It's Over, We're Cyberpunk Now: A Review of Baseball's Opening Weekend

Heading into Spring Training, baseball had been afflicted by the low-grade malaise that has been seeping into the sport for the past few years: there was the lingering Houston Astros sign-stealing scandal, questions about the juiced ball that baseball handled with a series of increasingly half-hearted denials and obfuscations, and an increasingly bold stance by owners that they didn’t get into the baseball business to pay baseball players that signals impending labor strife. But it is also clear that in a year that saw baseball heading into a season that was going to be defined by reporters repeatedly asking Astros players "did you bang the cans," that all of these concerns are muted by the possibility that Major League Baseball will literally kill someone.

Baseball careened into its pandemic restart plan with the panicked disorganization of a retreating army. As labor negotiations roiled into bitterness between players and owners, plans to play in Arizona and Florida fell by the wayside as Covid cases spiked in those states, and the testing regime immediately fell into delays that made it impossible to tell quickly and decisively if anyone was infected before they had the opportunity to spread disease around the stadium, I became increasingly convinced that this was all a giant ass-covering exercise; this way, MLB could claim that they tried before folding the season as the incompetent reset plans continued to lurch forward so haphazardly that it would be impossible to play without marinating the entire league in a virus stew.

But here we are. Baseball has returned, barreling through the clusterfucks and logistical nightmares with the confidence of a person drunk enough to try some amateur bear wrestling in the wild. In this week alone, the Canadian government denied permission for the Blue Jays to play in Toronto leaving them scrambling to secure a home field days before opening day, Nationals superstar Juan Soto tested positive just hours before a game but allowing teammates near him to still play; MLB is still ramming bizarre rule changes into a season that has already seen a universal DH and a mind-meltingly stupid rule to start extra innings with a runner on second-- minutes before the opening pitch, MLB announced an expanded playoff format as part of the sport and America's dominant fuck it we'll do it live ethos.

It is clear that attempting to play organized baseball, with the travel, infrastructure and close contact required by a modern baseball operation is reckless and stupid, and in a functioning country the entire thing would be completely shut down.  Instead, they brought baseball back, crammed the telecasts with triumphant commercials about persevering over a disease that is in fact bat-flipping in triumph at the American medical establishment, and lauded by announcers as something America needs.  It is insane to witness; I do not know why-- possibly because it is bracing to watch professional sports leagues stage grandiose plans for safety theater and execute them as if you or I or your neighbor who has strong opinions about brands of weedwhacking equipment were put in charge of the D-Day invasion-- but watching professional sports leagues attempt to play under these circumstances with increasingly ludicrous fake safety measures makes me feel completely unmoored from reality.  We absolutely do not need any of this.  We don't need Bubbles.  We don't need Alternate Sites.  We do not need to drive a steamroller over people so I can watch Jason Heyward roll over a slow grounder to the second baseman.

I watched like fifteen hours of baseball this weekend.

AN AESTHETIC REVIEW OF PLAGUE ERA BASEBALL

The biggest and most notable thing is the lack of fans, of baseball played in empty stadiums.  The broadcasts tried several ways to get around this.  Teams are blaring low-level crowd noise over the sound system.  Some set up cardboard cutouts of fans as a sort of comforting simulacrum of the televised baseball experience instead of looking at row after row of cold, empty seats and thinking oh shit there's a plague what the hell are we doing.  I like the cardboard fans.  They're goofy and charming.  The Dodgers had them set up for the game I watched late Thursday night, and I was disappointed they did not set up a cardboard Larry King to emulate what I think is one of the greatest camera shots in the history of televised baseball:


On Saturday's Fox telecasts, the production crew decided to go in another direction and remind us that we are all living in a cyberpunk dystopia.  Fox digitally inserted fans into the stadium using computer graphics from an early generation of console video games and taunted viewers with disturbing pixelated blobs waving disconnected limbs around and appearing and disappearing like ghoulish specters.  There were no fans behind the plate in the Cubs game I watched, but a player would hit a foul ball and the camera would pan into a crowd of weightless cub-shirted dolls, their limbs undulating like horror movie versions of inflatable car lot dancers.  It is an abomination.

The aesthetic of pandemic-era television is the grainy, pixelated Zoom quality of video images, and it is precisely the degradation of television from high-definition to blurry glitches that gives everything a feeling of cyberpunk dystopia.  I believe this is because this is how television and communications looked in every 1980s and 1990s cyberpunk dystopia movie.  Every day on our screens we see an entertainment apparatus that will not stop for anything including a pile of bodies continue to go through the motions with the same form and content but now these programs look exactly like how grainy video calls looked in Total Recall.  There is a television on at all times outside of my office, and every morning I see the same chipper morning news people grinning through elaborate haircuts and doing their inane post-human banter no longer in a studio but in their homes, in networks of flickering rumpus rooms, and the idea of someone sitting at home staring into a computer and vacuously chuckle-talking to Keith about his Summer Movie Faves has been consistently making my blood run cold.

Sports television has hewed to this aesthetic.  Networks have added teleconferenced announcers superimposed over game action nervously tripping over each other and disembodied crowd sounds echoing through eerie shots of abandoned stadiums but they have tried to maintain the familiar grammar of a sports broadcast.  It is the psychosis of the NFL draft but now Mel Kiper looks like a 1990s CD Rom Video Game Guy who sells weapon upgrades.  In my head, I hear Joe Buck narrating the fall of the American government from various regional warlord factions in his same lilting down low it's three and two cadence while John Smoltz interrupts to add in that it's also a rough night for Giants hitters as Kershaw's looking sharp. 

