Growing up, it all seems so one-sided ...

Left-handers were always something of an oddity at school. They sometimes had to have special seating arrangements. They had to have special equipment. They threw weird. And so on. On the playground, it was rare to see a lefty. In professional sports, not so much. Especially in baseball.

            There is a premium on left-handed talent in baseball. This exercise is mostly focused on hitters, though southpaw pitchers are, too, coveted like workers who speak (or think or even see) another language.

            A person is usually left-handed when the right side of their brain is more dominant than the left. The right hemisphere of the brain controls the left side of the body and deals with images and the connectedness of things, correspondences and resemblances. So left-handed people are often particularly good at art, music appreciation, and facial recognition. While right-handers might be better at logic, lefties would probably be able to imagine how a figure would look if its orientation in space were changed.

Think curve ball. Which defies logic.

Or sliders low and away. I'm not ruling out brain damage, but maybe there is at least one other explanation for why Sal Perez, who is right-handed, inexplicably flails at outside pitches in the dirt, failing again and again to recognize breaking balls. (He can catch a curve or slider because he knows it's coming.) Maybe Salvy is too left-brained?

Just because a person is left-handed doesn’t mean they see any better than anyone else. But they probably do see things in a different way than their right-handed counterparts do. This can be a very good skill to have. The majority of baseball players considered to be great hitters have been left-handed batters (and were presumably born right-brained?), though some threw from the right side: Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Stan Musial, Mickey Mantle (batted from both sides), George Brett, Tony Gwynn, and so on.

While the right hemisphere of the brain is busy with lots of complicated things, it is responsible for processing much more visual (sensual?) information than the left hemisphere, which is dominant in most people and processes math and language as well as controlling plenty of common sense stuff.

            It follows that most people who analyze baseball are fairly left-brained and right-handed, or normally balanced. People who play it are more likely than the general population (according to me) to have a dominant right hemisphere and, therefore, are better equipped for seeing a baseball and hitting it left-handed. In short, hitting is mostly seeing. 

*Ewing Kauffman, the great Royals owner who died in 1993, had a notion that eyesight was a very important factor in deciding what players to draft to play baseball for his team. This should have been obvious, but nobody had ever really thought to evaluate eyesight as an official, quantifiable “tool” like home run power or even the ability to take walks. A hitter either had a good eye or he didn’t. According to Art Stewart's book, Kauffman hired a specialist to create a baseball-specific eye test and later shared the proprietary information with the rest of MLB. Kauffman wasn’t a scout and didn’t really care if a prospect was left-handed or right-handed. But as an owner who was investing a lot of money, he damn sure wanted to know how well a player could actually see a certain pitch that was coming from either side of the mound. And seeing (really seeing) and reacting to a 100 mph fastball or a nasty breaking pitch is a super-human skill.

P.S. Good left-handed batters generally crush right-handed pitching (and the majority of hurlers are still right handed). But they do tend to struggle, on average, with left-on-left match-ups. Line of sight is important for batters from either side -- hence switch hitters, pinch hitters, and pitching changes.

2S. None of this is supposed to be innuendo or some kind of sick bisexual joke. 

3P.S. Lots of left-handed hitters throw right-handed (almost never the other way around), which is probably due to Darwinian advantages or something (or, more likely, due to the fact that throwing left-handed across the infield diamond, against momentum, just doesn't fly in baseball). Regardless, hitting is seeing; throwing is not. 

4P.S. In life, some people become right-handed to overcome disadvantages. In baseball, some people become left-handed hitters on purpose, which throws some of my theories out of whack. There are incentives in being a left-handed hitter -- if you can swing it, so to speak. For instance, a left-handed batter is at least one step closer to first base.

5P.S. According to my logic, right-handed batters with good eyesight should be better at hitting fastballs than breaking balls (not going out on a limb there). Left-handed hitters should be better in general. Would-be hitters with bad eyesight (from either side) would just be bad hitters.

6P.S. More left-handed pitchers are always needed to mitigate the advantages of left-handed batters. 

7P.S. Oliver Sacks, notably, has written popular (non-baseball) books about interesting clinical cases in neuroscience. 

Sugar

Haiti and the Dominican Republic share an island that is almost literally divided in half. It’s kind of like the Korea of the Caribbean, only very different.

            Haiti is the only place in the Caribbean that won lasting independence through a successful revolt of African slaves. Today, Haiti is a very dark and very poor place. Dominicans are scared of Haitians, who have spilled across the border from time to time with murder on their minds.

            That’s partly why, long after Columbus came, the Dominicans continued to absorb or even invite parasitic invasions from the Spanish, French, and Americans – for dubious protection. Over and over again, the Dominican Republic has been more or less conquered – while everybody tried to ignore Haiti. As such, the Dominican Republic has a very mixed set of identities. People still speak versions of Spanish, French, and English. Because everything is mixed up in the gene pool, it's difficult to guess if a baby will be born dark or light. Generally, the whiter the better – if for no other reason than to put more distance between the child and the Haitian side of the border. But, in history, there is one thing that has really set the Dominican Republic apart from Haiti.

