Playing a Slow Left Field for Team Fatal Flaw, Adam Dunn

The dichotomous maker-of-enemies; the hot-button issue, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the taking of the Rhineland. Adam Dunn is a divider. The two schools of baseball thought and cultural processing take their sides, one against the other, cracking off sniper fire from respective foxholes. The old school vs. the new school.

The old school thinks that the flaw is half empty. Adam Dunn strikes out just a whole whole bunch. Seems like every damn time to the old school (ranking him fifth in the NL this year with 160-some-odd Ks). And when he's not striking out, he's taking good sound hittable pitches, lusting passively after the base on balls like a pauper waiting for his ship to come in. "Jee-suz! Swing the bat, meat!" The old school grabs his fedora and crumples it in his hooked fists, the vein on his forehead swelling like the Old Man, the Mississippi, in flood season.

Whatever new school contingent of execs in Cincinatti must've grown weary from fending off the old schoolers, as they shipped out probably the fifth most productive hitter in the league for some prospects who I'm sure are just fine. Might've been something about a contract year, too, but in their weary hearts the new schoolers were likely glad to be rid of the man who came to dominate every scouting meeting, drink at the bar and sauna session in Cincinatti. (BTW, the folks at FJM are much better at poking fun at the old school than I).

And what, you might ask, did Adam Dunn do to deserve this? What is his fatal flaw, and why is he on this team at all? Perception is the flaw. Dunn is a divider, tearing war rooms apart, rending a tear in the delicate fabric of administration. It's better to be rid of the man--productive as he may be--than to let the acrid debate continue.

Some team somewhere will be happy with the Texan. The board room will buzz with anticipation, knowing that they're bucking the straps of the old school for the emancipation of sabermetric success.

Team - The Chicago Cubs - Team #3 The Fatal Flaw

Fatal flaw: the small sample size. The Cubs excelled over a great swath of time--history's clock. The clay sculptor whose masterpiece collapses with the final dab on the tip of the nose, the structural tenuousness of greatness, the weightiness of excellence. Pressures.

Fatal flaw, Suggestion #2: The Cub fan. Statistical irregularities are not tragic. The infrastructure built around them, the scaffolding of fear and loathing; that is the wreckage of tragedy. You could break down any part of the human experience in this manner, heartlessly. Failed relationships are statistical anomalies (or more accurately, regularities). I suppose it doesn't do any good to get so cold about it. It's tragic, after all, to raise a score of hopes and disappoint.

Is it a flaw to get all excited about something that you care about? To commit time and energy to the pitiless trials of chance? No, I don't think so. Flaws, after all, suggest strengths in the otherwise. For what's a hero cut down but a hero still?

Does even a hero clad in iron not sometimes wear a terrible goatee?

Bengie Molina Post - The Word Cloud

The Bengie Molina rosterization, as word cloud.

C - Bengie Molina - Team #3_The Fatal Flaw

I recall from some far off, long ago TV broadcast, hearing about how Bengie Molina was the slowest ever. Laughing, jocularity, surrounding the reliable World Series champ and his footspeed. A little research uncovered an article in the Hardball Times: "Run Slowly and Carry a Big Bat." Craig Burley writes " I suppose I have always known that Bengie Molina was slow." Exactly. We all know, through some trick of the collective unconscious, that this third of the Molina catchers is quicksand.

Bengie is a good ballplayer, renowned, even, for his catching skills. He's got a good bat, overlooking a few sabermetric short comings. But The Slow. Every ball that I've watched Molina put in play is coated with The Slow, because there is the question of the ball itself (a hit, a homer??) and then there is the question of the The Slow. A slow, slow dribbler down the line means one thing with an average runner, but with Molina it is like reading a long poem: a familiar language made the more interesting for a slightly altered vocabulary. The third baseman can hesitate for a hair longer and set his feet, unrushed. Molina's barely two-thirds of the way down.

(This is the flaw's role. It changes the rules when that player steps in.)

[Catchers get a bad rap for being slow (it's a bad rap but an accurate one, according to Burley's tabulations). When I was in high school, I enjoyed challenging middle infielders to on-the-spot sprint races. "To that fence post, Go!" I'd pace them if not beat them and notch a small victory for catchers. That was a good little trick until my junior year or so, when I got a little bigger and I guess slower, and the middle infielders got quicker. In youth, I could bend expectation, but as we neared maturity, the roles were solidified. That I could keep up, a lead-footed catcher, became a comical notion, a farce.]

Molina has stolen 3 bases in 10 years in the league. That is 12 seconds of the highest drama, when the farcical hits the e-break, locks up and spins the heads of all present.

stats, the bros., a tear in the space-time fabric

Lineup - The Fatal Flaw

C - Bengie Molina
1B -
2B -
3B -
SS -
LF -
CF -
RF -

SP -
RP -

Manager -

Memo: Team #3_The Fatal Flaw

Your third team in the Rosterized library, as dictated by the Rosterized Board of Directors: The Fatal Flaw.

This team is made up of those players who, despite any manner of impressive baseball abilities, possess one or several obvious on-the-field deficiencies. This isn't a bash, though. This is a celebration of the fatal flaw. Finely honed skills are nice and all, but there are as many instances in which the fatal flaw is as compelling and endearing as any beneficial trait. On this team, I sing the imperfect, the rough edged, the flawed.