The aesthetics of American Cyberpunk as depicted on sports television

And yet, despite all of the harrowing dread, baseball is still baseball.  The pitch still thumps into the catcher's glove.  The ball still cracks off of bats.  Every few minutes, a large person you have never heard of named Tanner Traegarten or Chance Hacklebourg comes in to throw 98.  The umpires still communicate in their indecipherable grunt-argots.  For some reason, everyone is still spitting and grabbing at their extremities at all times, which is comforting in baseball and would give me an anxiety attack if I saw someone do it on a sidewalk. It took about 15 minutes of me settling in to watch my first Cubs game to go from marveling at the ludicrousness and recklessness of the entire enterprise to start worrying about their ramshackle bullpen consisting entirely of fictional guys from the famous Japanese Nintendo game graphic.



In the midst of all of this, the Cubs decided to launch their own television network.  And because the Cubs are owned by the eternally grasping Ricketts family, it naturally involved an important Business Deal that threatened to leave Comcast customers, the main carrier of all Chicago area cable subscribers, unable to watch the game until they came to a last minute agreement on opening day.  The Marquee Network exists to show nothing but Cubs content, and I have occasionally been thinking about what they have been airing for the past several months as the entire reason for its existence has been swallowed up by the pandemic.  For the past few days, since the Marquee Network has loomed large in my brain, I have been unable to stop thinking about them airing a Ryan Dempster talk show that is just a 1990s talk show where Dempster wears an enormous boxy suit and painted tie, talks to Sissy Spacek and Antonio Alfonseca, and everyone involved is constantly housing and spitting sunflower seeds everywhere.  

Baseball has returned with a sense of anxious joy and horror, something that should not be happening at all but is, and since I am powerless to stop it I might as well see if Javy Baez can knock some dingers.  It exists, like the return of all entertainment and amusement parks and throngs of people hosing each other down with particles in bars, an abomination, an indictment of a government and society unwilling to protect itself from annihilation, and it is also the comfort of knowing that on a summer day you can turn on the radio and hear Ron Coomer talking about how Kris Bryant is really looking for something he drive here the same way you always can.  And if this contradictory state of affairs seems untenable, an impossible way to reconcile enjoying something that should not really exist, there is nothing I can tell you that you can't already know from watching college football in normal times.

The NBA Announces Plans to Do a Fitzcarraldo

There is a scene in the documentary Burden of Dreams where Werner Herzog is discussing with a safety expert his plan to physically drag a boat over a mountain using a series of cables in a stunt meant for the climax of his film Fitzcarraldo.  "If there are sixty people, how many could die," Herzog asks. "They could go off flying like a rocket. Psshew psshew," the safety expert replies, his eyes darting upwards and to the sides as if following the trajectory of people being flung to their doom.

Fitzcarraldo is a classic Herzog film on one of his favorite themes, the hubris of man futilely fighting against a wild and untameable nature.  The titular Fitzcarraldo engages in an impossible task that is almost heroic in its stubborn refusal to bend to the laws of nature and physics (dragging a large ship over a mountain), ludicrous in its end goal (to build an opera house in the Amazon and somehow lure Enrico Caruso to perform), and insane in his complete indifference to human death and suffering to achieve his ends.  In Burden of Dreams, Herzog literally recreates the entirety of the endeavor as he tries to drag a ship up the mountain with the same admirable determination and mad indifference to human suffering in the service of a movie about doing the exact same things except he also introduces Klaus Kinski into the mix to unleash the maximum amount of chaos possible.  The entire film becomes an unfathomable quagmire that involves negotiations with numerous governments and tribal organizations.  Someone gets shot with an arrow.  Somehow it is a documentary about Werner Herzog proving his own point.

ESPN has announced that, in addition to its insane and dangerous Orlando "bubble" where NBA teams will compete in a postseason tournament to determine which team has the fewest number of key players with permanent lung damage, they are prepared to activate a Loser's Bubble based in Chicago.  This is for the eight teams that did not qualify for Orlando and whose fans probably do not want to see play another game.  The Orlando Bubble already represents the Association's Fitzcarraldo, a grandiose and clearly insane attempt by man to defy nature by pretending a virus cannot penetrate the perimeter of Disney World in an attempt to crown an NBA champion; the Chicago bubble, if it happens, would be like trying to haul a ship over a mountain in order to convince Chicago mobster Frank "Skids" Caruso to come to the opera house and violently extort the audience.

Incidentally while I was looking up some opera stuff about Caruso, I stumbled upon this astonishing google groups thread from 2008 of opera fans that, like all internet discussions, degenerates into a barrage of ludicrous insults including "You're a piece of filth - hence, not a man. Tell me, who indulges in phone contacts with psycho-dreck like yourself, Swill?  Not I!"

This is probably the part of the post when I would bemoan the pointlessness of the Chicago bubble and the obvious greed compelling teams to wring the last droplets of TV money out of the NBA sponge to offset revenue losses that will have no impact on the lifestyles of any of the people or entities wealthy enough to own NBA teams, but I can't imagine anyone reading this who is going to think oh the blogspot guy has a good point I'm now reconsidering wanting to watch whatever Rump Pistons show up flail around listlessly for a few games and also maybe get violently ill.

One of the central questions is if players are allowed to opt out, as they are in Orlando, why would any of them come here?  Chicago does not even offer the remote possibility of an NBA championship.  Why would they upend their families to go to Chicago and play several terrible preseason-style basketball games against the Atlanta Hawks to an eerie, silent arena so that the person who owns their team can fulfill contractual obligations to a regional cable network that wants to air commercials with Trae Young telling a car dealer named like Bob "Mack" Whitmanty that his deals are a "slam dunk" in a jersey designed to look as much like a Hawks jersey without infringing on trademarks.

