{"id":5059,"date":"2010-05-11T14:30:31","date_gmt":"2010-05-11T21:30:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.seamheads.com\/?p=5059"},"modified":"2010-05-11T14:30:31","modified_gmt":"2010-05-11T21:30:31","slug":"strasburg-in-syracuse-first-start-game-interrupted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/2010\/05\/11\/strasburg-in-syracuse-first-start-game-interrupted\/","title":{"rendered":"Strasburg in Syracuse First Start: Game, Interrupted"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dedicated to \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcAndres:\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Cesar Andres Corrales Moya<\/em>
\nOf Quito, Ecuador<\/em><\/em>
\nAnd his father<\/em>
\nJulio Corrales Leon (1962-2010)<\/em><\/p>\n

He has been promoted. I drive now out of the cluster of mountains in northern Pennsylvania through the long, glacially carved ridges and valleys of New York state. I pass through Elmira, where I spent much of my childhood watching the Pioneers at Dunn Field, through Ithaca, the buildings of the campus of Cornell University gleaming on the slope to my right, up the right side of Lake Cayuga, longest of the Finger Lakes, through Cortland, (for which the breed of apple was named in 1898), and then onto I-81 for a twenty-six mile run to my destination. That run passes by the Onondaga Indian Reservation, and I wonder if the Iroquois are another subject I must include before this book is done.<\/p>\n

Syracuse is the very parody of the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcCity on the Hill.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Since Maxwell Hall was established on the Quad at Syracuse University in 1937, its \u00e2\u20ac\u02dciconic ionic\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 pillars visited by cameras during one break or the other of every televised basketball game played by the Orange, the city and university planners seem to have made every conscious attempt to imitate San Gimignano, the medieval Italian city of towers. Whether the steel beams support college dormitories or the Children\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Hospital, or the pit dug into the hillside and covered with an inflatable roof which constitutes the Carrier Dome, the result is concentrated concatenation, a rhythmless squalor which wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t even carry a rhythm if it could somehow be translated to audio.<\/p>\n

I should confess that my father, myself, my uncle and my cousin are all raging Orange sports fans. Now I pass a billboard featuring last year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s basketball players which touts the tepid brag, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcThey Just Keep Getting Better.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 This is appropriate to what a team with three freshmen did last year, but it is also a code\u00e2\u20ac\u201d\u00e2\u20ac\u02dcThey Just Keep Getting Younger,\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcThey Just Keep Throwing the Ball Away,\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 or \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcThey Just Keep Getting Drafted.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s getting harder and harder to watch college basketball these days with much pleasure.<\/p>\n

Off Exit Twenty Three and left on Park, I catch my first glimpse of Alliance Bank Stadium. It is back there somewhere, through a plaza featuring a variety of discount shops, beyond a giant white aluminum warehouse. My first sight is a light stand and\u00e2\u20ac\u201danother tower, this one rounded, capped with a concrete lid and ball on its top, the fortress\/dungeon which whispers of the pleasures\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand-perils\u00e2\u20ac\u201dof Camelot. Again I join the line. No one in Harrisburg has warned anyone in Syracuse to have the police out directing traffic whenever Strasburg starts. We form two lines towards paying four dollars. One woman stands between them, working first right and then the left. A man and his family slide under a chain link fence. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not that they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re sneaking in- we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re nowhere near the park yet– it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s simply that they have walked into an enclosed area of the industrial complex and have no other way out of it. This, I realize, is what Alliance Bank Stadium is, a relic, a dinosaur, a park left over from the days when baseball was shunned by \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcbetter folk\u00e2\u20ac\u2122\u00e2\u20ac\u201dit\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a stadium built as an afterthought in the back of an industrial park complex.<\/p>\n

