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	TODAY: Saturday, May 20
	Calling for help on home runs By Jayson Stark ESPN.com
	What we have here is a crisis. You read it here first. If there were a shortage of most basic essentials in life -- gas, vegetables, beer -- it would be on the cover of Time and Newsweek. But in baseball these days, we're facing a shortfall just as huge, just as basic. And the public has never been alerted -- until now. Triviality Rickey Henderson has hit more home runs leading off games than any player who ever lived. But three other active players have hit more than 25 leadoff homers. Name them. (Answer at bottom) This just in: We are looking at the most frightening shortage of home run calls mankind has ever faced. Examine the evidence. More than 6,000 home runs will be hit this season at the current pace. And almost every one of those home runs will have to be described at least 10 times: By the home team's radio and TV crews. By the visiting team's radio and TV crews. By the local news highlight guys. By all the SportsCenter anchors. By the Baseball Tonight crew. And, in the case of the Montreal Expos, by a broadcast crew screaming very loudly into a megaphone. So that's 60,000 home run calls we'll need this season alone. And we've obtained a secret report from the National Bureau of Long Ball Statistics which shows conclusively that that exceeds the number of really good current home run calls by 59,993. If ever there were a definition of a crisis, that's it. And don't think America's most distinguished broadcast minds haven't noticed. "When I was a kid listening to Giants' games," says ESPN's Jon Miller, "Russ Hodges only had a call for when the home team homered. When the Giants homered, Russ said, 'Tell it bye-bye, baby.' And when you'd hear that at home, you'd get goose bumps. "The Giants even had a radio theme song with that in it. It went: 'When the Giants come to town, it's bye-bye, baby.' And the point is, when you heard that 'bye-bye, baby,' it was special. But now there are so many of them, it can be repetitious if somebody has the same call over and over and over." And that's exactly what we're talking about. We've listened to literally hundreds of home run calls already this year. We've seen the looks on the faces of the men who tossed them out there. And we can testify: This is a desperate situation. But not just for the play-by-play men. Those color commentators might be facing an even greater crisis. "The play-by-play guy can just do his signature call," says Astros broadcast-witticist Jim Deshaies. "He can say 'Going-going-gone,' or 'Kiss it goodbye,' or 'No doubt about it' -- whatever his signature call is. But you can't have a signature analysis of a home run You can't show the replay and go into your signature analysis. You can't just say, 'He put a really good swing on that one,' every time. It doesn't work. "And it gets tough to find a new one after a while. How many times can you say, 'He left it out over the plate?' Man, I always hated that as a pitcher. You listened to this stuff as a pitcher and you'd begin to think you're never supposed to throw a strike. 'He got it out over the plate?' You'd think, 'Maybe I was just trying to throw a strike. Ever think of that?' "Or how about, 'He got it right in his wheelhouse?' I mean, what is a wheelhouse, anyway? It's got to be some old sailor term. But this is the kind of stuff we're saying now." See? They're so desperate they're resorting to old sailor terms. Any time sailor terms infiltrate our game in more than just passing clichés, it becomes an official worldwide crisis. We checked around. Indians broadcaster Tom Hamilton has had to fire off more than 1,000 home run calls since 1995. He admits he's always looking for new ones. "I feel you can learn something all the time," Hamilton told Week in Review. "I've listened to many other broadcasters and learned from them. Basically, it's called stealing." Ah, but stealing doesn't pay. Our mothers taught us that. So what, exactly, are our options? "Maybe we should change focus," Deshaies suggested. "Let's focus on singles instead of home runs. On Baseball Tonight, when they show the home runs at the end, maybe they should just show the guys who didn't go deep. That might be a better category." Great idea. But probably not workable. So it's time to resign ourselves to the truth. And the truth is that the home run call is not going to vanish. So these folks need some other ideas. That's where we come in. And that's where you come in. This is your chance to come up with some brand new home run calls all your own. We've surveyed the greatest broadcasters in America. They're looking for suggestions. And they have been for years, even before the Great Home Run Call Shortage became serious. Miller says he has a friend from Marin County named John Bamberger who once gave him an idea for a new call that went like this: "Clang the symbols. Bang the drums. Look out, bleachers. Here it comes." He never used it. And back many years ago, when Russ Hodges retired from the Giants' booth