But for Bulls fans, the bubble has an even more catastrophic feeling, not only because a potentially superspreading event may be activated in their city, but because of the possibility that the Bulls will unleash another several weeks of Jim Boylen on an already exhausted populace.

Ever since Arturas Karnisovas and new GM Mark Eversley have come in, everyone has assumed that Jim Boylen will not coach another game for the Bulls because he is an oaf.  Every single thing that Boylen has done has been embarrassing-- it is not just losing a bunch of games, which a number of normal people could have done with the inept Bulls teams assembled by the previous front office, but it is the strident, bug-eyed, arm-flailing boobshiness with which he has comported himself that has been admittedly extremely funny and enjoyable to blog about.

For several months, I have been wondering what Jim Boylen has been doing day-to-day, away from the team.  Is he calling players and exhorting them to train harder? Is he trying to break into the practice facility to polish the fucking time clock that he was making players punch into?  Writing a Treatise on the Usage of Late Game Time-Outs With Reference To My Critics Who Have Invidiously Attacked My Own Strategems?  Has he been sending e-mails to players who hear an alert on their phone and immediately roll their eyes because it is from Boylen and the subject line is "re: your spirit"?  Presumably he hasn't been doing that because he has been sitting around waiting to be fired.
 
Excerpt from the Boylen Treatise

No one wants to see another second of Bulls basketball this season, but the idea of Bulls basketball with Jim Boylen gallumphing around the sidelines sweatily exhorting people like a vengeful spirit of all dads returning a defective lawncare item cannot possibly be real.  The only way it could be tolerable would be if the new front office promised that Boylen would be gone after the bubble and they were only keeping him around for us to laugh at him or if he were restrained in some sort of Hannibal Lecter apparatus. 

The Chicago NBA Loser Bubble represents the nadir of all American sports restarts.  The other leagues have some pretense of chasing a championship or playing some sort of semblance of a season that disguises the lunacy and recklessness of devoting so many resources to something so superfluous and frivolous.  But an attempt to impose a "bubble" with a testing regime and entire armies of people to support whatever ramshackle versions of the NBA's shittiest teams deign to show up presents the most desperate and despicable sports gamble yet-- until the NFL decides to do anything.

The NBA "Bubble" Is Making Me Feel Genuinely Insane

Over the past several months we have all witnessed a daily barrage of surreal, maddening images of what the television commercials tell us are These Uncertain Times and in the grand scheme of things the machinations of a billion dollar professional sports league are relatively small potatoes, but I cannot help but look at reports about the NBA's plans to resume play in a half-assed quarantine bubble at a network of Disney World resorts and feel like I am listening to a bunch of guys who go on television to discuss whether or not talks between the Los Angeles Lakers and Avery Bradley are "heating up" earnestly describing to me some insane nightmare their subconscious has cobbled together while under general anesthesia for a surgical suit enlargening procedure.

As the so-called bubble plan took shape, the central NBA conversation has focused on how many teams would play, the structure of the playoffs format, where players would stay.  It ignored other questions important to me such as what has Jim Boylen been doing every day for the past three months and whether or not the idea of players literally living at Disney World but unable to go on any of the rides was a situation specifically enacted when the Lopez Brothers got their enormous hands on a monkey's paw.

When you are specifically barred from Space Mountain

But of course the central issue with the the bubble plan itself despite the safety protocols and testing regimens for the players and coaches and staff and reporters and family members and assorted hundreds of other people in the general NBA Bubble retinue is that the central thing they are gathering to do is to have a bunch of enormous sweaty guys lever forearms into each other for two and a half hours at a time in front of empty crowds during a pandemic that is rampaging through Florida so that cable television networks can air commercials where a guy pretending to be Chris Paul accidentally drives a combine harvester through the library wing of the Paul family manse.

The NBA's drive to return fits in as one of the most ludicrous and hare-brained schemes that fit into the larger and equally insane schemes to "open up" the United States while doing essentially nothing to address the fact that waves of plague are sickening and killing thousands of people every single day.  They keep repeating that phrase "opening up" and it is reverberating around my skull in the deranged register of some Lynchian black lodge character or in the way that phrases get chopped up, distorted, and crushed up against each other in every single FM radio promo that inexplicably became the industry standard because the only way to lead into another solid block of Zeppelin Friday is with a sound collage taken from the climax of a direct-to-video clown murder film.

There are numerous reasons for the race to Open Up that you can read from people who do not write blogspot websites about mediocre football teams, but the consequence of having a patchwork of local restrictions, contradictory and confusing messaging, the pandemic getting sucked into a brain-warping culture war over hypothetical constitutional guarantees to eat at Fuddrucker's whenever the fuck we want, or the president going on television to tell people that he is going to have our brave generals shrink themselves down into microscopic submarines and shoot at the virus with very strong lasers, they tell me they can do incredible things with these beautiful lasers has resulted in a matter of grave public health turning into an individualized ritual of self-expression.  There is the juxtaposition of people hurrying out of grocery stores in masks and gloves pirouetting around snaking lines of people waiting to get onto patios so they can order beers and blast spittle into each other's faces in conversations that largely involve yelling did you see what Kyle did on his instagram.

One entity that is decidedly not open for business is Major League Baseball.  Baseball's plans to return have been derailed by a protracted labor fight.  For whatever reasons, baseball teams have come to be owned by a group of people who seem to despise baseball, baseball players, and baseball fans.  Their sole interest appears to be paying baseball players as little money as possible-- front offices actually passed around a championship belt for the teams that best screwed over players in arbitration and this is what these guys do for fun at their decadent spreadsheet jamborees.