Let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s look on the bright side. Let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s call it \u00e2\u20ac\u02dchistoric.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 No doubt its habitues love the old joint. True, like the park in Altoona it has been given a brick fa\u00c3\u00a7ade, but the fa\u00c3\u00a7ade is graceless and imposing, a bluff which will be called. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s presuming I make it inside. Finally I pay my money to park, and am guided around in a circle sort of back where I started from, and find a notch on a grassy gravel knoll which makes me glad I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m parking a Subaru. Low, gray and braided by the wind, altocumulus clouds line the sky. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re canal clouds, what our ancestors saw often enough in these parts as they rode a packet on the Erie headed to settle in\u00c2\u00a0 Chicago, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Duluth\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthe core of Great Lakes cities which in two or three more generations would populate the stands of Ban Johnson\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s American League. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s cold again\u00e2\u20ac\u201dI put on my throw-over and my lined Columbia jacket, and will not notice them as a problem all night\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a question of just how long a line of thunderstorms is going to hold off.<\/p>\n

I finally make it inside and discover that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve forgotten a pen. (There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a joke here somewhere, the sportswriter at the park without his pen, as if Ruth or DiMaggio walked up to the plate once without a bat in their hands.) I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got fifteen minutes to find the souvenir shop and a pen, and then my cousin and Andres, his current student from abroad, and then my seat, which, as a matter of timing in ordering tickets, is apart from theirs. Somehow I manage to do all this. First I find a stand featuring a pile of pens at no charge\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthe Onondaga County Health Department is pushing lead testing, and for the pen, here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a plug for them\u00e2\u20ac\u201d\u00e2\u20ac\u0153At age one and two, testing for lead is what to do!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0 I find section 209 and realize my cousin and his guest student are somewhere behind me in the traffic\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand then take my seat in 205.<\/p>\n

The country beyond the center field fence reminds me of the Montezuma Wildlife Refuge north of Auburn, which is thirty or forty miles west of here\u00e2\u20ac\u201dtall reeds and swamp, and out in left, a railroad track cutting past and disappearing at a sharp angle into the wilderness between here and Watertown. This is the very northern edge of the city. The stadium itself is two basic decks, in a very simple ticketing scheme: the upper deck is general admission; the lower seating is more complicated. Considering some of the seating schematics I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve seen on computers, chalk one up for the Chiefs. Out in the right center field alley, an old scoreboard, a long rectangle, is covered over with a tarp. Four grid iron light towers, painted an ugly green, rise from the reeds and stand evenly spaced around the park.<\/p>\n

Next to me a teen kicks over his soda. His conversation stops and we all watch the ice cubes slide over the precipice into the row below us. The PA announces Diane Thomas to sing the national anthem. Timid and nervous, she switches to perhaps five keys during the assault on Fort McHenry, but the crowd lets loose as she sticks the high note on \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcfree.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 The Chiefs have posted the game as a sellout, but the crowd is still pouring in around me as Strasburg readies for his first pitch. Worse, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve sold SRO tickets: the crowd is four or five deep at the rails, but this gives some fans the impression that they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve oversold, and all throughout the game spectators will sit down and then be kicked out of seats around me.<\/p>\n

Strasburg delivers to Gwinnet Braves\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 center fielder Matt Young. Gasps and hoots rise up at the ninety-six mile-an-hour fastball. Young goes 0-2 and manages to foul one off before grounding to second. Left fielder Gregor Blanco steps in to the box. It strikes me that this is perhaps Strasburg\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s first confrontation with a batter who has been in the majors. It doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t much seem to matter. Blanco goes 2-2 and then watches a sweeping bender finish him. All night long Strasburg\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fastball will be his setup pitch; it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Uncle Charlie who will don the mask as the Grim Reaper. Right fielder Brent Clevlen sees the same on 2-2, and flails at where the ball used to be.<\/p>\n

The Chiefs, now six games over .500 and tied for the division lead with Buffalo, go out twice in the bottom of the first and then put runners on first and second. Right fielder Mike Morse then grounds to short, where Luis Bolivar gloves the ball and catches runner Kevin Mensch, the one time Texas Ranger, rounding third. A rundown ends the inning. A woman with a black polka-dot umbrella leads her two children to the row in front of me. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153So are these<\/em> our seats?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d one of the boys asks. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I think so. Just sit down,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she replies.<\/p>\n