and was replaced by Bill Thompson, Miller recalls the radio station sponsoring a contest to come up with a new call just for him. And the winner was ... (drum roll, please) ... "Adios, mother." Uh, Bill Thompson never used that one, either. "It's a great idea," says Miller, "especially for me. I want a good one. I'm tired of having to think them up myself. I want a good one I can write down and use every time." Innovator of the week Here at Week in Review, we're always searching for creative, futuristic-type people who can take this sport to places it's never been before. Last week, such a man stepped forward to literally do it all. Terry Mulholland would like to pitch in relief between starts. He's Braves pitcher Terry Mulholland. And he's a fellow who has often claimed that pitchers who just sit around eating sunflower seeds every four days between starts are underused. So last week, he proved it. In a span of four games, the 37-year-old left-hander made a start, had a three-hit game at the plate and picked up a save in his spare time. He even followed that by keeping the pitching chart for two straight games -- "a small streak," he said, "but still worth watching." For 14 years now, Mulholland has been trying to create a new position for himself -- utility pitcher. So it's about time this concept finally caught on. "I think baseball has finally turned the corner," he said. "They're realizing they can get more for their money if they're not tied to this idea that the pitcher can just get in a game every five days. Heck, fans show up for more than one game every five days. So why can't pitchers?" No kidding. Especially in an era when the supply-vs.-demand crisis in the pitching industry is worse than the computer industry. But Mulholland must have seen that coming, because he first proposed this utility pitcher idea way back in 1986, to his Triple-A pitching coach, Tippy Lefebvre. It didn't catch on then. It didn't catch on for the next 13 years, either. "The reaction I got, mostly, was just a lot of strange looks, and a lot of waves of the hand, and a lot of turn-away walkoffs, basically," Mulholland said. "But you've got to keep politicking if you want to establish policy. You've got to beat the campaign trail. It seems like anymore, everybody runs for something. So why not me? Why not make me a utility pitcher?" And after that stirring campaign speech, he could end up as George W. Bush's running mate. But back to our story ... Mulholland says he first detected progress last August, when the Braves let him save a 14-inning game in Denver two days after a start. But his latest save, Tuesday against the Giants, "was a little different," he said, "because this came before a start, as opposed to after a start." Of course, it can be hard for us lay folks to tell the difference. But Mulholland says there's "a fine line that determines whether it's before or after a start. Two days before is before a start. Two days after is after a start. There's a 24-hour period where it swings one way or the other. But it's up in the air which is more physically demanding. I think a lot of it has to do with sleep patterns, too. See, there's all kinds of research that's got to be done to come up with a solution." Mulholland doesn't think he could actually pitch in all 162 games -- at least not if he had to start 35 and relieve in the other 127. That would be too tough even on him. But he fears it would be way tougher on pitching coach Leo Mazzone. "I don't think Leo's back would hold up," Mulholland said. "He'd probably rock himself to death." But if 162 is out of the question, he'd gladly go for 35 starts and 40 relief appearances. And the rest of the games, maybe he could pinch-hit now that he's a certifiable offensive force. He started his batsmith career by going 3 for his first 69. But his lifetime average has now soared over .100. And last weekend, he amazed even himself with his first-ever three-hit game, against the Phillies. "That's another one of those unexplained phenomena," Mulholland said. "We'll have to bring Leonard Nimoy in to look into this one. It's like those big stone things on Easter Island. You can't explain why they're there. It's the same with my unexplained outburst of hitting." OK, so pinch-hitting is probably out. But utility pitching? Why, asks Terry Mulholland, shouldn't that be the ultimate "in" thing of the next millennium? "If Eddie Gaedel can play in the big leagues and a guy named Three Finger Brown can pitch," said our innovator of the week, "then you have to think pretty much anything is possible." Rivalry of the week Like a remake of "Groundhog Dog" run amok, the Houston Astros keep heading back to Milwaukee this season. And every time they do, they seem to break through some whole new barrier in baseball ugliness. The first time they were there, just a couple of weeks ago, they hooked up with the Brewers to produce a game that featured 23 walks and 174 pitches that missed the strike zone. That wasn't real attractive. But when the Astros returned this week, a mere 15 days later, things went from bad to