. An example of the latter point is
Post by d***@supanet.comPost by Jack LinthicumPost by d***@supanet.comdemonstrated in the different responses that arise when a bowler/
pitcher hurls the ball with the deliberate intention of hitting the
chap holding the big stick. In cricket, it's an accepted part of the
game, and the only issue is that the batsman isn't supposed to let any
blood get on the pitch. In baseball, the players get terribly agitated
and engage in "handbags at 10 paces".
There are and have been powerful batsmen capable of hitting a ball a
long, long way. Bowlers and fielders play accordingly. There are
essentially two approaches; bowl such that the batsman doesn't have
After the bowler is taken to the hospital what is the next option? A
long way is how far?
Bowlers are allowed, even expected to hit the batsmen. Only wimps and
wusses object to a physicality to a game. And if a batsman is scared
of being the target of 5.75 oz of leather hurled at 100mph at his face
from a distance of 22 yards, then he's no right to be playing the
game. It's not supposed to be a game for people who have no pluck.
And if their bowlers do it to you, what do you think your bowlers are
for?
How far is a long way? It depends on the ground; 300-400 feet would be
typical, but it could be more or less than that. Of course, some
players can strike the ball way, way further than that, with the ball
clearing the boundary rope by some considerable height and would
continue for twice that distance. For one example that I witnessed,
Flintoff (a powerful but by no means the most powerful) batsman hit a
ball at the Oval in 2003, and it broke the window of the opponents
dressing room, some 500 feet from the point of impact, and some 50-75
feet from the ground. It was reported that the ball was still rising,
but that could easily be an exageration.
I will give you something to read which explains why throwing at a
hitter in baseball is not just unwise it is dangerous. A guy with
great potential gets to bat in his first major league game, hit in the
head by a wild pitch and unable to function thereafter. Which is why
any pitcher who throws at a hitter is automatically thrown out of the
game.
"Within the cowhide of an official baseball is a core of rubber-
encased cork, which is then surrounded by 1,100 feet of tightly wound
yarn. The entirety weighs about five ounces, and every kid who has
ever played the game is routinely urged not to be afraid of it, no
matter how hard it is thrown. But, of course, a baseball can be as
hazardous as any similarly sized rock. In 1920, a wayward pitch
crushed the skull of the Cleveland Indians shortstop Ray Chapman.
Blood poured out of both ears. He collapsed as he staggered about and
was dead by the next morning. While big-league baseball has suffered
no other fatalities, there have been plenty of other horrendous
beanings. The future Hall of Famer Mickey Cochrane, one of the game's
greatest catchers, had his career halted in 1937 by a pitch that left
him unconscious for 10 days. Thirty years later, Tony Conigliaro, a
brilliant young outfielder with the Boston Red Sox, was smacked just
below the left eye, shattering his cheekbone and damaging his retina.
He said it felt as if the ball were going into one side of his head
and coming out the other. The wildly popular Tony C. made a comeback
in 1969, but his eyesight had weakened and he was never the same."
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/magazine/25baseball.t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=slogin
Head Trip
By BARRY BEARAK
The moment possessed that rare, rapturous feeling of a dream come
true. Adam Greenberg knelt in the on-deck circle, awaiting his first
at-bat in his first major-league game. He had arrived at this occasion
by successfully ascending all those smaller steps along the way:
Little League, Legion ball, high-school ball, college ball, the minor
leagues. He was 24 now, an outfielder playing his best baseball ever.
The Chicago Cubs had promoted him from their Double A farm club in
West Tennessee. "Greenie, get a bat, you're hitting for the pitcher,"
Dick Pole, the bench coach, told him in the top of the ninth. The Cubs
were up 4-2 over the Florida Marlins. It was a Saturday night, July
2005. Towers of beaming light fended off the dark for a Miami crowd of
nearly 23,000. The air was steamy. A pelting rain had left the grass
with its deepest color. As Adam left the dugout, he wrapped his hands
around his favorite bat, a Zinger model X53, a 34-incher with a black
head and a cherry handle. He breathed in the familiar smell of the
polished wood. Dusty Baker, the Cubs manager, called out
encouragingly, "C'mon, Greenie, get on!"
