Hyde Park Blvd

In case you missed it, Amity Shlaes in the Washington Post uses Obama’s Team and Perfect Mark Buehrle (courtesy of Steve Kaplan) to ’splain why pay caps for CEOs are a non starter:

After all, people hire for the long term, not just for one recession or recovery. And talent is rarer than we tend to think. “In a world where skill is in great demand and markets are large — when a lot of money is at stake, whether it’s baseball or finance — market forces insure that those skilled people get paid a lot,” says Kaplan. Pay caps, or even too much harassment from regulators, will drive the talent to jobs where there aren’t such obstacles. The result will be fewer perfect games in the corporate world: “You pay peanuts, you get monkeys,” says Kaplan.

As of January 1, 2009, a total of 11,305,896 Major League baseball games had been played since the leagues were first organized (founding of the National League in 1876).

Eighteen of those games have been perfect.  Or one of every 628,105.

Or .00016%

Until yesterday, five pitchers had thrown one perfect game and at least one no-hitters:  Addie Joss, Cy Young, Sandy Koufax, Jim Bunning, and Randy Johnson.

Age 30, Mark Buehrle is under the radar.  He doesn’t make a lot of noise, largely  because he rarely throws 90mph and because it’s not his nature.  Reminiscent of Carleton Fisk, he keeps to himself (the difference being that Carlton moved on a glacial time scale.  For Buehrle, it’s get the agate and throw it; whatever happens is just part of the game.  Posturing and overthinking aren’t part of the plan).  Yesterday the cut fastball wasn’t working, so the mix was mostly change-ups and curve balls. A left-handed Greg Maddux?

With one out in the 9th, Buehrle struck out Michael Hernandez on a 3-2 changeup.  With a changeup!  With a perfect game on the line.

How to explain?  For my money it’s the poise of a man comfortable in his own skin and constantly humbled by his own good fortune.

Happy 4th!  Let’s talk baseball.

Headline news:

Sam Fuld arrives, born from the head of Zeus via Stanford with a name to conjure with, maybe the perfect baseball name.  Despite the two-game career to date, he’s already the best Jewish, diabetic outfielder ever.

And he’s the difference-maker that the Cubbies have needed lo these many months.  Sweet Lou woke up one morning, decided that it was his team, and he said, ‘Self, it’s time to sit Fonzie despite his .220 batting average and Quixotic fielding.  Screw the All Star voting.  Screw Hendry.’

Double down on that pre-season bet.  Watch Los Cubs go from here….

GordonBeckham — Bacon if you’re Ozzie Guillen — is the first wave of the next-gen Sox.  Sox Machine puts its finger on the delicious puzzle that is Kenny Williams (and why he and Ozzie make up the most interesting mgr/genl mgr team, at least from a fan perspective):

The next wave is already setting up shop
For the next couple of years, the Sox have a chance of running out a five-man rotation that costs less than $25 million, especially if Aaron Poreda can stick as a starter.

They have half of the diamond covered with long-term solutions at depressed prices (Gordon Beckham, Carlos Quentin, Alexei Ramirez and eventually Tyler Flowers).  Brandon Allen could be in the plans as soon as the start of next year, and Jordan Danks won’t be far behind.  In 2011, Dayan Viciedo becomes another true impact possibility, and maybe even Jared Mitchell if all goes well.

What has the past told us?
After the 2007 season, everybody expected Kenny Williams to officially close the window of opportunity.  Instead, he extended Dye, Buehrle and A.J. Pierzynski, traded his most attractive asset for an older shortstop and mortgaged the farm for Nick Swisher.  It worked.

Williams is nearly impossible to predict, but here are two things I know about him:

No. 1: He doesn’t make obvious decisions in obvious situations.

This is a guy who let a 90-win team sink under its own weight, then went and bolstered a 72-win team.  Given that this team is literally a .500 club, there may not be a clear-cut path Williams “should” pursue.

It’s probably something along the lines of, “Get something for Dye, Thome and Dotel, because you aren’t going to get draft picks,” so I’m going to go in the opposite direction.

No. 2: He’s loath to make public concessions.

Williams does know when start over, and 2007 is a good example.  He chose to reshape his rotation aggressively by trading for Danks and Floyd, but they had to take their lumps before his vision came to fruition.