            Sugar.

            Turns out, the Dominican side of the island is perfect for growing sugar cane. Because it was sparsely populated, Europeans imported slaves to harvest the cane. In the 20th Century, Americans used both world wars as excuses to invade the impoverished country. And, even before the wars, Americans were teaching baseball to hungry Dominicans who were working in foreign-owned cane fields. Workers affiliated with various mills were eventually organized into teams that played on Sundays. Kids took up the sport, too, using whatever equipment they could make or pilfer. There would be no shortage of ballplayers.

            The other two major sugar-producing countries in the neighborhood have been Puerto Rico and Cuba. It’s no coincidence that the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Cuba have produced so many talented baseball players. And, after the Cuban pipeline was disrupted for political reasons, it’s no wonder that the Dominican Republic was destined to become known for baseball -- a development that has often been exploited by foreigners and corrupt versions of the Dominican government.    

            In addition to having cheap labor to harvest the sugar, the Dominican Republic has probably been the most economical place to procure good baseball labor. The young ballplayers were never subject to the rules of an amateur draft like the one that now protects the pool of players in the U.S. and Puerto Rico. Dominicans can still be signed by any U.S. club at the age of 16, cheap, on the spot. Some very promising kids get increasingly large bonuses to sign. It's like winning the lottery, assuming they aren't swindled out of the money by shady characters. Regardless, MLB teams typically feed and house prospects at baseball "academies" that are located in the shadows of the sugar mills. When they are ready to play minor league ball, the Dominicans are sent to the states. Even before Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson, some token Latin players were "welcome" in the U.S. But since integration, lots of Dominican players have become stars (though most have not). For the lucky ones who make it to the big leagues, staggering amounts of money are up for grabs. Dominicans don't have to defect like Cubans, so even a little U.S. baseball money goes a long way back home.

            (Before Jackie broke the barrier, President Trujillo, a serial criminal, used to send a representative to New Orleans with bags of cash money to lure well-known black players to the Dominican Republic, where baseball was already a serious spectator sport and where skin color wasn't a deal breaker. Satchel Paige, among other Negro League players, went briefly to the Dominican despite the consequences – the threat of firing squads – of losing baseball games.)

Today, the economy of the Dominican Republic is largely dependent on the exportation and exploitation of its baseball talent, which would have never been cultivated in the first place without sugar. Mark Kurlansky wrote a book about all of this called The Eastern Stars. It’s supposed to be about the shortstop-producing town of San Pedro de Macoris, but it’s really about sugar. It’s not nearly as good as Kurlansky’s book about cod called Cod, but the subject matter is similarly fascinating. In Cod, Kurlansky details how the Basques were fishing off the coast of North America (before Columbus) and mysteriously returning their lucrative catches to the European markets – thanks to salt. Long story.

P.S. Robinson Cano (named after Jackie Robinson) recently signed one of the largest free agent contracts ($240 million) in baseball history. Cano is from the Dominican Republic. 

It is what it is

When the realities of a situation are what they are it’s time to hunker down, because it is what it is. But that resignation in the short term doesn’t preclude forward-thinking people from biding their time, waiting patiently (often painfully) for a new set of circumstances, a new pattern of realities, to emerge, all the while punching the clock and secretly making big plans for change when the right time comes. (Think of any great movement.) Often times, after years, the window for realizing swift changes comes all of a sudden. Others don’t see it coming. So be prepared jump. The result is what we may refer to as a quantum leap or a paradigm shift. For the Kansas City Royals, it was what it was for a long time. Now, it is what it is. And that is a very different “is” than what it was or used to be. More on this later.

On Syria, seriously

Patton wanted to invade the Soviet Union, our ally. Dubya wanted his dad to go all the way to Baghdad (and eventually did it himself as president, gung-ho). Once the ISIS threat is scattered, as it must be, will U.S. leaders transfer energies to the different-but-evil presence of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, where countless people have been murdered and half the population has been displaced? Regardless, Al-Assad has been one lucky dictator up to this point. The Arab Spring and the emergence of ISIS have turned out as well as could be expected for him, somehow, in the short term.

            I am fresh off of judging a high school debate competition this weekend, so I have some questions about Syria…

Dr. Rany Jazayerli is a dermatologist and family man in the Chicago area. Jazayerli is a founder of Baseball Prospectus and has been published in the New York Times. He makes his analytical opinions about the Royals and baseball well-known, but he also has a devoted, though more closely guarded, interest in the deadly developments in Syria.

I really want to pick Rany's brain for this blog. Here are some questions I would ask him about Syria if I had his email address (maybe he’ll stumble across them and provide answers).

Q. Imagine if one of the diplomats killed in Benghazi (in Libya, by militiamen) would have, instead, been captured and beheaded on video. What would we be looking at now in Syria with respect to the resistance against Al-Assad and the concurrent/subsequent rise of ISIS?

