Hospitals are wonderful places, temples to science and healing.  Also depressing: I find myself in need of diversion.  And what better diversion does American society offer than baseball.

It’s late August, and the Giants and the Dodgers are essentially tied for first place in their division.  Based on the games they show, ESPN seems to think the greatest rivalry in baseball is Yankees/Red Sox.  Strewth!  Balderdash!  That’s like the rivalry between Richie Rich and Scrooge McDuck–that’s Microsoft v. Google.  When the two richest teams in the land go at it, I’ll admit to a certain schadenfreudish hope for comical catastrophe, but that hardly meets the criterion for a rivalry. Giants/Dodgers goes back to the New York roots of both teams, given a NoCal v. SoCal twist.  Giants/Dodgers is sick. 

A week ago, though, things looked grim for my ‘Jints.  Melky-gate had rendered us all gloomy.  This past off-season, the Giants pulled of a comically one-sided trade that landed us the second best hitter in the National League, Melky Cabrera.  He instantly became a fan favorite, with an entire section of the ballpark devoted to fans of his dressed like milkmen; i.e. the Melkmen.  (Or Melk-maids, for those of the female persuasion).  Then we learned of the possibility that his success was due in part to chemical enhancement–he had tested positive for testosterone.  It got worse–turns out Melky had paid someone ten grand to create a fake website, to create the impression he’d ordered a vitamin supplement on-line, not knowing, see, that it was laced with PEDs.  It ain’t the crime, it’s the cover-up that gets ya. 

So he’s gone, suspended for the rest of the season.  And he’s a free agent at the end of the year, and the Giants have lots and lots of historical reasons to be real uninterested in signing a steroids abuser.  So Melky’s gone, the Melk-man outfits permanently retired.  And a team that struggles to score runs anyway just lost its best hitter. 

Or second best.  Because our catcher, Buster Posey has, without much fanfare, put together a wonderful season.  Last year, Buster’s ankle was destroyed in one of the ugliest injuries I’ve ever seen on a baseball diamond.  A complete recovery seemed unlikely.  For him to come back, this season, better than ever, well, beyond a miracle of medical science, also suggests a young man of remarkable strength of character. 

And this Giants team is about pitching, about a brilliant core of young pitchers.  For us to have any hope of winning the pennant, the kid pitchers are going to have to step up.  This Dodgers’ series–in Los Angeles–would show us all what they’re made of. So the Giants are about pitchers and the guy who catches them.  That’s the core of my favorite team.

Monday: Madbum. 

Most twenty two year old pitchers are still in the minor leagues, trying to harness their talent, developing secondary pitches, honing their craft.  Madison Bumgarner is already pitching big games in his third pennant race.  Madbum is a tall left-hander, from Hudson, North Carolina.  A good Christian kid, married to his high school girlfriend, his Mom’s a schoolteacher.  He’s got a smooth, three-quarter pitching motion, hides the ball well, throws a big fastball and sweeping curve, but his best pitch is a slider, which he gets in on the hands of right-handed batters.  Monday, he was up against the Dodgers’ best pitcher, Clayton Kershaw, and it was a gorgeous game, a taut duel between two terrific young lefties.  Giants’ first, Angel Pagan (and yes, that’s his name, got to be the most conflicted name theologically since Jim Gott was facing Tim Teufel) hit a double, got bunted to third, scored on a fly ball by the Panda.  Pablo Sandoval, in other words, who resembles the Kung-fu Panda enough that it’s become his nickname.  Panda knocked in another one later, and that was all Madbum needed: Giants 2, Dodgers 1.  Giants in first place, barely.

Tuesday: Timmeh. 

My favorite baseball player right has to be Tim Lincecum, the Freak.  Most great pitchers are tall: 6’3, 6’4″.  You get more leverage, throwing down.  Lincecum is generously listed at 5’11′.  Skinny, long-haired, he looks and dresses like a skater dude.  Been busted for pot, won two Cy Young awards, can do a standing back flip from a table, over a sofa, and land on his feet.  When we won the World Series in 2010, Timmeh impishly made sure to drop at least one F-bomb in every network interview.  But when Giants’ fan Bryan Stow was beaten half to death in the Dodger Stadium parking lot, Tim started a fund to help Stow’s family, and seeded it with a generous donation. 

