The
Major Leagues will not be generating any new baseball for some time,
which makes this an appropriate time to dip into Important Baseball Lore.
The most indispensable baseball writing this offseason for me as been Joe Posnanski's Baseball 100,
where he rates his top 100 baseball players of all time and writes
essays about each one, and I thought I should shamefully rip that off.
So here's the BYCTOM 100*, a series of essays not on the top 100
baseball players of all time, but of lesser heralded players that have
floated through the ether of baseball, the players that David Roth
refers to as Guys, the foundation of baseball itself that the giants of
the sport can homer off of, do handshakes with, and occasionally get
humiliated by because baseball is a weird and cruel game. The asterisk
is of course because there is no way I will do 100 of these, let's face
it I'll be shocked if I do five. If you have a suggestion for someone
to be covered in BYCTOM 100*, please send it to me, and I'll consider
it.
JARED HUGHES
Jared Hughes toils as a largely anonymous middle relief pitcher for undistinguished teams so if you know him it is probably as the guy who, when brought into a game, absolutely books it like a maniac out of the bullpen. This is a high-risk maneuver. On the one hand, it offers the type of fame and notoriety that gets him featured on a blogspot website; on the other hand the opportunities for a player who has chosen the Braveheart Charge as his personal relief pitcher schtick to be humiliated are endless. Any reliever who sprints out of the bullpen with a full-on Tom Cruise run towards the mound runs the risk of eating shit and wiping out in front of tens of thousands of people when he could have just as easily strolled over or, in some cases, taken a golf cart shaped like a catcher's mitt. The other scenario, the one that unfolds for me in my mind every time I see Jared Hughes summoned from the 'pen, would involve him sprinting in, throwing one pitch that the batter demolishes into subatomic baseball particles, and then sprinting into the dugout before the ball even lands in the stands. It's a fraught existence for the Sprinting Reliever, and one that makes Hughes one of my favorite relief pitchers that I otherwise would have no reason to remember exists. Another thing Jared Hughes does is to stare at the camera maniacally during Team Photo Day.
I had assumed, based on the fact that Hughes has moved teams and toiled in middle relief, that he was a middling reliever, but when looking him up for this profile I was mildly surprised that he has been far more effective than I thought. He has a lifetime 2.88 ERA and ERA+ of 140. In 2018, with the Reds, he got his ERA down to .194 in a career-high 78.2 innings. He's a sinkerballer who relies on ground balls and does not get a ton of strikeouts, and so he is far more at the mercy of his defense than the assembly line 96 MPH strikeout relievers. Still, I was expecting to see the volatile stats of a journeyman reliever who had absolutely horrible years. Instead, he has been consistently good at making a beeline to the mound, throwing that sinker he tosses almost exclusively, and getting outs.
Perhaps he would be better known if he had spent time on the national stage, but quality setup man for the Pittsburgh Pirates and Cincinnati Reds is not a position that leads to baseball notoriety; his only playoff appearance was the 2014 NL Wild Card game when the Pirates ran into Madison Bumgarner, who spent that postseason levitating in the air and glowing. The next year, the Pirates' season finished in the Wild Card Game at the beard of Jake Arrieta and after two consecutive seasons ending that way, I am surprised by any Pirates fan who has not become a baseball nihilist. The other notable thing about Jared Hughes is that he is a classic NL Central Guy. Until he was traded to the Phillies in the middle of the 2019 season, Hughes played for Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, and Cincinnati. The 2016, 2017, and 2018 seasons were particularly disorienting when he switched teams every year. As someone who watched a lot of Cubs games in those seasons, it became a spring ritual to turn on a game and see Hughes doing his mad dash in a new uniform like he had a one-man barnstorming operation and traveled the midwest by secreting himself in the luggage compartment in the Cubs team plane. I am not sure how common the phenomenon of division guys has become or if there is a reason for it other than random chance and teams getting a good look at their divisional opponents. A small club of players have managed to play for every single team in the division except in the AL Central and NL East (the member of the NL Central club is Cesar Izturis who knocked out the Cubs, Pirates and Cardinals in 2007-8, and then managed to spend the last legs of his career with the Brewers and Reds. Izturis won a gold glove in 2004 with the Dodgers, but he must have been a literal anthropomorphic baseball glove; he batted an astounding .254/.293/.332 for his career and only twice managed an OPS+ over 70). But the Majors, I'm sure, are riddled with journeymen who have played for two or three teams in the same division in a short amount of time, ready to appear at a moment's notice to do some pinch hitting or middle relief work with the shortest possible commute.