Q. Do Syrians have a high degree of brand loyalty to the country? Or are religious and other cultural identities foremost?  How is Syria most different from Iraq (neither of which pose/posed a threat to the U.S.) in terms of its assets and Muslim factions?

Q. Do the majority of Syrians have a favorable opinion of Iran?

Q. Do you favor an independent Kurdish state/country in present-day Iraq or Syria?

Q. If you could go back and re-draw the map of the Middle East in the wake of colonialism and World War II, what are a few changes you would make (especially with respect to Israel, Syria, and Iraq)?

Q. What does Emergency Law mean to you?

Q. If you need someone to pitch like an ace (like Bumgarner) to win a World Series, why will that someone be Danny Duffy for the Royals?

The Art of Scouting, by Art Stewart with Sam Mellinger

Art Stewart is the elderly man you might have seen on TV during recent champagne celebrations in the Royals clubhouse. Art is a legend. He has been a scout for seven decades. It feels like it took him seven hours to write this book, which is approximately how long it took me to read (and kind of enjoy) it.

            The typos and bad formatting made me cringe. I’m sure they make Sam Mellinger – a great sportswriter – cringe too. You can tell this book was done on a shoestring budget by Ascend Books – which is probably appropriate since Art was often scouting on a shoestring budget, especially during the dark years when David Glass first took ownership of the Royals and tried to run the club like Walmart. Actually, he ran it more like K-Mart. Everything from the fonts to the photos in The Art of Scouting is tacky.

            The forward by George Brett is pretty bad. Art’s stories are interesting but not very deep. There are the obligatory, well-known stories about Brett and Bo Jackson. I did read some things I might have forgotten. That Willie Wilson was a catcher in high school. That Billy Butler studies a lot of film and Mike Moustakas could care less. And that the Royals really do pay attention to new developments in baseball. Art tells us that Mike Groopman and John Williams run the analytics department. Being an expert reporter and detective, I Googled them. Both fit the mold – Ivy League degrees in math and science.

            Art also recalls his days as a scout with the Yankees, back when players could be signed on the spot. My favorite story is about two former Yankee pitchers who swapped wives. “They traded wives, children, even dogs…Ben Affleck and Matt Damon announced they wanted to make a movie about it…We’ll see.”

            I enjoyed Art’s stories about the generosity of Ewing Kauffman, about the Royals Baseball Academy, about scouting in the Dominican Republic, and about various negotiations with players. The book really does give a lot of glimpses into the life of a scout.

            Art talks about drafting Zack Greinke, which is cool, and how the Royals got both Hunter Dozier and Sean Manaea in 2013. But I wish he would have gone into even more depth about particular trades and past drafts – specifically why the Royals chose certain players, what the bonus situations were like, and especially how those drafts worked out (and how David Glass was a cheap bastard even if he has always been considered a good baseball guy by insiders.)

I also wish Sam would have had more time to edit this book and that it was not published by Ascend. It could have been a classic, like Art Stewart. And it definitely could have been worthy of second edition, an update – now that the Royals have finally made it back to real relevance in the wake of the book’s publication. Now, there are a lot of new stories worth telling. It would be interesting to get the insidery scoop on the strategies used by men like Art and Dayton Moore to assemble the 2014 team.

Three non-baseball books I recently read with my eyes

True North, by Jim Harrison

It occurs to me that a lot of male authors really like to write about the virtues of fishing (especially fly fishing). And they are usually much better at writing than they actually are at fishing. Harrison likes to write about fishing and young women. As far as themes go, the latter gets a little disturbing at times.

            Harrison’s main male characters tend to be benign and pathetic womanizers, heavy drinkers who try to wash away the sin by fishing. They also tend to be writers or liberal arts types, thinkers who are looking for an escape. In addition to True North, I have read The English Major. In both, the main character is more or less free to pursue his hollow desires, only to reach the inevitable conclusion that the only thing that matters is finding a familiar place to rest, preferably with a dog who likes to go fishing. Sounds about right to me.

            In True North, the main character is David Burkett, who, it seems, wants nothing more than to kill his father. (Nothing is said about wanting to sleep with his mother.) The Burketts live off of an inherited fortune that was accumulated on the backs of loggers who cleared the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. David’s father is the living patriarch, an alcoholic (like nearly everyone in the novel) who spends lavishly and indulges in pedophilia (young girls) as a birthright. David doesn’t want to be associated with his family name – in fact, he wants the family to be exposed for its crimes against nature. He alternates time between the family mansion and living in shacks in what’s left of the woods near Lake Superior. Since he doesn’t have to work for a living, David dabbles in religion but mostly takes long walks, goes fishing, and entertains thoughts of women. He spends the entire novel (covering a period of decades) working on his “project,” which is never quite defined but has something to do with painstakingly describing all of the places in certain areas of the U.P. where trees have been harvested. Harrison uses lengthy passages to detail the present geography while ruminating on the past. In the end, I guess, the novel itself is the project, which still makes no sense. The story concludes when David goes to Mexico (long story), where he manages to play a role in finalizing his father’s destiny, setting both of them free, more or less.