He’s kind of a Franken-pitcher.  His Dad’s a mechanical engineer, and figured out the optimal way for a kid to throw a baseball. Which means that his throwing motion isn’t like anyone else.  And Tim throws a mid-90′s fastball with movement, a nasty curve, a mean slider, and those aren’t even his best pitches.  His change-up looks like a fastball coming out of his hand, and then drops off a table.  It’s basically unhittable.  At his best, he doesn’t get hitters out, he embarrasses them. 

And this season, he’s been terrible.  Not must a little off, completely terrible.  It’s been excruciating to watch, to see Timmeh, invincible Timmeh look unsure of himself on the mound.  He’s kept working hard, trying to figure it out, he’s changed his training regimen (it’s no longer as In-’N-Out burger intensive), and he’s looked good his last few starts.  Tuesday . . . well, he wasn’t quite the old Freak, but he was darn close.  Six innings, one run.  Buster got him two runs in the first, and Timmeh breezed from there.  Final score, 4-1.

Wednesday: Matt Cain.

It’s funny: most players have nicknames, sometimes pretty cool ones.  Matt Cain is just Matt Cain.  Big kid from Tennessee.  Tall, blonde, throws hard.  None of that captures him.

Let me try this: Matt Cain is a grown-up.  He’s the team’s union rep.  He’s just unflappable.  For years, he had a reputation as a bad luck pitcher–the team had a horrible time scoring runs for him.  There’s a stat for that (there’s a stat for everything, it’s baseball), run support–he had the worst run support in the National League.  Never a word of complaint.  At all, ever.  He just went out there an competed.

 He throws a good fastball, not great, a good curve, a good slider, a good change.  Normal repertoire of pitches.  He just goes out there, game after game, and quietly, without much fuss, gets guys out. 

Wednesday, I was following the ballgame on GameCast, with ESPN’s Baseball Tonight on TV.  And in the first inning, Angel Pagan (who’s been great lately), scored a run, and Curt Schilling was on ESPN, and he said (I’m paraphrasing) “That game’s over.”  His co-host was all, ‘it’s only the first inning, it’s only one run, surely there’s plenty of time for the Dodgers to win,’ and Schilling (a heck of a pitcher himself, back in the day) said “it’s Matt Cain. It’s August, it’s the pennant race.  Matt Cain will not lose this baseball game.”  And he didn’t.  Sweep. 

Baseball has the longest season of any major sport.  162 games, April to October, game after game after game, night after night.  It’s about staying physically ready, having a routine, doing your stretching and your lifting.  It’s about staying focused, staying mentally alert, ready to go.  Going to work, even when you don’t feel much like it, it’s about hard-working, lunch-bucket values.  That’s really the appeal of the game.  This is what Melky forgot: being good at baseball is like being good at life. 

I’ve heard from some of my readers that my baseball posts are your least favorite.  Other readers like the baseball ones best.  Go figure.  When I started blogging, my intention was to be fairly eclectic–to write about pop culture AND Mormonism AND baseball AND politics–basically to reflect a poorly focused, intellectually incoherent mind.  The best baseball writing today is very stats-based, which isn’t my thing, seeing as how it involves, like, math.  What I can offer is not so much a fan’s perspective as an evangelist’s.  I like the odd-ball stuff, the human interest-y parts of fan-ness.  I’m trying to turn non-baseball people on.  And the best way to start is by acknowledging the essential absurdity of the entire baseball fan enterprise.

And what I love about baseball is this: every baseball game I have ever attended, I have seen something new, something I have never seen before.  This goes back to high school, when my friend Bosco Elkins, who tried out for our high school team as a lark, who liked being on the baseball team because it gave him something to talk to girls about, finally got into a game, the last game of the year, and hit a grand slam home run in his only high school at bat.  Every time I go, I see something unique.  

So, okay, this:  Saturday night, Dodger Stadium, Padres vs. Dodgers.  On any given day, there are two games I’m more interested in than any others–I’m rooting for the Giants, and for whoever is playing the Dodgers.  Saturday, the Giants were winning their game, and if the Dodgers also lost, we’d be in first place. 

Top of the ninth inning, the Dodgers were leading 6-5.  The Padres had runners on second and third, with two out.  On third, with the tying run, was Everth Cabrera.  He had come into the game as a pinch-runner for Yonder Alonso. (I love “Everth” replacing “Yonder”.  Baseball has the best names).

I do not know why Everth’s parents named him that, but he’s a fun player to watch, very fast, alert on the bases, a marginal player who has eked out a career with hard work and intelligence.  On second, was Will Venable, son of former Giants player Max Venable, who for some reason I always wanted to call “the venerable Venable.” 