interminable. On Tuesday, these two teams conspired to set baseball back another couple of decades with a 16-inning game that took 5 hours and 39 minutes to play. It included these unforgettable highlights: 515 pitches, 42 players marching to the plate a total of 115 times, 13 pitching changes, 10 pinch-hitters, 16 walks, 2 hit batters, 30 runners left on and, by the end, more names in the box score than people in the seats. "You could have put the whole attendance," reported our Astros correspondent, Deshaies, "in the lobby of the Pfister (hotel). Everybody in attendance by the end had caught a foul ball. There were no races to the foul balls because everybody already had one. And that's always a bad sign. "There were actually guys sleeping in the bleachers. We showed a shot of one guy in a prone position, spread out all over his row. And all you could think, looking at him, was: 'Go home.' There was no Croix de Candlestick award if you stayed. The sausage race was hours earlier. Go home. But he had it all well-timed. Every time the inning started, he'd wake up." It was tough to believe, at 1 a.m., that this had once been a 5-4 game in the fourth inning -- and somehow was still a 5-5 game in the 16th. Which tended to dampen the energy level after a while. "At the start of the game, we were running onto the field," Ken Caminiti told the Houston Chronicle's Joseph Duarte. "Halfway through, we were walking out. And by the end, we were crawling onto the field." Because the Astros fell behind early, they had to maneuver furiously just to tie this thing. They used eight different pitchers to throw 11 consecutive scoreless innings. Reliever Jay Powell didn't pitch -- but he did pinch-hit in the 15th (and struck out). By the 16th, the Brewers were out of pitchers, because reliever Curtis Leskanic had been sent home with a groin infection. But they didn't want the Astros to know that. So in the bottom of the 16th, with runners on second and third and one out, the Brewers got a man up to throw in their bullpen. Except it wasn't a real pitcher. It was bullpen coach Bill Castro. In the meantime, they also sent the last remaining position player on either team, Tyler Houston, out to the on-deck circle, ostensibly to hit for pitcher Hector Estrada. But Houston was never going to bat, because there was no way the Brewers could take Estrada out of the game. The Astros actually caught on -- and pitched to Henry Blanco anyway. Blanco hit a sacrifice fly -- which, fittingly, was dropped by Roger Cedeno. And this game, mercifully, was over. But the travails of the Brewers and Astros weren't over. The next day, they waited around half the night and got rained out. Then Thursday, they had a doubleheader obliterated by every storm front known to nature. So on Monday, the Astros have to go back to Milwaukee -- for the third time in 21 days -- to play a makeup doubleheader. And we can only imagine the spectacles that might produce. "It's like the Ten Commandments," Deshaies said. "We've been visited by all the various plagues. We had the 23-walk game. We had the 16-inning game. We had the (single-game) rainout. Then came hail. So next, I figure, must be locusts falling from the sky." Couch potato update of the week Last week in this space, we reported on baseball's injury of the year -- Marlins pitcher Ricky Bones heading for the disabled list after hurting his back watching TV in a clubhouse recliner. Naturally, the reverberations of this injury have been felt all around baseball. In the Tigers' clubhouse the other day, catcher Brad Ausmus was seen watching TV. When questioned by Booth Newspapers' Danny Knobler about whether he realized he was risking injury, Ausmus quipped: "It's OK. I stretched before I sat down." Rockies coach-humorist Rich Donnelly reported: "He got hurt sitting down, right? We make all our guys watch standing up. We put all the TVs way above ground." Diamondbacks reliever Dan Plesac told Week in Review that with all the home runs being hit, he's now taking precautions when he watches baseball on TV. "I wear a (protective device) now when I'm watching a game," Plesac said. "I try to take the screen home from the ballpark with me and set it up in front of the couch." Phillies deep thinker Doug Glanville thinks teams need to react to this injury before it's too late. "All I can suggest is to make every television remote a mini-universal gym," Glanville proposed. "Each button pressed forces the user to do a specific exercise for a different body part. Changing channels would result in an all-out sweat. Prevention is much better than finding a cure." Absolutely. But not all prevention is that complicated. There actually was a much simpler prevention all along, says retired bullpen jokemeister Larry Andersen. "You know, Ricky Bones wouldn't have had this injury," Andersen said, "if he had been watching Richard Simmons." Mile highjinx of the week It seemed like a good idea at the time. Remember last winter, when the Colorado Rockies decided to put together a whole different kind of baseball team -- a team that wasn't going to be