Another AL umpire exhibits the long-term effects of exposure to the Royals.
Not things like jumping at the wall to have the ball bounce harmlessly off the warning track for a ground-rule double on a sure out (my guess—Joey Gathaway? Gathright? It might have been Emil Brown. Or the outfield collectively running back toward the dugout in obvious celebration of an inning-ending second out. Or the top player currently in the organization being unable for some time when we drafted him to get a suitable prescription eyeglass/contact lens. Royals fans are used to stuff like this.
I take my Royals on the radio. In KC (and Lawrence, and Topeka, etc. etc.) the Royals are available on AM radio only. I could get the MLB package, and I’m still highly considering it so I can listen to some actual baseball this year. But I have this team on the radio, and I don’t even have a decent AM receiver. They simply aren’t quite worth even that modest investment.
Friday evening, I saw a guy I went to school with out at the golf club. We briefly (no more than ten minutes) wasted time talking about this baseball team. I think we both had just a little bit of hope that things will improve. The Royals would really have to trip over the bar if there is a failure of accomplishment. They’ve finished last or next to last every year since the strike, except 95 and 03. This in a five-team division. They only have to beat three teams to finish second, and they can’t do that in their best years. “I’ve been to see them five times this year,” he tells me.
“You’re a better man than me. I’ve been…twice…I think. But…what are you going to do?” I rhetorically ask. I honestly can’t remember if I’ve been once or twice, but I know the trip(s) have been quite forgettable. It’s something I just catalogue away in my mind. Maybe women who have been through the much more serious and miserable trauma as rape sometimes do the same thing as a coping skill…I cannot speak to that, and the comparison shouldn’t even be made, except that I am able to completely dispose of the bad after some period of time. It takes something truly ridiculous or outstanding to grab my attention as a Royals fan.
Our man O'Sullivan in a much slimmer era. The down side: The chain here is at a career-high 5% total body mass.
The game came on, and I was immediately horrified. We had Sean O’Sullivan on the mound, and he was wearing something I’d describe as a dog collar with a miniature oriental throwing star attached at the front. The Bee Gees would have deemed it tacky and excessive in 1977. But Sean O’Sullivan is out there testing the fucking fashion water on semi-national TV.
I text a friend: “Does O’Sullivan always wear that sweet-ass medallion when he’s pitching? This is much harder to watch than to listen to.” The answer: “Yes, he does.”
I found this very hard to believe. The guy’s already substantially overweight, (He looks to me that he’s packed on about 40 pounds since his spring training photos) and he’s dragging around about five pounds of scrap metal around his neck. That can’t be good for the body or soul. I’m not in shape—I get that. I’m in arguably the worst shape of my life. Smoke a couple of packs a day, drink about three pots of coffee, and exercise almost none has been my daily personal prescription for several months. I’m 39 damned years old, pathetically out of shape, and I can tell by looking at the guy I’m in better shape than the 23-year old O’Sullivan, who is being compensated to professionally play a game.
I don’t get the fat ballplayer phenomenon. It’s not just a Kansas City thing, though we seem to be better plagued than most locales. I think a lot of them just decide that if they suck, they might as well be a fatass. Curious decision making from a professional athlete. I don’t care at all what they look like, if they can do the job they’re being paid to do. More often than not, a ballplayer that looks like Terry Forster pitches a lot like Terry Forster.
And if the guy was mowing down batters, he could be wearing a fucking ball gag for all I care. If that’s what it takes to get you in the state of mind, well…so be it. But I’d be pretty critical of some asshole wearing a ball gag when he’s giving up homer after homer after homer.
It’s not all his fault. O’Sullivan is a sinkerballer, and entirely dependent upon the low strike call. And more than one decision has been made by multiple people to allow him to do what he does. If he can’t get that call, he can’t force ground balls. Or he walks a hell of a lot of people trying to win an implied argument with an umpire. Either way, there will be trouble with O’Sullivan when that low strike isn’t available to him. And last night it wasn’t. And he was pitching against the Texas Rangers, AL Representative in the World Series last year.
So it appears that he’s not getting the low call, and it appears he’s going to get shelled. I kept the game on for a good part of the lower half of the first. A couple of smashes later, and the first run coming across was enough for me. This thing was written in stone. I started to do something else, and I got the game going on the radio again, with the TV off. Something piqued my interest in the top of the second, and I turned the game back on. It seems the Royals were acting like they might be able to score or something. Already forgotten what it was they were trying to do in that instance, but I don’t think they got it done.
It was a gloomy day—some weird mix of spit and fog and rain all day. I’d been considering going for a run, but I was so sore I don’t know if I would have made it. I’ll never know. I’d gone running for the previous couple of days, and I just couldn’t go very far. Can’t get my legs under me quite yet. I’m in tremendously bad shape, and I know it, but I’m working on it. I even walked to the end of the lane, but the weather was just bad enough that I turned and came back an hour or so before the game.
So, anyhow, the game’s back on the TV for whatever reason, and I’ve got the pleasure to watch O’Sullivan give up about a 400-foot blast to get the Rangers going. Sean O’Sullivan doesn’t miss bats. His whole game is predicated at him throwing the ball at a bad part of the bat. Weird game plan for a young righthander, but…whatever.
So I watch the ball fly violently out of THE Texas Ranger Ballpark at Arlingon, and I screamed something that sounded like, “FUCK!” and grabbed the golf clubs and a hat. If I wasn’t going to run, I’d go out in the miserable conditions to do something to ensure I would look a little less like Sean O’Sullivan as a person. I can’t change the past, but I went out to do a little something about the future.
I got to the car, and SOS had already given up a second homer. The game was turned automatically to the station carrying the games, so when I started the vehicle, I was treated to a Texas celebration. By the end of the round, a third consecutive homer had been hit by the Rangers, and O’Sullivan had given up ten runs.
Lose the chain, man. Lose the chain.
“Well done, sir.”—The B’s G take a break from stuffing trousers and watching cricket to mesmerize themselves with Sean O'Sullivan's true style in action.
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