Most of these players are current. One of them, a player to be named later, is done in the major leagues, and in the Mexican Leagues and the Korean League. His flaws were numerous, but for a moment in timed he had only one: he couldn't pitch away from home.

Most of these players are also very good. Keep in mind that a single flaw does not always portend an unsuccessful career. Instead, the flawed player attunes the other facets of his game to compensate, and takes the shit from the media and punks like me and spins it into gold.

Decisions - Team#2_The Movies

The movies have been done for a while, my mind dragged off to elsewheres, mostly to the baseball season itself. Team #2 The Movies was a tough haul. I thought, in the beginning, that it was a home run team, full of colorful characters, easy-to-use personae and plot companionship. In the end, though, it was a bit of a chore. There aren't, after all, very many good baseball movies. A list of the top five will get you far, and you'll miss nothing good beyond that.

That is the point, though: movies about baseball will never--with the exception, perhaps, of Field of Dreams--be as good and as moving as baseball itself. One nine-pitch postseason at-bat has more dramatic tension than any--any--cinematic, simulated pitch and hit, no matter the bursting orchestral score.

So ultimately I kept going back to the same wells, self-consciously mining only a few of the exceptional sources. They are great movies, but give me an afternoon in Chicago, with a long view of the lake over the right-field bleachers. I won't need a plot but for the one unfolding on the green.

Lineup - The Movies

C - John Kinsella
1B - Jack Elliot
2B - Ken Burns
3B - Roger Dorn
SS - Nicky Rogan
LF - Terence Mann
CF - Kelly Leak
RF - Shoeless Joe Jackson

SP - Bugs "Baseball Bugs" Bunny
RP - Ricky Vaughn

Manager - Morris Buttermaker

Manager - Morris Buttermaker - Team#2_The Movies

Amanda Whurlitzer: I know an 11-year-old girl who is already on the pill.
Coach Morris Buttermaker: Don't ever say that word again.
Amanda Whurlitzer: Jesus! Just who in the heck you think you are?
Coach Morris Buttermaker: The goddamned manager, that's who!
Amanda Whurlitzer: Big wow!

In all honesty, the entire Bad News Bears (1976) roster could populate this category based on charm and originality. So perhaps it is appropriate that their manager will manage, in turn, The Movies Team, Team Number Two.

I stood at the mercy of many men in my baseball career (no women, that I can recall, in the lead role). Childhood and adolescence take their shape from the series of adults to whom the child submits for decision-making and leadership capacities. Baseball is perhaps an extreme example of this, as the adult/s in fact determine whether the kid gets to engage in the activity at all. When a kid goes to violin lessons, there is absolutely no chance that a teacher will prohibit the kid from actually playing the violin.

As a player, I was benched and withheld from Actual Baseball Action many, many times. Post-age 15 was an era of Playing Time Interuptus, characterized by stuttering inclusion in the course of the actual game. In high school and college there was 7/8 of the time a better catcher in front of me, and easy for various coaches to enjoy the fruits of my catching labor without payment in playing time.

In college, one coach nearly broke me. He was a football-type guy, and I knew far more about catching than he did, and he yelled a lot. His boss was irresolute and succeeded only when the players on his team transcended leadership. In high school, it was a zealous winner-type; charming and intense. An old friend from that team told me of a conversation long after high school, in which the coach told my friend that he should've played me more. By that time he'd left high school sports to be a car salesman in New Mexico (at the behest of his wife, the story goes), which seems a suitable enough penance.

That high school coach was a true lover of baseball, to the point of addiction. He pitched live batting practice, took swings in the batting cages, simulated games, all with a competitive scowl. He played in over-30 leagues. Instead of swearing--and thereby breaking his own rule--he bellowed "Dad-gummit!" on the minute. He was a hard man to dislike, and it was a slowly unfolding truth that though I played for his team, I never really would.

I have now done some coaching myself, a bunch of 13-year-olds. I am absolved of most of the personnel responsibilities, thankfully, but I've realized quite quickly how ruthless a coach's mind can be. There are kids I don't like to see out there, who've earned my bias. This is true, and maybe unavoidable. What I've tried to do, however, is to steer my biases based almost solely upon effort. The kids that rankle me are the ones who don't bust their humps.

Did I bust my hump as a player? Not always, but usually. Probably didn't look like it. A little lazy, not so dogmatically committed to excellence as some others. Pretty easy-going. Oops.

now, bad news bears, god-awful remake

Lineup - The Movies

C - John Kinsella
1B - Jack Elliot
2B - Ken Burns
3B - Roger Dorn
SS - Nicky Rogan
LF - Terence Mann
CF - Kelly Leak
RF - Shoeless Joe Jackson

SP - Bugs "Baseball Bugs" Bunny
RP - Ricky Vaughn

Manager - Morris Buttermaker

Memo: General

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The Rosterized board of directors discovered another compatriot from the multi-nation of creative lineup fabrication.

The Graphic Tales blog has a team comprised of illustrators. The board's favorite GT criterion: "you have to be dead." Needless to say, the board does not require such for inclusion in Rosterized.

While the board is short on knowledge of the illustrating biz, the collective favorite (voted upon in the wee hours of this afternoon, in the lull between lunchtime handball and late afternoon engraving session II.a) is most assuredly Robert Weaver.

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