In defense of napping

No, the whole dust-up surrounding the report that Ken Griffey Jr. was asleep in the Seattle Mariners clubhouse when called on to pinch-hit over the weekend doesn't have anything to do with the Orioles — aside from the fact that said Mariners are currently in Baltimore for a three-game set, that is.

Hell, I'll take it. It's not like there's anything new to say about the O's, who are still booting balls and losing games and, in two-out RBI situations, looking about as comfortable as an Englishman on a nude beach.

So I hope you'll indulge me for a moment while I step up onto my soapbox ...


My feeling about Griffey slam-dancing with the Sandman mid-Mariners game is essentially this:

WHO THE FUCK CARES?

First of all, I don't think this would be a big deal even if it'd involved one of the game's lesser lights — like, say, a middle reliever from Kansas City or that sixth Molina brother or anyone batting sixth through ninth in the Baltimore lineup. (And if it'd been Manny Ramirez, you can bet your ass folks in Boston or L.A. or wherever he's currently making a mockery of our pastime would've already shrugged and chalked it up to — ugh — "Manny being Manny.")

But in the case of Ken Griffey Jr., dude's earned it.

Look at it my way. I'm an inveterate napper. I've been at my current job now for three and a half years, during which time I've proven myself more than adept at whatever work's come my way (which, breathe a sigh of relief, I won't bore you with the details of). I didn't sneak naps at first — probably not for the first two and a half years, even. But now I've got absolutely zero issue with ducking down for a quick Z at my desk. Don't even care when I wake and lift my woozy head only to find a full-force flooger extending from my lower lip down to the forearm on which it'd previously rested.

Point being, Mike Laws : his job  ::  Ken Griffey Jr. : professional baseball, and we're both allowed to nap if we're knackered and not busy and need to recharge our own personal Duracells.

But the bigger issue here is that baseball, let's face it, can be really, intensely, undeniably fucking boring. Anyone who's sat in a press box every day over a whole summer can tell you that — tell you how, despite their love of the sport, they'll still show up at the park each evening, arrange their notes, fill in their scorecards, open their laptops, then pray for a 1-0 pitchers' duel. Get this thing over ASAP. My guess is the players (who, after all, have shown up at the park far, far earlier than your typical newspaperman) don't feel much differently.

And let's not forget the alternative to catching a quick clubhouse nap. If you're going to mandate that your players be wide awake for each and every inning of all 162 games season in and season out — even the rarely called-on relievers, the bench players, that sixth outfielder who doesn't even bother with BP anymore — you can expect some pretty unsavory behavior. Remember the whole "greenies" issue? Remember how much it turned out ballplayers enjoyed a good line of the ol' Bolivian marching powder to ward off boredom and fatigue? You might prevent players' napping, but soon enough you'll be forced to listen to Felix Pie telling Craig Tatum all about snowflakes being the key to the fifth dimension.

So let's give Griffey a break. He was sleeping. Alone. And not in a room featuring portraits of himself as a centaur.

An alien in orange

They're out there.

On a park bench on a path on the Mall — under canopied cover of leafy summer green, thick dark tangled green splashed with ocher-tone where the unruly oblique light slashes through — there they silently sit, lipless and snarling and backlit by the setting sun, they're all teeth, the rest is shadow at this sinister hour.

You latch onto the things that give them away, the facts of their being that not even the collusion of light and haze and shadow, not even the craning reptilian contortions of their heads atop their necks, can conceal: neon shorts unveiling knobby knees, neon fanny-packs slack and limp like a synthetic second gut, cheap plasticene visors probably procured only hours earlier from a nearby vendor.

You have to remind yourself: These are creatures of harmless comfort, pudgy and soft with late-middle age, ladies with varicose veins and carbuncular pre-cancerous skin-tags who've sought out this place to sit in the shade — this twilit respite from screaming kids and photo-crazed Japanese tourists and sad-eyed, slow-moving vets hawking their wares, their pins and T-shirts and sew-on patches: VFW, RIP, POW-MIA.

You have to stop doing this to yourself — selecting as your soundtrack for the long walk home these icy, glass-encased anthems, Mirrored by Battles, "Echoes" by Pink Floyd, austere atonal dirges like alien laments for our doomed, dying planet — and what's worse, these are funeral marches with real climaxes that never fail to synchronize in some fatidic way with the long walk itself: how "Echoes" chugs up and out of chaotic cacophony and into that final verse just as you stride out of the forest and onto the huge flat tiles below the Lincoln Memorial; how Battles' "Tonto" coalesces into its mammoth stomp precisely as you separate from the madding crowd and pivot to get your first view of the Memorial Bridge back to Virginia.

