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I love baseball and I love great stories, and never did the two intersect as they did in 2007.
First there was Josh Hamilton, playing like the power/speed monster he was before years of substance abuse.
Then there was Rick Ankiel, reinventing himself as a masher after losing the acquaintance of the strike zone as a pitcher.
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| Fred Lewis might be more suited to following in the footsteps of Michael Tucker than those of Mays and Bonds. (AP) |
Each of these was solemnly pronounced a great story and we, the consumers of all things baseball, were expected to honor them as such. The words "stuff of legend" figured into 92.5 percent of all dispatches on each matter.
Of course, the reporting of the great stories omitted a few crucial details, like the instances of drug-addled misery Hamilton heaped upon friends, family, and the team that drafted and invested heavily in him. The great Ankiel story lost its shine when, three weeks after his big-league resurrection, the New York Daily News -- a paper that revels in great-story-debunking -- reported that Ankiel had received a shipment of HGH back in 2004. The Rockies didn't need the media to torpedo their great story: They did so on their own by no-showing in the World Series.
And so with a (sorta) new season comes new promise for new media-anointed great stories, hopefully involving either unexpected triumph over adversity or beautiful magical princess ponies. The rules for a great story? It must involve some kind of reversal of fate, perhaps a personal resurrection coinciding with a professional one. It must have a flawed human being at its core.
It also must be rendered using as much purple prose as possible; the person who writes it up must rhapsodize about its subject with the lyricism of Bernard Malamud or Diane Warren.
When all the elements come together, you have a world-weary dude with a healthy-at-last shoulder who makes the majors for the first time at age 35 (Jim The Rookie Morris). You have a grocery bagger who transforms into Joe Montana and marries a woman with a pointy head (Kurt Warner). You have a great, grand, super, uplifting, edifying story. Grown men weep. Grown women sigh.
Are there candidates for 2008 great-story immortalization? Why, I never thought you'd ask.
Fred Lewis, Giant Among Giants: He's the early leader in the great-story derby, based on his unique professional circumstance (replacing Barry Bonds in left field) and a tragic personal one in his recent past (outlined quite heartrendingly here). He appears to be a wonderful fellow, playing hard and respecting the game and doing all those other things that make baseball sentimentalists feel tingly downstairs.
Here's the problem, though: desperate attempts by San Francisco-based writers to atone for 15 years of saying nice things about Bonds notwithstanding, Lewis doesn't seem destined for more than occasional proficiency. He might have put up a line of .303/.382/.495 so far, but the 28 strikeouts in 123 plate appearances forebode dark things when opposing pitchers start paying attention to him.
This great story could still have a detour through the All-Star Game, mostly due to the lack of other obvious candidates on the Giants (as of now, Tim Lincecum deserves the nod). But it's probably going to end in the lonely hinterlands of fourth outfielder-dom, the domain of many a troll and ogre.