Everything about this milestone was as thrilling as he had envisioned
it in a thousand boyhood imaginings. Two days earlier, he got the news
from the Cubs at a Day's Inn in Kodak, Tenn. A first-class plane
ticket to Florida was waiting in his name. There would be no more
daylong bus rides from nowhere to nowhere, no more paying rent month
to month, no more pinching pennies on a minor-league meal allowance.
In Fort Lauderdale, he was booked at a Marriott on the waterfront.
Awaiting him in his room was a note of congratulations from his agent
along with an iced bottle of Dom Perignon and two Champagne flutes,
each holding a blue napkin and a pink carnation. At the ballpark, he
was issued a uniform with 17 on the back, the number once worn by Mark
Grace, the Cubs star first baseman of the '90s. There was also some
pleasurable paperwork to complete. He signed a contract for $316,000.
The salary was the major-league minimum, but it didn't seem so minimal
to him. It was 15 times what he had been earning before.
Greenberg's parents, Mark and Wendy, rushed to Miami for the occasion,
bringing along Adam's two younger brothers, Sam and Max, and one of
his two sisters, Loren. Some remodeling was being done to their home
in Guilford, Conn. They hurriedly scrawled a note to the contractor on
a piece of Sheetrock: "We're on our way to Florida. Adam is a major
leaguer." Mark thought his son had defied incredible odds: "Adam is a
5-9, 180-pound Jewish kid from Connecticut. You don't see a lot of
those in professional baseball." Now the family was watching the game
from the box seats behind home plate. When Adam came out of the
dugout, Wendy sneaked down to the first row with a camera. "You can't
be down here," an usher chided. "But that's my son," she insisted.
In the on-deck circle, Greenberg concentrated on the pitcher, the
injury-plagued veteran left-hander Valerio de los Santos. Like any
good hitter, he used the vantage point to study the flow and twist of
the pitcher's motion and the release point of the ball. The Cubs first
batter grounded out. Then Greenberg stepped to home plate. More
excited than nervous, he smoothed the loose dirt in the batter's box
with his cleats and surveyed the field. The Marlins were playing him
straight away, though the center fielder was a shade to the left. As
de los Santos reared back to throw, Greenberg, a left-handed batter,
rocked back slightly as well, some of his weight shifting to his back
foot, his body ready to uncoil with the confident kinetics of a
seasoned hitter.
A major-league fastball takes less than half a second to travel the 60
feet 6 inches from a pitcher's hand to home plate. This one was moving
at 91 miles per hour, which isn't particularly brisk as such things
go. And yet the ball's errant path toward Greenberg's head seemed so
utterly unavoidable that it was as if the pitch had been misaligned by
some magnetic force, the foreknowledge of its menace allowing time for
only the slightest twinge of fear.
As he instinctively spun away, Greenberg was hit behind the right ear,
with part of the impact on his helmet and the rest on his skull. An
imprint from the curved stitching of the baseball would remain stamped
on his skin for days. His eyeballs floated upward, but he didn't lose
consciousness; in fact, he remained alert enough to worry for his
life. He was sure his skull must have split open, and as he rolled on
his back with his knees in the air, he held his head between his
hands, trying to keep anything from leaking out.
The crowd united in a gasp and then fell into a solicitous hush. The
two Cubs trainers raced to home plate. The team's dumbstruck TV
announcers groped for something meaningful to say. "Certainly you hate
to see that," Bob Brenly, a former big-league catcher and manager,
commented gravely. "We sure hope the young man's O.K. That ball was
just tracking his helmet from the moment it left de los Santos's
hand."