The Dodgers’ pitcher was Kenley Jansen.  He’s their best relief pitcher, a big guy with a monster fastball.  At bat was Alexi Amarista (another great name–the hero of a romance novel maybe?). 

So that’s the situation.  At this point of the game, the Dodgers looked to be in good shape to win.  Amarista’s not much of a hitter, and Jansen quickly blew two fastballs right past him.  One more, and the game would be over.  Cabrera, on third, is a matter of concern, but as long as Jansen can get Amarista out, he won’t matter.  And Amarista looked completely overmatched. 

Time out works differently in baseball than in other sports.  In basketball and football, timeouts are limited, because both games have clocks.  You call time out to stop the clock from running, to give your team a chance to come back, perhaps.  To buy time.  In baseball, there is no clock–games last as long as they need to last.  Time is measured in outs, not hours.  There’s no competitive advantage to calling time out.  So baseball has many more timeouts in a game–dozens, even hundreds. Every time a guy steals a base, for example, he immediately calls time out, so he can brush off his uniform. 

As he waited on the mound, ready to blow another fastball past the overmatched Avarista, Kenley Jansen apparently noticed that he had a little dirt lodged in one of the cleats of his shoes.  He decided to step to the side and knock the dirt out. Said he could get more on the fastball if he was sure of his footing.  He could have called time out for this purpose.  In fact, it would have been normal, routine for him to do just that.  For some reason, he didn’t.  He just thought he’d deal with it.  So he stepped off, dealt with his cleat.  And Everth Cabrera stole home. 

The video is particularly great.  For one thing, the cameraman missed Cabrera initially; the producer was busy following Amarista.  Jansen recovered quickly, and fired the ball home.  But he was so startled by Cabrera’s moxie, that he made a terrible throw, way over catcher A. J. Ellis’ head.  The umpire was so discombobulated by the play that he made the wrong call, calling Cabrera out, then quickly reversing himself.  And then, Jansen, distraught, made another stupid error.  In that situation, Ellis off chasing the wild throw home, somebody has to cover home plate.  There was still another runner, Venable, rounding third. The fielder responsible for home plate in that situation is the pitcher–Jansen. And he didn’t realize it until it was too late–you can see Venable sliding in home with the winning run, with Jansen still ten feet from home. 

What a smart, heads-up play by Cabrera.  Great alertness as well from Venable.   Post-game interviews; you felt a little bad for poor Jansen.  Me, there’s a great German word for how I felt: schadenfreude.  Joy at the failure of others. 

Best of all: it happened to the Dodgers.  Heh heh heh heh.

I am a  Giants’ fan, and that means I hate the Dodgers. 

I just wrote that, and looking at it on my computer screen, it seems ridiculous.  I have chosen, for arbitrary reasons of my own, to like and to root for the professional baseball team that plays in San Francisco, a town I do not now and never have lived in. That is to say, I am emotionally invested in the fortunes of a group of professional athletes hailing from the Dominican Republic and Venezuela and Mexico and North Carolina and Tennessee and Texas and Seattle, who happen to have signed contracts to play baseball in San Francisco.  (All of them from modest backgrounds, and all of them paid better than I will ever be paid for anything ever in my life.)  And that emotional investment means that I am obligated to dislike adherents of a group of professional athletes hailing from the Dominican Republic and Oklahoma and Arizona and Texas and Japan and other states and countries who happen to play in Los Angeles.  Basically, I’m rooting for whoever wears the uniform of my favorite team. Basically, I’m rooting for laundry.  Against slightly different laundry.

Okay, so: this.  March 31, 2011, Bryan Stow, a 42 year old Santa Cruz EMT, drove down to LA with a bunch of friends, to watch the Dodgers play the Giants on opening day.  He went to Dodger Stadium wearing a Giants cap and jersey.  The wrong laundry.  After the game, two Dodger fans jumped him in the parking lot and nearly killed him, beat him so severely that he suffered a serious brain injury.  Fourteen months later, Stow can talk a little, recognizes his family, can feed himself.  He’ll certainly never work again.  (Tim Lincecum, the Giants’ pitcher, started a fund to help the Stow family, and donated a sizeable amount to seed it.  Reason number 822 why we love Timmeh.) 

And that’s ridiculous, of course I get how absurd that is.  I like the Giants.  But beating people up?  What are, we: soccer fans?

