100 Things I Love About Baseball (Part 2)

Time now for our second 50 in the “100 Things I Love About Baseball.” As a reminder, here’s where we left off:

No. 52: “The game of ball is glorious.” — Walt Whitman.

No. 51: “Pitchers and catchers reporting.” — All of us. Soon. But not soon enough.

And away we go:

No. 50: The little half pencils so many people use to keep score. Those half pencils have been keeping golfers, putt-putters, church pew visitors, refrigerator notepad scribblers, and baseball scorekeepers happy since the Eisenhower administration, and I hope they never go out of style.

No. 49: The way batters slap their bat in frustration after fouling one straight back.

No. 48: Everything Kyle Schwarber. I mean, everything Schwarbs. He’s a free agent this year, and there seems to be some thought that the Phillies — having fallen just short the last few years — might move on from Kyle. This would be a horrible, horrible mistake in so many ways, but particularly on a cosmic level. Every team that has let Schwarbs go has gone to hell at least temporarily, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

No. 47: I sent No. 48 to our pal and over-the-top Phillies fan Linda Holmes in an effort to see how she would feel if the Phillies did indeed let Schwarbs go, and at first — because she’s Linda — she was philosophical about the nature of the game, the realities of finance and frustration. But after talking it through a bit, she ended by saying, “You’re right, I will be irate if they let him go.”

No. 46: The fact that every rookie, no matter how worldly, cynical or unromantic they might be, desperately wants the baseball from their first big league hit.

No. 45: A perfect bunt. I’m not a fan of the bunt as a strategy — not a fan of giving up outs when those are the most precious commodity in the game — but a perfect bunt that dies just out of reach of fielders’ gloves is a beauty to behold.

No. 44: The fact that I can write down a bloodless number like 5,714, and a good percentage of you will instantly think of the exact same pitcher, his rising fastball, the way he grunted after releasing the ball, and maybe that time he beat up Robin Ventura.

No. 43: Those little dances players do when they get on base. Yeah, they’re stupid. Baseball always should be at least a little bit stupid. These are young people playing a game!

No. 42. Home runs where the outfielder doesn’t move.

No. 41: The windmill arms of a third-base coach waving a runner in. It’s the most perfect signal in all of sports — better even than those two hands up in the air signaling touchdown or the spinning hands to indicate traveling. Those arms go round and around and shouting out — “GO! YOU’VE GOT TO GO! MOVE! RUN! HOME PLATE AWAITS!”

No. 40: “I would legitimately like to drive a yellow bus when I’m older. I wanna either be a crossing guard or drive a yellow bus.” — Brilliant Reader Joey Votto.

No. 39: The fact that NOBODY knows where the word fungo — as in “fungo bat” — comes from.

No. 38: The aura of weirdness surrounding the New York Mets. I don’t think there’s another team in sports like them. They’re often good, they’re rarely atrocious, they spend a lot of money, they legitimately try, and they always have Lucy pull away the football in the end. And they fail in different ways every time. It’s awe-inspiring, really.

No. 37: Home run saving catches that ACTUALLY save home runs (not as impressed with great catches where the ball would have bounced off the wall).

No. 36: The fact that just about every old baseball newspaper story I’ve seen lately — and I’ve seen A LOT of them while working feverishly on my next-next book — refers to at least one player as “elongated.”

No. 35: This list of the 11 rookies since 1935 who put up more than 40 batting runs:

Seven of these 11 are Hall of Famers or will be when they retire. Fred Lynn and José Abreu won MVPs (Lynn should have won a second in 1979). Pete Alonso is a beast, potentially on his way to 500 home runs.

And there’s Nick Kurtz. Future looks pretty bright, kid.

No. 34: I love this particular time where Nick Kurtz is not exactly a secret but is also not super well-known nationally. It’s like knowing about a band JUST before they break out.

No. 33: The fans who stubbornly refuse to stand during the wave. But also the fans who totally get into doing the wave as if it’s the best part of their day. There’s room in the world for all of us.

No. 32: Ice cream helmets. Obviously.

No. 31: The “How many parks would that have been a home run” Statcast feature. I love that stat so, so much, and I’m desperately trying to get people to call long homers that would have been out of every ballpark “30-for-30 blasts.” Yeah, I’m looking at you specifically, Boog and Jason. I put you in my first 50 things I love about the game, you owe me.