It took more than a minute before Greenberg sat up. The trainers asked
him: How many fingers? What's your name? Where are you? As Greenberg
recalls it, they then asked him something a bit more challenging.
Where were you two days ago? He replied to that one with a smile. "I
was in the minor leagues, and I'm not going back."
This quick-witted reply was a relief to everyone at the time. But the
answer has turned out to be sadly untrue. Fate was in a nasty and
perverse mood that evening, and that one throw of a baseball, that
single amalgam of variables within the mechanics of pitching - the
fingers exploring the braille of the ball's raised thread, the hurried
windmill movement of the arm, the angle of the launch, the density of
the air, the deflection of spin as a smooth circle pushes through the
emptiness - glided inches awry and changed everything. Adam
Greenberg's biggest moment lasted only a half second.
It may be the entirety of his major-league career.
I first met Greenberg last July in Kodak, Tenn., outside the same
Day's Inn where the year before he received word of his elevation to
the majors. After his fateful at-bat, he suffered vertigo, and though
that condition eventually went away, he remained burdened by something
nearly as dreadful - inexplicably diminished skills in hitting the
ball. He was no longer with the Cubs. Weeks earlier, he asked the team
to release him from their minor-league system, a request easy to
oblige since Greenberg was hitting a wretched .179 and mostly riding
the bench. He had since caught on with the Los Angeles Dodgers and was
back on the road trying to revive his faltering career with their
Double A affiliate in Jacksonville.
Nearly a year later, I was reminded of Greenberg by an article in The
Chicago Tribune by the columnist Mike Downey. It likened him to Dr.
Archibald (Moonlight) Graham, a character in W. P. Kinsella's
whimsical novel "Shoeless Joe," which was made into the 1989 movie
"Field of Dreams." Doc Graham, played by an elderly Burt Lancaster,
was an actual player fetched from the footnotes of baseball annals,
someone who got into a single major-league game in 1905 and was
marooned in the on-deck circle without ever coming to bat. "It was
like coming this close to your dreams and then watching them brush
past you like a stranger in a crowd," he laments in the film. "At the
time, you don't think much of it. We don't recognize our most
significant moments while they're happening. Back then I thought,
Well, there'll be other days. I didn't realize that was the only day."
When we met, Greenberg himself brought up the Graham comparison. "I'm
tired of hearing it," he said flatly. A freakish play may have plucked
him from obscurity, but he wanted it clear that he needed no one's
pity. He remained a hard-nosed, high-octane center fielder with a
terrific glove. He may never have hit with much power, but when he got
back to normal, he would be batting his usual .290, walking a lot and
creating havoc on the bases. Sportswriters were too prone to dwell on
eerie coincidences, he said: that he and Graham had the same initials,
that they both attended the University of North Carolina, that their
major-league appearances took place 100 years apart almost exactly to
the day. A few stories even seemed to imply reincarnation. "Isn't it
kind of ridiculous?" Greenberg asked.
Greenberg thoroughly understood why a reporter might seek him out.
"It's a great story," he said of himself. "You push and push and push,
you have some ups and downs, you get to the top of the mountain - or
at least you think so - and before you can even blink, literally,
everything comes crashing down, and not lightly. It's not slow. It's a
rapid decline." He took a deep breath before continuing in the second-
person singular with the pep talk he delivers to himself daily: "You
can be the person at the bottom who never digs himself out or tries to
get back up. I don't want that. I don't want any regrets."
He was committed to baseball. "Failure is not an option," he said. He
had begun talking to a sports psychologist, who advised him that while
batting he needed to blot out all inner seepages of negativity. "Last
night was huge for me," Greenberg declared two days after we first
met. He hadn't gotten any hits, but he did walk three times, drove in
two runs, scored twice and stole a base. "I'm just putting positive
thoughts in my head."