Last night, the Giants beat the Dodgers.  Ryan Vogelsong (one of the best stories on the team) outdueled Clayton Kershaw (the Dodgers’ ace, a scary-good left-hander) 2-0.  It felt good.  I watched it on the Inter-tube thingy, right here on my computer-machine; not sure how that works, but am pretty sure wizards were involved.  Sports are fun, sports fandom is fun.  Last night, at the ballpark, they showed a group of ten guys dressed like milkmen–old fashioned white uniforms, with caps and orange ties.  They’re Melk-men; fans of Melky Cabrera.  With them were two girls, in powder-blue milk maid costumes, hair in pigtails, cute as can be.  Melk-maids, right?  Then Melky Cabrera hit a home run, and they went nuts.  I thought about those kids, the time spent thinking up and putting together those costumes, how much fun they must have been having. 

But nearly killing a guy who’s wearing the wrong cap is just . . . I can’t think of words strong enough to condemn it. Or rioting, or fighting or thuggishness generally.  Years ago, I was in London, riding the Tube.  I saw a British soccer fan, wearing the colors of a team that I’d read in the paper was in danger of relegation.  They were playing that night, and if they lost, then next season, they’d be dropped down a level, move from the Champions league to a lesser league.  So this bloke was riding home after this crucial game involving his team.  Apparently, they lost.  I got this from the fact that, every stop on the way home, the guy stuck his head out so the doors would close on his head.  Crunch crunch crunch.  Every stop for miles. 

The root of the word ‘fan’ is fanatic. 

So when I say I’m a Giants’ fan, and that I hate the Dodgers, I’m using ‘hate’ and ‘fan’ in very specific and limited ways.  I’m a Christian. I don’t believe hatred solves anything. I’m a liberal humanist–not so down with fanaticism either.  Okay, I guess I hate Hitler, in some weirdly abstract way.  I hate Evil.  I hate Injustice.  But that’s all meaningless, just a rhetorical indulgence really.  What matters is what you do when someone treats you badly, and what I in fact do under those circumstances is harbor grudges to the point of absurdity.  (I said I was a Christian; I didn’t say I was a good one.) But hate?  Really HATE?  No.  Not ever. 

It’s a strange word anyway, the way we use it.  “I hate it when you do that,” we say to our loved ones.  “I hate mustard on hot dogs.”  “I hated that movie.”  But then we talk about ‘hate crimes,’ and how ‘hatred’ fuels episodes of genocide and ethnic cleansing.  Real hatred is a real thing, with real consequences.  So it’s a word that means everything from ‘an emotional state so severe as to lead to murder’ to ‘mildly dislike.’   Everything, and next to nothing, and everything in-between

So when I say I ‘hate the Dodgers’ I mean I feel good when the Giants win a game and feel even better when we win at the Dodgers’ expense.  But my best friend lived in LA for years, and is a Dodger fan, and we get along great.  It’s meaningless foolishness, this rooting for laundry stuff, even though it’s a kind of meaningless foolishness in which I indulge myself with great frequency and pleasure. 

We play the Dodgers again today.  They’re in first place, but we’re on their heels, and if we win, we’ll be tied.  And there are still four months left in the season.  It’s tremendously important that we win, and it’s also completely meaningless; everything, nothing, everything in-between.  I’m a fan without being a fanatic, I root for laundry with an ironic nod to that absurdity.  I think emotional investment is a good thing, even when it’s for something silly.  Embrace the silliness, then, and Go Giants. 

This.

I have been a San Francisco Giants fan since the mid-60′s.  Growing up in south-central Indiana, this was a very odd thing for me to be. Most of my friends were baseball fans, to be sure–we tended to like baseball third best among the major team sports, after basketball and basketball.  Almost all my friends were fans of the Cincinatti Reds, since they were closest to Indiana, or the Chicago Cubs, second-closest.  (You just didn’t root for the White Sox.  You just didn’t.)  But San Francisco?  Seriously?

But playing Little League baseball, our coach took us to a game in Cincinatti, where the Reds were playing the Giants, and we got to shag flies during batting practice.  Some of my friends and I wanted to get Pete Rose’s autograph–he turned us down, rudely and profanely.  Fighting tears, I wandered away, and this huge black guy came over and said “what’s the matter, kid?”  It was the Giants brilliant first baseman, Willie McCovey.  He took me over to the Giants’ dugout, and I got my glove signed by five eventual Hall-of-Famers: Willie Mays, McCovey, Juan Marichal, Gaylord Perry and Orlando Cepeda, as well as other Giants’ greats–Tom Haller, Jim Ray Hart, Jose Pagan, Hal Lanier.  My Mom threw that glove away when I went on my mission.  I expect someday to be able to forgive her. 

