The Man in the Irony Mask

Headline on my profile of Stephen Colbert, which ran in the October 2007 issue of Vanity Fair:

The Man in the Irony Mask

(The GQ story, incidentally, is by Matthew Klam, one of my favorite writers and the author of Sam the Cat, a truly phenomenal collection of short stories. Thankfully, writers have nothing to do with headlines, so I can still rip on GQ for their lame-ass mimicry. Also: the head worked better on the Colbert piece. Suckers.)

There is, of course, another odd non-perfect game in Sox history: the June 23, 1917 match in which Babe Ruth walked the leadoff batter, promptly got tossed, and was replaced by Ernie Shore, who went on to retire every batter he faced. (That leadoff walk was wiped out on a double play, so Shore only actually pitched to 26 batters.)

Chass has long been somewhat of a bete noire for me. I have no independent news about his supposed forced buyout, but if his career is actually done–and unlike Jackie Mac, I can’t imagine anyone bidding for his services–I’ll need to look elsewhere for my morning dose of indignation. And two-bit baseball officials and washed up hardball lifers will need to find someone else to faithfully regurgitate their pablum.

My strongest memory, however, won’t be a single memory, but an enduring appreciation of his awesome, impish, love of the game–his childlike enthusiasm, one all the more infectious because it was married to the best right-handed pitcher ever to play the game. That’s what makes his recent injury–and the last several years–so sad. He can still pitch; he’s too smart and too innately talented to completely fall off the table. But he’s frail. And when he’s on the mound he looks, well, old. I want to remember this guy, the one who dominated the 1999 All-Star Game, the guy who looked like a teenager when he got to Boston…not the one being helped off the field for what feels like the 100th time in the past three years.

In that spirit, I give you this full-throated appreciation of Pedro’s majestic 2000 season…which was recently rated as the best single season performance in Red Sox history. Here’s the key graf: “Let me state this unequivocally: Not only did Pedro Martinez in 2000 post the best season by any player in Red Sox history, he posted the best pitching season ever in the history of baseball. His 1.74 ERA, stripped of all context, is still in the top 100. When considering the league-average ERA in 2000 was 5.07, the mind boggles. No hitter has ever bested the league-average OPS by 190 percent – no one’s really ever come close.”

That write up is part of a larger project: the ranking of the top-50 best individual Sox seasons of all time. (Rounding out the top five: Williams ‘41, Pedro ‘99, Yaz ‘67, Cy Young ‘01.) The whole thing is worth checking out, and will undoubtedly case plenty of debate. (Like, for instance, the fact that D-Lowe, whose ‘02 season comes in at 29, is higher than Papi, whose top season (2006) is ranked 30th.) Enjoy. It should help you keep your mind of what’s been going on with #45 for the last several years.

Without further ado…

I’m currently reading Harvard History of Science professor Anne Harrington’s The Cure Within: A History of Mind Body Medicine. It’s a fantastic book. I’m not going to try to summarize it here. (Jerome Groopman wrote a glowing review in the Times Book Review; also, the Globe recently ran an interesting Q/A with Harrington.) Among the many fascinating issues it raises is the constant tension between “hard” science and the validity/ability of our mind to effect our physiological reactions. One common example of mind/body interplay is the placebo effect. Here’s another: a recent study gives evidence that group stereotypes have concrete (and measurable) results on performance. That’s not as intuitive as you might think…and gives the lie to the notion that behind every stereotype lies a kernel of truth. (It could be that behind every stereotype lies some self-actualizing truth…)

Other interesting links:

Coffee really does make you smarter.

It won’t be long before you can get your insurer to help you with all that time you spend looking up stats online.

A lot of the reason for that is systemic: if you’re covering the Sox beat and your game story is missing a quote that’s in every single competitor’s piece your editor is gonna be on your ass. It takes a lot of work, and a lot of smarts, to put together something that’s interesting, comprehensive, and new. That’s what makes Alex Speier’s new series in the New Hampshire Union-Leader so impressive (and enjoyable). It’s about a topic that’s near and dear to my heart: the Sox player development system, the way the team has emphasized building–and keeping–young talent even when it means dealing with the wrath and scorn of the instant-gratification hoi polloi.

Today’s piece is the first in a six-part series. Those words–”first in a series”–usually serve as a cure to the most stubborn insomnia. Not this time. Do yourself a favor and skip the stories about Colon pitching the PawSox season opener and savor this instead. You’ll be glad you did.
(As an aside, Speier’s work also shows why the current evisceration of the country’s press corps so upsetting. Are there a lot of redundancies? Yes. But redundancies are necessary to make sure everything out there gets covered. Take the WMD controversy - it wasn’t the Times, or the Washington Post, that did the most important work when this story was in its early stages; it was Knight-Ridder’s Washington Bureau. A bureau that, along with Knight-Ridder itself, no longer exists.)

As Netscape founder Marc Andreessen put it, “my brain just exploded.”