            I liked True North, but I can certainly see why many people would not. I would now like to go to the U.P. I like the idea of living in a shack with my dog and my projects, with plenty of money and nothing pressing to do but read and think and complain. I embrace the fictional notion of going into town to find a female companion when solitude and fishing get boring, which they rarely do. I like the thought of a long winter. 

           

When the Ground Turns in Its Sleep, by Sylvia Sellers-Garcia

I went to the library looking for a good book on the Guatemalan Civil War. I came home with a novel. When the Ground Turns in Its Sleep is the story of a young man, Nitido Aman, who travels to the country of his birth in search of himself. Nitido’s father has died in the U.S. after suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, taking untold stories to the grave.

            In Rio Roto, Nitido is mistaken for a priest. He assumes the role and uses it as leverage in an attempt to discover his family’s past. But stories and identities don’t reveal themselves easily in Guatemala. Although he speaks Spanish very well, there is a barrier that must be broken down slowly. Father Aman must learn how to listen all over again if he hopes to gain trust and uncover any truths. The poor villagers in Rio Roto and elsewhere are deeply scarred by the long guerrilla war that left thousands and thousands without family members – who were murdered or just disappeared. It’s hard to tell who’s on whose side. In the end, Nitido finds a way to trace his roots in the jungle.    

            When the Ground Turns in Its Sleep is a good fictional account of what Guatemala is like. The country is still feeling strong aftershocks, unnoticeable to many oblivious outsiders, from the savage civil war – which is a war that has been impossible for reporters and historians to describe in full. Sellers-Garcia manages to capture a glimpse of Guatemala, in the only way possible, through magic and realism.

Note: In an email, Sellers-Garcia told me that a good non-fiction book on the subject is The Art of Political Murder by Francisco Goldman.

Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See, by Juliann Garey

This is a book I want to own. It could be a case of recency bias, but I think Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See might be one of the best novels I’ve ever read.

Garey probably made her main character a man because Greyson Todd is an asshole and assholes are usually men. Greyson is also crazy. It’s easier for me to relate to a crazy asshole if that crazy asshole happens to be a man.

            Greyson is a rich Hollywood executive. He is bipolar. He leaves his wife and young daughter and travels the world, trying to outrun his insanity, trying to disappear and not disappear at the same time. Garey, who has had to deal with the debilitating results – high anxiety and low or manic depression – of being bipolar in real life, tells the story through the haphazard viewpoints of Greyson, who has finally ended up in a mental hospital, where he is undergoing electric shock treatment. During the ECT episodes, Greyson recalls vivid scenes from his childhood, his life in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter, and his time on the run, all flashing by in his unreliable memory for your reading pleasure. To his brain, the electric shock therapy is like radiation or chemotherapy is to a cancerous organ – like Napalm. The idea is to kill the enemy and salvage what’s left.

            In Rome, Greyson decides to do something touristy. He goes to see what is purported to be Jesus’ foreskin. There is a long line. “Jesus Christ, how long does it take to look at a fucking foreskin?” Greyson mutters under his breath to a group of Catholic schoolgirls.

            In Bangkok, he goes to grotesque sex shows. In Uganda, he pays a guide to take him to dangerous places. In Kenya, he marries a young widowed mother who, he knows, will soon be dying of AIDS. He gets arrested in Nairobi for freaking out in public. He hides out in Hell’s Kitchen. He does lots of mean things. He assumes multiple identities (including Lee Majors). He drinks heavily. He thinks he sees his daughter in cities all over the world. He sleeps with lots of women. He doesn’t sleep. He panics. He gets worse. He tries to get assistance to commit suicide but is turned down. You, meanwhile, cringe at him, laugh at him, feel sorry for him, and learn to root for him as his world closes shut. Everything is too bright, too loud. As a person who has had bouts with mental illness, you are thinking: Yes, Right, Nailed It.

            (Disclaimer: I think some people imagine that going crazy might be kind of fun; it is not. Others assume you are not in touch with reality. In many cases, you are too much in touch with reality.)

            Once the shock treatments start to wear off, Greyson, still crazy after all these years (but also still sharp as a tack), comes to terms with his disappearing acts. Because, after all, he wanted a Hollywood ending. And this novel will most definitely be made into a movie, one that should be great for crazy assholes and other people. I will buy tickets. I hope it’s really good.

P.S. I put a hold at the library on the Art of Scouting, by Art Stewart and Sam Mellinger. Looking forward to that. 

Here's the thing about Cardinals fans

If they were really the best fans in baseball, they would hate you and your team with the heat of a thousand metaphorical suns. But they don’t. A lot of Cardinals fans seem to be genuinely caring people, which makes them all the more intolerable. The worst ones are quick to point out that they are also rooting for your team, as if Major League Baseball games are, in part, an insincerity contest. Cardinals fans can be so passive-aggressive – not unlike parents at a youth soccer match, always finding a way to mention that their kid would have scored another goal (probably) if not for the bad call in the second period. Not that they were keeping score. And they really thought your kid played a good game too.

