Taking The Heat

"Observe your enemies, for they first find out your faults." Antisthenes (445 BC - 365 BC)

It's evident that a bat and ball can cause much more anarchy than even the grand panjandrum of baseball, Bud Selig, would care to admit these days. Just this week alone we've had Pedro bringing George Steinbrenner to tears by going handhunting through the loathed lineup of the Yankees and knocking Jeter and Soriano out of a game on fewer pitches than it takes Tom Glavine to hit the strikezone on a given night. Then, a few nights later, we have the ridiculous Randall Simon tenderizing a human sausage by taking a T-Ball swing with his 33 1/2-ounce Louisville Slugger model R205. The funny thing is, while one of these abominations invoked a three game suspension for its primary participant, the other elicited nary a comment from the grand poohbah of baseball philistinism.

If you have a pulse, after seeing Pedro nail the first two hitters of the Yankee lineup you had to be getting that sort of two outs, bottom of the ninth, seventh game of the World Series-excited at the prospects of Pedro buzzing through the entire Yankees team like Audie Murphy through a squadron of Nazi soldiers. After Soriano and Jeter were both hit in succession I admit to succumbing to wild fantasies of seeing so many Yankees sent to the DL in one inning that even the enigmatic Drew Henson was going to get a plate appearance eventually.

Not that it was a bad thing, of course. Whenever you can compel the bizarre scene of George Steinbrenner weeping, issuing corybantic threats and innuendo out of fear and frustration, you've earned your day's pay. While Pedro continued to deny "intentionally" hitting Soriano and Jeter, the point of knocking out the 1-2 punch of the Yankee lineup within less than a half-dozen pitches is crystal clear, a message that any team with a head-hunting zealot like Roger Clemens should take notice of.

Clemens, as you recall, is the same milksop who, after hitting Kevin Millar on the right hand in the midst of getting mercilessly pounded and giving up eight runs to the Red Sox only the day before, whined that "Guys don't get out of the way of the ball anymore." Adding insult to injury, following his beating, he issued a threat to Clemens-Killah David Ortiz, noting over and over that, "He [Ortiz] surprised me. I'm going to have to do something about that."

Something indeed. Big Bad Roger likely won't pitch against the Red Sox in the July 25-27 series in Boston, just like Big Bad Roger was almost always conveniently left unscheduled to pitch against the Mets in Shea Stadium after he'd almost decapitated another Clemens-Killah, Mike Piazza. Big Bad Roger seems awfully brave at leaving his teammates to take the hardballs thrown at them on his behalf.

Pedro, on the other hand, is making sure that he's going to be pitching in that series, and for good measure, in a season where he has already let his mouth do his thinking for him on two previous occasions to ill effect, came up with the quote of the season so far when he sang of the wailing and whimpering Steinbrenner, "Georgie Porgie, he might buy the whole league. But he doesn't have enough money to put fear in my heart.''

Then of course, we have the sausage assault. Certainly everyone has seen the video, witnessed the outrage, like the LAPD on Rodney King, Pirate slugger Randall Simon took his bat to the costume of a certain Italian sausage racer and earned a three game suspension, as well as a $2,000 fine for his antics. It provoked another amusing spectacle from outraged scribes across the nation who issued draconian demands of retribution with their stentorian voices of baseball morality in typically boorish fashion. One of the vice presidents of the Brewers, Rick Schlesinger, was beyond himself with rage: "This is one of the most outrageous things I've ever seen inside a ballpark or outside a ballpark," he sobbed.

C'mon Rick, one of the most outrageous things seen inside a ballpark? When was the last time you watched your own Brewers muddle their way through their own lamentable rendition of a "professional" baseball game? If any crimes are committed in Miller Park lately it is the criminally poor impersonation of Major League Baseball the sad sack Brewers discharge from their lackluster lineup every night. This is a franchise, two Seligs removed, that has to have people running foot races dressed as sausages to provide its fans with a modicum of entertainment. Can you imagine how exciting it must be to be Brewers "fan"? An embalmist's life would be more interesting. So instead of crying about the outrage, small-minded curmudgeons like Rick Schlesinger should be thanking the heavens that Randall Simon finally provided Milwaukee with something more exciting than calculating Richie Sexson's homerun to strike out ratio for a change.

Naturally, the Randall Simon Sausage Bop and the existence of such things as sausage races evoked other possibilities of entertaining the forlorn and humiliated fans of Shea Stadium night after night. After all, there can be no great rivalries at Shea that aren't immediately extinguished by the bottom of the first innning when a series of fielding gaffes, pitching heresies and overall incompetence can push ahead in line. The Mets-Yankees and Mets-Braves rivalries have become cruel parodies of their former selves. In their last seven games against the Yankees and the Braves, the Mets have been outscored 46-24 while going 0-7. Whether the root of the problem is youthful inexperience or plain ole incompetence, the issue of entertaining the fans for the 8 1/2 innings after their chances of winning the game have already been smothered is still to be addressed. Note to Mets: Start holding schlemiel races. You can dress up Steve Phillips, Fred Wilpon and his idiot son, chief operations officer Jeff Wilpon up as potato knishes and let the fans chase them around the field with chainsaws between innings. It's either that or turning back the clock to public stockades and horse-whipping.

You can't say Dusty Baker isn't giving Cubs fans their money's worth of education and entertainment these days. Baker, who says he learned this history from his mother, who taught black American history in Sacramento, expostulated earlier in the week that "It’s easier for most Latin guys and it’s easier for most minority people because most of us come from heat," and also availed us of his theories on the migratory habits of the human race: "You don’t find too many brothers in New Hampshire and Maine and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. ... We were brought over here for the heat, right? Isn’t that history? Weren’t we brought over because we could take the heat?"

The Chicago Cubs have gone 5-12 during the current heat wave. Maybe they'd better turn down the air-conditioning at Wrigley Field so the brothers can go on a winning streak.

Speaking of winning streaks, when is Tom Glavine going on one? I was no fan of his signing over the winter. I said so back in December when Fred Wilpon was soiling himself with excitement for overpaying for a 37 year old on the verge of collapse. Since the second half of last season, he can't get anyone out and now says "I don't know anyone who's happy with it [QuesTec], most of the noise you hear is from pitchers, but a lot of hitters don't know what the strike zone is anymore. Don't tell me the dynamic hasn't changed when your catcher comes out before the game and says, "The ump says you're not getting the corners."

Boohoo Mr. Glavine. The amazing thing is, I never heard him crying about the strikezone when he and his fraudulent sidekick, Greg Maddux were fattening up Hall of Fame careers on personal strikezones wider than Jackie Gleason's waistline. Just because Wilpon has some sort of schoolgirl crush on Glavine doesn't mean I have to root for him after spending all those years hating him for the special treatment he and Maddux got from the umpires. If it frustrates Glavine that umpires have told Mets catchers that they will not call pitches on the corners at Shea because they don't want the machine to give them poor grades then bully for this terrifying machine. It's about time someone made Glavine pitch to a strikezone that isn't the size of George Steinbrenner's fat head.

"Why not eliminate that altogether and have an electronic strike zone?" Glavine whined. "That's almost what it's coming to."

Yes, and while we're at it, why don't we just eliminate the players and their trillion dollar salaries altogether and have computer-generated holograms compete for championships instead? Why don't we put robots behind the plate and a brain in Bud Selig's head? We can replace the fans with cardboard cut outs and hold sausage races all day. We can let Dusty Baker manage from an incinerator since we only brought him over because he can withstand the heat, we can cryogenically freeze Mr. Steinbrenner's tears when the crocodiles all run out of their own and we can name Pedro Martinez baseball's new poet laureate.