dependent on the home run, a team that wasn't going to be able to score runs just at Coors Field? Oh, well. They tried. Despite their best efforts, the Rockies now have scored at least 10 runs in seven straight games at Coors (and in no games during the same span on the road). That's a record in any park. Meanwhile, at least one team has scored in double figures at Coors now in 10 straight games. Which has to be a record. "I haven't seen that many 10's," said our Coors Field correspondent, Rich Donnelly, "since Bo Derek." "It reminds me of that little machine we used to play at the arcade," Donnelly said. "You know that baseball game where you'd hit the ball and it would go ding and the little runners kept going round and round and round? That's Coors Field." Not that everything about these games is bad, you understand. "The one good thing about our games," Donnelly said, "is there's no traffic going home (because everybody already left). We had a game (May 12) where we'd played 2 hours and 15 minutes, and we were in the bottom of the third inning. So that clears out the traffic pretty good." But these guys need something to speed up the games, and Donnelly has the perfect solution. "What they ought to do is just move the bullpens onto the field," he said. "Where they are now, it's taking too long to get these guys into the game. Just stand them outside the dugout, warm them up and bring them in. They're coming in, anyway. The hinges on the bullpen door need some WD-40, they're opened so much. Whatever happened to the car to bring these guys in? Of course, if we had that car, we'd have had to retread the tires four times by now." Wild pitches Box score line of the week A week after shutting out the Rockies on two hits over seven innings in San Francisco, the Giants' Joe Nathan made the mistake of following the schedule into Colorado last weekend for his encore. It produced this R-rated line: 2 2/3 IP, 9 H, 12 R, 10 ER, 4 BB, 3 K, 2 HR. Those 12 runs in not quite three innings were twice as many as Pedro Martinez has allowed all season. But incredibly, Nathan is the fifth pitcher to give up 12 or more in a start since 1998. The others: Charles Nagy (April 22, 1998), Mike Oquist (Aug. 3, 1998), John Burkett (May 17, 1999) and Jose Lima (April 27, 2000). Box score line of the week (minor league dept.) Scranton reliever Manny Barrios, a guy once traded for Mike Piazza, cranked out this crooked-number festival in a 24-8 loss to Durham on May 13: 2/3 IP, 7H, 10R, 10ER, 3BB, K. He was then relieved -- by his catcher, Fausto Tejero. Who got out of the inning (but did allow three more runs). Box score mini-line of the week He wasn't around long. But Orioles reliever Mike Trombley left his mark on that May 13 game between the Orioles and Red Sox. His short, not-so-sweet line: 0 IP, 3 H, 4 R, 4 ER, 0 BB, 0 K, 1 HBP, 7 pitches, 3 balls. In other words, all the pitches that weren't balls were home runs. Hard to do. Cleanup hitter of the week But that Mike Trombley outing wasn't the only thing nutty about that Orioles-Red Sox game. Due to another afternoon of hyper-managing by Jimy Williams, the Red Sox wound up the game with two infielders (Donnie Sadler and Jeff Frye) in the outfield -- and pitcher Derek Lowe in the cleanup spot. In the ninth inning, Lowe even had to bat. But he was ordered by pitching coach Joe Kerrigan not to swing. So he didn't -- whiffing (looking) against Mike Timlin. Of course, that didn't stop Lowe's teammates from getting all over him for his awful at-bat. "As bad as it was, he did go up to the plate with a game plan," catcher Scott Hatteberg told the Boston Globe's Gordon Edes. "The plan was: Don't swing the bat. But he didn't fool anybody. He was flopping around out there, no (batting) glove, no nothing. Pathetic." Trifecta of the week If it's May in Philadelphia, it must be time for another three-homer game by Mark McGwire. Almost two years to the day after his previous three-homer show (May 19, 1998, also in Philadelphia) Big Mac launched three more bombs Thursday at Veterans Stadium. The Sultan of Swat Stats, SABR home-run historian David Vincent, reports that McGwire became the eighth player in history to have two three-homer games in the same visiting ballpark and the second to do it in Philadelphia. The other: Lou Gehrig. All three shots were typical McGwire rockets. But the second -- which landed five rows up in the upper deck in deep left-center -- traveled so far, it should have had to stop to clear customs. "With all the talk and confusion about where the new baseball stadium will go in Philadelphia," said Glanville, "I think he was just chipping in by providing us with three different locations. ... I prefer the center field home run location, Better subway access." Lost Unit of the week What had to happen to produce Randy Johnson's first loss since Aug. 31? A shutout, of course. This one was pitched Tuesday by Javier Vazquez in Montreal. And that makes five times now in the last 11 months that the Diamondbacks have been shut out with the Big Unit pitching. They haven't been shut out with any other