Making Sure the Melk Stays Cool

Melky Cabrera had a helluva All-Star Game, as befits a man having a helluva season.
The man once dubbed "Leche" by then-teammate Derek Jeter, Cabrera was labeled a "six-tool player" by another former teammate, Alex Rodriguez.
Any fan of the game knows what a five-tool player is: a guy who hits for power, average, can run, can field and can throw with the best of them.
A six-tool player, said Rodriguez, according to the All-Star announcers, can play in New York.
Alas, Melky didn't fare quite so well in New York. His best season in Gotham, far as batting average is concerned, saw him hit a respectable .280 in 2006. Best RBI year? Seventy three rib-eye steaks a year later.
Jump ahead to his time in Kansas City last year, and San Francisco this year, where he is on pace to obliterate those marks.
A-Rod could've expanded the geography of the sixth tool; if you can succeed in New York, conventional wisdom says you can succeed in Boston, and vice versa.
Says Paul Konerko of new mate Kevin Youkilis in today's NY Times:

 “I think we knew that eventually, whether it took a couple of weeks, he would do his thing because he’s a good player and he’s always been really good. He’s won the World Series, and if you can play in Boston and play in New York, you can play anywhere.” 
Youk would probably be considered a five-tool player: hits for power and average, fields and throws well, and can succeed in Boston.
Speed? Not so much.       

[image: BleacherReport.com]

Surely You Own a Shirsey

Posey Shirsey

I was checking out the Met game on the ESPN.com Gamecast last week, and trying in vain not to follow the real-time Twitter feed on the right of the screen.
One tweeter mentioned a guy sitting in front of him, wearing a Carlos Beltran "shirsey."
So I Googled "shirsey," a nice diversion from another Met loss.
"Shirsey" is, in fact, a real thing, with its own website selling, yes, shirseys.
You've seen shirseys before. Perhaps you even own a few. It is the team jersey-styled t-shirt--a shirt-jersey, of course, for those who perhaps can't quite afford a full-on replica jersey.

The @Shirseys Twitter feed even acknowledges its budget-minded focus.
"When you've only got $20 to spend on your favorite player," reads its tagline.
The beauty of the shirsey is, while it is styled after the baseball jersey, you can grab a shirsey bearing the name and number of your favorite hockey guy, hoops dude, or footballer.
Shirseys.com founder Jake Fehling explains what the heck a shirsey is on his site:
I asked myself the same question two years ago when my cousin-in-law (if that’s even a thing) Alex from South Jersey told me how excited he was with his new Phillies Chase Utley shirsey. All I could offer back on the other end of the phone was dumb-founded silence. Did he just say an “Utley purse key”? No, that makes even less sense. An “Utley hershey?” Mmmmmm, but no.
An Utley shirsey.
I finally responded with an “ohh, yeah…hell yeah, nice, man,” but it wasn’t until about five minutes into the call that I finally did the math:
T-shirt + jersey = shirsey. I dig it.
Over the next several months I heard the word used 3-4 more times. I had gone nearly 30 years of never coming across “shirsey” — calling the ones I owned at the time: “t-shirt jerseys” — and now within three months I’ve got family members and buddies from different parts of the country throwing around the word as if it was commonplace. Maybe these people are all onto something, I thought…

Slumping Batter May Have a 'Screw' Loose

You hear it fairly frequently--So-and-So batter is really hitting the ball on the screws.
In Sports Illustrated's season preview, Prince Fielder's "bat speed looks good this spring," noted a scout. "He's hitting the ball on the screws."
Last spring, a hard luck Derek Jeter was finding his hard hit balls beelining straight to someone's glove.
Wrote ESPN NY:
With two out and a runner on first in the seventh inning of a relatively close game, Jeter again hit the ball on the screws only to see it disappear into the glove of first baseman Miguel Cabrera.
Even at the high school level, they are screwing around on the diamond. Noted Huntington (SC) High school coach Brandon Cassell a few weeks ago:

"Really, two and a half or three weeks ago, we just started hitting the ball on the screws."
It is akin to, in more modern baseball parlance, "squaring up on the ball."
I just popped out to the garage to check out a baseball bat. I didn't find any screws.
While you can, of course, throw a screwball (though few pitchers do anymore), there are no screws in the ball either.
So why do we say "hitting the ball on the screws"?
Wikipedia's fairly useful baseball glossary offers what may well be a good explanation of the term's origins:
The phrase apparently derives from golf, referring to "a well executed shot. In the good ol' days, when woods were made of wood, club makers fitted a plastic insert into the club face as a safeguard against premature wear. These inserts were fastened to the club with screws. When a golfer would hit a good shot, he would say, 'I hit it on the screws'."^[8]

Project 'Runway', Starring R.A. Dickey

R.A. Dickey's autobiography Wherever I Wind Up elicited some emotion, some chuckles, and some good, fresh terms for the ol' language-of-baseball blog.

In one part where Dickey is ironing out aspects of his not yet famous knuckleball with a mentor, Dickey reveals some names for parts of the ball that I never heard before.


"He asks me to show him my grip, and I hold the ball up with the fingernail of my index and middle fingers bitting into the 'runway'--the part of the ball where the seams come closest together," Dickey writes.

"He suggests I move my nails to just underneath, the 'horseshoe.'"

("runway" to the left, "horseshoe" to the right)

Greinke Toys With Mets With 'Nintendo Stuff'

Perhaps the greatest compliment for a pitcher isn't that his stuff is "nasty" or even "filthy", but that he throws "Nintendo stuff."

Zack Greinke has been hot and cold the last few years, but last night it was (video) game on for the lanky Brew Crew righty.

Writes the NY Times:

In one particularly nasty sequence, in the third, Greinke struck out [Metsies catcher Mike] Nickeas on a 70 m.p.h. curveball, an 83 m.p.h. slider and a 94 m.p.h. fastball.

"He’s 95 and then comes at you with that curveball at 70,” Nickeas said. “It’s Nintendo stuff.”

"Nintendo stuff" came to be, 1, because ballplayers get to play video games all day long, and 2, because Stephen Strasburg and his one in a billion arm defied all flesh and blood description.

Drew Storen, then of the Harrisburg Senators, said this of Stras at the time.

He’s got Nintendo stuff. You create a player on a video game, and that’s what he has. The ball just comes out differently from his hand. He does something that nobody else can do.”

Tongue in Cheek, Axford Pens Cliche After Cliche After Cliche

John Axford, the Brewers' stellar closer and wearer of the finest 'stache in baseball, poked some fun at the cliche-filled post-game comments from his ball-playin' ilk while ducking out to tend to his very pregnant wife over the weekend.

Axford had just blown a save, snapping his 49 game save streak against the Cubs Friday. He wasn't avoiding the press afterwards so much as he was hustling to the hospital because his wife was in labor.

"Ax" was good enough to leave a note for the press. With a large "Media" scrawled on the top, Axford wrote, "All I can do is begin another streak and keep my head up! Cliche...cliche...Another cliche. Gotta go!"
Ax then signed it "Love," the O a heart.
We [heart] him for that.

Mo Hurts Himself 'Shagging'

To be sure, there's nothing funny about Mariano Rivera, pure class on and off the field, sustaining a season (and nearly career) ending injury. Even for the Yankee haters out there--sorry, rooting for Rivera's misfortune is off limits.

OK. Once that is clear, let's consider how it happened, and a delicious double entendre involved.

Rivera was, of course, shagging flies, as he does before every game, when his knee buckled.

As any fan of the game knows, that means catching BP fly balls.

It's known, simply, as "shagging," which has a much different meaning across the pond, as any fan of Austin Powers well knows.

"I'm glad it happened when I was shagging," said Rivera after announcing he would play next year. "That's what I love to do."

C'mon, at least that injects a hint of humor to an otherwise sad situation.

I've reached out to Paul Dickson, author of the Dickson Baseball Dictionary, to find out where the term "shagging" comes from.