No. 30: The fact that pretty much every time I walk or drive around, I will see at least one parent — moms about as often as dads — throwing a baseball around with their kids.

No. 29: The fountains at Kauffman.

No. 28: The loving way umpires will walk around and slowly dust off the plate and slow the game down whenever a catcher is hit with a foul tip.

No. 27: That we live in a time where, arguably, the best baseball player of all time and the best hitter of all time are in their primes … and they’re two different players.

No. 26: That feeling of settling into a game that Tarik Skubal is starting … and knowing, just knowing, that you are about to see something extraordinary.

No. 25: The baseball use of the word “ace.” I love this so much — the word “ace” evolved from the Latin “as” which loosely means “a unit of one.” Based on my very limited etymology research — and I apologize in advance to all English professors everywhere — the English word ace was first used to denote the one dot on a six-sided die (singular of dice). Over time, it came to refer to the ace in playing cards, a winning serve in tennis (you win on one shot), and someone who excels at something like a flying ace.

So it would just make sense that you would call the team’s No. 1 pitcher an ace.

But it SEEMS as if the pitching ace actually comes from an entirely different source — it probably derived from the pitching exploits of Asa Brainard, who played for some teams in the National Association before the birth of the National League. Brainard — along with Jim Creighton — was one of those rebellious pitchers in the early days of baseball who didn’t want to be the token “play starter.” Back then, pitchers had to pitch the ball underhand to the batter’s requested location. Brainard and Creighton started spinning the ball, flipping their wrists to add speed, refusing to throw the ball where the hitter wanted it. Creighton was probably more effective and influential, but nobody wanted to call star pitchers “Jims.”

So ace it is.

No. 24: McCovey’s Cove.

No. 23: Bob Uecker on when he got released: “They broke it to me gently. The manager came up to me before a game and told me they don’t allow visitors in the clubhouse.”

No. 22: All those kids — so many kids — who have sent me photographs of them reading The Baseball 100 and Why We Love Baseball. Yes, that’s personal, not universal, but every time I hear people say that baseball has lost the kids (and boy do I hear that all the time), I think about them. There’s a whole lot more for kids to do now than there was then, absolutely, but so many of them still love baseball, and it makes my heart sing.*

No. 21: Those days when Mike Trout is Mike Trout again. Alas, it doesn’t look like his body will ever let him be the legendary hitter he once was, but he still knows more about hitting a baseball than just about anyone, and it’s still something profound to watch him work. And when he connects, it feels like a few years have melted away. What I want for Mike Trout is for him to be a veteran for a winning team, for him to get to the World Series, for him to have a few more moments in the sun. But I don’t know if that’s in the cards. Really, I just want him to be happy in his final years before he goes to Cooperstown. He’s such a credit to the game.

No. 20: The on-deck circle and the fact that nobody stands inside it.

No. 19: That feeling of possibility that washes over me when I see a 1987 Eric Davis baseball card. I know there are players like that for you, too, players you loved who were so good … and had the promise of being even better.

No. 18: The baseball phrase “Ducks on the pond.” This comes directly from early baseball announcer Arch McDonald, who is worthy of his own rabbit-hole story. For now let’s just say that Arch was probably not much of an announcer, but he had a knack for phraseology — he was the first to call Joe DiMaggio the “Yankee Clipper,” the first to say a middle-middle fastball was “right down Broadway,” and he was the one who referred to runners on base as “ducks on the pond.”

No. 17: The ageless Dodger Stadium. I don’t care how old it gets, there’s still no place better to watch a ballgame. You know, once you actually get in. And good luck getting out. But those hours in between are bliss.

No. 16: The tilt-a-whirl ride that is Elly De La Cruz.

No. 15: The fact that I know balks exist, and yet I’ve never actually seen one.

No. 14: All those players from George Brett to Craig Biggio to Vlad Guerrero to Jason Kendall who would not wear batting gloves. Every now and again, Vladdy Jr. will go to the plate without batting gloves, and it makes me so happy.*

*Remember that very weird time when a handful of NFL kickers wouldn’t wear shoes because they were convinced they could kick the ball straighter and longer with bare feet? I sure hope we see that again someday.

