Beltran’s New Intangible Tool:

Carlos Beltran, who recently proclaimed that Mets were the team to beat in the NL East, is in many ways your classic five tool player: he 1) hits for average, 2) hits for power, 3) is an excellent base-runner, 4) fields his position exceptionally well, 5) and has a strong throwing arm. Jimmy Rawlins, the Philadelphia shortstop at whom Beltran’s statement was directed, is fairly toolsey himself, but people more frequently praise his fire, leadership, passion, and, lately, his NL MVP award.

The five-tool label is justly regarded with a fair amount of skepticism, firstly because it is hard to accurately judge who actually posses said tools, and also because it is not really necessary to posses all five tools in order to be an amazing ball player. David Ortiz does literally nothing for the Boston Red Sox other than draw walks and smack the shit out of the ball; you’d still want him on your team over the vast majority of baseball players, even if that meant playing him at first and being defensively weak there as a consequence.

The five tool designation is used to identify the players who posses the physical gifts necessary for the game of baseball, and there is an implied opposition between them and the gritty players, the “grinders” and “hustlers” (the David Ecksteins, Paul LoDucas, and Endy Chavie), who, while not blessed with inordinate physical gifts, have gotten themselves a place in the game (and in the affections of sports writers) through heart, passion and character. Classic five tool players include Alex Rodriquez and young Barry Bonds and the implication, when one considers the way in which writers and fans have treated the arc of their careers, is that their superabundance of talent actually hurt them, both as human beings and ballplayers. Due to their amazing physical gifts, they were never forced to develop the fortitude and intangibles of their less talented counter-parts and this is the reason that A-Rod is a choke artist and a head-case and Bonds is an arrogant asshole. Five tool players are frequently presented like the rich girl in my high school photography class, who took far and away the best pictures of any of us: she had a really nice camera and had taken pictures of India-- the rest of us had ok cameras and pictures of New Jersey. I felt no need to giver her any particular credit.

While this attitude is rarely explicitly stated, it is also clearly prevalent and can even be somewhat inferred from the very phrase “five tool player.” Tools are extremely tangible objects, means to the end, rather than an end in itself. The tool exists only to be used; calling someone a “tool” is a fairly serious insult. In the world of actual tools there is no credit or honor associated with owning a very good set of them: you are given credit for using them.

Beltran, then, is further typical of five-tool players, in that, while he has been excellent at most of the measurable aspects of baseball, there has always been a sense that he was intangibly lacking. This was probably never clearer than in the opening days of his Mets career. In a weird departure from A-Rod, the knock on Beltran was that he had hit too much in the post-season, his home run barrage for the Astros in ‘04 coming suspiciously on the eve of his free-agency and leading some to believe that he had done it on purpose, in order to get a larger paycheck. This paycheck he got, and large it was, from the Mets in 2005, and he then proceeded to have, by his standards, a fairly bad season. With their typical sportsmanship and logic, the Shea faithful started to boo him, which Beltran (perhaps unfortunately) took hard; he was pissed enough that Julio Franco had to talk him into coming out for curtain call after he hit his first game winning homer of ’06.*

Beltran is tied for the club single-season home-run record, but, as the New York press never tires of pointing out, is not really your typical New York player. Beltran does not have the exuberance of Reyes or Pedro, the polished charisma of Wright or Jeter, the venerability of Tom Glavine or Marriano Riverea. He doesn’t seem to like speaking to the press; he is not known as a clubhouse leader; he is not a character or a practical joker. He doesn’t really seem to do anything except for hit (for power and average), field his position very, very well, throw out runners, and steal bases at one of the highest percentages in major league history. Off the field he is quite, charitable, religious, and dedicated to training. He is apparently slightly vain about his cloths.

This year, it seems that the poor bastard spent the off-season reading the Post. He learned that the Mets collapse was due to a lack of fire and clubhouse leadership; he lamented, with the venerable of gentlemen of the sporting press, that what little of the later there had been departed with Tom Glavine and Paul LoDuca.

So Beltran reported to camp in ’08, firmly resolved to be more intangible. It is, perhaps, to be regretted that his first foray into leadership was such a blatant copy of Jimmy Rawlins; but Beltran is new at it and if he is going to steel from someone it might as well be from a master-- an MVP of intangibility, if you will. I look forward to his further intangible efforts with interest…as long as it doesn’t take away from his hitting.



