Baseball season

It won’t be spring for another month, but major league baseball’s spring training season started earlier this week. With it comes a veritable flood of interesting, odd and disturbing stories.

What would Ted Williams have thought if he knew his body would be hanging upside down in a nitrogen-filled tank with perhaps four other full bodies and five heads at a cryogenics lab inside a strip mall in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Ed Janes, instant message, Feb. 19, 2003

My brother was talking about The Splendid Splinter, of course, and quoting ESPN’s recent story (based on an article by Bill Madden in the New York Daily News) on the horrifying post-mortem treatment of the baseball great’s remains.

Later, he mentioned that Baltimore Orioles’ pitcher Steve Bechler collapsed from heatstroke on Sunday and died the next day; a Washington Post article quotes the team’s doctor blaming a dietary supplement containing ephedra, which has been linked to several high-profile deaths involving athletes. Two days later, fellow Oriole pitcher Jason Johnson was rushed off a practice field… after a diabetic episode.

This led Ed to share a trivia fact: Only one man has ever been killed by a thrown ball in MLB history, Ray Chapman by Carl Mays in 1920. I countered with a question triggered by memories of Dave Dravecky breaking his arm while throwing a pitch to Tim Raines of the Expos in 1989: how many players have broken limbs while pitching? We came up with four: Dravecky (who later had the arm amputated), John Smiley, Tom Browning, and Tony Saunders (who, incredibly, had it happen twice).

The day after my conversation with Ed, Rebecca Blood posted about Mamie Peanut Johnson, the first female pitcher in the Negro Leagues. Which led to another question: there was more than one woman in the league? My knowledge of the Negro Leagues in general is woefully inadequate, as is my knowledge of other alternative leagues (like the AAGPBL, featured in A League Of Their Own).

And finally, something that I’ve meant to do for weeks is to pick up tickets for the new Canadian Baseball League team, the London Monarchs. On a related note, I’m sad to say I’ve never even been inside historic Labatt Park, even though it’s only a 15-minute walk away.

To coin a phrase, I love this game.