Divisional guys serve an important role in baseball's endless, repetitive ecosystem. The sheer, overwhelming amount of baseball forms a crucial part of its appeal. Over the course of a season it is possible to figure out what each player is likely to do in any situation and the surprise and frustration comes from the unexpected. Baseball games are played in series where opponents become recurring characters, and those that play in the same division become as familiar as unpleasant relatives while the teams play over and over again. A player who bounces from team to team in the same division appears out of the mist with two important qualities: raising the question wait, how did he get on the Milwaukee Brewers and providing the comforting thought that oh it's him I know that guy and his whole deal. The fact that Jared Hughes literally bursts onto the field every time amplifies this feeling. As of publication, Jared Hughes has not yet signed to a major league team. Any team this season, if it even happens, can engage a good sinkerballer to chug his way onto the mound in the seventh inning and pose for alarming profile photographs. He got released from spring training by a team on March 19 after a rough spring. The team he was in camp with? The Houston Astros, still in the NL Central when he made his major league debut.
The Major Leagues will not be generating any new baseball for some time, which makes this an appropriate time to dip into Important Baseball Lore. The most indispensable baseball writing this offseason for me as been Joe Posnanski's Baseball 100, where he rates his top 100 baseball players of all time and writes essays about each one, and I thought I should shamefully rip that off. So here's the BYCTOM 100*, a series of essays not on the top 100 baseball players of all time, but of lesser heralded players that have floated through the ether of baseball, the players that David Roth refers to as Guys, the foundation of baseball itself that the giants of the sport can homer off of, do handshakes with, and occasionally get humiliated by because baseball is a weird and cruel game. The asterisk is of course because there is no way I will do 100 of these, let's face it I'll be shocked if I do five. If you have a suggestion for someone to be covered in BYCTOM 100*, please send it to me, and I'll consider it. JOSE VALENTIN
The first and most notable thing about Jose Valentin is the mustache. Valentin had one of the great mustaches in baseball history, especially when you considered that his heyday in the late 1990s and early 2000s was one of the great mustache droughts in American history. Valentin did not sport a huge soup-strainer or a Rollie Fingers-style crazy mustache, but the power of his mustache came from its resiliency-- at a time when American ballplayers abandoned the mustache in droves for goatees and, especially in his era, the long, dripping soul patch, Valentin's mustache remained steadfast. It is a mustache from another generation, a silent movie mustache with walkup music replaced by an organ blast of diminished chords or the mustache belonging to a 1970s detective who sleeps in a blanket of cigarettes. In baseball terms, it is the mustache clung to by grizzled first base coach who is slowly turning into an anthropomorphic catcher's mitt. The thing that I will always remember about Jose Valentin was that for several years in the early 2000s when he was on the White Sox, he absolutely murdered the Chicago Cubs. I have a lot of thoughts like this; because baseball happens in moments, and the moments that stick in your memory tend to be the ones that are joyous or crushing, I tend to see a player who had a few big at-bats and remember them as a titan only to look up their numbers and realize they had thousands of plate appearances where the statistics suggest that they are flailing at the baseball with a large, novelty sandwich, so it is an absolute delight when the numbers bear out my memories and here they are: in 57 games against the Cubs in his 15 years in baseball, he hit .289/.386/.561. Valentin was a career .243/.321/.448 hitter, but for 57 games against the team I would have watched him play against, he was 2019 Juan Soto. There's a basketball video that I really enjoy shot from the stands of a Toronto Raptors game where the Raptors are clinging to a late lead. Then the Grizzlies get the ball into the hands of Rudy Gay, and the guy filming it screams DEFENSE DEFENSE NO IT'S RUDY GAY! NO!!! NO!!!! NOT THIS GUY! NOT THISSSSS GUUUUYYYYYY AHHHH!!!! and then unleashes a barrage of profanity as Rudy Gay wins the game. For several years, whenever I saw Jose Valentin in the batter's box, that was my internal monologue. In 2003, Jose Valentin produced one of the more gut-wrenching sounds a baseball player could produce, the sharp blast of a walk off home run followed by Hawk Harrelson bellowing you can put it on the board.