*Julio got so much credit for having talked Beltran into that curtain call that maybe they would have gotten rid of him sooner if Beltran would have decided to just trot out there by his own damn self. And if they get rid of Julio earlier maybe they win two more games in ’07, and then…Beltran…what an asshole.

Met's Martinez honored at Dominican Sporting Event

I feel deeply irresponsible for not having responded more promptly to the Pedro Martinez/cockfighting incident. In that I have an excuse, it is because I find the matter utterly trivial, and was unable to resolve the debate about what form my sarcastic response should take. The principle objections to cockfighting, that it is 1) brutal and 2) unkind to chickens, are inarguable, in and of themselves. However, in that we live in a society where people frequently eat chicken McNuggets and frequently watch pro-wrestling or hockey (not to mention financing and implicitly supporting murderous wars, but whatever) without being subject to any form of public condemnation or censure, all objections to cockfighting are pretty much hypocritical and preposterous.

I’d actually like to take the opportunity to put in a plug for Roger Corman’s Cockfighter (1974), starring Warren Oates. Oates plays a man who has vowed not to talk, until he wins the Kentucky Cockfighter of the Year Award, which is actually given out, oh, not necessarily annually, but only when there is a deserving recipient. The brilliant thing about it is that, story-wise, it perfectly mirrors your classic inane sports movie about an introverted athlete who needs to make peace with himself or his love ones, en-route to the success that he craves. Only its about cockfighting. It’s also amusingly permeated with skevy ‘70s sexual mores. Any movie where someone loses their girlfriend to Harry Dean Stanton over a cockfight gets tons of points.

******

The Clemens Hearing:
Nigel: I haven’t seen anyone in such unabashed self-righteous denial since Nixon.
Sam: yeah, well at least Nixon didn’t try to pin it on his wife.

*******

I recently subscribed to Baseball Prospectus, and found an article about the top performers in the Winter Leagues. The top rated pitcher was Nelson Figueroa, who, while he hasn’t distinguished himself in the majors lately, won championships in Taiwan and Mexico this winter. He is an older player, who works mainly with off-speed stuff: if he fits in, in the majors, it would seem to be as a durable, back of the rotation guy, or a long-man in relief. Apparently he is a non-roster invitee at the Mets camp, although I haven’t been able to find any mention of this on the Mets website.

******

Further Pedro Speculation:
Part of me thinks that Pedro put the video on YouTube himself, since he was tiered of everyone paying attention to Santana. Either that or he was attempting some sort of reconciliation with Anna Benson.

Dr. Louis Fishman, who was variously known in life as Lou, Sonny, and, to the author of this blog, PopPop, was a longtime Knicks fan who died in the early morning on Tuesday, January 22nd, after suffering a stroke on the previous Wednesday and having spent the interval in a state that was more or less unconscious and inert.

My last conversation with him had, not surprisingly, taken the form of an argument about the Knicks. It was my contention that the team was badly assembled and that all of the players were, relative to other professional basketball players, bad at basketball, and I saw this as the major explanation of the Knicks troubles. My grandfather blamed the team’s abject state on Coach Thomas; he felt that Thomas “just sat there” on the bench and did not show the animation and passion appropriate for a man being played well to run an historic franchise into the ground. (I speculated, privately, that, had Thomas been a white man, what my grandfather called apathy would instead be seen as “cool” and “collected.”) My grandfather maintained that the Knicks players were, in fact, quite talented, and that a competent coach (such as Larry Brown?) could have turned them into a winning team.

A particular point of non-agreement was our respective assessments of Jamal Crawford. Early in the season, I had observed that the Knicks depended on a dominant scoring performance from Crawford to even be in a game. The problem is that Crawford is no player to depend upon: he is a streak shooter whose performance regularly fluctuates from awful to brilliant. He takes a lot of shots, and, while on some nights many of them go in, on other nights almost all of them miss and, given the state of the Knicks’ rebounding, a missed shot is very much like handing the ball to the other team. An inherently unreliable player, he had, due to the badness of the team, found himself their most reliable scoring option—which essentially dooms the Knicks to mediocrity and inconsistency. My grandfather took the opposite point of view, and maintained that Crawford was one of the five or so best players in the East. I abused Crawford’s defense and might have referred to him as a far crappier version of Rip Hamilton.

