The Futility Infielder

Sunday, April 9 marks a special day in the history of FutilityInfielder.com. Namely, it's been five years since the inception of this site, five years since I penned this memorial tribute to Willie Stargell, registered a domain name that had been rolling around in my head for a few weeks, started learning the basics of HTML and web site construction, and began inflicting my version of baseball fandom and Luis Sojo worship on an unsuspecting public.

In the back of my mind, when I started to to think about this milestone, I envisioned doing something special to mark the occasion. Before I could get too serious about implementing any of my splashy ideas, I landed a sweet six-week gig writing for Fantasy Baseball Index, one that turned the rest of my life upside-down in the service of keeping attuned to the depth charts and injury situations of all thirty teams during a time of maximum roster volatility. It left me very little time to write in this space, something I dearly missed, but at the same time, it was exhilarating, it was maddening, it was educational, it was stoopid, it was work, it was fun. In conjunction with a few promotional appearances for Baseball Prospectus amid the mayhem, I felt proud that the five years I've put into this site and into writing about baseball had literally paid off.

Doing Futility Infielder has changed my life. It's made time fly; just the other day I was a 31-year-old art director with a new girlfriend on the cutting edge of a nascent phenomenon. Now I'm a 36-year-old freelance writer/designer/layabout who's closing in on my one-year wedding anniversary to the gal who encouraged me to follow my muse, often finding myself too busy to add to the massive chorus of a blogosphere gone wild. Running this site has provided an excuse to travel in pursuit of spring training, the All-Star Game, and the World Baseball Classic. It's put me on TV, on the radio, in bookstores, into a seven-foot tall sausage costume and on the shitlist of at least one bestselling author and a few mainstream columnists. It's filled my shelves with a plethora of free books from other authors, and crammed my scorebooks full of observations both trenchant and inane. It's brought me a wide network of new friends with whom I can spend hours swapping emails, talking on the phone, bending elbows or reveling in the highs and lows of the local nine.

Most importantly, it's allowed me to find a new voice for myself -- a voice I'd been seeking my entire life, I now realize -- and even made me a viable candidate for paid work in writing about baseball. I don't think I could ask for much more than that out of the past five years. And I thank each and every one of you out there who has helped to make that possible; I know who you are even if you don't.

So I'll wave this particular milestone through as though it were a runner on second base scoring on a gapper, a cool moment, but still part of the bigger picture of what I'm working towards -- a book or three with my own name on the cover, a site stocked with stories of all the characters which have made my quarter-century of fandom so rewarding, a wealth of tales for my kids and grandkids that can live up to the ones my father and grandfather told me about this grand pastime. I'm light years closer to that goal than I could have envisioned half a decade ago. So if today's celebration is a bit muted by the aftermath of my crazy month and the dawn of the regular-season Prospectus Hit List, know that I'll find some way to revel in The Big Five in due time.

• • •

On Opening Day, a few of my Baseball Prospectus buds and I indulged in a roundtable as the Yankees destroyed the A's 15-2. At some point the chatter turned to scouring the rosters to see the unlikely names who turned up. Nate Silver placed the over/under the players of whom roster maven Christina Kahrl had never heard at four. Christina took the time to count and came up with two or three. Yowzah.

While I couldn't approach that number, I could relate. Roster battles had become the essential dietary staple of my fantasy month, whether following the players I'd covered for BP06 as they chased spots on the 25-man Opening Day dockets (here's poor James Jurries, beaten out by a nearly invalid Brian Jordan for a spot on the Braves, there's Matt Diaz winning the platoon battle in left) or stumbling down memory lane with a blast from the past (how the hell did Luis Ordaz, a staple of the original "Confessions of a Futility Infielder" piece, and one of the most inept hitters ever -- .218/.274/.248 -- turn up on the Rays roster, only to tear up his knee five innings into his first big-league game in four years?).

Savoring Ordaz's all-too-brief cameo in the box scores, I dug in when our chatter randomly turned to a member of Infielderus futilis whom I knew nothing about: Jim Walewander, a Tigers backup whose sole big-league home run (witnessed by Nate Silver) became inextricably intertwined with his appreciation of the band the Dead Milkmen (who also witnessed said blast), somehow scarring his meager career (see this Chin Music interview for the full story).

I love the places that talking about baseball can take us. That's why I do what I do.

• • •

As I recall the fond memories of my own baseball-watching youth, I'm heartened to find that the anniversary of this site's inception shares its date with another noteworthy anniversary. Twenty-five years ago, on April 9, 1981, a rotund 20-year-old rookie, Fernando Valenzuela, took the hill of Dodger Stadium in place of an injured Jerry Reuss and spun a shutout against the Houston Astros to open the season. That was the first of an eight-start streak in which Valenzuela would toss seven complete games and five shutouts. By May 18, he was 8-0 with a microscopic 0.50 ERA, a transcendant superstar who could pack stadiums yet still couldn't speak a lick of English. Fernandomania was all the rage.

I was an 11-year-old baseball geek when this all went down. I'd cut out Valenzuela's box scores and tape them into a notebook, compute his microscopic ERA on my mom's calculator, trace pictures of him out of Sports Illustrated. No player ever let me revel in the experience of being a fan the way he did.

Though a seven-week strike would mar the 1981 season, the Dodgers, due to some split-season chicanery, made the playoffs on the strength of their early burst from the gate on Valenzuela's broad shoulders. They fell behind the Astros 2-0 in the ad hoc Division Series between the two champs of the NL West before taking three in a row, fell behind the Expos 2-1 in the NLCS before forcing the game -- delayed a day by rain -- that would decide the pennant. Fernando matched Ray Burris for eight innings of a tense 1-1 duel before Rick Monday bopped a two-out solo home run off of Steve Rogers, the Montreal ace summoned in relief on two days' rest, in the top of the ninth. The Expos had two out and two on before Tommy Lasorda summoned Bob Welch out of the bullpen to close the deal and nail down the pennant for the Dodgers (ask an Expos fan about Blue Monday and you'd better have a handkerchief and a shoulder to offer).

Thus the Dodgers made it back to the World Series to face the Yankees for the third time in five years. They fell behind two games to none but Valenzuela proved the stopper in Game Three, recording one of the ugliest complete games on record: 9 IP, 9 H, 4 ER, 7 BB, 6 SO. The Dodgers won that game 5-4, and reeled off three more to vanquish the Yanks for their first World Championship since 1965. That winter, Valenzuela was voted to both Rookie of the Year and Cy Young honors.

Of all people, my sparring partner at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Gene Collier, penned the warmest tribute to Fernandomania today:

In the quarter century since, baseball rarely has delivered the kind of uplifting story line that would explode across this continent over the next 5 1/2 weeks. On this silver anniversary of Fernandomania, that sounds vaguely like an indictment, even if it isn't meant that way.

...But he was so much more than the staggering proportions of his statistical profile. His cherubic innocence channeled everything that was good about the game, and his windup, an earnest 100-degree twist punctuated with a last-second glance to the heavens just before his delivery, suggested the intercession of a higher power.

I'm not sure I could have found a better example of the way baseball brings all of us together than to find an old nemesis evoking such fond memories on this special day.

That, dear readers, is why I do what I do.