In the second, Strasburg throws four pitches. Barbaro Canizares grounds to third on 0-1. Joe Thurston picks on the first pitch and grounds it back to the mound, where Strasburg bobbles the ball, but doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t rush his throw. Second baseman J.C. Holt grounds his first pitch to second base. As he does a horn sounds and a northbound train passes. (It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not a real <\/em>train; none of them are anymore. A real train has a caboose. Now they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re just locomotives.<\/em>) In reply to the top of the second, Chief\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s second baseman Seth Bynum places a double neatly to center with one out. After catcher Carlos Maldonado flies to left, Strasburg steps to the plate. He\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll show you how to hit a first pitch\u00e2\u20ac\u201dhe hits it up the middle, through the hole before the second baseman and the shortstop can converge, and the Chiefs lead 1-0. The throw home sails past the catcher, but Strasburg does not bother to try for second.<\/p>\n

In the third he throws six pitches. Gwinnet shortstop Bolivar grounds to short 0-0. Catcher Clint Sammons tries to work the count.\u00c2\u00a0 He has one ball in his favor when Strasburg breaks out the big looper and sends him back to the bench. Pitcher Ryne Reynoso also takes his chances at the first stab. Third baseman Chase Lambin looses the ball in his glove but has plenty of time to throw out Reynoso at first. Now a CN train is heading towards Watertown; it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all oil cars. The woman with the polka dot umbrella gets moved from her seat by a group of college kids.<\/p>\n

BNST, CNW, good old Santa Fe, AGP, GATX.\u00c2\u00a0 The Chiefs go down 1-2-3 in the bottom of the third. What are all these cars carrying? It could be poison gas and I wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know it. What gets shipped by railroads these days?<\/p>\n

It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the top of the fourth now, and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m beginning to realize some things. First, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve told Strasburg to forget all about his motion, to just go out there and throw and the motion will find itself. The result is the strongest game of his minor league career. Secondly, I am greatly disappointed. I had hoped Triple-A would offer Strasburg an entirely new level of challenge, but it is not so; indeed, nothing is truly going to challenge this man until his second season in the major leagues, when the best hitters in the world begin to adjust. Until then, it is all cruise control. Now he takes out Matt Young on a 1-2 check swing. Gregor Blanco swipes a bleeder which second baseman Bynum just barely can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t reach\u00e2\u20ac\u201dit is the only hit for the Gwinnet Braves all day. Clevlen goes down looking 1-2. Canizares gets to 2-0 but then pounds a slider into the ground to shortstop. I have only enough time to notice the mascot, a train engineer with a stuffed baseball for a head, before my cousin calls my name.<\/p>\n

[If I was a professional journalist writing only about baseball, I might not include what happened next. But I am only a writer who decided to follow the path of Stephen Strasburg and follow where it lead me, come what may. True, in the fifth, Strasburg walks lead off batter Joe Thurston. But Holt grounds into a fielder\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s choice, Bolivar grounds to third advancing Holt, and Sammons again swings at the first thing he sees and gets picked clean by Lambin at third base. In the sixth with two out, Strasburg unpacks the curve once more, retiring Blanco on a full count. As he heads off the mound he receives a roar from 13,766, perhaps the biggest ovation of his career since the College World Series in Omaha. But my head is no longer in the game. I must leave as soon as he is finished.]<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Gerry.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Hey, Rob!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d We shake hands. He is on crutches. This I know. He tore his right achilles tendon two years ago, and just recently the left one. How he steers about on crutches in this crowd, in this weather, with a cast that can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get wet, I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t imagine.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Listen,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he says. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got to tell you something. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s going to be sort of upsetting, so hold on.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d My cousin Rob is a sort of e-principal for a great many foreign high school students spending a semester in the northeast United States. He himself is hosting Andres, from Ecuador. I met Andres last Christmas. Andres loved it when I told him I received twelve books for the holiday, and by the time he was done watching Rob and his wife Kristin scamper after their daughters Maddy and Molly, he seemed well convinced that he would not want children.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Andres. He just got a phone call. Gerry, his father, back in Ecuador\u00e2\u20ac\u201dhis father\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just been killed in a car crash.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

I give out a weak \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re kidding me.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know if you still want to come tonight. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s gonna be pretty rough.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