It is hard to overstate how actually pleasant this conversation was for both of us to have. We both, I think, felt a desire to connect with the other that was out of proportion with our meager abilities to transcend the gulf of years; our patience for minor differences in attitude, opinion and demeanor; and our capacities to even understand such a desire, much less express it. We had few subjects of conversation in common, and on the remaining ones we would generally either find ourselves in tedious agreement, or so fervently opposed to each other that frank conversation was completely impossible.

The great mercy of sports is that, due to their relative ultimate banality, a level of difference of opinion that would be unacceptable on a subject like the State of Israel is almost welcome when it comes to the New York Knicks. Both my grandfather and I possessed somewhat argumentative personalities, and it was pleasant to find ourselves in a disagreement where we could be sure that all that was finally at stake was the evaluation of a group of basketball players, and not larger judgments on ways of life or habits of thought.

On Tuesday, January 15th, the Knicks beat a tired Washington Wizards team; in their previous game, on Sunday, they had beaten a tired Detroit Pistons team. On Wednesday, in an e-mail to a friend discussing the victory, I wrote “the next time Jamal Crawford goes 6-for-fucking-7 from downtown, the Knicks might win that one, too.” Sometime before or after I sent that e-mail, my father called me and told me that my grandfather had had a stroke.

At that point it was unclear what exactly the ramifications of this would be—although in retrospect this uncertainty seems mainly due to the reluctance of all parties concerned to contemplate the worst and likely outcome while there was still a credible cause for hope. When I spoke to my father, my grandfather had been sent home from the hospital; his refusal of treatment having been honored largely because he was himself a physician. His speech was impaired and he could not swallow. There was a chance that the symptoms would clear up in the course of the night and there was also a chance that they would get worse.

The Knicks were playing the New Jersey Nets that night and I was pleasantly surprised to find that they were winning when I checked the score on-line before I left work.

As I had planned on the train, the first thing I did when I got to my apartment was turn on the television and check score, to see if the game would be a cheerful and appropriate topic of conversation when I called my mother, which was the next thing that I did. The Knicks were up by something like fifteen or twelve, with six or so minutes left to play, and so I decided they were safe.

My mother was watching television with my grandfather, whose condition had not improved. Speech was now impossible for him, and he had resorted to communicating with notes, although this was also becoming difficult. At the same time he seemed comfortable and peaceful. Were they watching the game? No, they had switched to something else when the Knicks had been trailing earlier. Well, I have good news…

I spoke with my mother for a little longer. When I got back to the game, the Knicks lead had shrunk to five, and it promptly proceeded to evaporate completely, putting the game up for grabs in the closing minutes. What the hell were Randolph and Curry doing on the floor at a time like this? Where was David Lee, IsiahThomsas-yousonofabitch? I felt insanely guilty for having potentially inflicted this spectacle on my grandfather, which had probably given him another stroke.

But the Knicks hung on, their victory assured after Jamal Crawford, who had had another very good game, stroked in a three pointer in the game’s final minute. I decided that I would call my mother again, to tell her the final result in case they had turned it off at a point when it seemed that the Knicks were going to lose.

As the game ended I experienced a lonely feeling of uncertainty which frequently comes at the end of a game and dimly mirrors the feeling of finishing a very good book. I had briefly vested my interests in a group of people who were not myself, and in the wake of their departure, and my return to my actual circumstances, I was left in a certain confusion about what to do next.

This time my course of action quickly appeared to me out of this emptiness: I was going to call my mother and tell her to tell my grandfather that I had been wrong, and that Jamal Crawford was a great basketball player. And following closely on this realization was the knowledge that my grandfather was going to die.

They had actually watched the end of the game, which had somehow not been fatal for my grandfather. He apparently smiled when my mother told him about my change of heart regarding Crawford, and wrote on a peace of paper to ask if I was at home. Home in Queens or home in New Jersey? I was at home, but in Queens.

After my grandfather fell asleep that night, he never woke up in any recognizable way, although a debate about his level of awareness persisted until he died on the following Tuesday. His children, my mother and her sister and brother, inhabited his apartment in a rapt state that almost mirrored their father’s, while my father, my sister, and myself appeared, when we could, on the fringes, brooding and protective, making coffee or brining food. As we slipped into an existence without him, our efforts at understanding each other and ourselves were like Jamal Crawford’s jump shots: frequently bouncing sharply away from the rim with an ugly clang and sometimes falling perfectly into place at the end of a marvelous parabola, graceful and improbable.

