Kurkjian Tim - Im fascinated by sacrifice flies: inside the game we all love

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TO KATHY, KELLY, AND JEFF . THANKS FOR ALL THE SUPPORT.
THANKS FOR ENCOURAGING ME TO WRITE ANOTHER BOOK.

T IM K URKJIAN BEGINS this delightfully informative and entertaining stroll down baseballs broad, sunlit boulevard by recounting how he once astonished colleagues on ESPNs Baseball Tonight by exclaiming on the air, Im fascinated by sacrifice flies! Was heis heeccentric? Not at all. When you read chapter seven, you will understand how this seemingly simple part of baseball offense can seize the imagination of one of the games most enthusiastic and diligent chroniclers.

Do you know who has held, for more than half a century, the record for hitting the most sacrifice flies in a season? You soon will. Do you know that you can get credit for a sacrifice fly while hitting into a double play? Tim tells you how.

He derives more fun from his vocation than anyone I know. He knows, however, that baseball is not always fun for those who play it.

The word fear is the entire first paragraph of the first chapter of an insufficiently remembered baseball book from more than fifty years ago. It is Leonard Koppetts A Thinking Mans Guide to Baseball . Koppetts startlingly abrupt beginning to his book was his way of forcing fans to shed some of the obscuring sentimentality that sometimes envelops baseball. He wanted them to face a fact from which they often flinch.

Sentimentalists may speak of ballplayers as boys of summer but in fact they are men, and their work is dangerous. They are, as Tim says, hard men playing a hard game. When a six-ounce baseball comes hurtling out of a pitchers hand approximately 55 feet from home plate, the batter has about .28 seconds, give or take a few hundredths of a second, to decide whether the pitch will be a ball or a strikeor a mortal danger. Tim quotes Kevin Seitzers description of being hit in the face by a Scott Erickson pitch in 1995: It was like my face was crushed by a bowling ball, a bowling ball going 95 mph.

Baseball, Tim persuasively argues, is not only dangerous, it is the most difficult game to play. There are, he says, more two- and three-sport high school athletes playing in the major leagues than there are in the NBA, NFL, or NHL. The Mets third baseman David Wright says, I would say that most Major League Baseball players dont sleep well at night. The game is too hard. Tim lets a player tell you just how hard it is: Reds center fielder Billy Hamilton, who scored 22 touchdowns his senior year as a receiver in high school, and averaged 27 points a game in hoops, told me, Baseball is the hardest sport. Not even close. There are nights in baseball where it looks like Ive never played the game before. That would never happen in the other sports. My athleticism would just take over.

How hard is it to hit a 95-mph fastball? As Tim says, Tiger Woods can become incensed if a single camera click occurs during his backswingand the ball he is trying to hit is not moving. The crowd is asked to be quiet when a tennis player is about to serve a ball he controls. But when a hitter is trying to make contact with Aroldis Chapmans 100-mph heater, the crowd is urged to go wild.

To reach the top in this demanding game requires extraordinary competitiveness, which manifests itself off the field as well as on it. J. J. Hardy, the Orioles Gold Glove shortstop, has the astonishing athletic talents you would expect in someone whose mother played on the LPGA tour and whose father was a professional tennis player. J.J. is such a talented Ping-Pong player that, Tim says, one day in spring training a teammate beat him. And Five minutes later, Hardy received a text from the Brewers Ryan Braun, who was 2,500 miles away. It read: I heard you lost in Ping-Pong.

It is frequently said and always true that there is a lot of failure in baseball. There also can beactually, there must bea lot of humor in failure. In the late 1980s, Tim writes, Orioles outfielder Brady Anderson was a passenger in a car driven by teammate Rene Gonzales, who was going far too fast on a very dangerous road late at night in the rain. Anderson said to Gonzales, Gonz, if I wasnt hitting .178, Id ask you to slow down.

This book is, among many other things, a guide to baseballs unwritten rules, unbelievable superstitions, and unexpected hilarities, one of which occurred when a coach new to the Milwaukee Brewers was asked to tell at a team meeting a highlight from his career as a player. The coach mentioned hitting a home run into the upper deck of old Tiger Stadium. Then-Brewers slugging first baseman Prince Fielder, whose father, Cecil, had played for the Tigers, piped up: I did that when I was 12!

Baseball, the game with the longest season and the longest reach into Americas past, continually generates enchanting statistical oddities. Tim discerns them so that the rest of us can savor them. For example, pitcher Madison Bumgarner hit more grand slam home runs in a season (two) than Derek Jeter did in his career (one). And Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, and Barry Bonds never hit for the cycle, but Bengie Molinawho is extremely slow even by catchers standardsdid. Or the fact that Scott Sizemore, playing his first game at first base, participated in a triple play, something that Steve Garvey, Fred McGriff, Mark Grace, and Rafael Palmeiro never did in their combined 8,599 games playing first.

There is an old saying: If you love your work, you will never work a day in your life.

Tims love for what he does is, happily, infectious. His aim with this book is to spread the happiness that baseball has given to him and can give to those who immerse themselves in its lore and complexities.

Elliot Johnson, a journeyman infielder, told Tim this story about how someone in the stands heckled him. The heckler yelled, Elliot Johnson, Elliot Johnson, I Googled you, and the reply was, Why? Johnson says, I turned and gave him the thumbs-up. That was pretty funny. Google Tim and, if Google has a lick of sense, its reply will be: Tim Kurkjian is, of course, the baseball commentator with the best stock of stories. If you doubt this, just turn this page and get on with the pleasure of getting to know the mind of the man who is fascinated by sacrifice flies.

George F. Will

S TEVE B ERTHIAUME WAS worried about me anyway. As one of the hosts of ESPNs Baseball Tonight, he had seen me clip box scores from the newspaper and tape them in my box score book, a daily ritual that, pathetically, I did for twenty years without missing a day. He had seen me keep a daily tally of all sorts of ridiculous statistics, including players that strike out four times in a game; every year, there are 100-plus, though Bill Buckner never struck out three times in a game. And Berthiaume was in the ESPN newsroom the night I leaped from my chair because something Id been following every day for years had finally happened: the Angels Garret Anderson was hit by a pitch for the first time in 5 seasons. And Berthiaume was there when I incorrectly referred to the movie as The Devil Wears Prado, no doubt having much-traveled infielder Martin Prado on my mind, to which ESPN colleague Wendi Nix quickly corrected me, saying, Tim, its Prada, not Prado. The Devil Wears Prada. What is wrong with you?