For the past several weeks there has been a cycle of Major League Baseball throwing out a proposal to players and players largely scoffing at it and demanding more money and then Major League Baseball offering them more or less the same amount.  The role of commissioner Rob Manfred remains unclear.  Manfred, a dead-eyed functionary who resurfaces from time to time to either explain how much people despise baseball or to come up with a plan to shave three more seconds from games by catapulting players from the dugout to the on-deck circle and who generally has the bearing of a guy who spends a lot of time setting up and filming elaborate model train accidents, has been largely absent.  Baseball's collective bargaining agreement expires at the end of next season, and judging by the antipathy between players and owners we might not have baseball for quite some time.

In this case the owners' nauseating avarice may come to some good because lost in all of the labor strife is the fact that it is probably a profoundly bad idea to attempt to play baseball.  Other leagues that have returned in Taiwan and South Korea and Japan are doing so in countries that quickly quelled the virus and maintain robust testing and tracing procedures to manage further outbreaks whereas in the United States we remain unable to fathom a way of solving a problem without shooting it either with a gun or shooting it with another gun; getting a bunch of baseball players whose entire routines involve constantly emitting spittle and jamming on their crotches etc. seems like it would spell disaster.  The independent American Association, my emails from the Chicago Dogs that continue unceasingly because I once bought tickets on their website tell me, plans on starting play July 3 in three midwestern "pods" hosting several teams.

I cannot imagine an apocalyptic disease scenario that will stop the NFL from trying to play, even if alien spores infect Jerry Jones and turn him into an unstoppable carnivorous plant.

Even as sports leagues sputter to life in fits and starts, the central question on my mind is whether I even miss them.  At the beginning of the quarantine lockdown, amidst chilly weather, confined at home, and in the middle of spring training and the dying moans of terrible local basketball seasons, I found myself starved to just turn on The Game.  I spent a lot of time in March and April watching youtube videos of entire old baseball games just to settle into the comforting rhythms of the game and to psychologically torture myself by listening to Tim McCarver say "actually not a lot of people know this, Joe, but the curve seems to the batter to 'curve' in the air making it harder to hit with those bats."
 
But virtually everything, including the raging, uncontrolled pandemic, faded into the background during the eruption of protests against police brutality and racism that ignited with the video of a Minneapolis police officer murdering George Floyd.

There are two types of videos that I have seen over the past weeks involving police: in one they stand in futuristic armor gleefully truncheoning people or blasting them in face with chemical weapons and in the other they stand with folded hands behind a union president who is excoriating the big-city mayor who has spent the past month humiliating him or herself by saying "I agree with the truncheoning" for not being obsequious enough while rivulets of foam run down his mustache.  In Chicago, the mayor imposed a curfew, walled off the downtown like a medieval fortress to the point that I expected them to explore the possibility of bringing the alligator back to patrol the Chicago River in case protesters decided to launch a flotilla against the sacred ruins of the River North ESPNZone, and a constant din of helicopters besieging large groups of people most of whom have been walking and holding signs. 

For awhile, in a genuinely unhinged scene, weird unmarked paramilitary units flooded Washington D.C. that appeared be recruited overwhelmingly from car avatar guys who indignantly reply to verified sports personalities tweeting about Colin Kaepernick. 

Some NBA players have questioned whether a return to play makes sense not only in the context of the absurd Stately Virus-Dome boondoggle but during a time of a massive popular surge for civil rights.  Kyrie Irving reportedly argued on a conference call with more than 80 players that the NBA's return could serve as a distraction from the movement.  

The virus's surge through Florida may soon render these discussions moot.  Even the NBA's byzantine and farcical Rules and Regulations in the quarantine zone such as telling players they must discard decks of cards after use or having families spread out masked in the theaters where they may be treated to Disney exclusive sneak preview movies as part of their families' commitment to being biosphpered do not quite fit with players being encouraged to absolutely mash their  crotches into the nearest Plumlee when throwing a violent dunk on him because that is an integral part of the game.

But the other thing at stake is an enormous and unfathomable pile of money for team owners and the corporate consortia that profit from the NBA, the loss or gain of which will make no material difference in any of their lives other than making a number go up and down, and it is almost impossible find any force whether from a pandemic unprecedented in our lifetimes or the streets bursting with calls for social justice that can stop that.

Basketball player DESTROYS the New York Knicks for Ten Hours

There is no universe where a Michael Jordan documentary can provide a searching, searing take on the Legend of Michael Jordan that involves the participation of Jordan and his various representatives and phalanxes of brand protectors; without them and their own ability to shape the narrative Jordan does not agree to allow the use of archival footage and appear on camera with fuchsia eyeballs to say fuck and cackle derisively at his vanquished foes presented to him on iPads like platters bearing the heads of slain enemy generals. 



While I understand frustration with The Last Dance for anyone looking for anything beyond a glossy advertorial for the master Michael Jordan narrative, I enjoyed it because I am a Bulls fan who grew up watching Michael Jordan, imbibed all of the swirling Jordanian lore, and reveled in him destroying his-- and by extension my-- basketball enemies, and did not mind reliving this for ten hours during a sports-ending pandemic.  Perhaps those who don't have Proustian sense memories of the very Baker's Square where B.J. Armstrong tried to get Jordan to come back from his baseball hiatus or the traffic-stopping Rodman billboard on the Kennedy or the McDonald's Beef Wennington or the soothing existence of the phrase "The JCC Presents Jud Buechler's Basketball Camp" can look at the documentary and demand that corporate behemoth ESPN put together a thoughtful critique on the greatest meal ticket in sports history with intricate financial ties to the network, but for Jordan delighting in the various times he made Pat Riley angry with a few fucks and sometimes shits thrown in was entertaining enough.

