The Futility Infielder

I'm back from my two-week vacation in the Bay Area and Alaska. Both stages of my trip were great, with the former giving me an opportunity to reconnect with some old school chums and the latter netting me some 15 pounds of red salmon as a take-home, not to mention a boatload of hilarious fish stories (none, thankfully, related to the Florida Marlins).

I've been more or less off the grid as far as baseball is concerned, except for a few stray sports sections here and there and an hour spent surfing in the San Francisco airport last Monday during a six-hour (ugh) stay there. Most of this will come as old news to you, but here are some of the happenings and writings -- good, bad, or ugly -- that have impressed me as I've tried to catch up:

• With a .276 AVG/.303 OPB/.418 SLG, it's tempting to say that Pittsburgh Pirates starting first baseman Randall Simon can't even get arrested. But Simon proved that to the contrary in Milwaukee on July 9, showing that he'll swing at anything that moves. Simon clubbed the Italian Sausage mascot during the Brewers' famous sausage race, resulting in not one but two mascots falling down (the gal in the Hot Dog costume was the other victim). Though the swing was in jest, Simon was arrested and booked for misdemeanor battery. Prosecutors declined to file criminal charges, and Simon was left off with a $432 fine for disorderly conduct. The woman wearing the Italian sausage costume, 19 year old Mandy Block, was treated for scraped knees but didn't take too much offense, settling for an apology along with the bat Simon used. MLB said they never sausage terrible behavior, and relished handing out a 3-game suspension along with a $2,000 fine for Simon's hot-dogging. What a weiner.

• In the same sausage-marred game, relief pitcher/outfielder Brooks Kieschnick recorded his first major-league win. Kieschnick entered the game as a pinch-hitter in the 11th inning, hitting a single. He then took over the pitching duties, tossing a scoreless inning before the Brewers scored a run in the 12th.

The Kieschnick experience is working out reasonably well for the Brewers. As a pitcher, he's tossed 31 innings in 23 games, with a 4.35 ERA and a 1-1 record. He's shown good control, walking only 5 and striking out 18 (3.6 K/W, 5.2 K/9). As a hitter he's been even better, hiting .333/.362/.622 (984 OPS) with 4 homers in 45 at-bats. He's 7-for-15 as a pinch-hitter, with an 1162 OPS. The Brewers are having another rough season in the cellar of the NL Central 37-56, .398 winning percentage), but their 25th man isn't the problem.

• Finally, there's a real Pride of the Yankees. Curtis Pride, best known for making the majors ten years ago despite being almost totally deaf, joined the Yanks on July 4. Of course, that's the anniversary of Lou Gehrig's famous farewell speech. In a story too perfect for fiction, Pride homered in his first game as a Yankee on July 6. In front of a packed house of 55,000, Pride drew a curtain call he couldn't even hear, but whose vibrations he could feel. The blow helped the Yanks beat the Red Sox, 7-1, and to turn around a tense series complete with with trash talk and purpose pitches.

The 34-year-old Pride has played in parts of seven seasons in the bigs prior to this stay with the Yanks, hitting .256/.335/.414 in just over 700 at-bats. His best season came in 1996 for the Tigers, where he hit .300/.372/.513 with 10 homers and stole 11 bases. Prior to joining the Yanks, he hadn't played in the majors since 2001.

When Pride came up in 1993, the bigs hadn't seen a deaf player in 50 years. Baseball Primer's Bruce Markusen, who also works for the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, has a history of the handful of deaf players who've played in the majors, starting with Dummy Hoy, who popped up on an old scorecard I investigated recently. Hoy is often credited as the reason umpires adopted hand signals for safe, out, and strike calls, which would make for a nice little niche in baseball history. Alas, according to Markusen, it's not quite so clear-cut; the signals his third-base coach gave Hoy may have inspired their usage by umps.

• Speaking of substitute Yankee outfielders, Karim Garcia continues to do his David Justice impersonation since donning pinstripes. Since joining the Yanks, he's hit .349/.364/.581 with 3 HR in 43 AB while the team has gone 10-6. While he just suffered through a hitless week, Garcia's play since joining the Yanks has given them a nice little lift and added some sorely-needed depth.