Because up until that point, when you've left behind all the tubby tourists in their bright clothes and the packs of Neoprene'd joggers and the screeching kids on their field trips — when you're heading back to the Old Dominion on the leg of the walk where you're unlikely to encounter another living soul and you're on those disused cracked sidewalks and the music's taken another turn — it's too easy to forget who's been the alien all along, isolated under wraparound headphones and behind Saigon-mirror shades in his orange Nike Dri-Fit, his worn rubber soles.

Mail time!

I never thought I'd be saying this about a 7-and-18 team, but I have nothing to complain about today — not after the Orioles completed a weekend sweep of not just any team, not the Royals or A's or Indians, but the Red Sox — and did so in dramatic fashion, a pair of 10-inning barn-burners bookending the three-game set and a wild, 12-9 slugfest providing the sweet, sweet meat in this particular grinder.

Which, of course, meant a lot of red-eyed Red Sox fans hanging their heads on the way out the gates on Eutaw Street. Fenway South this ain't, kid. Your team looks wicked awful.

Anyway, in lieu of the usual self-pitying splenetic venting, and on the heels of a real interview with yours truly in re: this ridiculous and ill-conceived idea for a blog, I thought I'd answer a handful of questions I've received from you, beloved readers. Don't say I never did anything for ya.

Are you really watching every inning of every game? — Aaron Blake, Washington, D.C.

Fuck, no! Aren't the long walks to work and repetitive exercises punishment enough? You think I actually want to pay attention to this team? Nah, brah, if there's anything else worth watching on TV — a Penguins playoff game, an MS telethon, reruns of "Saved by the Bell: The New Class" — that's what I'll be doing from 7 to 10 most nights. Then in the morning, I'll go find a box score and add up the walks issued, errors committed, strikeouts against, GIDPs, etc., and get down to business.

What do you do for weekend games? — Elsbeth Mantler, Baltimore, Md.

Well, Els, as you well know, I'm something of a closet karaoke freak, and come Friday that freak flag gon' fly. Which usually means sublime renditions of Sublime at Summers. Which usually means I'm in no shape to do any walking or working out on a Saturday morning. Point being, I've decided to give myself Friday and Saturday games off, as I don't work weekends anyway and thus couldn't be expected to walk downtown following a loss. Sunday games do, however, count against me — and remember, this is a team that, over the past two seasons, has gone a combined 14-and-37 on Sundays.

What if it's raining during your walk? — Ambassador Henry Imbabwetumba, Yamoussoukro, Côte d'Ivoire

I'll just do what the pros do and postpone the walk for a later date — possibly even a double-header, in which case I'll walk both to and from work, burning calves and battered feet be damned! Speaking of which, I'm also now greatly looking forward to days the Orioles have off — just like the players themselves, I'm betting.

In any event, the MO here is to keep a running tally of rain-delayed walks; currently my magic number is two. I do likewise for the exercises, as I've been advised that one shouldn't engage in such lifting every single day of the week. I currently "owe" seven sets, which figure I'll add to tonight's totals — sure to be hefty (no pun intended), as CC Sabathia's pitching — and blast out in the a.m.

If the Orioles sweep the Yankees or Red Sox, shouldn't you give yourself a day off from walking, like a Get out of Jail Free card? — Chad Ford, Salisbury, Md.

Best idea I've heard in a long time. My magic number is now, officially, one.

Thanks, BoSox!

Who are the ad wizards ... ?

Back in the halcyon April of aught-five, when I was about to graduate from college and spring had just sprung and the Orioles were tearing up the league, having gone 16-7 for the month and even sweeping the Yankees in a four-game set — in short, when all seemed right with the world — I chanced to come across a local-TV ad for the lowly Kansas City Royals.

Because I was in school in Providence, R.I., at the time, I figured I'd try out this crazy newfangled MLB.tv package, which allowed the user access — grainy, choppy, largely unsatisfactory access — to whatever out-of-market game his baseball-besotted heart might desire. Using an S-video cable, I'd Bogart the downstairs TV of our senior-year house, watching my then-surging O's intently and shouting drunkenly at what I thought were blatant bad calls and generally bugging the shit out of my roommates.