If Carlos Delgado can Hit .400, then Barak Obama can be Elected President

At some point today, I thought to myself, “huh, I sure am glad that the Mets went out and got Santana, because otherwise I might be tempted to pay attention to/worry about this whole primary election thing, which, from the small pieces of information that I have gathered somewhat inadvertently, seems to be a total bummer.”

The election process, at this point, reminds me of the Mets two weeks ago when they had not gotten Santana and the club was trying to muster enthusiasm over the possible signing of Liavan Hernandez: a development, which under sane circumstances would be regarded as pretty much a disaster, emerges as a positive only by virtue of the absolute horror that proceeded it.

The one possible ray of hope would seem to emanate from Barak Obama, who distinguishes himself by having provided me with no particular reason to hate him. He seems sort of like Steve Trachsel would seem, if he pitched for the team that you rooted for and the other starters in the rotation were Jose Lima, Scott Schoenwise, Barak Obama and me: it’s not quite like he gives your team a good chance of winning, but he doesn’t really guarantee a loss so, hey, that’s something.

I was still glad that the Mets had signed Santana, (thus removing the temptation to transfer any psychic energy into supporting Obama) because the signing of Santana seems to bode more definitely well for the cause of Mets baseball, than the election of Obama would bode for the cause of things in general not going to hell completely. Santana definitely make the Mets a stronger ballclub; the Superbowl was clearly an excellent football game and I am completely glad that the Giants won. You can’t really ever reach that degree of certainty about anything in politics, which is one of the reasons that sports are great.

But, if through some strange all-American alchemy, it were possible to get Obama the Democratic nomination by sending Santana back to Minnesota, would I pull the trigger on that deal? I honestly can’t figure that one out. Fortunately, my Google Overlords have bestowed upon me the power of putting polls up on my blog, so you can weigh in-- that is if the process of voting in the primaries hasn’t exhausted your capacity to choose between two categories that are meaningless. (do bear in mind that the question refers to Obama getting the Democratic nomination, not becoming President of the United states)

FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH, the Mets are paying Santana $137.5 million for six years of pitching (an option exists for a seventh year, but whatever). In 2005, according to a Democratic Party Website, the Iraq war was costing $195 million a day. So, for the money that the Mets are giving for six years of Santana, they could afford to occupy Iraq for a little less than seventeen hours. (in 2005)

Great News

So it looks like the Mets got Johan Santana, at the mere price of Carlos Gomez and three of their best pitching prospects. I’m almost sad: I had pretty much resigned myself to futility in ’08, and now I’m going to have to be all disappointed, angry and depressed when they blow it.

But seriously folks: Santana, Pedro, El Duque, Ollie and John Maine? That rotation is so good that I think I’ll be able to sleep at night, even with Shoenwise in the bullpen.

Anyhow, in honor of the Mets sudden relevance, and because this is the 100th post on this blog, here is a look back at ten of my favorite posts:

--This post suggests that an additional honor be bestowed on one of the inaugural Hall-of-Famers.

--This post also looks back at baseball history, at a player whose rare disability gave his team an unusual dimension.

--“Please Sir, can I have some more?” Oliver Perez is currently in arbitration talks with the club, asking them for an extra $4 million. This post illuminates why I would be happy if he got it.

--Gary Sheffield latter clarified his comments about Latinos being easier to control than African-Americans, saying that he was actually talking about how Latin-American players are ineligible for the draft, and thus more at the mercy of ballclubs. I took his pre-clarified statement to task in this post.

--This is a chronicle of my first trip to Shea in ’07.

--“The Called 3rd Strike in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is probably the best title that I ever came up with.

--This post discusses the similarities between mets.com and Pravda. And now that Comrade Marty Noble has been utterly discredited, can I have his job, please? No?…bummer.

--I offer these posts as a specimen of pre-Mitchell thinking on PEDs.

--This is a poignant reflection, on the time between the second-to-last, and last games of the season.

--It is hard to feel sympathetic towards Stephon Marbury, as the Knicks recent stretch of not being utterly horrible seems highly correlated with him being out for the season. I still like the job that this post did of exploring the intricacies of his persona.

Thanks to "Nigel" for help with the list.

NBA Updates

Firstly, a few weeks back I made a reference to Oscar Robinson without including a link to The Big O’s website. This was a mistake. Particularly, his FAQs are one of the most eloquent commentaries on the idiocy of ever asking anyone anything about sports.