The Jordan story that they tell is the one everyone already knows: Michael Jordan is an insane, competitive monomaniac who blazed a trail of destruction through the National Basketball Association off of a deranged obsession with real and imagined slights who wins and wins until stopped by an avaricious owner and his chief henchman who would get rid of him and finally get to shape their vision of the Bulls as cheap and shitty and run exclusively by people with oddly-shaped heads. 

If a filmmaker is going to involve Michael Jordan in a Michael Jordan documentary, then Jordan will get to tell the story he wants, and the way he likes to tell it is as a vanquishing of enemies and redressing of grievances.  And while it is exhausting for a person who won all of the time to constantly harp on the people whom he has already stomped upon-- his deranged Basketball Hall of Fame Speech remains the purest strain of Jordan ever released into the wild-- Jordan had the benefit of collecting hideous enemies.  Consider his nemeses: the revolting Bad Boy Pistons, Pat Riley's blackjack and knuckle-duster Knicks, Utah's vile penis-punching operation led by the odious Karl Malone.  One of the funniest things to come from this documentary was a week of sputtering Isiah Thomas television appearances to defend his honor after Jordan and a legion of former Bulls had an unprecedented national spotlight that they all used to shit on him.  To be fair to Isiah Thomas, the admittedly funny walkout after the '91 Eastern Conference Finals is probably the least disgusting Isiah Thomas scandal.

The vaunted behind-the-scenes footage amplifies what most viewers already knew about Jordan.  Anyone who wanted to see footage of a legendary Jordan roasting session has minutes of new insults inveighed against Jerry Krause for being unkempt and roly-poly and Scott Burrell for being worse at basketball than Michael Jordan.  There's Jordan the gambler matching up with the unexpected breakout star of The Last Dance, a mustachioed perm-mullet security guard who took a twenty off Jordan in a game where they threw coins at a wall in the bowels of the United Center.  The new footage largely shows Jordan swaggering into a locker room, exchanging some mildly amusing and vaguely hostile banter at teammates and staffers forced to sort of chuckle through it, and then going into the arena to humiliate Patrick Ewing.



The central question I have for anyone looking for something more from Jordan in The Last Dance is what if there's nothing else there?  What if the way that Jordan presents himself as a relentless, berzerk competitor righting an unending number of imagined wrongs by beating someone at basketball at a time where he had the muscle of bazillion-dollar corporations to make him transcendently famous and sell him to the entire world is in fact how he sees himself and there exists the sum total of what Michael Jordan is able to tell us about being Michael Jordan? 

I'm not sure what additional depths of Michael Jordan still exist to plumb.  Jordan was incredible at basketball through a combination of athleticism, skill, and ludicrous obsession.  He is also petty, vindictive, obsessed with gambling, and an asshole.  There are, I am sure, more horrid examples of his bullying that Jordan or the dozens of producers involved with this kept out of the documentary-- insults that would result in his immediate cancellation, sordid gambling anecdotes, an admission that he was actually part of the infamous "cocaine circus"-- that would not tell us anything more than the internet's various Codices of Michael Jordan Insults that have been floating around for 30 years.  How much more vicious do we need to see Jordan in rare footage to get the point that we get from a Jud Buechler talking head where he tells us that he was terrified of him?

 
I was not expecting Buechler to transform into Artie, the Strongest Man in the World

The only time Jordan shows emotion other than suppressed rage, delight at having vanquished someone, or derision while staring at an iPad interview is when he gets choked up at the thought that everyone thought he was an asshole.  But even here, Jordan doesn't seem to show remorse for ceaselessly calling his teammates "twenty-one feet of shit," but frustration that no one seems to understand that he only insulted people because he wanted to win.  Jordan cannot fathom anyone not getting that the Bulls could not win a title unless he mentally broke Will Perdue.

There still remain compelling Jordan mysteries.  There is the question of Jordan's sudden retirement and attempted baseball career that, even throwing aside conspiracy theories about a secret suspension, still keep me wondering why even the potent cocktail of grief at his father's sudden, senseless murder, a growing gambling scandal, and the ever-present pressure of being the most famous athlete in the world that could understandably get him to retire nevertheless manifested in him joining another sporting concern that would lead to unending scrutiny, failure, and ridicule.  There is the question of whatever was gnawing at him from the insides to get him to invent insults from LaBradford Smith.  The documentary does not even touch on latter-day Jordan from his Wizards career to a comically disastrous run as an executive and team owner who keeps drafting various versions of Frank Kaminsky.

The most compelling Jordan question, though, is the overarching riddle of what it is like to be Michael Jordan, to achieve a level of success and fame that most people will never approach, to attract massive crowds and people for whom a single glimpse of Jordan could provoke a religious reaction.  To Jordan, it appeared to be a crushing burden, the price of his desire to dominate his rivals on the basketball court and then sell more shoes than them, one where a step outside of a controlled zone meant crowds of people who all wanted something from him and recorded his every move.  It seems strange and awful.  Does this interest Jordan?  Is there a human being alive who can wring insight into this bizarre life out of him?  Because what seems to interest him more than anything in the world where he has reached a zenith of fame achieved by few people in the history of human civilization is discovering whether Antonio Davis said something to him that he could use to work himself into a frenzy.