starter since April 27, 1999. Well, we always said that any time Randy Johnson starts, you have a chance to see a shutout. "Yeah," said Plesac. "Unfortunately, some of them have been against him. You know when Randy's pitching that one run is like five runs. But that one run can be hard sometimes." Rain men of the week The Detroit Tigers haven't had much luck beating the American League (except for the Yankees). Now they can't even get a win against that pesky veteran, Mother Nature. Twice in nine days, a team that almost never takes a lead has jumped ahead in a game -- and then had it rained out. The Tigers led Kansas City 3-0 on May 9 and saw that get flooded out. Then they led the Indians 5-0 Thursday -- and couldn't survive that deluge to get through five innings, either. Luis Polonia went 5-for-5 in those two games -- meaning he should be hitting 289 but is actually hitting .257. And Polonia and Gregg Jefferies kicked off Thursday's game with back-to-back homers -- the first time the Tigers had started a game that way in 14 years. But according to the bizarre baseball rule book, they still haven't done it in 14 years. "This is why every team should move to California," Gregg Jefferies told Booth Newspapers' Danny Knobler. "There or Hawaii." Burglars of the week It sounds impossible. But the Marlins really did steal 10 bases in one game Thursday against San Diego-- and still lost. "It's not the worst loss of the year," said Marlins manager John Boles. "It's one of the worst losses ever ... I feel like my head is going to explode. I feel like my skin is on fire." He had reason to want to call the fire department, too. The Marlins were one short of the NL record, set by the Cardinals on Aug. 13, 1916. But if it's any consolation, according to the Elias Sports Bureau, the last team to steal more bases in one game -- the '76 A's -- stole 12 and lost as well. The trouble with the Marlins, though, was that they didn't just lose. They stole 10 bases in five innings off the same pitcher (Stan Spencer) and scored just two runs. Now that's hard. "We stole everything," Boles said, "but home." Catch of the week There ought to be easier ways to make the Plays of the Week. Last Saturday in Detroit, it was so windy at Comerica Park, it turned a foul pop-up by Scott Brosius into an adventure that forced Tigers catcher Brad Ausmus to go back, camp under it and then make a running, diving catch. Ausmus' review of what he did: "An emergency jump and twist." "He looked like Jerry Rice," said Jefferies. Hot streak of the week When a guy goes 29 days without making an out, he's either hot or hurt. In the case of Rangers hit machine Frank Catalanotto, it was both. He just ripped off a 10-for-10 streak in which he reached base in 12 straight trips. So that's hot. But in the middle of all this, he went on the disabled list with a pulled groin. So he was hurt, too. But with the help of that DL visit, Catalanotto didn't make an out between April 19 and May 18. He came off the DL Wednesday to start at first base in place of flu-ridden David Segui and went 5-for-5. Segui watched that act, ripped out his IV and asked to play again Thursday. "I don't want to sit around and watch Catalanotto get five hits again," he told the Fort Worth Star Telegram's Simon Gonzalez. "I might never get back in there." Brother act of the week Wednesday in Cleveland, Roberto Alomar hit a single and double. Meanwhile, his brother Sandy tripled and homered -- for the first bi-cycle built for two in Indians history. "Just say Alomar hit for the cycle," Robbie Alomar told the Cleveland Plain Dealer's Paul Hoynes "Don't say R. Alomar or S. Alomar. Just say Alomar." Mystery slugger of the week The most unlikely back-to-back homers of the year were hit May 12 in Houston by the Reds. Doing the honors were Pokey Reese, who hadn't homered all season, and relief pitcher Danny Graves, who was 0 for his four-year career (0 for 11) until Enron Field intervened. "I can't hit home runs in batting practice," said a shocked Graves, "even if I was standing on second base." Milestone of the week We've often said all saves aren't created equal. And Texas closer John Wetteland proved it last weekend. The good news was, he collected his 300th save. The bad news was, he did something in the process he'd never done in any of the previous 299: He gave up three runs. (He entered an 11-8 game in Anaheim and got out of the eighth inning, but took a five-run lead into the ninth and gave up a homer, double and homer to the first three hitters but held on.) "Oh, it was memorable," Wetteland said of No. 300, "for all the wrong reasons." SRO house of the week The Pirates played an exhibition game against their Double-A club Monday in Altoona, in a ballpark without a single empty seat. Imagine the shock of that. "This will probably the last sellout we play in front of," Jason Schmidt told the Beaver County Times' John Perrotto, "in the state of Pennsylvania this year." Trivia answer Devon White, Chuck Knoblauch and Brady Anderson. Jayson Stark is a senior writer at ESPN.com.		ALSO SEE Jayson Stark archive