Tied 5-5 with the Blue Jays back on Monday night, bottom of the ninth, the floundering Red Sox pieced together a couple of hits with one away. Men on first and second, and suddenly hot Mookie Betts is coming to the plate. Pitcher Miguel Castro and the Blue Jays need a double play. The Red Sox need to win a game after a weekend hazing by Buck Showalter and a lackluster performance against the Rays before that.
So, my question is, why doesn’t John Farrell pinch-run Clay Buchholz or some other light-footed, athletic pitcher for Hanigan? As zoomy as Betts is, if he raps a ball to second base, Hanigan’s not going to break up the double play. Farrell has back-up catcher Sandy Leon on the bench to replace the pinch-running pitcher in case the game goes into extra innings. Should anything happen to Leon, (I’m only sort of kidding) do-anything Brock Holt can catch.
The answer to the question is, surely, that as of April 27th, John Farrell is not prepared to risk a pitcher getting injured on the basepaths. His perspective is easy enough to grasp. Boston has been playing badly, but they’re still above .500 and there is no clearly dominant team in the AL East and it’s not even Flag Day. A couch manager like myself would stick Buchholz in to run, but Farrell has to think about tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
So, maybe the real question is, when can you seriously consider letting a pitcher pinch run? After the All-Star break? Only in the playoffs? Only in an elimination game? I honestly don’t know. In an ideal world, you’d like to be able to use every talent of every player at your disposal, and send your athletic pitcher out there to run. It would be fun to see.
Back on April 27th, Miguel Castro promptly mooted the issue by bouncing one to the backstop. Bogaerts and Hanigan advanced on the wild pitch, a few seconds later Mookie slipped a grounder through the drawn-in infield, and the Standells started to tell everyone a big fat story about Boston.
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Hey, while we’re here, and speaking of worlds that are well short of ideal, another question comes to mind: Should we be ashamed to be living and dying with a baseball game while riots are happening in Baltimore and people are crying out for understanding and for explanations in the death of Freddy Gray?
The inevitable announcer pablum comes to mind: “[blank] is bigger than the game,” “[blank] puts the game in context,” etc. Groan. You’ve heard it. This rhetorical device pretends to appraise a serious subject, but it’s actually just a pat on the shoulder to reassure us that we have our priorities straight and we are now excused to watch our game and not feel guilty about what’s happening in the world beyond on left field.
I bet we can do a little better than that, yes?*
* If you don’t think we can do better than, or if just don’t want to, or whatever, this is a fine place to either stop reading and do something else, or jump straight to the Comments to excoriate me if that’s your desire. No one will mark you down a grade.
Now, the last thing I want to do is to dismiss the palliative and nurturing qualities of entertainment. I do believe – in the strongest way – that it is perfectly fair to sit down and devote oneself to a ballgame for two or three hours. Everyone deserves a chance to relax and enjoy oneself. Everyone deserves the chance, but not everyone gets it. We’re the lucky ones. I am a lucky one.
“Lucky?” crieth Some Dude. “I worked my ass off all day to come home and watch this game! I earned it, you tofu-gobbling, Chardonnay-swilling northeastern elitist! No surprise you’re a Red Sox fan!”
Some Dude, I will admit that you have me pegged. Allow me to take a guess about you? Here goes: like me, you did not grow up in Freddy Gray’s west Baltimore. How’d I do? From The Washington Post:
Court papers described [Gray’s] difficult upbringing: a disabled mother addicted to heroin who, in a deposition, said she couldn’t read; walls and windowsills containing enough lead to poison the children and leave them incapable of leading functional lives; a young man who was four grade levels behind in reading.
Such lawsuits are so common in Gray’s neighborhood that the resulting settlement payments — which Gray lived off — are known as “lead checks.”
One way of recognizing our good fortune might be to spend a little time reading through an article or two about the death of Freddy Gray. You could even pass an eye over a statement by Orioles Executive Vice President John Angelos, which clearly opposes violence, while not shying away from the root problems of his city.
Writes Angelos, “… my greater source of personal concern, outrage and sympathy beyond this particular case is focused neither upon one night’s property damage nor upon the acts, but is focused rather upon the past four-decade period during which an American political elite have shipped middle class and working class jobs away from Baltimore and cities and towns around the U.S. to third-world dictatorships like China and others, plunged tens of millions of good, hard-working Americans into economic devastation, and then followed that action around the nation by diminishing every American’s civil rights protections in order to control an unfairly impoverished population living under an ever-declining standard of living…”
Today, the Orioles are playing the White Sox inside an empty Camden Yards. It’s likely to be a sad scene; what’s a major league tilt without fans? But maybe, given the circumstances, the inevitable image of all those tiers of empty seats is right. A lot of people in our country -- stadiums and stadiums worth of people -- have been locked out of the game for a long, long time.
