Jayson Stark
MLB
  Scores
  Schedules
  Standings
  Statistics
  Transactions
  Injuries: AL | NL
  Players
  Weekly Lineup
  Message Board
  Minor Leagues
  MLB Stat Search

Clubhouses

Sport Sections
TODAY: Monday, May 15
Anybody for a game of chess?



One of the great mysteries of baseball life is: How do you keep Pedro Martinez from beating you?

Well, we know that hitting against him doesn't work real hot. So the Detroit Tigers and Cleveland Indians came upon a much better strategy last weekend:

Triviality
Six active players have won a home run title while playing for the organization that originally signed them -- but not one is still with that team. Can you name them?

(Answer at bottom)

The rain dance.

Four straight days, it was Pedro's turn to pitch -- first against the Tigers, then against the Indians. Four straight days, the Red Sox got rained out.

For the Tigers and Indians, this was a development that waterproofed them against a whole mess of strikeouts. And for the rest of us, it produced maybe the greatest Pedro quote of all time.

"I think it's romantic, the rain," Martinez poeticized. "Rainy days are good to cuddle and stay at home. Not to play ball."

The Red Sox, however, were not allowed to cuddle and stay at home. They had to come to the ballpark every single day and wait for the rain to go away. Baseball is cruel that way.

That meant three straight days and nights last weekend of cramming themselves into their clubhouse at Fenway -- a room custom-designed for the ballplayers of 1912, whose average height apparently was about 4-feet-2. So you've heard of cabin fever? These guys had clubhouse fever.

Pedro Martinez
While Pedro Martinez dominates, the rest of baseball searches for anyone who can simply get some outs.

"I've been in cabins bigger than that locker room at Fenway," said catcher Scott Hatteberg. "You cram 40 people in there, it gets pretty tight."

So how did these men kill time, maintain their sanity and avoid unnecessary cuddling for all those hours? Here's the report from Hatteberg, our rain-delay correspondent:

Muchee madness: When in doubt, eat. That's our motto. And it worked well for the Red Sox.

"If you got up and walked around, it seemed like you were always going past the food table and the cooler with all the drinks," Hatteberg said. "So you wind up eating a lot of snacks. I'll admit it. I snacked quite a bit. Potato chips. Cookies. All your big food groups. Everything a champion needs."

The tube: Too bad the people from the Neilsen ratings weren't surveying Fenway last weekend. Ratings would have soared for just about every program on the air, except possibly "Teletubbies" and skin-care infomercials.

"We watched pretty much everything you could watch," Hatteberg said. "We watched the basketball playoffs. We saw pretty much every game of those. We had some Blues fans, so they were watching the hockey. That was on in the weight room. We've got some wrestling fans, too. So we watched some of that. And that last day, Sunday, we were there from 9 o'clock in the morning and didn't leave till about 5. So I think we caught every baseball game on the air. We've got six TVs. Every one had a different game on."

And, amazingly, after all that quality viewing, there was still way more time to burn. So ...

"We watched a bunch of movies, too," Hatteberg said. "I know I saw 'Happy Gilmour' -- for about the 50th time. We've got about five movies that we basically rotate over and over, and 'Happy Gilmour' is real good. If you can watch it 50 times and still laugh, it must be pretty good."

Finally, there was the most popular programming of all: The Weather Channel. These guys used to watch radar-gun readings. Last week, they were more interested in the Dopplar Radar readings.

"Yeah, but (Fenway superintendent) Joe Mooney's got his own Dopplar, I think," Hatteberg said. "You'd look at the radar, and there was nothing but green over New England. Next thing you knew, we had a two-hour window."

The chess club: You can tell these guys had soared beyond the boredom line if they started hauling out the pawns and rooks. And Hatteberg reported there was a massive outbreak of chess playing, too. Eventually, players who didn't even know how to play chess were playing.

"Hey, we had so much time on our hands," Hatteberg said, "guys had time to learn."

Deja vu-yah: What a life. Every day, these men woke up, turned their windshield wipers on, came to the park, ate their chips, watched every sporting event in North America, never played and went back home.

What we had here was a baseball team trapped in a performance of "Groundhog Day."

"It definitely seemed that way," Hatteberg said. "Nothing ever changed. Day after day, we walked in and that was it. It was the same thing, over and over and over."

So imagine their shock when they headed for Texas on Sunday night and arrived at a place where no water fell from the sky, where Noah had sold his ark, where baseball was actually played.

"We showed up in Texas, and there was this giant orb in the sky," Hatteberg said. "We said, 'What's that?' "

The bright side: Thankfully for the Red Sox, it won't always be like this. Their next homestand they may even get to play a game or six. But they couldn't help but imagine what life would be like if every homestand was like that one -- three games, three rainouts.