I do not know if it is strange or deeply understandable that the rivalry in the Greater Chicagoland Metropolitan area between the Cubs and White Sox is one of the most bitter, hateful rivalries in baseball for two teams that went 91 years in between games that counted and have played almost no meaningful games-- except in the way that four to six annual regular season baseball games count as meaningful-- since their World Series clash in 1906. In New York, the rivalry makes sports sense; there's the Yankees, the biggest, richest and most decorated team in baseball that owns a chokehold on the history of the sport, and there's the Mets, a catastrophe. In Chicago, this dynamic does not really fit because for almost the entirety of the twentieth century both teams were both so completely inept that the last time either team made the World Series before 2005 was in 1959, shortly after Bonanza was regularly broadcast in color. The seething rivalry between the Cubs and White Sox has been shaped by the geography and the obvious faultlines that entails, but in sheer baseball terms the fans fought over the question of which crappy team was slightly less crappy for decades. The Cubs were far more famously shitty and leaned into the history with a large cohort of fans driven by WGN's ubiquitous reach into American homes. White Sox fans instead faced the ignominy of being absolute dreck and not even getting romanticized for it-- the louder Boston Red Sox seized the mantle of the second most snake-bitten team, driven by famous playoff collapses and an army of writers and sports personalities who could, within minutes, appear in a book-lined study to wax rhapsodic about them for Ken Burns. For years, White Sox fans and Cubs fans were forced to snipe at each other over wins and losses against teams neither would face, only playing occasional exhibition games to slake supporters' bloodlust. And then in 1997, that all changed. The early years of interleague play in the city of Chicago arrived in a cloud of festive recrimination with a city ready to boil over into a baseball war between the very people who would spend Sundays united in honking, righteous anger at Dave Wannstedt. The atmosphere in those early games reached a fever pitch for two fanbases largely unaccustomed to the playoffs. I remember seeing players come out of both dugouts to watch a brawl happening in the upper deck of Comiskey Park. The games the year that Sammy Sosa came back from his bat-corking suspension featured fans physically vibrating in anger. This raucous maelstrom was where Jose Valentin did his most damage. Valentin left the White Sox in 2005 for the Dodgers, missing the White Sox' World Series victory by a year. He later ended up, poetically, on the Mets before injuries and age finally caught up to him in his late 30s. Valentin eventually bought a team in Puerto Rico, and joined them after his career in the majors ended before returning to coach in the minors and majors. But when I think of Jose Valentin, I see him switch-hitting, chin jutting out, his mustache imperious and stately as he prepares to wreak havoc in an intracity rivalry that means nothing and everything.
Chairman Kaga, resplendent in an outfit that simultaneously brings to mind a matador, a figure skater, and late-period Michael Jackson, has summoned the Iron Chefs, he has bellowed out the theme ingredient, and contestants are urgently shuffling towards a podium to grab some vegetables or swallow's nest or some thrashing, wriggling sea creature that they will need to bonk to death with the blunt end of a carving knife. Iron Chef debuted in Japan in 1993, came into the United States on the Food Network in 1999, and now it exists in a series of grainy Youtube videos that you can watch right now. The genius of Iron Chef was how it took a cooking show and perfectly translated it into the grammar of sports television and then added in a charming, campy absurdity. The entire premise is silly and ultimately superfluous, but the idea of framing a cooking competition in the context of a wealthy gourmand who dressed like the unlucky magician that Siegfried and Roy replaced with a tiger who oversees the entire thing like it is culinary Kumite is an incredible stroke of genius-- there are currently a large number of cooking shows available now from all over the world but only one of them has Chairman Kaga and voice actors dubbing over people with practice in voicing literal cartoon villains. Though the cooking action takes almost the entirety of the show, to me it's the aesthetics that make Iron Chef so enjoyable. There is the overwrought music, the iron chefs rising onto a platform like gladiators, Chairman Kaga delightfully overseeing the whole thing. There is the best part of the show, the ludicrously self-serious introductions of the challenger that sets up a storyline that will frame the entire competition and occasionally veers into the absurd. The most memorable of these for me is the Cabbage Battle, a redemption story that contains a genuinely shocking turn of events but the person narrating it (a rare replacement for Kaga's usual voiceover actor who according to IMDb is best known as a voice on the Playstation game Crazy Taxy) delivers every line with an insanely overdramatic reading reminiscent of Stephen Toast.