            Cardinals fans do have a healthy and open disdain for the Cubs – but, really, does anyone think they deserve a fucking medal for that? They remind me of Nebraska football fans and Kansas basketball fans. Most of them would find nice things to say about Ebola while voting to wipe several West African countries off the map in the name of science.

            The best fans in baseball don’t get Woody Allen movies. They post videos of cute puppies and quote clichés from vapid self-help gurus on Facebook. They take vacations to Mexico during the off-season and spend the entire trip sipping pre-mixed margaritas within the confines of a well-guarded American resort.

            What many Cardinals fans won’t tell you (and often don’t realize themselves) is that they secretly view you as a sub-class of people who are missing limbs or were born without eyes. They feel sorry for you. You need their charity. You need some of their WASPish good fortune to rub off on you. Just maybe you will have a conversion to their faith, and be better off for it. You might change colors. You might get your life together. You might, someday, be miraculously cured and drive away in a beautiful SUV.

            Meanwhile, the best fans in baseball pack that shitty stadium like Mormons at a huge Amway convention. If they win a baseball game, it is a joyous occasion to celebrate what was meant to be again. If they lose, they always have an excuse (signed, Eckstein’s mother). God must have had a particular emergency that day. Either way, it’s OK. Cardinals fans are happy if you get to enjoy a moment – as long as you realize it was only a fluke.

P.S. Deadspin got here before me.

Disorderly conduct - or - Moe Berg's blues

Moe Berg was a graduate of Princeton University and Columbia Law School. Berg spent 15 years in the majors as a backup catcher. He spoke a dozen languages, but it was said he couldn’t hit in any of them. In 1934, a team of All-Stars traveled to Japan. Berg was one of the “stars,” along with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. While his teammates were focused on playing exhibition baseball games, Berg went to the top of a hospital in Tokyo and filmed the city with his movie camera. As the story goes, that footage was later used in the planning of U.S. bombing raids on the Japanese mainland. After his playing career was over, Berg went to work for the Office of Strategic Services. One of his missions was to determine if physicist Werner Heisenberg intended to help Germany develop atomic weapons. Berg, who was Jewish, was allegedly dispatched to Europe to assassinate Heisenberg if necessary (which it was not). Berg never married. He lived out his life as a delusional, reclusive vagabond.

He was probably insane.

Actually, he was probably somewhere on the autism spectrum. (He wouldn’t read newspapers after he saw that someone else had touched them.)

            Mental disabilities and disorders obviously don’t discriminate. In some chicken-or-egg cases, they contribute to making people more eccentric, more artistic, or even more intelligent (though rarely happier). The most common mental illness today is depression (which Berg likely had bouts with, too, to say nothing of obsessive compulsiveness or bipolar disorder). About 10 percent of Americans suffer from depression. Everybody knows about it; it’s hell on families. Lots and lots of people are on medication these days. Others self-medicate, numbing themselves with alcohol and street drugs.

            Anxiety disorder is also fairly common. A real panic attack will send you straight to the emergency room, presenting all of the characteristics of a trapped badger. Because the same drugs are used to treat anxiety and depression, they are often linked. And they do go together; people develop both. Panic attacks feel very different than depression does, but both can be nightmarish and debilitating.

            All of this shit compounds, becoming indistinguishable, swallowing you up. Every day, I take an anti-anxiety and anti-seizure pill. I also take a pill for bipolar disorder (to slow my thoughts down, according to the psych doc) and one for depression. Some would say we are overly-medicated and coddled in a liberal society, and they would be half right; but I know what I was like before, what I had become. I couldn’t leave the house; I was haunted.

I am far from being a genius like Berg was, but I did go crazy. Now I seem to be doing better – since I stopped getting drunk and started seeing the psychiatrist instead of family doctors and psychologists/shrinks. At first, family and friends who meant well tried to empathize instead of sympathize. Because they had heard so much about anxiety and depression (and post-traumatic stress disorder) on the news, they felt like they could understand. Of course, they couldn’t – unless they were struggling with the same issues. Laughably they told me to relax or suggested I get out more. I have a hard time forgiving a few frustrated people who told me to “suck it up” or “be a man.” Over and over, I have had only one thing to say to “normal” people to explain myself: “You don’t understand.”

            Anyway, anxiety and depression have taken a big toll on my family and on my social life. They conspired to steal the “me” from me.

            Maybe Moe Berg could have been even more prolific, especially later in life, if he would have had access to modern chemistry. Maybe not. There are plenty of more recent examples of professional baseball players (and millions of people like me) who have struggled with various and wide-ranging forms of mental illness in their primes. Some of them went on to thrive; others did not.