"If every homestand was like that," Hatteberg said, "I could work for ESPN, with all the TV I watched. And I could take on Kasparov, with all the chess I played."

Three-peat of the week
Speaking of deja-vu events, there was another classic last weekend, when the Anaheim Angels ventured to the wildest dome on earth, Tropicana Field.

In the fourth inning of their game April 21, Mo Vaughn, Tim Salmon and Troy Glaus all hit home runs. Then, in the ninth inning, Mo Vaughn, Tim Salmon and Troy Glaus all hit home runs again.

Two different innings. Three home runs by the same guys. First time ever, in the 10 billion ballgames ever played.

Of course, there hadn't been unprecedented outbreak of home run history in a couple of hours, so we were due.

"It was weird," Glaus said. "I'm standing there on deck in the ninth, and it wasn't like a premonition, but after (Salmon) hit his homer, I said, 'Shoot, I've got to hit one now.' "

So naturally, he did, as the remaining occupants of the Trop were scratching their heads and asking, "Wait a minute. Didn't that just happen about an hour ago?" One of those occupants, in fact, was our favorite turbo-charged Angels broadcast personality, the great Rex Hudler.

"When it happened the second time, I had to check my scorecard again," Hudler said. "You know, I'm new to keeping score because I never did that as a player, so I make mistakes. So I looked over at my partner's card to make sure I had this right. It was like cheating on a math test, and I was cheating off his paper. But he had the same thing I had. And I said, 'Wow. That really happened. That's kind of unusual, isn't it?' "

Yeah. Kind of. But the Trop is an unusual kind of place. After all, Glaus' first homer broke one of the world's most heralded laws -- the law of physics. It went up, but it never did come down, because it got stuck in one of those ever-present Tropicana Field catwalks, out in left field.

"It disappeared, dude," Hudler said. "Greg Vaughn, he was spinning around like a dog chasing a frisbee, and the frisbee got lost."

People may knock the Trop from time to time, but part of the fun of sports is seeing things you've never seen before. And face it: Nobody ever saw that at Wrigley Field.

"These guys are strong, man," said Angels manager Mike Scioscia. "I've heard the saying that a guy hit the ball so hard, it never came down. Well, I guess we saw it tonight."

Brawl game of the week
The World Baseball Boxing Federation is in danger of going out of business, now that Frank Robinson has suspended everyone but the hot dog vendors after last weekend's Tigers-White Sox Smackdown at Comiskey Park.

And frankly, no one will miss that World Baseball Boxing Federation, except for the people who have to assemble the plays of the week.

But if that Tigers-White Sox brawl was baseball's last donnybrook ever, it was sure an all-timer. Tigers coach Juan Samuel has been in the big leagues as a player or coach for 18 seasons. And he rates this fight the wildest he's ever seen.

Then again, it had to be wild for Samuel to get suspended for 15 games, since he's generally regarded as one of the most congenial men in the entire sport.

So when this columnist somehow turned out to be the informant to break the news to Samuel on Thursday that he'd just been suspended for 15 games, he said: "You've gotta be kidding."

No we weren't, of course. And once we'd convinced him of that, Samuel was disappointed in more than just his stiff sentence.

"If I knew I was getting 15," he joked, "I probably should have thrown more punches."

His next assignment will be to appeal this sentence. His other assignment? Figure out what's he going to do for those 15 games.

"Well, I could go to the WWF," he quipped. "I hope I get contacted by them."

List of the week
When Andruw Jones and Chipper Jones went back-to-back Wednesday, it was another great occasion: the first time two players named Jones went back-to-back. But we have had previous same-name, same-game back-to-backers. Here, courtesy of SABR's David Vincent, is the complete list:

Sept. 15,1938: Lloyd and Paul Waner, Pirates

Aug. 20, 1962: Willie and Tommy Davis, Dodgers

Sept. 9, 1964: Willie and Tommy Davis, Dodgers

April 13 1966: Frank and Brooks Robinson, Orioles

April 23, 1967: Frank and Brooks Robinson, Orioles

May 19, 1967: Frank and Brooks Robinson, Orioles

Aug. 2, 1983: Dave and Steve Henderson, Mariners

Sept. 14, 1990: Ken Griffey Sr. and Ken Griffey Jr., Mariners

Sept. 26, 1991: Rickey and Dave Henderson, Athletics

Aug. 30, 1995: Edgar and Tino Martinez, Mariners

Personal shopper of the week
He doesn't watch the Home Shopping Network. He never surfs Ebay. He'd rather wash sweat socks than go to the mall. So it's safe to say Reds clubhouse manager Rick Stowe was a long shot to become baseball's most valuable shopper of the year.