Maybe The Last Dance is the most interesting portrait of Michael Jordan that he is ever willing or able to tell.  And in that case, maybe the only way to understand him is like Magic Johnson telling a Jordan anecdote. One time someone told Jordan he could beat him at basketball. And Jordan said uh uh I'm gonna beat you at basketball.  And then he did.

The NFL Draft Reaches Its Deranged Apotheosis in Roger Goodell's Rumpus Room

The NFL Draft is already the most absurd spectacle on television, a slurry of brands and military hardware and grim self-serious analysts solemnly intoning that a player has tremendous instincts and sideline-to-sideline speed but might not have the SIZE and LENGTH to contribute right away in the NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE, but the fact that we are all sealed in our homes during a terrifying pandemic meant that NFL was going to reach operatic heights of absurdity.

For weeks leading up to the draft, we had heard about the technical challenges.  There have been stories about how GMs are converting their houses into Draft War Rooms, installing nuclear submarine defense infrastructure to their suburban mansions and complaining about the possibility of rogue cells waging Cyberwar against their zoom conference calls even though, as far as I can tell, the entire infrastructure of drafting involves being able to pick a name off a list and make a few phone calls.

The WNBA had done its draft with few hiccups a few weeks earlier, and everything had more or less worked out.  The show cut between commissioner Cathy Engelbert, a small ESPN crew of analysts, draft picks in their homes, and reporter Holly Rowe interviewing them.  There were a few glitches-- several draft picks had not been told to mute their televisions or use headphones so we got the classic sports radio situation of needing someone to scream "you gotta turn down your radio" at a person although these are professional athletes and not a mustache guy in the middle of proposing a baroque series of trades to reacquire Robby Gould, but watching the players at home celebrating with their families was very charming.  The NFL saw this and decided to brand its version a Virtual Draft; the GM of the Detroit Lions made his IT guy live in a Winnebago outside his house in case some villainous hackers decided to break into the Lions' mainframe and gain the incredible draft intelligence that the Lions were targeting shitty football players.

The NFL draft included a solemn introduction from Roger Goodell who wanted to talk about These Uncertain Times.  Goodell lives for this.  He seems to see the NFL as the nexus of brands and a nebulous form of American patriotism involving tanks, and the solution to every crisis is a sluice of ads showing concern over triumphant piano music.  Goodell's ideal response to a global catastrophe would be to fuse members of the military into exoskeletons made from the Official Pickup Truck of the NFL to shoot at the virus with laser guns while Domino's Pizza solemnly remembers the fallen.  They started the draft with a performance of the National Anthem and then cut to a TV monitor full of people who had painted their faces to look like footballs.

Goodell, standing in a rumpus room decorated with carefully curated knickknacks, was not up to the task of whatever he was trying to accomplish. His wooden bearing reminded me of the famously cadaverous Chicago-area lawyer Peter Francis Geraci who has been haunting UHF airwaves since the mid-1980s or a hapless Vice President of Ketchups thanking the Sun Belt Conference for participating in the Amalgamated Condiments Bowl.  His face was red as a sockeye salmon. He later changed into a sweater and then, on day two, managed to slip into a focus-grouped easy chair.  The whole setup reminded me of one of those Sally Struthers correspondence school infomercials. 

The business of the draft itself remained hilariously mundane.  This is because the essence of the draft remains a televised list reading.  In many ways, the virtual draft served as a more normal televised event than usual because most of the insane spectacle of the draft involved packing thousands of people into a Bud Light Draft Zone where they can stand in line to do the drill where you have to run through tires with your KNEES UP DAMMIT or to don jerseys and scream at picks that they have absolutely never heard of before Goodell would come out flanked by another group of military personnel.  

Some of the weirdest parts of the draft involved attempts to awkwardly recreate the live experience.  Goodell invited fans to boo him via zoom.  Before every pick, Goodell would bring up a small smorgasbord of teleconferenced fans in full team regalia to cheer the picks while he goaded them in a  manner that can best be described as executively.  The fans were barely visible and audible; even though ESPN has rebranded as the network that lets Michael Jordan say "fuck" or even Scottie Pippen, it is not going to let some guy in an elaborate, homemade Los Angeles Rams headpiece bellow one out on national television in front of you, the Commissioner of the National Football League, and God.

The other change from the draft is that it brought us inside the homes of NFL coaches and general managers and dozens of draft picks. This provided us with several shots of goatee guys in team-branded apparel doing some action packed texting in carefully-prepared draft areas where they could ostentatiously display as-told-to books by football players on Leadership or revel in Kliff Kingsbury's palatial opulence, or even cut to Mike Vrabel allowing his rowdy, mulleted sons to operate a carnival of the bizarre in the background.  ESPN's analysts also set up at home except for Mel Kiper, who appeared to have transported himself into a 1990s CD-ROM game.

The draft's attempt to straddle the line between bone-crunchin' football action and solemn discussions of the global pandemic and concurrent economic crash was handled in the same ridiculous and ham-handed way that the NFL handles anything but talking about football and the same ludicrous ways that corporations are maneuvering to continue selling things.  Every few minutes, the draft would give way to a series of identical commercials about These Uncertain Times; the eerie repetition of that phrase and the attempts by Taco Bell to show resilient heroes grasping their taco boxes has put us all into a George Saunders short story.

And yet, in its own moronic way, the NFL draft did provide a useful service this weekend.  Along with ESPN's Bulls documentary, the draft served as a vaguely sports adjacent thing to put onto television that millions of people would be watching and you could follow along and make dumb jokes with all of the other people who like to do the same thing on the internet, and if that meant having to endure a quavering Goodell invoking The Power of America and Specifically Football In These Uncertain Times and to watch as the Bears picked a Notre Dame Guy and no one took anyone from Northwestern then so be it.

