The Futility Infielder

In 1922, a young sportswriter named Paul Gallico made arrangements to step into the boxing ring for a single round against heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey. Predictably, he got the snot beaten out of him, though he took pride in having departed the event in one piece, "knowing all there was to know about being hit in the ring. It seems I had gone to an expert for tuition."

In 1960, inspired by Gallico's bravado, one of the great writers of the century, George Plimpton, pulled some strings through Sports Illustrated (where he was a frequent contributor) and found himself on the hill at Yankee Stadium, pitching to an all-star lineup of National Leaguers. Richie Ashburn, Willie Mays, Frank Robinson, Ernie Banks, Frank Thomas (the original), Gil Hodges, Stan Lopata, and Bill Mazeroski took their hacks against the amateur Plimpton (who, in a nod to T.S. Eliot, was pitching under the assumed name of Prufrock), chasing him in short order.

Plimpton turned his account of his struggles that afternoon into a book, Out of My League: The Classic Hilarious Account of an Amateur's Ordeal in Professional Baseball. It was a classic in short order, with no less than Ernest Hemingway hailing it as "the dark side of the moon of Walter Mitty." The tale was so well-received that he returned to that style of "participatory journalism" for several more books, including Paper Lion: Confesions of a Last-String Quarterback, The Bogey Man: A Month on the PGA Tour, Shadow Box (in the ring against Archie Moore) and Open Net (as a goalie for the Boston Bruins).

Into this grand tradition steps Sports Illustrated's Tom Verducci, who spent five days in spring training with the Toronto Blue Jays, an experience which is the cover story of this week's issue. Verducci (whom I've had the pleasure of chatting with at the past two winter meetings) is 44, slender, and athletic-looking, but his baseball skills are admittedly rusty:

Excluding handfuls of pickup games involving other sportswriters, I have not faced live pitching in more than 23 years, since a Rudy-like career at Penn State spent almost entirely as an outfielder on the practice squad. I have not hit with a wooden bat since I was 10, and that one was held together with nails and electrical tape.

The story opens with Verducci's tableau of life in leftfield:

With a change in perspective, the familiar becomes intensely intimate, like actually standing on the blue carpet of the Oval Office or feeling the floorboards of the Carnegie Hall stage beneath your feet or leaving footprints upon the Sea of Tranquility. It is not an out-of-body experience but rather its opposite: a saturation of sensations.

It is also a little like transporting dynamite on your person. A feeling of power, yes, but with a constant undercurrent of danger, especially knowing that Blue Jays first baseman Eric Hinske, who keeps fouling off pitches like a finicky shopper picking through unripe fruit, could at any moment send a curving line drive screaming my way or, worse, loft a fiendish high fly into that bright, cloudless sky and cruel cross-field wind, leaving me to look as if I were chasing a dollar bill dropped from a helicopter.

Verducci takes us through his five days in the Jays' camp, where he partakes in every BP session, runs every windsprint, shares in every clubhouse joke. He steps in against Roy Halladay and is impressed by the 2003 Cy Young award winner's "angry" fastball, but he's even more dazzled by Miguel Batista: "He has about eight varieties of pitches, and all of them move like a rabbit flushed out of a bush. He throws me one pitch that I swear breaks two ways -- first left, then right -- like a double-breaker putt in golf, only at about 90 mph." Verducci then reminds himself that Batista (or Shitty Poet, as he's known around these parts) was only 10-13 with a 4.80 ERA last year. To borrow a favorite line from The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading, and Bubble Gum Book, "Dear Ma, I'll probably be home sometime next week. They're starting to throw me the curve ball."

Over the course of his account, Verducci pitches in with plenty of observations about the cameraderie of the locker room, the personalities of the Jays' budding stars, the techniques of the team's coaches, and the rites of spring training -- right down to the pink slip. On day five, he finally gets into an intrasquad game. While he doesn't flail (or fail) quite as badly as Plimpton did -- and with all due respect, he's no Plimpton on the page either -- his account (and the accompanying self-interview) still makes for a unique and entertaining glimpse at a side of the game most of us would kill to experience.

• • •

If you're in the New York City area, I invite you to a Baseball Prospectus bookstore event tonight (Wednesday) at the Barnes and Noble on 106 Court Street in Brooklyn at 7 pm. Steve Goldman and Joe Sheehan will be plugging BP 2005 and answering questions, and I just may step into the box for a few myself. There are a couple more BP events in NYC on tap for this Saturday and next Monday; see below or here for details.