Later in life, I began dating a girl from San Jose, went to visit, and thought I’d ingratiate myself with her family by offering to take her little brother with us to a baseball game.  We went to Candlestick Park in San Francisco.  Willie McCovey, close to the end of his splendid career, played his next to last game that day.  He hit a single, hit it so hard to right field, he was nearly thrown out at first.  The Giants lost.  They lost a lot, those years.

It’s nice when the team you root for wins.  In 2010, for the first time in my life, the Giants won–won the World Series.  I glowed, for days I glowed.  But you grow to truly love a team when they lose, especially when they lose valiantly, bravely, after a great struggle.  From 1962-1969, the years I became a baseball fan, the Giants had the best record in baseball–that’s the most wins, cumulatively, for that 8 year period.  They never won any single year.  Made the playoffs in ’69, lost the World Series in ’62.  But year after year, Mays and McCovey and Marichal would finish barely second. 

Willie Mays was as close to baseball perfection as anyone I ever saw play–fielding, hitting, baserunning, he was great at all of it.  But his lifetime batting average was .302–he got hits 30% of the time.  And yet, in baseball, perfection is possible.  A pitcher can throw a perfect game.  He can face 27 batters, and get all of them out.  It’s rare–only happened 22 times in the 130 years of major league baseball.  And no one on the Giants has ever done it–not Christie Mathewson, not Carl Hubbell, not Marichal or Perry or Timmeh.  (Giants’ fan refer to Tim Lincecum as Timmeh). 

Until tonight. Matt Cain pitched a perfect game tonight.  Finished it ten minutes ago. 

Matt Cain is either the second or third best pitcher on the current edition of the Giants.  I think that’s about right–he’s not quite as good as Timmeh, and he may not quite be as dominant as Madison Bumgarner.  Such is the brilliance of the Giants’ pitching staff–he’d be the best pitcher on the team for almost anyone else.  He’s twenty seven, a big kid from Tennessee, drafted out of high school, in the majors since 2005.  Heading into this season, we had a lot of concern about him–his contract was about to expire, leaving him a free agent at the end of the season.  We had horrible nightmares of Matt pitching for the Yankees.  But this spring, the Giants’ organization signed him for 127 million over six years.  He’s a Giant; he’ll pitch for us until he retires.  I was amazed that he signed, honestly.  Up to tonight, his defining characteristic as a pitcher has been bad luck.  Giants’ media calls it ‘getting Cained’, pitching brilliantly while your team doesn’t score, losing games 1-0.  (That wasn’t going to happen tonight–we scored 10 runs, our season high, he wasn’t getting Cained tonight.)  He’s a good guy–he and his wife bought a house in the Bay Area, he gives a lot to charity.  He’s a team leader–the team’s union rep. 

And now he’s perfect.

We never get to be perfect, we human beings.  And perfection, even in baseball, is equivocal, human, limited.  Baseball perfection, I suppose, would be a game in which the pitcher struck out every hitter on three pitches.  Nobody does that.  There was one foul ball in this game that was barely foul, so close that the replays were inconclusive–that could have been called fair, and ruled a hit.  A long smash to right center looked like a sure hit, but Greger Blanco, our rightfielder, ran and ran and dived in the warning track and barely came up with it–an amazing catch. 

Still, it’s something to contemplate.  That perfect mixture of stuff and command, a superb pitcher in full control of his craft, exquisite pitch after exquisite pitch carving up the Astros’ hitters.  The camera kept cutting to Chelsea, his wife, in the stands.  She was crying, couldn’t watch, couldn’t not watch.  My right hand still hurts, I was clutching the remote so hard.  Cain looked–indomitable, fearless.  A final groundball to Joaquin Arias, playing third.  He looked terrified, moved to his left, fielded it, stumbled a little.  It looked like he was going to fall down.  Then he threw, a bad throw, off his back foot, not a strong confident throw.  But enough, in time. Brandon Belt caught it, and went nuts.  125 pitches.  14 strikeouts. 

Perfection.  And perfect jubilation.

In the movie Moneyball (still the best movie ever about baseball stat nerds), the one scene that seems to stick out is one in which Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), General Manager of the Oakland A’s, swings a trade for Ricardo Rincon.  It’s a fast paced, dialogue heavy scene, with Pitt and Jonah Hill juggling names and phone conversations–”how about Juan for Doug, how about Elton for John?” 

