Dutchman, high-flying nuns

My favorite baseball story of the day has nothing to do with the World Series (though, for the record, I’m shelving my traditional loyalty to the Senior Circuit and rooting for the Rangers; the stench of Bonds and Kent is too recent for me to send any positive energy in the direction of the Giants). My favorite baseball story of the day is the one about the Sisters of Notre Dame and the Honus Wagner card that just fell into their holy laps.

The Roman Catholic nuns are auctioning off the card, which despite its poor condition is expected to fetch between $150,000 and $200,000. The proceeds will go to their ministries in 35 countries around the world….

The brother of a nun who died in 1999 left all his possessions to the order when he died earlier this year. The man’s lawyer told Muller he had a Honus Wagner card in a safe-deposit box.

When they opened the box, they found the card, with a typewritten note: “Although damaged, the value of this baseball card should increase exponentially throughout the 21st century!”

The card was unknown to the sports-memorabilia marketplace because the nuns’ benefactor had owned it since 1936.

The Sisters of Notre Dame don’t have a history of baseball fandom; Sister Virginia Muller, the lone nun quoted in the article, confesses that she’d never heard of Honus Wagner before. To be fair, even most baseball fans probably know Wagner better as “the guy on that really valuable baseball card” than as one of the greatest shortstops ever to play the game—one who hit .328 lifetime, won eight batting titles, by all accounts fielded his position better than anyone else of his era, and earned as many votes as Babe Ruth when the Hall of Fame inducted its first class of superstars. Now, 55 years after his death, he’ll also be the guy whose short-lived business proposition with the American Tobacco Company helps support ministries for the poor throughout the world.

Like most progressives, feminists, and thinking humans, I’ve got plenty of issues with Catholicism—but I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that some of the strongest women, and some of the biggest baseball fans, in my early life were nuns. They weren’t shy about using their divine connections (and their earthly subjects) to pull some strings for their team, either: I have a clear if somewhat disturbing memory of my third-grade class being assigned to write prayers for the 1982 Cardinals when they went to the postseason—oh, the Sisters pretended we were just praying for fair weather and good sportsmanship, but we knew the truth—and years later I was surprised, upon meeting people who hadn’t grown up in St. Louis, to learn that they hadn’t been excused from class to sit cross-legged in rows on the floor and watch the playoffs on TV. Why, we even got to wear Cardinal accessories to school during those heady weeks of postseason glory, and if you’re a fellow Catholic-school survivor, you know that there’s very, very little in the cosmos that justifies adulteration of the sacred uniform. Baseball was a big deal.

For further evidence that there’s a natural affinity between nuns and Cardinals, watch this fabulous two-minute video about the Sisters of St. Mary of the Angels, who have taken a vow of loyalty to the Redbirds for more than a hundred years now.

At least they didn’t title it “The Phillies and their fillies”

I’ve outrun it for the last few years, but this time the flu got me, and I’m currently on Day 7 of being housebound, which explains why the blog—like the house, the dogs, the cat, my jobs, and at least certain elements of my personal hygiene—has been neglected. Today, though, the Philadelphia Inquirer broke a front-page story that’s just too shocking to ignore: Women like baseball! And some of them even like it for reasons besides the players’ tight asses and the increasing availability of fashionable team apparel in feminine colors! But mostly not!

Before we delve into this morass, I need to do a couple of things. One is to take some more drugs. The other is to inform you that it could have been worse, and, in fact, was worse just a few hours ago. See how the headline of the online story says “Phillies a big hit with women fans”? This morning, that headline was “Female fans turned on by Phillies.” The theme of female fandom via sexual attraction—the assumption that hotness is necessarily the gateway through which women learn to appreciate male athletes and men’s athletics, if not the sum total of their interest—remains omnipresent in the article, of course, showing its face in the first paragraph (“These Phillies are a bunch of really nice, good-looking guys of all stripes….”) and hitting its stride a few inches down the page:

….while the to-a-player first-blush sex appeal of the Phillies surely has not faded— “Jayson Werth stretching in the batting cages” is a perennial YouTube video favorite among women fans—these players have proven themselves worthy of a long-term relationship.