No. 13: The Ivy at Wrigley.

No. 12: “They give you a round bat, and throw you a round ball, and they tell you to hit it square.” — Willie Stargell.

No. 11: 60 feet, 6 inches.

No. 10: That the bases can be loaded, juiced, drunk, jammed, packed, full, clogged, occupied, stacked, and bursting, and when that happens, there’s no room for the batter, no place to put him, no margin for error, nowhere to hide, no excuses left, no spot for waste pitches, but there’s also a play at every base, a force at home, a chance to be the hero, an opportunity for the double play, an opening to win this game with one swing of the bat!

No. 9: The first peek at the outfield green when you walk up the stairs into a ballpark.

No. 8: That gamers can play as Shohei Ohtani, Ted Williams, Satchel Paige, Jackie Robinson, Aaron Judge, Josh Gibson, or Babe Ruth when playing MLB The Show.

No. 7: Everything — absolutely everything — about PNC in Pittsburgh: the Clemente Bridge, the gleaming skyline, the Primanti Brothers sandwiches, the eternal hope that Willie Stargell will reemerge and lead the way.

No. 6: Rolling dice on a Strat-o-Matic board.

No. 5: The many hours I have spent trying to figure out Mighty Casey’s WAR.

No. 4: The Buck O’Neil statue in the entryway of the Hall of Fame.

No. 3: The echoing voice of Vin Scully.

No. 2: The childlike wonder of every person who hits a home run, a look that says, as the philosopher Urkel hath spoken, “Did I do that?”

No. 1: My Jim Kern baseball. Yes, this is personal, and the story is long, but I was just looking at the ball (well, the second ball) again this morning and smiling. When I was very young — maybe six or seven — we went to a ballgame at old Municipal Stadium in Cleveland, and we saw a bunch of kids standing at the railing. I asked my father, who came to America just a couple of years before I was born, what they were doing. He did not know.

“They’re getting autographs,” a friendly man sitting behind us said. “You should go down there and get one.”

So I took a few sheets of scrap paper and a pencil (I have no idea where they came from) and raced down to get somebody’s autograph. But I was so small that I couldn’t get to the front, and soon the players started to leave. I started to cry.

And then the tallest of the bunch turned around, saw me crying, and said, “Hey, give me the paper fast.” I handed him the paper and pencil, and Jim Kern — who was darned good, by the way — signed my paper.

I was SO excited. My first autograph. Greatest day of my life. I raced back to my seat to show my autograph to Dad and … well, he wrote it in pencil so lightly that we couldn’t even find it. I don’t think I cried the second time, but I’m sure I felt like it.

Years later, I wrote this story in the paper. A little while later, I got a little box in the mail. I opened it up to find the most delightful thing imaginable: An autographed baseball from Jim Kern. And it wasn’t just autographed — it had a special message from Jim himself!

Yeah, that says: “To Joe: Quit Whining.”

What a delight! That baseball immediately became my second-most beloved baseball treasure behind only the game-worn hat and bat that my all-time hero Duane Kuiper sent me (a whole other story, as most of you already know!).

The story should end there … but it doesn’t, because we have a dog. His name is Westley. He’s 13 now, spending his retirement years lamenting that the kids can’t bunt and starting pitchers don’t finish games (except, I tell him, Yoshinobu Yamamoto!), but the truth is he was never a particularly active ballplayer. No matter how many times we tried to get him to fetch, he’d just kind of look at the ball as if to say, “Why did you throw it all the way over there?”

For some reason, though, he LOVED that Jim Kern baseball.

I mean, he REALLY loved it.

That dog has been around hundreds and hundreds of baseballs, and that’s the only one he ever attacked. I don’t get it. Maybe he thought Sid Monge should have gotten more of those 1978 save opportunities.

Whatever, I wrote THAT story in a Why We Love Baseball footnote, and when I went to Dallas for a book event, the moderator began by saying, “We have a little surprise for you.”

And with that, JIM KERN HIMSELF walked up to the front of the room. And he handed me a baseball. This is what it says:

I mean, how great is that. But the best part comes when you turn the ball over.

I know as a baseball fan, you have your own version of this story.

God, I love baseball.