BYCTOM 100*: Micah Owings

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.
 
MICAH OWINGS

There is nothing that Rob Manfred likes more than going out onto the parapet of his Baseball Tower and issuing arbitrary rules edicts meant to chip away at the his apparent belief that people despise baseball and he must save it by mandating how teams use relief pitchers.  Under Manfred, the designated hitter is almost certain to disappear from the National League; with his propensity for proclaiming rules changes with almost no warning, the DH may actually have already gone and he has simply not gotten around to telling us yet because he is trying to figure out how to restart baseball in a series of Arizona Virus-Dome compounds that will eventually go dark and reemerge with Manfred proclaiming himself a prophet or deity while wearing an interesting robe.

No baseball rules debate has become more pointless and tedious than the eternal war over the designated hitter, and I have no wish to relitigate that battle.  Most people prefer the style their team plays and that they are used to, and anything beyond that is an aesthetic choice.  It is true that as a whole, most pitcher plate appearances amount to complete wastes of time, as close to an automatic out as exists in baseball, and the ability to predict the end of a rally because of pitcher is due up is one of baseball's most infuriating impending doom scenarios.  At the same time, the rare times a pitcher does anything at the plate constitute the most memorable and joyful experiences in baseball, and there are still fewer more enjoyable baseball archetypes for me than the pitcher who can hit a little.

The patron saint of hitting pitchers is Wes Ferrell who spent the 1930s as a good pitcher for Cleveland who also knocked the hell out of the ball.  In 1935 alone, he led the American League with 25 wins and also batted .347/.427/.533 with seven home runs.  According to this exquisite Wikipedia Sentence "He was a fiery competitor and a brilliant player with natural talent, whose achievements may have been obscured by his irascibility."

My favorite pitcher who can hit a little is Carlos Zambrano, who was somehow a switch hitter good for a least a dinger or two a season and one egregiously reckless adventure on the basepaths. Zambrano also fought teammates, pitched a no-hitter as the road team in Milwaukee against an Astros team forced to flee from a hurricane, and once screamed at journalists "This is not a baby's game! This is a man's game!"when asked why he was repeatedly throwing at Jim Edmonds.

But the most emblematic pitcher who can hit a little from this era remains Micah Owings.  Owings, a prodigious high school slugger, flourished as a two-way phenomenon in college.  After two excellent years at Georgia Tech, he transferred to Tulane and achieved another level as a powerhouse pitcher and outfielder, hitting .355/.470/.719, and also going 12-4 with 3.26 ERA.  Arizona took him in the third round as a pitcher, but when he came up in 2007, he appeared as a shimmering vision of a pitcher who can obliterate the baseball.

Here's a brief aside on pitchers hitting.  In 2007, Owings's debut season, pitchers came to the plate 5,899 times and managed to eke out a cumulative .146/.177/.188 line.  This is a baseball obscenity; pitchers appear to have been coming up to hit wielding novelty souvenir bats that say "save big money at menard's" or giant foam number one fingers. Very few position players have ever approached this anemic standard.  I searched Baseball Reference to find players with an OPS lower than .365 who played a decent chunk of the season (at least 200 plate appearances), and found that the champion of all of them was a catcher for the Brooklyn Superbas (at that point only colloquially known as the "Trolley Dodgers" along with a host of other nicknames including the Bridegrooms, the Atlantics, and Ward's Wonders that all seem have been used interchangeably) who managed it five times in the deadball era.  The last contemporary person to do it was the former all-star Dodgers shortstop Maury Wills as a 39 year-old running on fumes and managing an OPS+ of 3 in 1972.

(Wills resurfaced in the early 80s as the hilariously disastrous manager of the Seattle Managers who infamously tried to extend the batter's boxes an extra foot hoping no one would notice.  His Wikipedia entry notes that Oakland manager Billy Martin saw it and alerted umpire Bill Kunkel.  The Wikipedia entry contains the extraordinary phrase "under questioning from Kunkel, the groundskeeper admitted." Wills features prominently in this wonderful Mariners documentary.)