Also, on December 22 I wrote “…the Bulls are so bad this season that they lost a game to the Knicks. The Bulls are so bad that they would probably be better if they had hung on to Eddy Curry…So why aren’t people assembling with gigantic pink-slips to demand the ousting of the Bulls management?” On December 24th, Scott Skiles, the Bulls coach, was fired. While I give myself points for prescience, this seems to weaken my argument that Isaiah Thomas was operating within an acceptable level of awfulness. Since the ousting of Skiles the Bulls have played about .500 basketball, and the players have unanimously voted to bench my fellow Laurentian, Joakim Noah, for insubordination to an assistant coach—which seems not to have had any positive effect of the level of team unity. (Noah was actually only a Post Graduate at L’ville and went to actual high-school somewhere in New York)

I am Jack’s Tenuous Grasp on Reality

First off, thanks to Dan for sending me the link. This is completely amazing.

Jack Kerouac created a personal fantasy baseball league, using invented teams and made-up players, which he played (presumably by himself) and modified, from the years 1937 (when he was 13) until 1965 (when he was 42, eight years after the publication of On the Road). Detailed biographies were created for players and coaches, and were kept in spiral-bound notebooks. The article is vague about how games actually operated: “He created a set of cards that, in combination with the skill level of the batter and pitcher, controlled the progress of the game, possibly in conjunction with the use of dice,” which yields a picture of the legendary beatnick, sitting in a cold-water flat, with a jug of wine and a Camel hanging out of his mouth, playing Dungeons and Dragons by himself.

There is, I believe, a cautionary tale about technology here. Kerouac’s system, a fantasy baseball league with one participant, has to be one of the nerdiest things of all time. It might follow, since this thing seems to have taken up a lot of Kerouac’s time over a thirty year period, that Kerouac, in some essential way, was one of the nerdiest guys ever.

However, because the technologies needed to enable serious, hardcore nerdyness had not yet been invented, Kerouac went on to literally write the book on being cool. Coolness would seem to consist of drinking, smoking, sleeping with lots of girls and being an ass about it, doing recreational drugs, hanging out with non-white people, and listening to jazz music; Kerouac not only participated in all these behaviors, but he helped make them popular with America’s youth. (a last component of Coolness, New York Mets baseball, wasn’t invented until 1962)

The increased connectivity of the world has provided many more options for people who want to participate in things like imaginary baseball leagues, and since Kerouac’s death millions of people have spent thousands of hours on things like videogames, internet fantasy sports leagues, and Dungeons and Dragons, all of which seem to share a certain spiritual kinship with Kerouac’s baseball leagues. Did On the Road only get written because no one had invented Playstation in the 1950s? I guess we’ll never know.

Or maybe it’s a reason to be hopeful. The granddaddy of all hepcats seems to have been born to have a pocket protector and an opinion about StarTreck—under the pressure of circumstances he became Jack Kerouac. So throw your X-box out of a high window, tell you buddies on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan-fiction message-board that they can get started without you, buy a bottle of the cheapest wine at your local liquor store and head on down to the nearest highway and stick up a thumb… and you too might start a social revolution.

Kerouac seems to have named all of his teams after American car companies. That sort of makes the whole thing perfect.

Confused by the Acquisition of Pagan

The Sam’s Mets Blog brain-trust is completely divided on the impact of the Angel Pagan trade—indeed, while it is almost universally agreed that he brings a good name to the squad it is hard to tell if it is really a good baseball name, or if it is something more fitting for a minor character from Pynchon.

And what does he mean for the team? The club, apparently, says that they acquired him only for depth, which, if true, is a depressing admission of a lack of faith in Carlos Gomez or a firm conviction that Alou would spend the entire season injured. It would also imply that they gave Milledge away for a pile of beans in Ryan Church. All these things are bummers.

On the other hand, could it mean that they are considering a deal including both outfield prospects, Gomez and Francisco Martinez, for pitching? If this is true, it might or might not be a good thing. The need for pitching is desperate and I’d really by happy to see anything done to address that, but is throwing away their entire outfield future for some big name that might or might not produce a really a good plan? Hard to say.

Delgado says he is fully healthy and ready for 2008, and I sincerely hope that he is. With the way the team is looking, they could really use a monster year from Delgado in ’08. My prediction: in the middle of a 3-60 stretch Delgado says something insightful about the election, making it impossible for me to hate him.