Trading players is a fascinating part of professional sports generally, and yet a part that’s completely incomprehensible in any other setting.  “We really want the chair of your physics department.  We’d be willing to trade you an art historian, and an economist to be named later.”  In most professions, people like to have some say over where they work and live.  Not so sports, where at a moment’s notice, you can be told “sorry, I know you like your Manhattan apartment and you’re dating a supermodel and all, but you’ve been traded.  Report to Houston in the morning.”  In Ball Four, Jim Bouton describes a teammate who was traded, then sent to the minors, then traded again, all within a week.  Each trade required the player and his wife to pack up their things and move to a new apartment.  By their fourth apartment (again: fourth in a week), he says they’d developed quite a rhythm moving boxes back and forth–his wife having driven their moving van a total of 3500 miles, with him flying to the new city, playing a game, then meeting her at yet another new place. 

As fans, of course, we don’t think of any of that.  We evaluate any trade totally based on whether we think it will help or hurt our favorite team.  I am a fan of the San Francisco Giants.  Our trading history is, uh, spotty.  George Foster for Frank Duffy (explanation: we needed a back-up shortstop, and traded one of our best minor league players for one.  Duffy retired after a year.  Foster, post-trade, hit 348 home runs, and made five All-Star teams).  That one still rankles. 

This past off-season, 2011-12, the Giants had one huge pressing need–hitting.  The 2011 team had six very good starting pitchers.  You really only need five, but because of injuries, a pedestrian career minor leaguer named Ryan Vogelsong was pressed into action, put on a cape and mask, and began rescuing beautiful blondes from the heights of tall buildings.  (Great story, Vogelsong: he had decided to quit.  32 years old, nowhere close to a major league career–time to hang ‘em up. The Giants call, his wife persuades him to give it one more try–a coach suggests a minor tweak in his pitching motion, and voila, he’s suddenly Tom Seaver).  So it made sense to trade a surplus starting pitcher for a good hitter. 

The Giants’ GM is Brian Sabean.  He’s been there forever, and we Giants’ fans tend to think maybe a replacement might be nice.  But we won the World Series in 2010, buying Sabean at least five more years.  Like most GM’s, he’s made some good trades and some stupid ones. This off-season, he traded Jonathan Sanchez for Melky Cabrera.  So: brilliant?  Stupid?  One of those trades that helps both teams?

Break it down: Jonathan Sanchez was insanely talented, and immensely frustrating.  The brilliant kid in your class who never turns in his homework.  He didn’t throw all that hard (fastball in the 89-92 range, pretty average), but when it moved; it was close to unhittable.  Trading him made sense–would he ever put it together, live up to his potential?–but dangerous–you really wanna trade a guy that talented?  A possible superstar? 

What we got for him was Melky.

Talented kid, from the Dominican Republic, bounced around a lot–Yankees to Braves to Royals.  Has his best season last year, but before that was widely regarded as a disappointment.  Could be good.  Could be mediocre.  The consensus–the Royals got the better of us, getting a potential star, Jonathan, for a nothing-special outfielder with a funny name.  

Melky’s not short for anything.  His name is Melky.  There was a story he was named after Melchior (one of the Three Wise Men).  Not so.  His Mom just liked the sound: Melky.  And he doesn’t have a middle name, so that option’s out.  This would be like me naming a kid “Sporgle.”  The Giants’ fans have taken to him big-time, which, since we’re baseball fans, means dressing up like milk men to go to the ballgame.  Melk-men, milk-men; it works.  In the locker room, apparently, he sits quietly before each game reading the Bible.  This is not because he’s a Christian or particularly devout–a batting coach once told him it would help his concentration to read before a game, and a Gideon Bible was what was in his hotel room.  He read it one game, got four hits that game, has done it ever since.  This is my single favorite thing about Melky–he reads the Bible as a superstition. 

He’s been unbelievable.  He’s hitting something insane right now, .380-something.  He’s a brilliant left fielder, fast, can throw.  He plays the game with this crazy smile on his face–he’s joyous to watch.  He bought a house for his Mom in the Bay Area, so she can do all his cooking and laundry.  He’s this goofy, great kid.  

Meanwhile, Jonathan Sanchez pitched a few games for the Royals, was terrible, got injured, and is out for the season.  His career may be over.

See why trades are fun?