My life has been forever changed by the way this voice actor says the words "basta pasta" One of the best storylines from in Iron Chef was the rise of the Ohta Faction, a group of chefs led by Tadamichi Ohta and Toshiro Kandagawa that favored traditional Japanese cooking methods and repeatedly challenged Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto because they found his fusion methods distasteful. They get their own intros to denounce Morimoto and introduce the chef they have chosen to challenge him (invariably described as "hit men" and often have nicknames like "The King of Noodles" or something). They and dozens of followers with headbands and banners stream into Kitchen Stadium in a show of force. I can't immediately locate it (the Youtube account that specifically posts Ohta Faction battles cuts off the intros for some perverse reason) but the person they have voicing Kandagawa has a pleasingly villainous grunt. There exists no other cooking show, I believe, that features an Opposition Faction for ideological reasons and I am sitting here stewing over the missed opportunity for Gordon Ramsay to be in the middle of berating someone when the lights turn out and all of a sudden 100 members of the Society of Polite Chefs come in to gently shush him or a disastrous clash between the Frugal Gourmet and his arch-nemeses the Profligate Gourmands who are just tossing truffles and expensive cuts of designer beefs onto the floor to trample them while supporters of either faction watch the battle on wooden cage-bleachers designed and built by Bob Vila. The best Iron Chef episodes are the ones that manage to fit in contrived drama that came out of the show's own success. Early Iron Chef episodes invented this entire apparatus of the Kitchen Stadium and the Gourmet Society as a bit until Iron Chef became popular enough to actually become a legitimate platform for culinary celebrity and started to function in an eerie parallel to its own premise. The most entertaining battles are the ones that take this seriously. For example, there is an episode where Tokyo-based French chef Joel Bruant challenges Iron Chef French Hiruki Sakai with the stipulation that if he wins, he can replace Sakai as Iron Chef French. "His arrogance infuriates me," the Kaga voiceover says, "but how can I refuse?" Let's be honest and admit that Iron Chef is fake-- or at least, if not entirely fake, the production involves far more time and many more unseen hands than are visible to the television viewer. This has no impact on the show because the actual judging remains so silly and arbitrary that it is nearly impossible to determine who has won or lost. The contestants on Iron Chef are professionals with a full complement of assistants that rarely lead to obvious fuck-ups, and they deal in a fancy haute-cuisine that exists at an enormous distance to anything that I have ever experienced. The audience surrogates come in the form of a celebrity judging panel-- including the bow tie politician who is constantly either in or out of the legislature, a panel of actors and actresses, a fortune teller, a food critic-- some of whom have relevant experience or vocabulary to articulate their thoughts on the food and many others who are just coming up with some bullshit because they are on television. One of the funniest things that happens on Iron Chef is seeing a world-renowned chef who has just been bustling in a kitchen, handling red hot woks and chopping vegetables and occasionally feeding an octopus into an ice cream maker in order to plate an insanely fancy meal made sometimes with hundreds of dollars of ingredients into an intricate and perfectly laid-out dish is that a leathered baseball manager who looks like he has probably ingested at least part of a catcher's mitt on purpose will look at him or her and tell the chef it needs a little more salt. There are currently almost no sports happening in the world right now, and one of the things I have been doing is trying to imagine the entire bloated apparatus of sports talk media reconfigured to cover old Iron Chef episodes. There's Stephen A. Smith going on television to chastise the Ohta Faction for bringing on another CLOWN who CANNOT WIN. He can't even BLANCH that ABALONE, Skip. It's people calling into local sports radio with resplendently honking Chicago accents talking about how they're not sure of this Sakai and they need to see something out of Nakamura. It is Mike Francesa hammering "Chairman Kogger" for his "awful choice in ingredients. Awful. Who's gonna want an octopus? (35 second pause). Octopus. Not for me. Not my ingredient. Octopus. (12 second sigh) Not for me. Too many appendages. Let's go to Danny from Staten Island. Oh, you thought it was funny how I was trying to make the roast duck that Sakai served to the entire Finnish Cabinet on a state visit and I didn't understand how the pressure cooker worked and it took off like a rocket and exploded through my roof at the exact moment an entire gaggle of migrating geese came by and just unloaded through the hole and I ran out of the house covered in goose excrement and my glasses were broken and I was wearing one of those rapping tasmanian devil cartoon shirts that I've already explained a thousand times I only had because it was a personal gift from John Daly and that's when the news vans came out and caught me yelling "who do I gotta call for a goose incident?" at firefighters? Yeah, that's funny. Real sickos. Real sickos calling this show. Two and a half hours waiting for that. Real sickos. Can we please get some calls in about how Chen Kenichi is good but not great? Iron Chef lives on in the myriad food competition reality television shows that all borrow various successful parts of the show: innovating dishes on limited time with limited ingredients, breezy celebrity cameos, a panel of stern judges. But because it is a relic of the 1990s, it remains untouched by the irritating grammar of contemporary reality TV competition shows, and the show is free to be much weirder than any show like that has a right to be. Iron Chef's cooking is hardly the point. It is the goofiness of the premise and the dramatics and the silliness-- even Chairman Kaga, ferociously biting into that bell pepper in the beginning of the episode before it pans out to show him standing next to what appears to be a small army of theatrically motionless chefs and he is clearly chuckling through the whole thing.