"I hate shopping," Stowe told us. "I can't stand it. If my wife wants to go shopping, she's on her own. I'll watch the kids or something."

But last weekend, Stowe not only went shopping on company time. He played a role in baseball's first-ever shopping delay of a game.

It all started when the umpiring crew for the Reds' series with the Dodgers traveled from Montreal to Cincinnati. They made it fine. Their gear, on the other hand, went to New York. So all together now: Uh-oh.

It was about an hour and 15 minutes before game time. Stowe was minding his own business, doing his clubhouse thing. The attendant from the umpires' room walked in and handed him a shopping list.

"I thought he was kidding," Stowe said. "I said, 'What's this about?' "

Well, it was essentially about not having the umpires work a game wearing Reds jackets and Dockers. So Stowe gathered up his assistant, Larry Woelfel, and off they went on an umpires'-gear shopping spree.

They ran out of the stadium and jumped into manager Jack McKeon's car. Why his car? Best parking spot in the joint. "It was right there. Good space. His is usually our errands car," Stowe said.

They headed for Koch's Sporting Goods a few blocks from the stadium. Oops. Closed at 5:30. So off they went to Dick's Sporting Goods store, about six miles away.

They sprinted inside, found the manager, explained the deal and showed him the list. They gathered a bunch of store employees and went roaring around the store, like contestants on a bad game show.

"We were wearing our Reds shirts, but nobody seemed to notice," Stowe said. "About 10 of the store employees were wearing Griffey Jr. shirts. So we didn't look that unusual."

Eventually, they wound up with four golf rain suits, four pairs of Spandex pants (instead of long johns), four white T-shirts, eight pairs of socks, four belts, a ball-strike indicator, a brush to dust off the plate and four generic black hats. Total tab: $621 -- all of which went on Stowe's Visa card. (This story can serve as a receipt for his expense account.)

By then, it was 6:30. Game time was 7:05 -- in theory. But first, the anti-shoplifting devices had to be removed from this whole pile of gear. So by the time the shopaholics got back in the car, it was 6:38. They went zooming toward the ballpark until ... Wham. A mile and a half from the stadium, they ran into gridlocked traffic from people trying to get to the game and a Barney show across the street. (Just one more reason to love that Barney.) Most printable version of Stowe's reaction to the gridlock: "Oh, no."

But 50 yards away, Stowe saw a policeman on a motorcycle -- "and we just started screaming, 'Hey, hey, any way you can help us out here?' Luckily, he believed us, since we had all the stuff all over the back seat. I don't think he thought these were two guys just late for the ballgame."

Stow got a police escort down the wrong side of the road -- "lights flashing, all the bells and whistles. I enjoyed that," Stowe said. "It was the coolest part of the whole thing."

They arrived right around game time. Reds C.O.O. John Allen was waiting for them. They ran to the umpires' room "and literally dumped it all out of the bags. And they said, 'Hey, perfect.' "

So the pitchers were told to warm up. The umps put on their outfits. ("I thought they looked really stylish," Stowe said, admiringly.) And while the game began 27 minutes late, at least it began with an umpiring crew that didn't look as if it had spent the day shopping at a flea market.

After this tremendous shopping performance, Stowe -- who has worked in the Reds' clubhouse for 20 years -- might have a big-time future. After all, isn't this how concierges start?

"No way," he said. "I want no future in that. I quit. I'll stick to equipment manager."

Useless information dept.
  • It's that time of the year to zero in on the finalists in the Tom Lawless Memorial Last Guy to Get a Hit competition. The three players left who have made it from Opening Day to this weekend without a hit: Baltimore's Jesse Garcia (0-for-11), Montreal's Lenny Webster (0-for-8), and the winner of this year's A-trophy (last player to get into a game), Texas' Scott Sheldon (0-for-3). Stay tuned.

  • Then there's this special division of the TLMLGTGAH 0-fer-lympiad: Red Sox catcher Tim Speher went 0 for spring training (0-for-17 with Boston), then got sent to Pawtucket, started his season with strikeouts in eight straight at-bats and was 0-for-16 until he finally got his first hit of the year, April 21 vs. Rochester.

  • Perhaps you've seen this line in the transactions column someplace before: "Designated Jeff Manto for assignment." Yes, sir. He's done it again. When the Rockies designated the much-traveled Manto this week, it was the eighth time he has been designated for assignment -- believed to be an all-time record. Manto, who once said he has enough designation paperwork to wallpaper his living room with, has now been designated eight times, released five times, traded three times, claimed on waivers twice, become a free agent nine times and taken in the Rule 5 draft twice. He has played in 25 cities, for 12 organizations, not even counting a cameo stint with the Yomiuri Giants. We can hardly wait for his next destination -- or designation.

