Posted on 09/05/2007 2:51:31 PM PDT by rhema
You’d think there were slightly more significant things to talk about the day after Labour Day than Carlos Zambrano wishing he could give the Wrigley Field boo birds a date with the fricasee.
Pedro Martinez comes off the disabled list after missing the first five months of the season recovering from rotator cuff surgery, maybe he isn’t one hundred percent ready, but he throws stuff that looks like an imitation of Pedro Martinez and wins anyway, nailing his 3,000th career strikeout for good measure (ok, that’s cheating: he needed a mere two to get there) .
Roger Clemens, maybe the world’s highest-paid part-time worker, comes out of a game and goes straight to the MRI that turns into a cortisone shot in his elbow.
The Seattle Mariners, in the same game, end a nine-game losing streak at the expense of the Empire Emeritus to keep their postseason hope alive.
The Cleveland Indians make a patsy out of Johan Santana for the fifth time on the season; the Boston Red Sox just miss blowing a nine-run lead and manage to win, anyway; Greg Maddux beats the Arizona Diamondbacks, and Jake Peavy begs to go on short rest just for a shot at beating the Snakes in the bristling NL West.
But, no, we’ve got Carlos Zambrano and his Monday night mooing at the boo birds to think about.
It’s not that the boo birds didn’t have a couple of good reasons to sing. Not when Zambrano, who’s now winless in five starts since signing that yummy (albeit “hometown-discounted”) contract extension, worked his shortest turn since the middle of April, surrendered eight runs for the first time since mid-2005, walked five in four and a third including three out of four batters in one sequence, and surrendered seven hits.
And it didn’t exactly help his cause any when, on the bases in the third, he blasted through a stop sign around third base like he was the leader of a high-speed Los Angeles police chase, only to get stopped about three exits and a road hazard short of scoring what might have been a one-all tiebreaker, after—he admitted as much—he thought a drive to left slipped past Luis Gonzalez.
He even squatted on the mound rather than back up the plate when freshly-minted Dodger starting pitcher Esteban Loaiza—fresh from the American League, with four RBI on his resume since 1998—rapped a two-run single in the middle of the three-pass, three-run Los Angeles fourth.
Cub manager Lou Piniella lifted Zambrano during the four-run Dodger fifth, the second of a pair of innings in which Zambrano pitched a little too solicitously, the Dodgers repaying his continued kindness by slapping him silly enough again with an RBI groundout and an RBI single.
As he walked off the mound, he pointed to his temple, the classic gesture indicating that the gesturer thinks the gestured-to are two bases short of an infield. And that was the warmup round for the chin music he played the boo birds after the game.
I don’t accept that the fans were booing at me. I can’t understand that. You know, I thought these were the greatest fans in baseball. But they showed me today that they just care about them, and that’s not fair, because when you’re struggling, you want to feel the support of the fans. No, I don’t accept it. I just pointed to my head, and I will remember that because I don’t want any bad outings. I know the great moments of my career will come.
[Fans] pay to see a good show. They pay to see a good pitcher. Right now, I’m not doing too well. I just call [out to] the fans, ‘I want a little support.’ That’s all. When you’re struggling, or you have a brother who’s struggling, you show him love. You don’t show him you want to kick him out. That’s what I ask of the fans—a little support.
And not only [for] me. I go out there and try to do my best, but not everybody is like Carlos Zambrano [and can] keep his head up and keep trying to do a good job. There are people on this team who are struggling and going down and down . . .
When you’re booing somebody, you’re booing the 25 men on this ballclub, and that’s not fair. That happened before to some of my teammates, and that’s not right. I think we go out there to give Cubs fans a good show and to go to the playoffs, and that’s what I want. No one wants to do a bad job . . . Every single player in that clubhouse wants to do a great job for the city, believe me.
—Carlos Zambrano, as quoted by the Chicago Tribune.
Zambrano’s been getting ripped the proverbial new one on most sides from the moment the quotes first hit circulation, whether by the paid professionals (You don’t second-guess those who boo you. Not if you play ball for a living. Not if you expect 100 percent of fans to also be your friends. —Mike Downey, the Tribune) or by the unpaid fanatics, my favourite this moment being the respondent to my fellow MVNers at The Cub Reporter, who waxes, In your profession, if you do not perform to your companies standards, your boss will surely make you aware of your shortcomings.
Except that I don’t practise my profession in front of a boss that consists of several thousand customers paying their way into the building to watch me work, ready to boo if I so much as misplace a comma or an apostrophe, misspell a word, misshape a phrase, or misapply a number.