Micah Ownings came up 64 times in his rookie season in 2007, hit .333/.349/.683, clubbed four dingers, smacked seven doubles and a triple, and led all pitchers with an OPS of 1.033.  That is the third-best by a pitcher (with at least 50 PAs) ever; only Wes Ferrell and fellow two-way threat Don Newcombe topped him, although they both did that with nearly twice as many plate appearances, which is even more impressive.  He hit two home runs in one game as part of a four-hit night, claiming a record eleven total bases.  Owings also was a decent pitcher that year, compiling a 111 ERA+, and he attracted a mild fanfare, the type that causes baseball announcers to say "you have to be careful with Owings here, we know this guy can swing the bat."

Owings's stats took a dip in both hitting and pitching his next year (he still hit .304, but the power was not there), and the Diamondbacks traded him to Cincinnati as a throw-in as part of a transaction involving Adam Dunn.  He rebounded for the Reds at the plate in 2009.  That year, he hit an OPS of .818 with three dingers, but inexplicably lost the Silver Slugger to Carlos Zambrano who hit worse than him in almost every category but was a much better pitcher and higher-profile star. That was pretty much it for Owings as a starter.  He began coming out of the pen in 2010, and his plate appearances cratered-- the Red used him as a pinch hitter a few times, but he was not nearly as effective, his pitching never regained the promising form, and he bounced around the minors and independent leagues for awhile, attempting to pitch but increasingly appearing as an outfielder. 

 The statistics with any pitcher hitting in the current era remain strange because they appear so infrequently.  Owings has since been eclipsed by two-way superstar Shohei Ohtani, who, at least until an injury derailed his pitching career, looked like he could become baseball's greatest two-way star since Babe Ruth.  And baseball usually has at least one or two guys floating around who pitch a little and hit a little and do neither particularly well but are noteworthy for that.  The emblematic star of this role for me remains the immortal Brooks Kieschnick, and the Reds currently have a pitcher and anthropomorphic bicep named Michael Lorenzen on their roster who sometimes moonlights as an outfielder.

But Owings is emblematic of the ineffable romance of pitchers hitting, of pitchers doing anything other than walking up to the plate and immediately back to the dugout, of pitchers occasionally causing a tingle of fear in their opposites from other teams, and of the perfect aesthetics of them somehow managing a hit and then standing awkwardly on the basepaths in their dorky satin jackets, these masters of baseball who have played the game their entire lives only to arrive at the sport's pinnacle that few can even dream of and still look profoundly uncomfortable with one of baseball's most basic tasks.

BYCTOM 100*: Lenny Harris

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.
 

LENNY HARRIS

Lenny Harris's Baseball Reference page lists his position as Pinch Hitter.  He is also a third baseman and outfielder, but those served as minor distractions on his path to becoming baseball's Pinch Hit King.  Over eighteen seasons in the major leagues, Harris amassed 212 pinch hits, blasting by former record holder Manny Mota's 149.  The only person in the same galaxy as Harris pinch-hitting wise is Mark Sweeney, who got 175.  No current player comes close; the only active players to even breach 50 are Matt Joyce, Matt Adams, and Daniel Descalso, whose last season in Chicago was so riven with hitting ineptitude that appeared to be trying to get the ball out of the infield by way of strongly-worded letters.  Harris stands along as a giant of the bench, the Sultan of Sit, and after a few hours of poking around the internet I'm convinced that he has achieved one of the strangest and least-replicable baseball careers possible.

The most remarkable thing about Lenny Harris's time as the Dean of Left-Handed Bench Bats is that his hitting statistics are just south of mediocre.  He's a career .269/.318/.349 hitter.  Most of his best hitting years came as a young, everyday infielder for the Dodgers; in his ideal form as a pinch hitter he hit an anemic .264/.317/.337.  He did not walk a ton and, for a stocky lefty off the bench, he offered almost no power, never managing more than five home runs in a season.  Baseball Reference credits him with just 1.7 WAR for his entire eighteen-year career. Sweeney was a much better hitter, and rowdy Baseball Uncle Matt Stairs leads the majors with 23 pinch hit dingers.  Harris only leads in the category of hits and plate appearances as managers kept summoning Harris to pinch hit ineffectively over and over again.