This time around, the new guys are getting the hard-knocks treatment, but the Sox aren’t taking on water yet.  I don’t see Williams bowing out, especially with the money coming off the books.

So, hold or buy?

When the idea of a playoff push deserved a Jim Mora-style reaction earlier this month, I didn’t see Williams making a trade simply to make a trade.

Even though they’re in better position to buy, I haven’t changed my mind on that front.

At the risk of reading too much into one incident, I’m going to bank on the Peavy non-trade being the template for the White Sox’s deadline maneuvering — sidling up to other teams and saying, “Hey, baby, if you don’t want that extended contract in this economy … here’s my number.”

If the deadline comes and goes without any activity from the Sox, I wouldn’t be surprised — especially if Quentin is anywhere near 100 percent after the All-Star break.  That’s a big acquisition in and of itself.  Alternatively, I can see this year being an active one for post-deadline deals with payrolls being an issue.

What I can’t see is any scenario that makes the Sox a lesser team in August.  Nor can I see any reason to be disappointed by that prospect.

Carlos and Larry discuss dinner plans (AP photo)

Fun at the ballpark doesn’t get any funner than this weekend.  Sweet Lou Piniella apes his managerial heroes, tells Milton Bradley what he really thinks and suggests that Milton go home.  Not go in the clubhouse, but change into civvies and go home mid-game.  Which he does.

Next day, the Manager apologizes and Milton and Lou share some tearful man-love in a closed-door meeting (somewhere along the way, Lou lost his copy of the Billy Martin playbook).

Milton agrees to meet with the press, claims that he has no friends on the team, especially now that Gerald Perry and Joey Gaithright are gone.  Clearly, someone found Milton a dog-eared copy of the Adolfo Phillips playbook (in a legendary TV moment, Cubby outfielder Phillips cried to Jack Brickhouse and, in broken English, ’splained that Tony Taylor, his only friend on the team, had been traded to Philly).

Left unsaid is that it’s always about Milton, who just happens to be the last guy to arrive for a game, the first one out the door afterwards.  And that, most days, he’s not particularly approachable.

Pitching coach Larry Rothschild, who has become Lou’s Bobo, runs around telling people that it’s his job to find the ‘rat’ in the clubhouse.

Soriano (who misplayed balls all weekend, never fails to get a poor jump, and has now defaulted to playing deep and out of position), stood up for Bradley before the press.  With Fukudome (who doesn’t speak English), the three of them compose the worst $200M no-trade-clause outfield that money can buy.

The beloved, orphaned one, Mark DeRosa, who got a standing O from Cub fans when he returned this year as a Cleveland Indian), was dealt from Cleveland to St. Louis.

Big Z. did a public reading (for the benefit of the press) of pitching coach Don Cooper’s major league record (one win, six losses) from the White Sox media guide, noting that Coop never pitched a no-hitter.  Then the 4-3, self-proclaimed Cy Young-candidate Zambrano went out and had his usual emotional breakdown, threw a wild pitch on a suicide squeeze, hit the next batter, handed the ball to Lou, then looked for something to destroy in the dugout.  He was restrained by the Bobo.

I listened to all of Sunday’s 6-0 fun while stuck in the traffic surrounding Chicago’s Gay Pride parade, which made for what the French call ’son et lumiere.’  Especial thanks to the women on the Vespa wearing matching Catholic-school-cum-grindhouse plaid skirts and knee-high fishnets.

So much for physics and the Magnus effect.  As Bert Blyleven, Three-Finger Mordecai Brown, and Joan Joyce (of the Stratford, nee Raybestos, Brakettes, maybe the best of this elite company) could tell you, a curveball is more than just the physics behind the Magnus effect.

A curve ball — the deuce, hook, yakker — is what happens when you get the batter to look for one thing and you give him or her something else.

In other words, the perfect optical dissolution as demonstrated by Ennis et. al. in this Best Visual Illusion of the Year.

Cool even if you’re not into baseball.

Science has spent years explaining the physics of the curve.  For many years it was dismissed as little more than an optical illusion.  Dizzy Dean, a master of the art, used to say “Stand behind a tree 60 feet away (the distance from the pitcher to home plate) and I’ll smack you with an optical illusion.”