Anyway, one of MLB.tv's side-benefits (or -drawbacks, depending on how you tend to look at these things) is that you never really know whose broadcast the service is pulling from, your team's or the opposition's. So on one of these fine April days — I believe it was a game in which Geronimo Gil keyed a late rally, if you can believe that ever actually happened — during one of these broadcasts I caught an ad encouraging ... no, beseeching ... no, begging Royals fans to come out to Kauffman Stadium. In this endeavor — I thought shamefully — the spots employed the voices of various little kids, who talked about playing on the fun slides and monkey bars in the park's jungle gym or hanging out with Slugerrr the Lion or, you know, tweaking out on cotton candy — in short, any- and everything not having to do with Royals baseball itself.

Now, at the time I found myself tsk-tsking. How sad, I thought, for an organization to find itself reduced to selling the experience at the ballpark over the product on the field. My Orioles, as bad as they'd been since '98, were surely on the upswing now; we had our coterie of flashy free-agent signings (Miggi, Raffy, Javy, Sammy) to lure folks back into Camden Yards; no way would we ever hit the bottom Kansas City had.

Ah, but fate, as Morpheus once put it so eloquently to Neo, is not without a sense of irony. Because today I find myself praying ... no, imploring ... no, begging the Orioles brass or MASN execs or ... whoever to please get these infernal "Defining Moment" ads off the air.

Look, MASN broadcasts are already plenty painful. To say nothing of the actual play on the field (I'll let the 3-16 record suffice), we have to put up with Gary Thorne, who in another life was a fine play-by-play guy — for professional ice hockey. When Thorne's out, we get the pleasure of Jim Hunter licking Jim Palmer's ballsack for nine innings at a time. Then there are the constant fuck-ups: the wrong counts, the wrong number of outs, a three-run homer against the Birds that was actually a grand slam against the Birds.

Long story short, the commercials should offer a reprieve between bouts of prime, grade-A suckage — suckage infesting everything down Oriole Way, from the field to the booth to the truck. Instead, we get these ridiculous, unwarrantedly braggy ads in which Orioles fans, huddled together on a Baltimore rooftop, mitts on and all, taunt an opposing pitcher, daring him to throw the heater. "The faster it comes in, the farther it goes out," one guy says, shit-eating grin splayed across his mug.

These spots wouldn't even be cool if we were, say, the Phillies or Rays right now; wouldn't we want to be more magnanimous in victory? But let's not get ahead of ourselves. We're not the Rays or Phillies or Yankees or Cardinals. We're 3 and 16. Three and sixteen. Can't we film a quick series of ads that play up the charm of the warehouse or the cheap Natty Bohs or the Bird's killer blow jobs?

Still, I guess it could be worse. At least it was the Nats who got the worst of this series of ads. Um, yeah, we do know who Wil Nieves is — by your own admission, a guy who will never, ever do this again:

Let's stay together

Dearest Orioles,

Let me preface what I have to say here by telling you I love you. Always have, always will. It's not going to be easy to write what I have to write to you today, but just know I'm doing it for the sake of our relationship — for the sake of salvaging this beautiful thing we once had, and could again.

The truth is, things haven't been the same between us of late. Of late, hell — not for the past 12 seasons (and counting). It's like you just stopped trying after 1997. Sure, you'll say I changed around that time, too, but mostly I just couldn't support what you were doing: how you'd come into all that money; the lavish spending sprees that ensued; your flirtations with bad boys like Albert Belle, staying out all night. I know I started to lose my cool, what with the constant bickering, the shouting at you, that time I got drunk and told you I'd been fantasizing about the Blue Jays. And I'm sorry for all that. But you know and I know that you stopped taking care of yourself and your true needs. You lost your Oriole Way.

But we had it so good before that, baby! Remember those wild early days? The pennants, the playoffs, the lineups chockablock with future Hall of Famers? God, I was so smitten with you. And you, for your part, truly reciprocated. Lately the best I can get out of you is Matt Wieters T-shirt night; time was, the Bird would blow me in the back of a cab.

Maybe I was just young and naive. I was the new kid on the block in October of '83, all green behind the ears at 1 month old, and you were this sexy, experienced team ready to usher me into a world, and a World Series, the likes of which I'd scarcely know again. You showed me what it was to live.

And based on that promise, I stayed with you through the thick and the thin — through '88, the first time we almost broke up; through '89, when all of a sudden we made it work again; through the lean years of the early '90s and the heady vintage days of '96 and '97. That's why I'm still with you now, girl: We've weathered it all, you and I, and I know we can get back to that good stuff. You're my soulmate.

But I need you, please, to stop doing these things to torture me. You've made me walk to work every fucking day this week — and I wouldn't mind that; in fact part of me likes doing it, if for no other reason than to show the world my devotion to you. But yesterday you knew I was coming up on two consecutive days of hockey games, and you picked that day of all days to get totally smoked, 9-1, including a whopping 21 negative events, such that I'd have not only to walk downtown today, but also to nearly cripple myself lifting weights before doing so.