A Review of GarPax's Most Infernal Intrigues and Bone-Crunching Physical Assualts

Sports may be shut down, arenas may be empty, and the entire world might be on quarantine, but that will not stop the intrigue gears from spinning at Bulls Headquarters.  One of the only meaningful pieces of sports news-- that is to say sports news divorced from the pandemic and the eternal question of when sports will start up, whether billionaire owners will deign to pay stadium support staff, and what sorts of choreographed line dances professional athletes are tik toking in their estates-- is that the Bulls, in a seemingly impossible coup, have hired a new front office.  They brought in Denver GM Arturas Karnisovas as Vice President of Basketball Operations, sidelined John Paxson into a reportedly salaried position to sort of hang out, and finally hurled Gar Forman into a crevasse in the crust of the earth.

This being the Bulls, reporting has suggested that the change came from Paxson.  Only on the Bulls can change come from an executive finally deciding to scheme against the only opponent strong enough to beat Paxson in a bureaucratic battle-- himself.

There have been millions of words by aggrieved Bulls fans written on the internet about the Paxson and Forman years, but while it is important to lament the various Doug McDermott trades throughout the years, I'm more drawn to the atmosphere of paranoia and dread surrounding the organization as it retreated further into a sclerotic decline that led to people screaming FIRE GARPAX at Stephen A. Smith as he attempted to interview Zach LaVine.  So, here are some episodes and vignettes as a review of the Garpax era.

Randy Brown's Espionage Cell Activated to Pass Crucial Intelligence About Fred Hoiberg

"Gar has never come to me and said, 'Hey, Randy, I want you to be a spy in Fred Hoiberg's locker room.' That doesn't even sound right. Gar and Pax (executive vice president John Paxson) would never ask me to do that. And Fred Hoiberg knows that." Randy Brown to the Chicago Tribune, Feb. 4, 2017.

Rumors circulated among allegations from Jimmy Butler and somehow Rip Hamilton that assistant coach and former Jordan-era Bull Randy Brown was a spy in the locker room for Gar Forman, who recruited him to play for New Mexico in the 1980s.  These players accused Brown of discussing the inevitably complicated Bulls locker room politics to Forman and, we can assume, strategically hiding in lockers, using DNA from discarded towels to have facial reconstruction surgery when he needed to disguise himself as Jerian Grant, locking himself in the trunk of Robin Lopez's car in order to compile a dossier of rides he likes at Six Flags Great America, and doing "wet work" when it was necessary to destroy one of Paul Zipser's knees because he had badmouthed Forman in a German-language newspaper not understanding the reach of Forman's network on the Continent.

Many basketball teams have had fucked up, dysfunctional locker rooms.  Few have approached the truly operatic feuding between various camps of players, coaches, and the omnipresent front office than the Three Alphas Era Bulls that resembled the feuding component states of the Holy Roman Empire.  But there are also few teams that have had so many allegations of spying from the front office; this is not even my favorite or funniest incidence of alleged espionage from the Bulls.

Everyone involved has denied these allegations, but I just want anyone reading this to think about Gar Forman, dressed like a German walk signal, silently passing papers to undercover basketball operatives at the United Center-adjacent Billy Goat Tavern while saying cryptic passwords like "it feels like spring so often for one week in February" that tell the person to compile a detailed report on whether Fred Hoiberg is getting through to Denzel Valentine.

Bulls Players Open Roaring, Grunting, Shaking Shipping Crate, Unleash Jim Boylen

The Bulls fired Fred Hoiberg and then, arriving from a secure basketball coaching facility, was a flesh-skulled maniac wailing and gnashing its teeth and demanding wind sprints.  Boylen had been on Hoiberg's staff and had won a championship as one of Gregg Popovich's assistants, but I don't think anyone had seen this coming, this surreal mutant gym teacher taking over the Bulls and immediately wreaking so much havoc that the players needed to form a bureaucratic structure for Corporate Governance in an attempt to shield themselves from him.

Jim Boylen has to be one of the funniest coaches in NBA history.  I have often written about sports coaching as a position bereft of dignity-- it is difficult for someone to become a gris eminence when there are hundreds of hours of footage of that person screaming at officials, throwing clipboards, sniping at beat reporters, and sweating through the suits that they have to wear for some reason; the price that coaches pay for exorbitant salaries and fame is that they are some of the few people whose apoplexy gets captured repeatedly by cameras, and they also are constantly subjected to having Stan from Glen Elyn call into sports talk radio every day and talk about how incompetent they are while trying not to get into an accident on the Eisenhower Expressway.  But Boylen has done himself no favors-- he comes across as an oaf, a boob, a strange maniac who regardless of his knowledge about basketball has seemed to also be a person who has no idea how to connect with people, handle the press, or exist in a human society that is not solving problems with through a ritual combat by dodgeball.


That's when the attack comes SWISH from the sides from the two 
other Jim Boylens you didn't even know were there

The uncertainty around the NBA and sports leagues in general in the midst of this pandemic has made Boylen's job status unclear.  There might not be a point to firing a coach while there are no games being played and while his job duties are probably teleconferencing with players with his bulbous head filling up a zoom window while screaming at them about how he's "jacked up" to see them doing pushups on Instagram or whatever.  But we can assume that Boylen cannot be long for the Bulls and while hiring a more competent and palatable maniac will be better for the team, we will all be losing out on his press conferences, bizarre quotes, and his weird and infuriating time outs at the end of games the Bulls have no chance of winning that have nearly caused altercations.