I haven’t been paid to write in a long enough time. But the last time I was paid to write, after gathering the necessary information in the field or elsewhere, I worked in one of two places: a nice and cozy little cubicle in the office; or, in front of a computer in my nice and cozy little bedroom.
You don’t see most workers playing to an audience who’s likely to start booing at the drop of a hammer, a pen, a telephone, a backhoe, a laser pointer, or a traffic light change. About the only time kids really boo their teachers is when a pleasant day’s classwork is rudely interrupted by an announcement of a surprise test the next day. Not even the police draw crowds on the streets ready to boo their heads off when they’re lured into a high speed chase or blasting up an alley to flag down a couple of thieves or shooters.
And, while we’re at it, ask yourselves whether Carlos Zambrano—who did indeed cop to his baserunning blunder and his none-too-great pitching amidst teeing off on the boo birds—is the first, or is likely to be the last, among his profession who might just be pressing it a little bit much trying to live up to that yummy contract extension.
That even happens to Hall of Famers. Just ask Mike Schmidt, who had an off season pressing precisely that way, after signing his first multiyear megabucks deal, trying to live up to the deal. And he played in a town whose boo birds have a reputation for making all the other boo birds resemble love birds.
And before you wave it away as the price that’s paid by a guy whose concentration might have been AWOL for a short while, try to keep in mind that there have been boo birds who fly down upon the guys who deliver the best they’ve got with what they’ve got and come up with the other guy delivering just a little bit better with what they’ve got. They weren’t invented with Alex Rodriguez’s too-often-celebrated postseason struggles.
Carlos Zambrano, who was scheduled to apologise for his Monday night mooing at a Tuesday afternoon press conference, probably has reason enough to fear what the idiot brigades among the Wrigley faithful might do if the Cubs do make it to the postseason and, God forbid, he should deliver his absolute best and discover the hard way that the guys on the other side have a little bit better in that time and place.
Ask Donnie Moore, once a Cub himself. But you’ll have to wait until you see him in the next world to ask him. With his team one strike from going to the 1986 World Series, Moore threw the best he had to throw to Dave Henderson. Twice. The first time, he caught Henderson off balance and Henderson came to within a hair of missing the foul tip. The second time . . .
“Numerous other athletes who’re in trouble—taking heat, answering tough questions, hearing catcalls—got themselves in hot water by doing what they knew was wrong,” wrote Thomas Boswell, upon the news that Moore’s post-1986 struggles, on the mound and apparently with depression, ended with Moore shooting his wife and then himself. “All Moore did was pitch despite a sore arm, throw a nice nasty knee-high forkball, and watch it sail over the left field fence.”
The fans in Anaheim didn’t let him live it down, even if his manager did. (That would be Gene Mauch, a man not known ordinarily for taking losing with a grain of salt.) Never mind that their team now had two more chances to get to the World Series. Chances they blew to a Boston Red Sox team who did get to that World Series, where they got a perverse taste of their own medicine. When Bob Stanley, a strike away from squelching an eleventh-hour stand and winning the Series, threw the wrong pitch, when Rich Gedman may have called for the wrong pitch, when the ball squirted past Mookie Wilson to the backstop, allowing Kevin Mitchell home with the tying run and Ray Knight into scoring position . . .
“Moore’s wife . . . once said that, after the Pitch, Moore would often come home after games at Anaheim Stadium, where he was booed, and burst into tears,” Boswell noted.
All of a sudden, Mitch Williams looks as though he got off easy. All he had to worry about during and after the 1993 World Series was one or several jackanapes leaving assortments of nails around the tires of every vehicle in his driveway, not to mention his house being vandalised.
Zambrano may not be likely to burst into tears every time he hears the boo birds from now on. But heaven help him if he has to learn the hard way how rank some fans can be when you’ve done the best you can do and you still got strafed.
The right to boo comes with the price of the ticket. The best fans on earth (a reputation Zambrano himself acknowledged Cub fans enjoy in eyes enough) are only human, after all.
But you’d think even the best fans on earth would try to remind themselves that, like it or not, however long they’ve had to put up with it, with the guts to smile and laugh through it, and no matter who’s getting paid how much down there, the guys on the field are only human enough, too. They don’t all behave like self-absorbed prima donnas who think the game and the records and the fortune are their God-given birthright.
And somebody—even for a century—has to lose.
Except that I don’t practise my profession in front of a boss that consists of several thousand customers paying their way into the building to watch me work, ready to boo if I so much as misplace a comma or an apostrophe, misspell a word, misshape a phrase, or misapply a number.
A good point. Speaking of which, Mr. Cub Reporter, you really should make that company's standards, assuming you're addressing a singular you.
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