The mystery for me is how Lenny Harris managed to stick around for eighteen years as a bench bat barely able to breach the .700 OPS threshold.  Because Harris played most of his career in the 1990s and early 2000s, my natural inclination was to ignore even the basic slash metrics and take a look at the triple crown stats that ruled the game then.  He did not sock many homers or pile up RBIs even for the relatively few plate appearances he got over a season nor did he swipe many bases.  Harris did hit the magical .300 batting average threshold several times; it is possible that his .300 seasons were spaced perfectly for him to scuffle around 2.70 or even plummet to .235, but then pull off a .300 season at the opportune time for a grizzled Moneyball villain front office person made entirely of used mouth tobacco to get on the phone and start screaming profanities at someone to sign him before mailing Bill James a manila envelope filled with violently torn up spreadsheets.

But I believe there is some sort of ineffable, spiritual purity to Harris's reputation as the preeminent pinch hitter in baseball history that transcends his underwhelming numbers.  First of all, anyone who makes a living as a pinch hitter will not be exploding with OPSes because if they did, they wouldn't be pinch hitting.  But more importantly, Harris embraced pinch hitting and made it into an arcane art-- not every player can deal mentally with sitting in a disgusting dugout day after day eventually summoned for one at bat, but Harris mastered it, learned the Way of the Bench, and honed an approach to allow him to pinch hit dozens of times a season.  This approach helped sustain Harris's career because, once you become the Pinch Hit Guy, baseball's organizational inertia means that any time a team needed a left-handed bench bat, there is no way their imagination would extend past The Guy Who Pinch Hits.

Harris had a great part of a season off the bench for the National League Champion Mets in 2000, but I first became aware of him when he signed with the Cubs in 2003.  He had come off one of his best seasons the year before with the Brewers, but was miserable with the Cubs and let go when they acquired Randall Simon as part of the lopsided trade that also brought Kenny Lofton and Aramis Ramirez to the North Side.  Simon is best known for an incident earlier that season when he was up in Milwaukee and decided to playfully bop one of the racing sausages in the head with a bat; this knocked the sausage down, scuffed up the person inside the costume, and caused an outcry in Milwaukee because it turns out that hitting a racing sausage in the head with a bat looks a lot like hitting someone in the head with a bat.  The police got involved.  Simon was still on the Pirates then, but then he got to the Cubs and had to go up to Milwaukee again and face a seething, hostile crowd desperate to avenge his unthinkable attack on an anthropomorphic bratwurst, but Simon cannily defused the situation by buying brats for an entire section and sending the person inside the costume on a free trip to Curacao.

Harris ended up joining the Marlins and facing the Cubs in the ill-fated NLCS.  It would have been poetic if it was Harris who managed to hit that foul ball into the low left field stands over the bullpen or even managed a hit or walk to prolong the Cubs' agonizing death inning, but Lenny Harris's Revenge Series unfolded with l'esprit de l'escalie.  He managed three plate appearances early in the series, two outs and a walk; he made the last out in a 12-3 loss.  But I don't think Harris cares about any of that at all because a week later he became a World Champion.

In 1998, Lenny Harris made a pitching appearance with his Reds down 16-3 to the San Francisco giants in the ninth inning and struck out Brent Mayne looking.

The thing that I've found most compelling about Harris's career is that he sustained it for such a long time on a razor's edge.  After a few years in the majors, he never again worked his way into a full-time starter but never collapsed enough to be sent to the minors.  No matter what he did at the plate, when the balls were finding gaps in the infield or he was rolling over to the second baseman, some team always wanted Lenny Harris. And Harris did all of this in the strangest way possible, as a low-power contact hitter playing almost his entire career at a time when the game was teeming with available neck vein guys who were capable of anonymously blasting baseballs into low Earth orbit. 

I would be surprised to see another player like Harris again.  The idea of a player with Harris's skill set hanging around the major leagues for the better part of two decades seems remote at a time when teams have become obsessed with jettisoning veterans for cheaper young players; though Harris never signed a big contract, it seems that veterans like Harris are less welcome in the game than ever, especially in a baseball environment tending towards the three true outcomes instead of doing whatever he can to put the ball in play (Harris almost never struck out).

Lenny Harris was not the most productive or effective pinch hitter in baseball history.  He was instead the most pinch hitter, the man called upon more than anyone in the history of the game in the pinch, a person who sustained himself in baseball for long enough to turn pinch hitting into his own arcane art, and that is more impressive.

BYCTOM 100*: Jared Hughes

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.

BYCTOM 100*: Jose Valentin

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.