The Bulls also in the past had also elevated an interim coach named "Jim Boylan" who was an entirely different person and this has nothing to do with the previous paragraphs but it blows my mind every time I think about it.

The Bulls Send Luol Deng for a Recreational Spinal Tap

Sports fans have a tendency to blame their team's medical staffs for rashes of injuries, and this is not always fair.  Most fans are not physicians or professional sports trainers and have no idea what teams are or are not doing to prevent and treat injuries. Many injuries are the result of the fact that sports asks athletes to make insane and unnatural demands on their bodies and, in basketball, players are constantly jumping, landing, and getting bashed in the sternum by either Dale or Antonio Davis. 

But in some cases team's medical staffs can make mistakes that are clear and disastrous, and that would be the time that the Chicago Bulls sent Luol Deng to get an unnecessary spinal tap that could have killed him in 2013.  Deng had been complaining about flu-like symptoms.  Bulls doctors diagnosed him with meningitis and sent him to the hospital for the procedure, which developed complications including leaking spinal fluid.  Deng lost fifteen pounds in a few days and was beset with intense headaches.  The Bulls listed him as out with "flu-like symptoms."

No one here is arguing that the Bulls deliberately sent Deng into a dangerous medical situation but the Bulls front office touch was to do so in the midst of an atmosphere of downplaying injuries and illnesses.  Here is how one anonymous Bulls staffer put it in a scouting report quoted in this ESPN article from 2013:

Luol called me and told me he was really sick and had to go to the hospital. This was when we were in Miami in the playoffs ... soon after I get off the phone with Luol (redacted) play, that he's on his way to Miami. I told Thibs there is no way, he's on his way to the hospital, it was a bad situation. He blamed the team and they put pressure on him to play when he was seriously sick.

The article also mentions the entire incident happened in the context of the Bulls pressuring Deng to put off surgery to an injured wrist in the previous season.  The entire thing also happened in the maelstrom of the front office's neverending war with Derrick Rose over whether or not he was ready to come back from his various catastrophic knee injuries that had reached a boiling point that spring, when the Bulls believed Rose was ready to return and Rose decided to miss the rest of the season.  The Bulls and Rose feuded in the newspapers for awhile, and the relationship between the team and Rose soured while Bulls players questioned the organization's commitment to their health or grinding away to heroic second-round playoff exits.

 Tom Thibodeau's Staff Enacts the Moscow Rules

The thing I most appreciate about the GarPax area is their dedication to general Cold War tradecraft.  NBA teams have traditional folkways of dysfunction: feuding with players, undermining coaches in the press, or even exploring the avant garde ends of dysfunction like the time Mark Jackson attempted a bizarre process of psychologically torturing Festus Ezeli.  The Bulls, though, made this into an art.  The Bulls were running agents and, in my favorite GarPax allegation originally made by Adrian Wojnarowski, bugging offices.  Woj claimed that Bulls personnel were employing the classic tactic of running electric fans as white noise because they feared that Forman was listening to their phone conversations. 

I should note that there is no evidence that anyone bugged the offices.  There is also no evidence that Gar Forman drove a van marked Bannockburn Utility Landscape and Lawn Sculpture around the practice facility for surveillance purposes or cut off trade talks saying "not now I'm in the van."  No allegations have at this time surfaced of Bulls players using yellow chalk in a telling location over Kirk Hinrich's garage to announce a secret meeting or attempts to spirit away Ron Adams over the Glienicke bridge.

John Paxson Tries to Murder Vinny Del Negro Over Joakim Noah's Minutes

The delicate interplay of player usage, injuries, and toughness has become a hot-button issue in the NBA in recent years as teams have increasingly rested players, come up with a semi-scientific term that Sloan Sports people can use so they can say "load management" and pretend that it's an Analytic, and given Jeff Van Gundy something else to complain about, but nowhere in basketball did that play out as dramatically as the time that John Paxson attempted to shove his hand through Vinny Del Negro's chest in an argument about whether Joakim Noah was playing too many minutes.

Paxson has enjoyed recreationally feuding with his coaches.  Though he generally seems to prefer sniping at them in the press, undermining them, and then hiring a new one based on his criteria that all coaches must follow the eternal cycle of a Hair Guy giving way to a Bald Asshole, in this case he decided to showcase his Aggressive Shove Style of martial art.  Paxson then had Bulls assistants wheel out a table full of weapons while he gave Del Negro the option to either do a knife fight with their wrists tied together like in the Michael Jackson Beat It video or to dip their fists in glue and then in shards of glass before fighting to the death on the roof the Berto Center.  

Instead, Paxson holstered his fists and bided his time for a few weeks to fire Del Negro.  Within a couple seasons, he would be in an open war with Thibodeau, would fire his replacement Fred Hoiberg within a few seasons, and then hire Jim Boylen, an inept doofus who is the laughingstock of the NBA and whom Paxson seems to love.  Perhaps Boylen has already defeated him in combat.
 
ESPN will be airing a 10-hour documentary about the 1997-8 Bulls, another organization that was riven with dysfunction, conflict, and revolt among the front office, the players, and the coaching staff.  But in this case the conflicts came from a team that spent the 1990s as one of the most dominant teams at anything in my life; the conflict served as a dramatic undercurrent to all of the winning, destroying Karl Malone, Jordan referring to his centers as "twenty-one feet of shit," etc.  During the GarPax era, the Bulls got a few really good teams and a lot of years where the most compelling thing about the Bulls was the deranged bureaucratic infighting.

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.