Objection! Assumes facts not in evidence! “[T]he to-a-player first-blush sex appeal of the Phillies” isn’t just a turn of phrase so nauseating and sycophantic that a Bieber-worshipping fourteen-year-old girl would be embarrassed to write it in her private diary, it’s also easily disproved with two simple words: Brad Lidge. And Jayson Werth, for his part, already looks like a Tellarite who’s had a few inches added by means of the rack, so footage of his long and hirsute body being stretched further strikes me as more a scientific curiosity than a titillation. Your results may vary, naturally; in any case, the perennial need to frame women’s interest in sports as a dating scenario is as journalistically tired as it is eye-rollingly sexist.

Then there’s this:

“It sounds shallow, but you pick your favorite player because they’re cute,” [fan Erin S.] said. (And then you buy the shirt.)

We could talk about a number of facets of this little excerpt, including Erin’s failure to recognize that most things that sound shallow are shallow, the casual use of “you” to co-opt all female fans into her approach to the game, and the cutesy assumption that when it comes to women and their whims, all roads eventually lead to the mall. Instead, I’m going to take this opportunity to point out that of the five current and former Phillies cited in the article as players worthy of fangirls’ adulation, every single one is white. Isn’t that strange? This is a particularly ethnically diverse team, but the two African-American former MVPs, the Dominican Gold Glover and Silver Slugger, and the Cuban-American All-Star don’t even merit a mention in an article about players who have endeared themselves to these loyal female fans. Could it be that Ryan Howard’s 253 career homers and winning personality aren’t enough to make up for the fact that he’s a 250-pound black man whom many of these women (themselves overwhelmingly white, one notices in the photos accompanying the piece) would be scared to meet on the street after dark? So much for chicks digging the long ball.

We’re not done, folks:

No doubt, all this devotion has found a rewarding object with this team, no moral quandaries required. No reformed dog fighters among them, these Phillies talk of epic things like friendship (Roy Halladay) and of learning courage from team members (Cole Hamels about Halladay)…..

“What could be more wholesome?” said [fan Joan] Malseed.

I have a wonderful memory of my mother—yep, the same mother who got me into baseball—explaining why she had no desire to see Bend It Like Beckham: “It just sounds so goddamn wholesome.” Yes, exactly. I’m repulsed by the notion that women cannot, or perhaps should not, be able to relate to anything that isn’t full of virtue and vitamins, as if we might faint at the sight of a ballpark brawl and require a trip to the smelling-salt vendor. I’m disgusted by the idea of a baseball team as the grown woman’s Jonas Brothers, safe to crush on and giggle over because you know nothing will ever happen between you (nothing untoward ever happens between major Pennsylvania sports figures and their female fans!). And I’m amused by the suggestion that Friendship and Courage are topics not merely unique to the noble Phillies, but downright epic, as if there’s no such thing as media training to coach these guys on which clichés will get them the most mileage, and as if every other ad on MLB Network doesn’t already elevate baseball players to the stature of war heroes.

You might think that this article would be sufficiently patronizing to the ladyfolk that the dudebros wouldn’t feel much need to circle their recliners and reassert their claim on the territory of professional sports. You would, of course, be terribly, humiliatingly wrong. The comments on the piece don’t introduce any new themes we need to explore or indulge—and in some cases, infuriatingly enough, they use revoltingly misogynist language to make the perfectly reasonable point that lusting after a bunch of guys is not the same thing as baseball fandom—but here’s a sampling for your enjoyment:

women dont know anything about sports

all the young girls are at the games to get drunk and meet guys…i’ve talked to a ton at games and they hardly know anything other then which guy on the team is hot

I’m glad there are women coming to the games…for years I had to get my own beers.

they should be making dinner & doing laundry, not watching the phisl

Look at the rack on that chic with the glasses- she can’t even button her shirt-

i don’t talk about purses and shoes, women shouldnt talk about sports. also, i never saw a woman at a phils game at the vet

The only role women should have in sports is serving me beer and wings during the game.

