ESPN Monday Night Baseball. Athletics v. Cubs. Cubs scored like 5 runs in the bottom of the 7th, and now the announcers don’t seem so interested in the game. They’re chatting about all kinds of stuff, mostly speculating on how other teams are doing, who’s been sharp, who do we have concerns about, who needs the help of one more arm in the bullpen, when an Oakland player gets a 2-out double. Up to bat comes somebody named Nick Martini, pinch hitting, and now they’ve got a story to tell us.
It’s a short story, but they make it a longer one. Seems Nick Martini is relatively new to the bigs. He grew up on the North Side and regularly came to Wrigley as a kid. His whole family is in the bleachers wearing expensive replicas of his jersey, except for the early-middle-aged blonde woman in the center of the camera frame in the light orange, sleeveless, front-button-down cotton blouse who is identified as “Nick’s Mom” on the graphic. See, we’ve got a camera focused on them right there in the Front Row. They still live in the area.
“Not much for them to cheer tonight,” the announcers had said before the guy got his 2-out double.
Now, Nick is taking practice swings as the announcers tell us, “Martini has zero hits coming into tonight’s game.” Nick has one of those baseball beards, like an Amish farmer in a Harrison Ford police-corruption-clash-of-cultures movie.
It’s a situation MLB and ESPN dream about: One on, two outs, bottom of the 8th, and a guy with no big league hits* in the 8 years since his draft is coming up to bat with his family in the bleachers. You can’t make this up!
Sorry, I went away for a minute to watch the game. You shoulda seen what happened!
What Martini did was this. He had a 10-pitch at bat going. That’s a minimum of 5 foul balls, which I used to think was expensive for baseball because the fan who got the ball got to keep the ball but nowadays they throw the balls out like Rick throws away women when it comes within 3 inches of the ground, which cheapens the thrill of coming away from the stadium with a ball you didn’t have when you went in.
(We were allocated 2 balls per game in Little League. If a kid hit a foul ball outside the fenced area, some other kid not in the game would have to run grab the ball and bring it back to the green wooden announcers’ booth behind home plate to get a drink ticket, and kids would fight over the ball and the grown-ups would laugh about it, which tells you something either about the business acumen of the working class Dads running the league that folded three years after you graduated to Pony, or about the relative prices of fountain soda and baseballs in the ‘60’s, after “She Loves You” and before “Let It Be.” After the game, the used balls went into the teams’ equipment bags, one to each team. By the end of the season, each team had 18+ balls in their bags, minus balls that had decided to live out their lives in the ivy on the school playground we used for practice, and all the equipment bags went into storage in one of the families’ second garage (or barn) until next February, when the ground was dry enough again for tryouts.)
During these 10-pitches, the announcers talked about the strike zone and what the game would be like with an automated (i.e. video) strike zone, and I played that out in my head a bit.
You’d have to have instant video judgment on every call, which isn’t impractical with today’s tech prices and talent, but wouldn’t that mean just moving the umpires off the field into booths that realistically could be anywhere on earth, and do we really want to move umpiring offshore, and if so, why do we need capitals anymore since we can get everyone in the same virtual room with high-end video chat, and if we didn’t have to physically send representatives to the same building to negotiate** how we are going to spend all that money we pooled together to provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare, (does that include eliminating mass shootings?), and then negotiate how much each of us is going to chip in, and then some flathead says if you want one-man, one-vote then it has to be one-man, one-dollar of taxes, and there compromise starts to break down, well then would the results be any different?***
The announcer brings me back to beisbol again with talk of pitch counts. Turns out this is pitch 11, and Nick hits it out of the park, and how cool is that? I mean with his family right there on camera in their Martini jerseys jumping and hugging and the announcer pointing out, “Only Mom isn’t wearing Nick’s jersey,” and why is that important right now?
Cut to Nick rounding 3rd and slapping the 3B Coach’s hand. Cut back to the family.
“I think that’s Mom, right?” There is a hint of sexist-apology in Announcer’s voice that briefly confuses and distracts me.
Then…Then, get this! Then, the program cuts back to live an instant before the Next Batter Up launches the Next Pitch out of the park! Now how cool is that?
Postscript:
Martini’s spot comes up again in the bottom-of-the-ninth with one-on and two-out in a walk-off situation, but there’s a lefty throwing now and Nick’s manager sends up a pinch hitter, a right-handed power hitter, which is “the right thing to do,” the disappointed announcer tells us, and PH shortly launches one at the Martini family! but it dies on the Wrigley warning track. Cubs win.
Announcer says, “With the way the balls were flying out of here tonight, I thought that was a walk-off when it left the bat.”
What he meant was: “That must not have been one of this year’s juiced balls.”
*Not true. He had 0 hits so far this season but he had big league hits before tonight, and tonight was Martini’s 2nd career home run, and anyway, it’s a better story my way, don’t you think?
**Negotiation 101, w/Bruce Willis. One of my daughter and my favorite movies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TyxxLHfBwE
***Would #MoscowMitch still be able to single-handedly block sensible, bi-partisan gun control legislation?
The Billy Pulpit 