I give out a weak, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d better.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Perhaps there is something oracular in this, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d better,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d as if there was something I could do for them in the long vigil of the coming night. But as I sit through Strasburg\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s last two innings I come to disbelieve this. Certainly I will be better off out of their hair. Since I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve changed my mind and am heading south, and am not a cell phone person, I will now need to get a motel and phone Rob with my whereabouts.<\/p>\n

Right now he tries to give me directions. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Never mind, Rob. Ninety and thirteen and thirty-one. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got it. Go take care of your kid.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d After Strasburg buckles Blanco to end his night\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s performance, I am off like a shot. The twenty-six miles to Cortland stretch on forever.<\/p>\n

Let Rob speak for himself now, in an e-mail I received two days later:<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153We were late arriving, stuck in traffic, fighting the crowd to get to our seats, and then barely saw an inning before that phone call. . . Here we were, host father and \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcson\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 at the first professional game he had ever seen. During this fleeting experience, our entire relationship became much more significant in an instant. No longer did this young man have a biological father, and I sat there in the middle of 13,000 people consoling him like a real father, as he sobbed. . . when you think of the history of the game\u00e2\u20ac\u201dfathers and sons\u00e2\u20ac\u201dfrom Bobby and Barry Bonds to all the juniors out there playing the game today (Grifffey, Hairston, Cruz, etc.) and the American tradition of passing on a love of the game from fathers to sons, it takes on an almost fictional significance.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

Cheap motels are also in the tradition of the game. The one I stayed at that night was so cheap the phone system was a mess. I borrowed the owner\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s cell and then couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t pull up Rob\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s phone number on 411. Finally I called my father and had him call Rob to tell him of my whereabouts. I went to a Subway and brought too much food back to the room. I sat at a chair and a pulled-up table chomping on a sub, Sun Chips and a white chocolate chip cookie with a twenty-ounce Pepsi at my side. I watch something on the t.v.\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthe Suns and the Spurs; the news.<\/p>\n

Only the next night, when I am back at home and in my accustomed space, will I understand what is going on: I am ice-cold angry that my project has been interrupted. Compared with Andres\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 real agony, and Rob\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s anguish, it is a silly, prima donna<\/em> reaction to have. But there I am having it. How dare this happen in the middle of what I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m trying to create? How dare death interfere with my<\/em> project?<\/p>\n

As soon as I articulate this, I am over it. Back in that hotel room the night before, if I had only thought of it, I saw lots of interruptions. The BP executives who were killed in the oil rig explosion down in the Gulf of Mexico were there to celebrate that particular rig\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s safety record. Down in Florida, at the Sawgrass course, Tiger Woods has withdrawn from the The Player\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Championship with a sore neck, swearing up and down that the injury has nothing to do with the controversial car accident that started his downward spiral.\u00c2\u00a0 Who does not suffer interruptions? Wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t the game have been better off without the interruptions of the Black Sox and Pete Rose, the strike that destroyed the season in \u00e2\u20ac\u212294, or, in my father\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s case, the Dodgers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 and the Giant\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s move to the West Coast? The news winds down to the sports: the Chiefs have gone on and coasted to a 7-0 victory. Strasburg comes on the screen with his blonde buzzcut and says the same things: \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcI felt comfortable out there.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcKudos to my teammates.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 My mother says he looks like an\u00c2\u00a0 \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcunassuming young man.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Usually my mother\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s encomium translates to my mind as the fact that he carries that greatest of assets to any ballplayer: a resounding lack of imagination. Sometimes I envy this and sometimes I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t tell my mother that this \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcunassuming young man\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 and his unassuming family held out to the last minute and threatened to wait out another year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s draft. Forget it. Tonight let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just say he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s an \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcunassuming young man.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 At least he still has his father. I sit in the motel and stare at the screen. All this started as such a simple idea, to trace his starts. How could so much could be piled upon that face that isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t even twenty years of age yet?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dedicated to \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcAndres:\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Cesar Andres Corrales Moya Of Quito, Ecuador And his father Julio Corrales Leon (1962-2010) He has been promoted. I drive now out of the cluster of mountains in northern Pennsylvania through the long, glacially carved ridges and valleys of New York state. I pass through Elmira, where I spent much of my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":740,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/740"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5059\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}