Why is your wife in the living room when you’re watching the game? The chain from the kitchen is too long.

Because I’m sick, bored, and chronically, stupidly unable to resist sallying into arenas like this with my virtual dukes up, I posted a comment about the sexism of the article and the responses. The reply came swiftly:

ABlogOfTheirOwn, I have a question for you. Would an extra rinse cycle in the washer help to further soften towels once they are placed in the dryer without a dryer sheet?

Right. Sigh. Time for my next round of drugs. Want some?

Hell of a day, Halladay

I haven’t felt any large-scale affection for the Phillies since the days of Steve Carlton and Mike Schmidt, yet I can’t help noticing that they keep crossing my cosmic path in small, subtle ways that seem designed to win me over.

I ought to resent the heck out of Ryan Howard—he’s got an MVP at home that should be on Albert Pujols’s mantel, and he’s exactly the sort of big-bashing, free-swinging crusher whose offensive style represents the demise of the style of baseball I love. But he’s from St. Louis, he played trombone in high school, and he’s sufficiently modest and well-spoken that I can’t bring myself to dislike him.

Here on the West Coast, a close professional colleague earned extra cash as a teenager by babysitting Chase Utley. A really nice kid, she says when asked to recall what he was like. Damn! There’s another one I can’t hate.

That’s not all: Last winter, when my family embarked upon a week-long Caribbean cruise, we were instantly struck by how many Phillies shirts we saw on passengers boarding the ship. A coincidence? Nope—we were on the same boat as the Phillies Phantastic Voyage, which we were convinced would be a phrigging nightmare, given the nature of the average Philadelphia fan. As it turned out, the fans were on their best behavior, not least of all because they didn’t want to jeopardize their chances at currying the phavor of the players who were along for the ride. And about those players: Well, Shane Victorino seemed every bit the jackwad you’d expect him to be, and J.C. Romero lost me when he told a roomful of eager parents that their kids needed to turn their lives over to Jesus if they wanted to be big-leaguers, but Greg Luzinski was a gruff, good-natured riot, and Ryan Madson not only posed for a windblown photo with my niece and me (see above), but then proceeded to wave cheerfully at us each time he saw us during the remainder of the trip. (I think he secretly loved it when my brother-in-law said “We’re hoping Brad Lidge implodes and you get his job.” Too bad his temper rendered moot the power of our positive thinking.)

And now, Roy Halladay has done what Cardinal fans could only have dreamed guiltily of: Utterly humiliating the Reds on a very big stage. Halladay was so good that this game looked downright unjust. He was Michael Phelps and the Cincinnati lineup was the guy in lane 8 from a country that has no swimming pools. He was the United States Army and the Reds were Grenada. Except this was better—all of the beat-down, none of the liberal guilt.

Most of the Reds, to their credit (she types grudgingly), gave Halladay the honor he was due. Orlando Cabrera, on the other hand, erroneously credited the gem to home-plate umpire John Hirschbeck’s generous strike zone, which you might think would have prompted Brandon Phillips to call him a “little b—,” except that Phillips was presumably worn out after flinging his bat into Carlos Ruiz’s path in a fruitless attempt to break up the no-hitter with a cheap two-out ninth-inning infield hit. Yay! More failure on the grand stage! More reasons to like the Ph—nope, sorry, not quite there yet.

My feelings about the Phillies may be complex, but my congratulations to Big Roy are sincere. That was a game for the ages, and I bet the fans in Philadelphia are so excited that they’re puking champagne on each other instead of beer.

Chicago, Chicago, I’ll show you around

Dear Adrian Gonzalez:

Smooth move, buddy! That three-run homer you crushed off Matt Cain tonight (in the mustest-win of must-win games) may just hold off the angry mob that’s been forming among the Friar faithful.