“Jolly” Charlie Grimm

Last year, I wrote a blog about Kenny Williams and entertainment.  Right or wrong, the GM is always pushing used cars, always dealing, always convinced that, if he can’t beat the odds, the manager or pitching coach or cosmic whimsy will push things his way.  The Kenny pictured by Lewis in Moneyball was all wong.

The truth is, as long as the Cubs are around, Kenny (and Ozzie and A.J. and D.J. and the gang) will be a second-rate act.  Forget the schadenfreude, it’s simply a pleasure to wake up in the morning and read about the soap opera that is the North Side baseball club.  The sale, the park, the superstation.  Lou Piniella can’t wait to get out of the media room and into his next cocktail.  With a mouthful of spittle and poor word choices, Lou free associates about about Little Fontenot and Big Z and the saving grace that is May.

Big Z is injured, then he’s suspended, then he’s moping, then he’s whispering in that conspiratorial way that signals words put in his mouth by others, then he pinch homers in extra innings.  Nothing matters to Soriano, especially his inability to hit curve balls.  De Rosa is traded for budget and psychic spaces necessary to accommodate Milton Bradley and his traveling medicine show.  New father Carlos Marmol appears on MySpace canoodling with a not-so-sweet young thing.  Derek Lee is epic in his candor, his huge, graceful pose, and in his very human fall to earth.

Not to mention the delight of listening to Ron Santo.

And the fans?  In today’s Tribune, Sara Paretsky gets them just right:

Are Cubs fans like tragic literary characters?

No. They’re more like very tired women living with alcoholic men who complain about the drinking but do things that enable the men to continue. They’re not tragic, just depressing.

The end of the Michelin-man era. Ball players are noticeably leaner. Team focus is on speed, defense, skill positions — all the makings of a small-ball renaissance. The economy drives a renewed focus on farm systems and growing from within, as opposed to spending from without.

Prospects for my personal albatross, the White Sox, are poor this season, ideally a transition-on-the-fly — from Dye and Konerko and Thome to Beckham and Getz and Poreda. Which is disheartening, especially with the prospect of a flush Cubs team.

But I’m looking forward to a great year.

Good announcers make the difference. In short order, Harrelson and Stone have proven to be a delight.

Good announcing teams make bad games tolerable, good games treasures. During Thursday night’s 1-hitter by Buehrle, we listened to Hawk’s memories of Catfish Hunter and priceless banter about Mickey Tettleton and the immortal John Wockenfuss. Great stuff from my buddies for the next five months.

In today’s Chicago Sun Times, writer Joe Cowley reflects on a more sober White Sox clubhouse. In past years, the team was animated by characters more reminiscent of the players who populated the books of Mark Harris, “Bang the Drum Slowly” in particular (originally a “US Steel Hour” TV drama with Paul Newman as catcher Bruce Pearson, a role that De Niro played in the 1973 movie directed by John Hancock). Cowley writes:

No longer heard in the clubhouse is Juan Uribe calling Mark Buehrle ”Bailey” because that was the only way Uribe could pronounce his name. Or Uribe calling his teammates ”white people” because, for the most part, he didn’t know their names.

In Harris’ book, pitcher Henry Wiggen is the narrator. By virtue of his having written a previous book about his rookie season on the New York Mammoths (“The Southpaw,” also by Harris), his nickname is “Author.” Pearson, who can’t get most things right, calls him ‘Arthur.’

Which is to say that BTDS is a gem of a baseball novel (in a Ring Lardner/Mark Twain mode), the movie is underappreciated (Vincent Gardenia as Manager Dutch Schnell is particularly memorable), and it’s a primer for anyone interested in learning the intricacies of the card game TEGWAR — “The Exciting Game Without Any Rules.”

And that, crazy as he is, the Sox miss Uribe, his total lack of self-control, his ability to run sideways like a lizard (maybe even breathe through his eyelids like a lizard), his home-run minstrel-hands pose, and his voodoo whisper ‘Pro-fundo’ to the assembled in the dugout after each dinger.

Ozzie Guillen

I’m late, but I want to make sure that the blog memorializes my favorite statement ever from Ozzie Guillen. Ten syllables — as close as he’ll ever get to haiku:

Tomelo suave.