  • Dodgers pitcher Alan Mills has taken the early lead in the cheapest-save-of-the-2000s derby. Mills got a save in a 16-2 win over the Reds on April 22. Now he just has to hold on. Cheapest saves of the '90s: a tie between Texas' Ed Vosberg, for saving a 26-7 game in 1996, and Cincinnati's Stan Belinda, for saving a 22-3 game last September.

  • It was amazing enough that Vaughn, Salmon and Glaus hit homers in the same inning twice in one game for the Angels last weekend. But it was especially amazing that all three bombs in the second barrage came off homer-proof closer Roberto Hernandez. Hernandez gave up one home run all last year. He'd allowed three homers in his previous 107 appearances put together. And he'd never served up more than one gopherball in any of his other 518 games in the big leagues. You never know.

  • It may not be the Justice Department that caused Microsoft stock to plummet after all. If circumstantial evidence means anything, it could all be Ken Griffey Jr.'s fault. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's (and ESPN.com's) Jim Caple computed that in the time Junior was in Seattle, a $100 investment in Microsoft shares would have risen to $15,142.26 by the time Griffey was traded. And since the trade? Those same shares have lost $5,169.57 worth of their value -- down to $9,972.69. Hmmm. But at least those T-shirt salesmen in Cincinnati are happy.

  • We've heard of some strange curses -- but the Curse of the Opening Day Starter? The Brewers' last two Opening Day pitchers -- Rafael Roque and Steve Woodard -- still haven't won a single start since they were annointed to pitch the first game. Roque went 0-5 in nine starts last year (though he did win in relief). Woodard started 0-3 in five starts this year.

  • The Dodgers came within an RBI infield single by pitcher Eric Gagne of being shut out for three straight games last week. They lost 1-0 in two straight games. The Elias Sports Bureau's Ken Hirdt reports that no team has been shut out three times in a row since the Tigers did it in Sparky Anderson's final three games in 1995. No National League team has done it since the '92 Mets (July 25-27). And no team has lost three straight 1-0 games since the 1960 Phillies (Sam Jones over Jim Owens on May 11, Jack Sanford over Robin Roberts on May 12, Jim O'Toole over John Buzhardt on May 13).

  • Randy Johnson is up to 129 double-figure strikeout games -- which is more than J.R. Richard (39), Christy Mathewson (29), Juan Marichal (25) and Vida Blue (28) put together (124).

  • Pedro Martinez actually trailed (Rangers 2, Red Sox 1) in his start Tuesday in Texas -- the first time he'd been behind at any point of any game since last Sept. 10. But since his last loss on Aug. 19, Pedro has been absurd: 101 1/3 innings, 50 hits, 10 earned runs, 160 strikeouts, one home run. He's 11-0, 0.99, counting the postseason. After he beat Texas, on nine days' rest, Rangers manager Johnny Oates chuckled: "He did pretty good for being rusty. "He must have gotten some WD-40."

  • Funky road trip of the week: The Mets start a conveniently located four-city journey to Colorado, San Francisco, Florida and Pittsburgh this weekend. Naturally, they have to play games in San Francisco and Miami on back-to-back days, but they do have an off day between Florida and Pittsburgh. Bring on that realignment.

  • Schedule quirk of the week: Until they kicked off another homestand at Pac Bell on Friday, the Giants had played more games in Florida this season (six) than in San Francisco (five).

  • It's hard to believe we just missed another home run record last week. We had eight straight days with a grand slam. And the Sultan of Swat Stats, SABR's David Vincent, reports that ties the second-longest streak of all time. The longest: 10 straight days, in 1995.

  • The Devil Rays went from Aug. 22 to April 23 without winning a series at home. They played nine series in between, losing six and splitting three.

  • And what book did Chuck Finley just happen to bring to Boston for that rained-out Red Sox-Indians series? What else? "The Perfect Storm."

    Trivia answer
    Matt Williams (Giants), Ken Griffey (Mariners), Mark McGwire (Athletics), Albert Belle (Indians), Juan Gonzalez (Rangers), Jose Canseco (Athletics).

    Jayson Stark is a senior writer at ESPN.com.
  •  



    ALSO SEE
    Stark: Home runs here to stay

    Home run theories



    AUDIO/VIDEO
    audio
     ESPN's Jayson Stark talks about this year's home run craze.
    wav: 266 k
    RealAudio: 14.4 | 28.8 | 56.6