• But the sweetest music of all for Yankee fans is the return of centerfielder Bernie Williams, who missed 42 games after undergoing arthroscopic knee surgery. In his first game back last Wednesday, Williams broke an 0-for-23 skid with a single and drove in two runs.

Williams, who moonlights as an avid musician, will release his first CD, The Journey Within, on GRP Records on Tuesday. The New York Times describes Williams' music as "Latin-flavored jazz with a tinge of soul." That may not be your cup of tea, but then again, Paul McCartney's not your biggest fan.

• In considerably less melodic news, Dusty Baker apparently left his brain in San Francisco. The Chicago Cubs manager shot his mouth off on July 5 with a wacko racist theory which would have gotten a white man fired had he uttered it:

You don't find too many brothers in New Hampshire and Maine and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, right? We were brought over here for the heat, right? Isn't that history? Weren't we brought over because we could take the heat?

Your skin color is more conducive to the heat than it is to the light-skinned people, right? You don't see brothers running around burnt and stuff, running around with white stuff on their ears and nose and stuff.

Ugh. Anybody else think Dusty's spent too long baking his brains in the sun? Chicago Tribune columnist Rick Morrissey lets Baker off fairly gently, pointing out the scientific basis of Dr. Baker's theory is less than sound.

According to a study by Dr. Robert S. Helman of New York Medical College, "heatstroke affects all races equally. However, because of differences in social advantages, the annual death rate because of environmental conditions is more than three times higher in blacks than in whites."

Another study by the Borden Institute, which researches medical issues in the military, states: "It has been suggested that as a group, blacks are less heat-tolerant than whites. This is certainly supported by U.S. Army medical reports."

I don't want to make any more out of this than what it is—a man talking out loud without checking his facts first. Baker isn't saying the solution to the Cubs' difficulties is more people of color and fewer people of pastiness. He's saying what a lot of people take on faith, that blacks are better suited for work in warm weather than whites are. He just happens to be wrong.

Bill Conlin of the Philadelphia Daily News questions Dusty's history lesson ("Yo, Dusty, do you think more slaves died in the summer heat of the Southeastern states or in the raging influenza epidemics of the winters?") and serves up a few historical parallels for comments of Baker's ilk: Dodger GM Al Campanis, football prognosticator Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder, and John Rocker. Not exactly good company to be in.

• The Mets divested themselves of one of the most disappointing players in recent memory, Roberto Alomar, trading him to the Chicago White Sox for three minor-leaguers. It certainly doesn't look like new GM Jim Duquette got very much for the second baseman except the privelege of paying his salary while the Mets rid themselves of a major disappointment. Then again, I can think of people I've worked with whom I would have paid $3.75 million to see leave, if only I had that kind of change lying around. And an interested buyer, of course.

The pick of the crap, I mean crop, of prospects the Mets received is pitcher Royce Ring. Around the Majors' Lee Sinins had this to say about Ring:

Ring, 22, was the Whitesox 1st round pick in 2002. He was ranked as the team's #10 prospect by Baseball America and was given a B grade by John Sickels. After having a 3.91 ERA in 21 games in A ball in 2002 (plus 5 shutout innings in Rookie ball), the reliever is off to a 2.52 ERA start in 36 games in AA in 2003.

Meanwhile, the dismantling of the Mets jugger-naught continues. On Monday they traded outfielder Jeromy Burnitz to the Dodgers for three promising prospects, and reportedly the Dodgers will even pick up some of the outfielder's $11.5 million salary. Burnitz alone won't be enough to help the Dodgers' woeful offense, which is now smarting from a season-ending knee injury to Brian Jordan, a second stint on the DL from the Crime Dog, Fred McGriff, and an all-around craptacular season from Shawn Green. But even with all that and the Dodgers having lost 15 of 20, Jim Tracy -- with the help of the nearest hardware store and a deep pitching staff -- will probably still cobble together something resembling a wild-card contender.

There's plenty more of this stuff, but at the risk of drowning my readership in old news, I'm just going to have to accept that I missed the better part of two weeks baseball and move on...