            Zack Greinke, now on Zoloft, briefly quit baseball due to social anxiety disorder, claiming he’d rather mow lawns. Darrell Porter chased his demons to an early grave. Pete Harnisch’s depression was triggered when he decided to stop using tobacco. Joey Votto had panic attacks. Rick Ankiel and Chuck Knoblauch got the yips. Dock Ellis once threw a no-hitter while tripping on acid, which is a category unto itself.

            There are lots of things lurking, just waiting to drive you batshit crazy. And life as well as baseball – both games of failure – can confound anybody. As Yogi Berra said, “Ninety percent of the game is half mental.”  

            Dr. Charles F. Brady is an expert on obsessive compulsive disorder and anxiety. “It’s not a matter of intelligence or courage or willpower,” Brady told MLB.com. “When anxiety hits, until you understand what’s going on…no matter who it is, that person’s going to feel like their body’s falling apart. They’re going to feel like they’re dying. They’re going to feel like they’re losing their mind.”

            I know I thought I was.

P.S. Moe Berg’s life was captured beautifully, in full, by Nicholas Dawidoff in The Catcher Was a Spy.

2P.S. The best book I’ve found on this stuff (anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder) is a novel by Juliann Garey: Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See. It is really smart, shocking, hilarious, and heartbreaking.

3P.S. Right after writing this post, I read in the New York Times that benzodiazepines, which are used to treat anxiety, may cause Alzheimer’s Disease or dementia. So I’ve got that going for me.

A short history of baseball in Guatemala

One of the romantic notions I had about traveling to Guatemala, a place I could never possibly comprehend, involved taking an extra suitcase or duffle bag filled with old baseball gloves and baseballs. I had heard of this kind of thing before. We were going to be visiting an orphanage, and I imagined there would be several young shortstops, future stars, who were just waiting for a chance to gobble up grounders on the hardscrabbled dirt. 

            I abandoned that notion due to practical constraints.

At the airport in Guatemala City, I immediately wished I would have taken more Spanish instead of wasting all those years in French class. I followed a crowd through the terminal, and we deposited ourselves as a group onto the street. It was mass chaos. Luckily, for the first time in my life, I was tall enough to see over almost everyone. Feeling grateful, I located my colleagues who were waiting for me, and we were off to Antigua.

Antigua is an old Catholic city that is flanked by volcanoes. It is ancient, beautiful, and exotic. It is also in dire need of sanitation services and dog catchers. Funky passenger buses painted in psychedelic colors – Chicken Buses -- roar through the streets. There are no traffic signals or stop signs to obey. The dwellings, too, are painted in absurdly bright colors. Rich families own the coffee plantations, but it is common to have your own orange tree. Graffiti-like images of dark-skinned Jesuses are everywhere. The courtyards are lined with laundry and ringed, ominously, with barbed wire left over from the civil war. It is, indeed, a place filled with magic intertwined with realism.

Like most Latin American countries, Guatemala is stuck between the past and present, with the dead living in the midst. There is little regard for the future. The infant mortality rate in Guatemala is sky high. If you survive the water through childhood, you have a good chance at immunity. As for us, the Gringos, we couldn’t stomach the water. We couldn’t even brush our teeth with it.

Everywhere I went, I had three things on my mind for people who spoke English. Were there snakes here? (Not here, thank God.) Is there good fishing somewhere? (The water is very polluted.) Do you like baseball…?

Turns out, there has never been a major league player from Guatemala. Not even a single shortstop.

Soccer is pretty much the only real sport here, as it is in most of Central America and South America. Almost every patch of flattened ground in the highland jungle of Guatemala that isn’t used for some kind of agriculture is used by kids who want to kick the ball around. People are, of course, passionate about soccer in the way they are passionate about baseball in places like the Dominican Republic and Cuba.

Compared to other parts of Latin America, Central America as a whole has not produced many baseball prospects who made it big. The small countries of Costa Rica and El Salvador aren’t represented. According to Baseball Almanac, Honduras can claim one major leaguer in its history and Nicaragua boasts 13. Panama is the leading Central American country with 49 big leaguers, including the biggest name, Mariano Rivera.

Bordering Guatemala to the north (in North America), Mexico has sent 114 future Major League Baseball players to the U.S., most notably Fernando Valenzuela. The largest exporter of MLB players in South America has been Venezuela with an impressive number of 321. Elsewhere, again according to Baseball Almanac, 183 Cubans have escaped Castro’s island in the Caribbean and made their way to The Show. The Dominican Republic has produced 618 major leaguers, a lot of them All-Stars, far and away the most of any Spanish-speaking country.

But not one lousy player from Guatemala? They do have a professional baseball league in Guatemala City and there is a small, organized Little League program, though organization means something totally different in Latin America than it does in the U.S. But what kinds of things set Guatemala apart from other countries in the region?

While Guatemalans are generally very poor, economic conditions in many Latin countries, often war torn, are desperate. The biggest reason for Guatemala’s inability to groom baseball players, in addition to the overriding interest in soccer, might be that these people are short. Really short.

In Guatemala, when you sit down in a chair, you feel like you have just plopped your adult self down awkwardly in an elementary school classroom. You are suddenly the big Gringo in the room. On average, Guatemalan adults are eight inches shorter than American adults.