Still, I worried for him. He was barely hitting .200. I went to see
John Shoemaker, the Jacksonville Suns' gentlemanly manager. He was
delighted to talk about one of his favorites. "Adam's work ethic is
great," Shoemaker told me. "So is his style of play." Shoemaker has
been coaching minor leaguers for 25 years and wanted to be sure I
understood how big a compliment he had bestowed. Greenberg was always
the first player on the field, he said. He ran full speed on every
ground ball. He never threw to the wrong base. "With two outs in the
ninth, he's still picking up blades of grass in center field and
testing the wind," the manager said.
But then he reached for a folder that held the numbers. With the Suns,
Greenberg had struck out 30 times in 79 official at-bats. "That's not
so good," Shoemaker muttered somberly. He called in Mike Easler, his
hitting coach. Using invisible bats, they both demonstrated the
struggling hitter's unproductive swing and rendered assorted
diagnoses: He's not stepping into the ball. He's taking too big a cut.
He needs to adjust his back foot.
It was like watching that TV hospital series "House," with earnest
doctors inventorying a patient's symptoms and hypothesizing about
conceivable treatments.
Shoemaker glumly summed up the specialists' bewilderment: "Anyway,
something is wrong that needs to be fixed."
But what was it? The mechanics of hitting are as complicated as the
mechanics of pitching: the positioning of the feet, hands, hips and
shoulders; the assessment of the oncoming ball's location and
trajectory; the rotation of the body to convert torque into bat speed.
Even slight variations in technique can subvert the entire operation.
"So have you figured out what's wrong?" I kept asking Greenberg. Each
time, his answer was different, reporting the awareness of some new
flaw and the application of some new adjustment. The harder he worked,
though, the more messed up he seemed to get. "What is the root of my
problem?" he kept asking himself. Is it my stance? Is it my stride? Is
it my swing?
For a while, the villain had been vertigo, though this wasn't
immediately evident. In the hours after Greenberg was beaned, nothing
more than a lump on his head appeared in need of treatment. With an
ice bag pressed against his skull, he could still feel ebullient about
being a big leaguer. Valerio de los Santos called to apologize about
the pitch that got away, and one after another Greenberg's Cub
teammates came into the training room to amiably wish the rookie well.
Tomorrow, they assured him, would be another day.
But in the morning he didn't feel right. When he went to the stadium,
he was redirected to the hospital, where it was surmised that he had a
mild concussion. He sat out that afternoon's game. From time to time,
the TV cameras found him in the dugout with a big smile on his face.
But he kept returning to the clubhouse. He needed to nap.
After the game, baseball began its annual three-day All-Star break.
Greenberg went to Chicago, where he struggled with bouts of dizziness
so severe the world seemed to be capsizing in rough seas. Doctors at
first presumed the symptoms would simply go away. When the season
resumed, the trainers asked the new center fielder each day if he felt
ready to go. It pained Greenberg to respond honestly. He couldn't
play.
Arizona was a peculiar purgatory. On the one hand, doctors finally
figured out that Adam was suffering from benign paroxysmal positional
vertigo, an abnormal sensation of motion caused by a dislocation of
calcium crystals in the inner ear. His nerve cells were giving his
brain the wrong information about the movements of his head. On the
other hand, the correct exercises to fix the problem permanently - a
brief sequence of head movements - were a matter of trial and error,
and the right regimen was weeks in coming. At one point during this
frustrating hiatus, Greenberg prematurely declared himself ready for
baseball. By then, the Cubs no longer considered him a major leaguer.
So he was returned to Tennessee, with his eyes twitching
unpredictably, his vision flickering and his body taking ungainly
stumbles.
By September 2005, he had conquered the vertigo but lost his place in
line with the Cubs. He was no longer: solid hitter, outstanding
hustle, on the verge. He was: feeble bat, hard luck, question mark.
The Cubs were unimpressed by Greenberg at spring training, and he was
again assigned to West Tennessee at the start of the 2006 season. He
did poorly while hitting at the end of the lineup and then was moved
out of the batting order entirely.