When the latest Padre power outage began (actually it was more of a complete blackout), no one blamed you specifically, because you didn’t hit any less or suck any more than the other guys around you. But when you started missing throws and Bucknering ground balls, we couldn’t help wondering where your brain was. And then, right there in Tuesday morning’s Sun-Times, you served up the answer.

Chicago!

Oh, Adrian. I’m not going to try to talk you out of your enthusiasm for the Cubs, because that would be like trying to talk a kid out of thinking Santa Claus is real—if you’re naive enough to believe it, any attempt to set you straight would just be cruel. I do, however, want to offer you a crash course in media training:

1) Chatting happily about your interest in going to another team while your own team is gasping for breath is….well, it’s completely in keeping with everything the business of baseball has become, which is why you’re obligated to receive an extended tongue-lashing for it from pretty much everyone except Randy Jones, and he just likes being contrary. Stick to the script: You grew up idolizing [insert famous Padre here] and God willing you’re going to die a Padre and right now all you want to do is take care of business with the great bunch of guys in the Padre dugout. Padres! Woo!

2) You may not have realized that Cub Nation’s century-old inferiority complex translates all too easily into a tendency to leap headlong at the merest whiff of approval. You say “There’s definitely some positives”; they turn it into a headline that reads “Padres’ Gonzalez Raves About Chicago.” You say “They definitely have some good pieces”; they write “MVP candidate Adrian Gonzalez is one year removed from free agency and admits eyeing the hand-in-glove fit he could be for a team starving for the kind of left-handed pop, attitude, clubhouse presence, relative youth and Gold Glove fielding he provides.” See? The North-Siders don’t know about playing it cool. They’re terrible at poker and they’d trade the Sears Tower, Lake Michigan, and Oprah for a ray of hope regarding the Cubs. Next time the Chicago media come to you looking for validation, just create a distraction (“I heard Rahm Emanuel has a wicked curveball and curses even more creatively than Zambrano! You should go check it out!”) and scamper away.

3) If you’re going to drag your wife into this, perhaps you could at least try to portray her as something other than a vapid materialist. “My wife loves Chicago, for the shopping”? Barf. (And hey, is there a sudden shortage of retail establishments in southern California? Now that’s a news story.)

4) If all else fails, stick to the cliches, dude….and the three-run home runs.

Yours truly,

A.B.O.T.O.

Maple bats and missed opportunities

Here’s something you need to know about Midwesterners: At our cores, we’re really, really nice. Ridiculously nice. Incurably nice.

Yes, the Cardinals and the Cubs are bitter, age-old rivals, but the truth of the matter is that we don’t hate each other—we can’t, no matter how hard we try. We’ll never hope to achieve the level of pure loathing that Yankees and Red Sox fans have mastered, and a Cards fan will probably never shoot a Cubs fan dead in the stadium parking lot, which is what happened the first time I ever attended a Dodgers-Giants game in Los Angeles.

So I suspect I’m speaking for all of Cardinal Nation when I say with total sincerity: Get well soon, Tyler Colvin.

If you haven’t heard, Colvin, in Sunday’s Chicago-Florida game, suffered the injury that everyone in the galaxy has been predicting since maple bats became the norm in the big leagues. Colvin was leading off third when Cubs’ catcher Welington Castillo hit a sharp double to left. Castillo’s bat splintered, and one shard of it flew down the third-base line and punctured Colvin in the chest, sending him to the emergency room and ending his season. MLB.com has the story and video here.

Given that Colvin’s going to be okay, and given that four million other bloggers will be writing and we-told-you-so-ing about the dangers of maple bats, I’d simply like to use this space to say that if this incident had to happen, I’m only sorry it couldn’t have been Vladimir Guerrero at the plate….because I would really have liked to title this post “Vlad the Impaler.”

Best wishes, Tyler.