Maybe it’s the water. Maybe it’s the altitude. At any rate, professional scouts mostly don’t bother going to Guatemala.

Still, if 5-foot-6 Jose Altuve (from Venezuela) can become an impact player in the states, surely there are others. Indeed, the Orioles recently signed Juan Diego Montes, a Guatemalan, to a minor league deal. Montes only hit .236 in the Gulf Coast League with no power; he is a long way from ever playing in Camden Yards. But Montes is listed at 6-foot-2! For the purposes of this essay, we will consider him a really big anomaly.

Anyway, I stubbornly decide to scout the orphanage, which, thanks to a well installed by members of our party on a previous trip, has clean water.

We drive through mountains and clouds for hours. In one town, a heavily armed, jockey-sized man stands guard on top of a Pepsi truck while, nearby, prostitutes loiter. In one mountain pass, there has been a mudslide as a result of heavy rain or seismic activity. Locals who don’t ask why work slowly with shovels. They will finish the task at some point in the future, which is something they don’t think much about. They are used to this.

We finally reach the orphanage. I play a version of kickball with some of the kids; their English is a lot better than my Spanish. A few of the kids, despite their tiny statures, show some athletic promise. As for me, I can’t promise that I will ever return to Guatemala. Who knows? But if I do go back, I decide I might bring a few of those gloves with me.

It isn't rocket science

Some of the dumbest people I’ve ever observed have spent too much time in a dugout.

            Baseball is steeped in tradition and superstition; and ignorance is often celebrated through crotch-grabbing, prank-playing, spit-balling, bubble-blowing displays of arrested development and bravado that would make George W. Bush proud.

Catchers have the worst of it from the get-go, considering the self-fulfilling prophesy of the whole tools of ignorance thing. Most catchers have taken way too many foul balls to the head. Yet, they are in charge of calling a game. And after their playing days are over, they are often called upon to manage games. Kansas City manager Ned Yost, a former catcher, immediately comes to mind. When heavy-footed Billy Butler indicated to his skipper that he’d rather play first base than be a full-time designated hitter, Yost, who had a lifetime batting average of .212 in the majors and an on-base percentage of .237, semi-famously quipped, “You know what, I’d like to be an astronaut.”

At least Yost – he counts Larry the Cable Guy among his best friends – is smart enough to make a truly funny comment once a year. And there is definitely truth to the notion, Yost notwithstanding, that bad players can be good managers. It’s just that the formerly bad players should probably try to compensate by being smart. Off the bat, the smartest manager I can think of is Tampa Bay’s Joe Maddon. The son of a Polish mother and Italian father, Maddon went to Lafayette College, which later gave him an honorary doctorate. He was, in fact, a catcher in the minor leagues; and now he’s a very successful manager. He’s married to a law school graduate. You can look this stuff up on Wikipedia.

Great players rarely become good managers or coaches, no matter how smart (or dumb) they are. Last year, the Royals tried George Brett as their hitting coach because George was pretty great at hitting. Near as I can tell, Brett’s philosophy is See Ball, Hit Ball Hard, Run Like Hell. He is on record as saying that home runs kill rallies, which has a certain amount of backwards truth to it. Anyway, Brett was a lousy batting coach.

That brings us to the pitchers, the ones not named John Rocker or Nuke LaLoosh. Some of these guys are cerebral. Former screwballer Mike Marshall has a doctorate in kinesiology. Jim Bouton wrote one of best baseball books ever published. Dirk Hayhurst writes smart books about the stupidity of baseball’s unwritten rules.

As far as I know or care, no former NFL player has ever written a really good book (unless you count George Plimpton). But even the most barbaric NFL players at least had to pretend to go to college, while the majority of professional baseball players did not. And unlike Major League Baseball (as far as I know), the NFL has a way to quantify the intelligence of its prospects: the wonderfully named Wonderlic Test. Somewhat surprisingly, offensive tackles and centers had a higher average score in 2013 than quarterbacks, which ranked third as a group.

Regardless of sociological biases (race, language, etc.), you could probably make a case, I guess, that non-concussed professional football players are, on average, smarter than their lollygagging, non-pitching counterparts in baseball. Fortunately, you don’t have to teach any of them how to grow strong, react impossibly fast, throw thunderbolts, or run like the wind. They either have it or they don’t.

When it comes to the overall intelligence of fans and eggheads (who generally lack athletic skills), baseball is still, without much dispute, the most sophisticated, nuanced sport in America by far. Scholars and artists follow baseball, study it, write about it, and praise it with eloquence: James Earl Jones, Vin Scully, George Will, Ken Burns, Doris Kearns Goodwin, the late Buck O'Neil, et al. Meanwhile, sabermetricians had to be invented to slowly pull a lot of mouth-breathing players and managers, and especially reluctant scouts and front office people, into the post-modern era of baseball analytics.