One of the most jarring and strange things about consuming the news this week is the way that the endless, cacophonous buzzing of stories about a million different important and odd and interesting and things all seemingly instantaneously flattened into one dreadful thing during of all things an NBA game. To be sure, the growing threat of the pandemic had already ballooned into a crisis well before Wednesday evening-- even the few cases identified by paltry testing in the United States had been growing and the virus had escalated into a full-on emergency in the Seattle area, concerts and festivals had been postponed and canceled, stores had been emptied of hand sanitizer and toilet paper, and sports leagues had been planning to hold events without crowds while the virus continued its rampage through global hotspots.
But the events of Wednesday night's sudden cancellation of the NBA season really seemed to catalyze the threat in the surreal and insane way that things tend to unfold in the twenty-first century when we can see everything happening in real time. The Jazz and Thunder called the game shortly before tipoff when Rudy Gobert tested positive for Covid-19-- this was dramatic enough on its own, but because everything that happens must be laced with an otherworldly and almost writerly stupidity the news unearthed a barrage of videos of Gobert mocking the illness earlier in the week and gratuitously touching a bunch of microphones. The NBA player most stridently defying concerns about the outbreak turning into the league's first to test positive is not something that should happen in the real world because that turn of events comes from the ridiculous and contrived logic of slasher movies. I do not think people will remember what happened a short time later that evening at the Big Ten Tournament when a visibly coughing and mucus-oozing Fred Hoiberg of all people triggered a minor panic when he went to the hospital mid-game (he was reportedly diagnosed with the flu). Within a day, almost every sport in the country had canceled or postponed its season.
For the past few days for me, at least, there has been this bizarre, bifurcated unreality pervading over everything. There is everyday life that has not yet halted-- people going about their day, fake-urgent work e-mails, deranged young people who have decided that a pandemic will not stop them from exchanging projectile vomits in Wrigleyville-- mixed with a sense of impending calamity on the news, in ransacked grocery stores, in the horror of what is going on elsewhere in the world and in the parts of the United States first inundated, of chaos in airports, of the grotesque, Lynchian press conferences where the President goes on television to tell us he is doing such a great job while people in suits stand behind him and squint-nod. What it feels like for me now, in Chicago, is standing at the precipice, of something invisible encircling the city, of flustered press conferences from officials at all levels of government, of almost every bit of the conversations that filter up from the sidewalk to my windows-- many fewer than I can usually expect on a sunny Sunday-- all converging on the same topic whether it is about people worried and panicked or people who are blithely mocking people who are worried and panicked.
The cancellation of sports should fit into this strange sense of altered reality. This is a nominal sports website, and it is usually a time when I would be writing thousands of words about the dismal Cubs offseason being dominated by talk about boring business bullshit: the luxury tax and arcane television rights deals and the insane fake impecunity of baseball's richest teams obsessed with trading their best players and the increased importance of Ron Coomer's unrivaled tales about the midwest's densest meat pies for a fanbase that cannot watch its team on television. This is a time for college basketball, where Northwestern's Big Ten Champion women's team-- one of the best basketball teams ever fielded by the school-- lost its opportunity to play in the NCAA Tournament (Northwestern's men's team managed a feat few major conference teams achieved this season by completing all of its scheduled games). I also, in the tradition of this sports website, was in the middle of writing a review of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and the strange dissonance of reading a book lionizing a supremely competent bureaucrat helping an executive consolidate power in late January and early February of this year that is the thing that people want to read when it's stuck on the end of a long, tedious post criticizing the Chicago Cubs or reimagining the XFL as something called the "Bone League." I haven't been missing sports much because even though sports cancellations seemed to be one of the main triggers to react to this as a crisis, I haven't really been thinking about anything else. I have not really thought about flipping on a random college tournament basketball game or seeing if there's a baseball game on the radio where Pat Hughes is talking about an obscure spring training player named "Trent Jabroni" because for me it is all of a piece of everything and nothing going on at once, of the anxiety of watching a grocery store become a Paul Verhoeven version of Supermarket Sweep, of reacting to anyone coughing by recoiling like Dracula when someone brandishes some garlic at him, of doing nothing purposefully and stressfully.
