The preorder campaign for FIFTY SEASONS has begun! If you preorder FIFTY SEASONS from Rainy Day Books, I’ll inscribe it any way you like. And if you preorder it from anywhere, be sure to save your receipt — we will send you some of the chapters that were cut from the book. FIFTY SEASONS comes out February 2!
George Brett was the first person to tell me about baseball’s Dirt Rule. I don’t know whether he invented the precept or if it was passed down to him somehow, but the Dirt Rule goes as follows.
“The farther you are away from baseball’s dirt, the easier the game looks.”
I suppose the rule could be used to poke at sportswriters or fans who sit high above the field and enthusiastically criticize players even though, as the old line goes, they never played the game. But George meant the rule for himself. He would marvel at how much simpler the game looked when he sat in the owner’s box and how easy it was to forget just how difficult playing baseball at the highest level really is.
I’m not sure how I missed it, but I guess former Yankees star catcher Jorge Posada was on a podcast a month or two ago, and he went on a spectacular, Bob Felleresque and Goose Gossagesque, “in my day” rant about today’s baseball. Or anyway, that’s what the headlines said:
So I went back and had the whole podcast transcribed. Posada did indeed say that today’s baseball is garbage — and a whole bunch of other quotes that, when taken at face value, reek of a cartoon old man yelling at clouds:
A few examples:
“I don’t think that today all these numbers and all these formulas and all these things make the ballplayer. The baseball being played today is garbage. It’s garbage. It’s garbage.”
“I can’t watch it. I can’t watch baseball; I watch three or four innings. I watch the playoffs — that I do watch.”
“You know? You’re going to tell me you’ll give seventy million dollars to a person who doesn’t hit, who hits thirty home runs and bats .202. That’s a ballplayer?”
“Today everybody has a swing coach. Today nobody emphasizes that you have to make contact with the ball, you know? This swing of trying to hit it out — little kids who weigh a hundred pounds soaking wet, trying to hit it out, and not putting the ball in play.”
On Jeter’s subpar defensive stats: “You watch him, and he’d set up like Cal Ripken. He’d set up, and you’d see him move two steps this way, and he’d move and move forward when a fast guy was up. … But these are things that don’t show up on the computer: that the guy moved this way, moved that way.”
“Today, as I said, the player has changed a lot. And the player today — I don’t know if it’s the phone, or social media — today it’s ‘how do I look, and how did I look.’ And, you know, they’ve lost that sense of playing for the team. Today I don’t know, there’s a lot of selfishness, I think, in the player.”
Now, let’s be clear here because this is part of the point —