The good news in all of this for many people is that there is no solid correlation between intelligence and success in sports. Professional athletes don’t have to be smart at all to succeed, and neither do you! Being dense, or just smart enough, is an advantage in a lot of occupations. (I am thinking about the Nirvana song: “I think I’m dumb, or maybe just happy.”)

We’ll leave the last words on this subject to a particular pitcher, a Cy Young Award winner who cannot tell a lie and might be a genius: “I don’t want to name names, but there were guys I played with that were so stupid that they’re really good, because their mind never gets in the way,” Zack Greinke told the Los Angeles Times.

P.S. One former Royal accidentally shot a female reporter with an air gun and another once got his head stuck in a rain tarp. Neither player was very good.

2P.S. My pick for smartest baseball player ever is Moe Berg, who was a catcher and a spy. More on that soon.

3P.S. Blaine Gabbert (Mizzou!) and Alex Smith (Chiefs!) had the highest Wonderlic scores among 2013 quarterbacks.

4P.S. Gabbert sucked.

5P.S. According to the results, the Chiefs were the dumbest team in the NFL. 

Jewish baseball players: a short list

Regardless of religion, every left-handed pitcher who throws a baseball really hard and is white has been compared, at some point, to Sandy Koufax. Hank Greenberg, on the other hand, doesn’t get nearly enough love.

Below is a list of current Jewish players in MLB from Jewish Baseball News. (So, basically, I’m just ripping this off from them.) Braun, with some help from steroids, has been the closest thing to a slugger like Greenberg, I suppose. Pederson is supposed to be really good. Nobody on this list, though, compares to Koufax.

            Ryan Braun, OF, Brewers

            Craig Breslow, P, Red Sox

            Ike Davis, 1B, Pirates

            Scott Feldman, P, Astros

            Nate Freiman, 1B, Athletics

            Sam Fuld, OF, Athletics

            Ryan Kalish, OF, Cubs

            Ian Kinsler, 2B, Tigers

            Ryan Lavarnway, C, Red Sox

            Joc Pederson, OF, Dodgers

            Kevin Pillar, OF, Blue Jays

            Josh Satin, IF, Mets

            Danny Valencia, 3B, Blue Jays
            Josh Zeid, P, Astros

Tommy John Surgery: the meat of the matter

Like many pitchers before him, Sandy Koufax retired early because his pitching arm was ravaged by the unnatural act of throwing a baseball incredibly fast, sometimes throwing it with a seemingly impossible curve. The stress on his ulnar collateral ligament was too much to bear. It was a great shame.

            “If I was smart enough to do this 10 years before, it might be called Koufax surgery,” said Dr. Frank Jobe, who died this year (2014).

            Jobe performed what turned out to be successful elbow surgery on Tommy John in 1974, forever changing the outlook for future generations of pitchers. The procedure, though grisly, seems fairly simple (with the added advantage that it actually works). A tendon is harvested from elsewhere in the patient’s body (other elbow or knee) and then transplanted into the wounded elbow. Sometimes a tendon from a cadaver is used. The new tendon is attached to the ulna and humerus bones in the damaged elbow. After a year or so of recovery, a pitcher can start to regain his former velocity. The success rate these days is fairly high.

            Most professional pitchers eventually need some kind of arm surgery to prolong their careers. Throwing a baseball at high torque, repeatedly, causes all kinds of problems. But some pitchers are freaks of nature. They go an entire career without a serious arm injury. The biggest freak of nature in MLB has to be R.A. Dickey, who was born without an ulnar collateral ligament and pitched/is pitching past age 40 as a knuckleballer. Talk about a new market efficiency. Maybe parents should have promising youngsters go under the knife early and decisively, removing all doubt about potential elbow problems? (Caution: this probably wouldn’t work out well.)

            In addition to the elbow, there is another big area of concern for pitchers. If faster advances in rotator cuff surgery (and rehabilitation) would have been made in the 1970s, Steve Busby might have thrown more than two no-hitters for Kansas City – he was the first pitcher with two no-hitters in his first two seasons. Busby’s very brief but stellar career was effectively over in 1976 after he blew out his shoulder. He was the first pitcher to try to make a comeback from rotator cuff surgery, but the operation didn’t take.

            A pitcher is said to have blown out his shoulder because it can be a mess of muscles and tendons in there. Some shoulder surgeries are done arthroscopically while others require long incisions. The idea is to repair torn tendons through sutures and/or anchors. The amount of damage and therefore the degree of invasiveness required to fix it varies. Rotator cuff procedures are common, but strenuous rehabilitation efforts are necessary for pitchers who want to continue professional careers.

            Thus far, nobody (that I know of) has ever been born without a rotator cuff, which is really more of a region in the shoulder than a thing. (Talk about limber.) But plenty of pitchers have made full comebacks from these surgeries in the post-Carter years.

P.S. Prior to the 1970s, the only way for pitchers to continue their careers after experiencing serious elbow or shoulder damage was to re-invent themselves almost exclusively (and painfully) as a knuckleballer.