But now a raw-deal wild pitch had knocked him off his ascendance. I
wondered: Had baseball been his fool's gold? Had it lured him in,
swallowed his energy and stolen his youth? My frame of reference was
the Cubs, my hopelessness springing eternal. He may say that failure
was not an option, but wasn't it now a probability?
But September came and went, and while the Cubs had much to regret en
route to the National League's worst record, the events Wendy foresaw
were not among them.
Within the cowhide of an official baseball is a core of rubber-encased
cork, which is then surrounded by 1,100 feet of tightly wound yarn.
The entirety weighs about five ounces, and every kid who has ever
played the game is routinely urged not to be afraid of it, no matter
how hard it is thrown. But, of course, a baseball can be as hazardous
as any similarly sized rock. In 1920, a wayward pitch crushed the
skull of the Cleveland Indians shortstop Ray Chapman. Blood poured out
of both ears. He collapsed as he staggered about and was dead by the
next morning. While big-league baseball has suffered no other
fatalities, there have been plenty of other horrendous beanings. The
future Hall of Famer Mickey Cochrane, one of the game's greatest
catchers, had his career halted in 1937 by a pitch that left him
unconscious for 10 days. Thirty years later, Tony Conigliaro, a
brilliant young outfielder with the Boston Red Sox, was smacked just
below the left eye, shattering his cheekbone and damaging his retina.
He said it felt as if the ball were going into one side of his head
and coming out the other. The wildly popular Tony C. made a comeback
in 1969, but his eyesight had weakened and he was never the same.
Batting helmets, made mandatory in 1971, have mitigated many blows.
But a hit in the head can lead to consequences beyond the physical,
including a residue of fear. I naturally wondered if the origin of
Greenberg's problems at home plate was some infinitesimal flinch.
Again and again, he denied it. Then, in January, he reversed course.
"I wasn't scared to bat against lefties, but I was affected," he
admitted. It's sometimes harder for left-handed hitters to follow the
delivery of left-handed pitchers, whose throws can seem to be sweeping
across the plate from "behind." A newborn caution caused Greenberg to
change his batting stance slightly to get a better look at each pitch.
That in turn altered his natural swing, and then each time he
corrected one problem, he seemed to introduce yet another. "You can
make yourself crazy, which is what I did."
Greenberg presented this analysis as a triumph. He was declaring
himself cured. After the 2006 season, he said he had hoped to play
winter ball in Mexico, but none of the teams there wanted him. Now he
thought this snub had turned out for the best. His holiday from
baseball had put an end to "over-trying" during every at-bat and
"overthinking" after every failure. Muscle memory had now restored his
natural swing, like a switch of the controls to autopilot. "I have the
opportunity to go out there again and just have fun," he said.
On baseball's eager calendar, winter comes to a close in mid-February.
Greenberg reported for spring training to Surprise, Ariz., the
preseason home of the Kansas City Royals. His new team signed him as a
free agent, promising to overlook the dreary .228 batting average he
posted the year before. With tomorrow unburdened of yesterday,
Greenberg sounded elated to embrace a fresh start. The clothes he
brought along included two suits - the black with the blue pinstripes
and the solid olive. While he expected to start the season in the
minors, he said he was confident of being called up to the Royals
later on and explained that "you've got to dress the part."
In Surprise, I watched practice along with J. J. Picollo, the team's
director of player development. He said that the Royals had taken a
chance on Greenberg because some players who get plunked in the noggin
simply need a season or so to recover. "If he gets over that hump, he
could be a real discovery for us," Picollo said. It was too soon to
know whether Greenberg had a resurgent bat, but he had already earned
Picollo's good will. "The kid is such a heady player," he said. "Great
instincts, understands the nuances of the game."
"Sometimes you have to be at the right place at the right time."
After all, everything can change in the blink of an eye.