Not Happy with the Guys who Call Nets Games:

So they did this text poll during Wednesday night’s Nets game against Detroit: other than Jason Kidd, who is the best rebounding guard in the history of the NBA? Oscar Robinson won with forty-odd percent of the vote, followed by Magic Johnson with twenty-odd percent, Michel Jordan with just slightly less of the vote than Magic, and Clyde Drexler picking up the remaining votes (not very much). The announcers said they were surprised: they didn’t think that the Big O’s generation would be familiar enough with text messaging to achieve that result.

Now, the answer to that question is clearly Oscar Robinson. Over his first years in the league Robinson averaged a triple double (ten each of rebounds, points and assists), a feat which no one, at any position, has ever even approached. Major League Baseball will probably see another .400 hitter before anyone in the NBA will average a triple double again. The Jason Kidd caveat is irrelevant: when Kidd gets ten rebounds it is a minor occasion and Kidd does it far more frequently than any other guard in the today’s NBA.

Screw the Nets guys for thinking that the Big O’s winning was due to old folks knowing from cell phones, rather than young folks knowing from the history of the NBA. I very rarely (I actually think this is a first) feel the need to stick up for my generation, but I’ll say this for us: we tend to critically examine the numbers generated by sport, and even put those numbers in some kind of historical context. We fucking know that the Big O was the probably the best rebounding guard in the NBA. We aren’t like the previous generations of sports fans who only believe in things that they saw: we understand that a sports team consists of an aggregate of parts that can best be understood by examining statistics. Young basketball fans have straight up used the internet for to do more than watch videos of dunks: we have educated ourselves about the history of the game, and tried to understand today’s game in that context. I am unbelievably insulted that the Nets announcers attributed those poll results to anything else.

Anyway, in light of that Nets game, you heard it here first: Detroit Pistons win the championship. It is delightful to watch anyone do anything as well as the Pistons have played basketball over the years. Although the West is generally regarded as the vastly superior conference, Tim Duncan and Steve Nash, the linchpins of the two least flawed teams, are both a year older and playing with teams that do not seem to have grown in proportion to Detroit. This year, Detroit has wildly improved bench and a great mix of exciting young players coupled with a veteran core that has proved unbelievably consistent over the years: it is hard to think about their team and not imagine big things.

Merry Christmas From Sam’s Met’s Blog

I have extracted the worthwhile passages from Jose Conseco’s Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ‘Roids, Smash Hits and how Baseball got Big, in order to spare my readership from the whole thing. Merry Christmas.

“Mark [McGwire] didn’t like to go out with me because the girls wouldn’t pay attention to him. They would all pay attention to me. That was mostly because of Mark. He was never the best looking guy in the world.”

On being traded from the A’s to the Texas Rangers:
“I also wonder what role the steroid issue might have played in the trade. No one in the A’s organization ever came right out and said it, but by then there were a lot of rumors about me using steroids…
“But the Texas Rangers apparently weren’t worried about that. The managing general partner at that time was George W. Bush, before he was elected governor of Texas. At that time, he was very visible in the role of team owner…Sometimes he’d come down to talk to the great pitcher Nolan Ryan who had the locker over from mine when I first joined the Rangers.
“It was understood by then that teams knew all about steroids in the game. There was no question George W. Bush knew my name was connected with steroids—the story Tom Boswell had written in 1988 wasn’t the last word on the subject—but he decided to make the deal to trade for me anyway.
“And then, not long after I got there, I sat down with Rafael Palmeiro, Juan Gonzalez, and Ivan Rodriguez, and educated them about steroids.
“Soon I was injecting all three of them…Bush and Tom Grieve, the general manager, would have seen all three of those guys getting bigger before their eyes, starting within weeks after I joined the team. But they never made an issue of it, or said anything to me or to any of us about steroids.
“Was I surprised that no one ever brought it up? Come on. You never really get to speak to the owners or the GM on a daily basis. They spend their days off by themselves…I never had any sort of conversation with Bush. I shook his hand and met him once, but that was about it. He was around a lot; you saw him on his way in or out, but always just briefly. We were busy practicing or playing baseball. Bush did gravitate toward Nolan Ryan a bit, probably because he was a legend, and also closer to him in age. He didn’t talk to us Latinos much.”

“I used to use that thing when we would go deep-sea fishing; if we caught a shark, I’d shoot the hell out of it with the Street Sweeper.”