The Futility Infielder

It's that time of week again; the Prospectus Hit List is signed, sealed, and delivered. There's a new bird ruling the roost this time around, with the St. Louis Cardinals taking over the top spot from the Baltimore Orioles, who dropped to fourth, and the Twins and White Sox in between those two.

This was the tightest battle for the top spot in the half-dozen of PHLs I've written, with the top four teams completely shuffling themselves between Sunday and Monday. Interleague play wrought no small amount of havoc all the way around. The O's stumbled against the Reds (last week's #28) and the Pirates (who have shaken off the derision I heaped upon them earlier this season to approach .500). The Twins lost a dramatic series to the Dodgers, one which saw Hee Seop Choi hit six homers, including a walk-off on Friday night and a hat-trick's worth on Sunday (see Jon Weisman for some great insight into Choi's ups and downs). Last week's #4, the Rangers, lost five out of six to the Phillies and the Braves. Put two teams that don't see each other but once every few years, and stuff happens.

The Yankees, of course, continued to careen down the lost highway, dropping two of three to the Brewers and then two of three to the Cardinals, finishing their road trip at an unsightly 3-9 and overall having lost 11 of 14. They're now #17 on the Hit List. Friday night's three-error debacle prompted Joe Torre to give his squad both barrels:

Furious after a performance he called the low point of the Yankees' dismal season, Torre tore into his players in a meeting after the game. In comments to members of the news media after a brutal 8-1 loss to the St. Louis Cardinals, Torre did not hold back.

"I'm just not happy," he said after the Yankees collected three errors and just six hits. "It was an ugly game. We didn't play hard enough. We didn't do anything to help ourselves win. It was an embarrassing, embarrassing game."

Derek Jeter and others said they had never seen Torre as upset as he was after the game. Though he later modified his answer, Jeter seemed as disgusted as Torre at what he had seen. "It seems like we don't care," Jeter said.

Asked if the message would be heard in the clubhouse, the third-base coach, Luis Sojo, who won four World Series rings under Torre, said, "It'd better be, because he never talks like that. I've been here 10 years, and I've never seen him talking like that."

As if on cue, Randy Johnson finally delivered a gem on Saturday, shutting out the league's most potent offense and striking out seven in seven innings (hmmm, maybe he's just a National League pitcher?). But by Sunday, the Yanks were back to the business of sucking like an Electrolux. Scott Seabol, a former 88th round pick who spent seven years in the Yankees' system while drawing a lone at-bat in 2001 -- think of him as the poor man's Clay Bellinger and wince -- socked a two-run pinch-homer off of Tanyon Sturtze to key a four-run rally. Guh.

While George Steinbrenner declared that Joe Torre's job is safe the other day, how many Yankee skippers have heard that line before? How many who heard that are even alive to tell the tale? Not Billy Martin, Bob Lemon, or Dick Howser, to be sure, and one imagines a psych-ward's worth of interims who've been institutionalized as well. Like the ringmaster of a particularly decrepit traveling circus, GM Brian Cashman made the road trip to all four cities and though he's got "a lot of things going on behind the scenes," there are few Band-Aids available. Sure, the Yankees might move Tony Womack either to centerfield or (fingers crossed) a city more worthy of his baseball talents such as Moose Jaw, and futilityman Rey Sanchez has a pair of bulging disks in his neck, necessitating a roster move, but then what? Per Cliff Corcoran, we're just flogging the should-have-signed-Carlos-Beltran horse again, and that's about the deadest nag in the stable.

• • •

With the Yankee broadcast turned to low volume in the background, I'm finally digging into Steve Goldman's Forging Genius, and I've got a pile of other books to discuss as well (if you're an author or publisher who's sent one along, apologies for the delay; nothing personal, just a wedding and a honeymoon and the need to keep paying the bills ahead of you in the batting order). Though my scrawlings here have been kind of irregular, I'm going to try to get through one or two books in each of my posts.

Today's honor -- a book I bought rather than one sent in solicitation of a review -- goes to one of my favorite writers, Steve Rushin, who does the "Air and Space" column for Sports Illustrated. Stellar photography aside, he's really the only reason I keep resubscribing to the mag. Rushin's first book, Road Swing, saw him spend a year driving all over the country to sample every meat of our country's sporting stew (both literally and figuratively), with gut-busting results. Honestly, the only other writer who makes me laugh out loud on as consistent a basis is David Sedaris. If I'm reading either of them in public, I tend to giggle so maniacally that I get worried looks from strangers, and I thank multiple dieties that I've still got control of my bladder as I wipe away the tears. No joke.

Rushin's new book, The Caddy Was A Reindeer and Other Tales of Extreme Recreation, is a collection of columns and features done for SI, but it finds the author treading similar ground to Road Swing with no less hysterical results. Travel-writing dominates the collection, which is named for and more or less bookended by a pair of stories in which Rushin goes to the Arctic Circle in search of the northernmost golf courses in the world:

I had first heard of ice golf two summers earlier, while traveling under the midnight sun in northern Scandinavia. "You must return in the winter," implored the deskman at the Strand Hotel in Helsinki, "when we play ice golf on frozen lakes and snow, in freezing temperatures, with balls that are purple."

"Yes, well, I imagine they would be," I stammered...

Golf, the great leveler of presidents and palookas, forms the backdrop for a couple other stories and functions a metaphor throughout the book, as Rushin fully explores some of mankind's more futile sporting pursuits and our attempts to salvage dignity and build character through the adversity induced by them: "When I asked my caddie at Old Head what the course record was, he said, 'Safe.'"

In doing so, Rushin's travels take him all over the globe -- the Tour de France, the World Cup, pub darts in England, a flurry of pre-Olympic activity in Nagano, a volcano crater in Bali (site of an 18-hole course), the Nurburgring road in Germany (the closed track where many car commercials are filmed), and in pursuit of competitive eaters, rollercoaster buffs, and tailgaters extraordinaire. Rushin's a big kid at heart, one in awe of the world's sporting wonders, but he's a sensitive one as well, with a sympathetic ear for those whose out-of-leftfield sporting pursuits bring them a sense of identity, and a willingness to lose his lunch finding out what they go through.

Which isn't to say that the author avoids the big four North American sports. There's a a meditation on the secret language of Red Sox fans, a sympathetic profile of former Reds and Tigers manager Sparky Anderson, plenty of basketball (including a touching account of his courtship of WNBA star Rebecca Lobo, now his wife), and at the center of the book, a fascinating 58-page meditation, written for SI's 40th anniversary issue, that delves into the rise of such modern-day wonders as Monday Night Football and the career of Roone Arledge (a pet topic of mine), the Astrodome, and a profile of the men behind those garish rival startup leagues of the Seventies, the World Hockey Association and the World Football League.

How great is this book? I can give it no higher praise than to say that it was the only one I took time out from my honeymoon to read. I had saved it for just such a special occasion, and it more than lived up to the honor. Don't miss the an excerpt of Caddie at Amazon and check out an archive or two of Rushin's columns (some of them subscription-only) at SI.com if you haven't had the chance to sample his work.