That's just cold, baby. Still, I'm willing to forgive and forget and move on with you; to grow old with you; to die with a love for you and you alone in my unwavering heart.

Just please, for the love of God, win a couple ballgames.

1-6

Opening night

All right, Mike Gonzalez, I'm willing to forgive and forget — so long as you don't make this a regular occurrence.

Turns out a nice long walk was just what I needed: the sun beating down, the a.m. temperature already a breeze-free 75°, packs of tourists like wild Nikon-wielding beasts skulking around the steps of the Lincoln Memorial — forerunners, all, of what'll doubtless be a long, hot, sticky summer.

And of course that reminded me of all the games yet to take place — 161, to be exact (I'm assuming the Orioles won't be playing any more than that, but prove me wrong, kids!). So while this one smarted, especially since it was opening night and the other pitching performances were so stellar and all the young dudes (Wieters, Jones, Markakis) were hitting the ball on the nose, I'd decided, by the end of my meditative five-mile jaunt, that Mr. Gonzalez deserves to be judged by his work over a full season, and that comparisons to Jorge Julio* or Armando Benitez are premature at best.

(By the way, that's a rather pleasant catch-22, eh? Gonzalez's performance, and his performance alone, undoes all the hard-fought at-bats, all the wriggling-out-of-jams of earlier in the game, is itself the sole reason I had to walk to work today — and yet, by very virtue of that walk to work, he's forgiven.)

Shifting gears ... I'm seeing the Arctic Monkeys in Baltimore tonight and thus felt it'd be appropriate, over the course of the walk, to revisit the band's debut LP, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not.

The verdict? Despite the title (which, like the band name, is shockingly awful, especially viewed in light of Alex Turner's considerable gifts as a lyricist), the album holds up fairly well, though I think I'll go and take a piss or hit on that bartendress with the lip-ring if they decide to play "Riot Van"** or "Perhaps Vampires is a Bit Strong But ..."*** or "Still Take You Home." Happily, on the other hand, "The View from the Afternoon" and "When the Sun Goes Down" still rock like all hell, the latter of the two, in this author's humble opinion, offering a sign of things to come once Turner turned his penetrating gaze away from the public house's bathroom mirror.

That said, if they don't play "Cornerstone," I'm demanding my money back.




And finally ... I'd like to apologize to whoever was in the adjacent stall in the office bathroom when I used mine as a personal changing station****, proceeding to strip, wipe myself down with paper towels (and then, having run out of those, with wads of toilet paper) and re-dress in the work clothes I'd portaged in my backpack. I can see how it'd be weird to look beneath the divider and see bare feet — weird enough, possibly, to stop an otherwise-pleasant bowel movement midstream. Part of me hopes you'll see this just so you know I'm not a homeless.

ENDNOTES:

* Speaking of Jorge Julio, I was surprised, a couple of days ago, to find myself in a conversation with a fellow bar patron in which the subject of his conceding a home run to Jack Wilson — yes, that Jack Wilson, the sure-handed shortstop who hadn't homered since 8-year-old league, probably — came up. Mostly I was surprised that any non-Orioles or -Pirates fan (and let's face it, there aren't many of either, or at least not many who'll admit to it) would remember this moment, being as it happened on June 7, 2005. But I remember, mostly because that was the death-knell of the Baltimore season, which had gotten off to a rollicking start (16-7 in April) but was bound to fall back to earth at some point. Anyway, to that guy at the bar, I just want to say: So glad you remember.

** The only good thing about "Riot Van" is how perfectly it segues into "Red Light Indicates Doors Are Secure." Which doesn't justify the Arctics' trotting either out in Baltimore tonight.

*** That track was never as winning or lovable as, say, Eminem's early stuff in its prediction of the undesirable trappings of future success — success that itself had yet to be attained, mind you — namely the press shitting all over you, which, it should be noted, never really happened to the Arctics.

**** Ordinarily, when I use a stall for this purpose, the bathroom is otherwise empty. I'd've used the back stairwell, except then I would've had to close the door to said stairwell behind me, and I happen to know that the doors in this building lock from the outside, which nugget of wisdom I gleaned when, early in our then-covert courtship, I spirited a certain lovely co-worker back there for some thrillingly dangerous making-out but then, less suavely, found that I'd gotten us both locked out and that we'd have to descend nine flights of stairs to get to the lobby and take the elevator back up. (By the way, if you're a boss or a building manager and you're reading this, I totally made the whole thing up. Poetic license.)