The Best American Sports Writing 2013 (24 page)

Soon I was fully in the sway, pounding pints before breakfast, and by Christmas—spent with my folks in Omaha—I was frantically calling around town to find somewhere to watch the match against Hull. I began to have an emotional investment in the team and the outcome of matches. I started referring to the Red Devils as “we.” I developed superstitions about attire to wear, and in which fashion, to ensure victory. Alone at home, I cheered—raucously, at length—at goals. My blood pressure would shoot up if the opposition took the ball into the box late in a tight match. I started reading British sports sections online. I shopped in vain for a Manchester United scarf fitted for my bulldog. My wife—a lovely, patient, and understanding woman who deserves saint status—pretended to be interested when Paul Scholes knocked in that brilliant header in injury time to win the April 2010 Manchester derby and I kept rewinding the DVR and insisting she watch it
one more time
to fully appreciate the glory of it. Can you imagine, I asked her, what it must be like to be there?

Fast-forward to that Valentine's Day weekend. My wife had been planning a trip. All I officially knew was I had to take off a couple of days from work and pack a bag. She would take care of everything else. True, I had my suspicions she might be plotting a pilgrimage to the holy land—there'd been seemingly innocent questions about the stadium, and if the seating area was covered, and what happened if it rained—but I also knew there was no way in hell, ever, she'd be able to score tickets to one of the biggest matches of the season.
Just in case
, I scooped a bit of Martin into a film canister and tossed him in my suitcase. Worst case is I'd end up muling a bit of dead Martin to some quaint upstate B&B. Instead, we were soon marching up Sir Matt Busby Way alongside the other believers in red and white, weaving through a phalanx of police horses, and as the shouts of “Fuck off, City!” grew louder and more frequent, I felt at home and on fire with that white-hot zealotry reserved for converts, children, and suicide bombers.

We were tied 1–1 going into the 78th minute when Rooney misplayed a pass and then, seconds later, got the ball lobbed back to him and pulled off this unbelievable maneuver: with his back to the goal, he jumped a few feet off the ground, wheeled his leg up and over his head, nailed the ball, and sent it rocketing into the top-right corner of the net. The sound in the stadium was like a napalm strike, and yes, I did one of those frantic I'm-so-excited-I-don't-know-what-the-fuck-to-do jumping-hug things with the guy standing next to me. I like to think I ground a few grains of Martin into Old Trafford right then, and that he'll have those crazy-good seats forever.

Sir Alex Ferguson, United's manager, called it the best goal he'd ever seen at Old Trafford, a quote heavily featured in the near pornographic next-day coverage in the British papers. You have to understand that Rooney'd been having a fairly crappy game that was rather emblematic of his abysmal season—beset by injuries, a hooker scandal, and a silly tantrum about maybe leaving the club. That goal was his redemption, and I'll merely mention that a case could be made for a touch of divine Scottish intervention in it—that
that
goal happened in
that
match, right in front of us, on the day Martin came back after a long time away, and that Rooney, the limping front-man of Martin's beloved team, got the boost he needed to shut down those cunts from across town in such mythic fashion. Pretty cut-and-dried, I think, but you can do with that what you will.

ERIK MALINOWSKI

FROM
DEADSPIN.COM

 

O
N FEBRUARY
20, 1992, more American homes tuned in to
The Simpsons
than they did
The Cosby Show
or the Winter Olympics from Albertville, France. A foul-mouthed cartoon on a fourth-place network bested the Huxtables and the world's best amateur athletes. Fox over NBC and CBS—its first-ever victory in prime time. New over old.

Why the shift? Well, the Olympic programming that night featured no marquee events, and
Cosby
was just two months away from ending its eight-season run. Meanwhile,
The Simpsons
, airing just its 52nd episode out of 500 (and counting), had put forth its most ambitious effort to date, an episode called “Homer at the Bat.” Months of work went into corralling nine baseball players, a cross-section of young stars and established veterans, to guest-star as members of a rec-league softball team.

Sam Simon, the co-creator of
The Simpsons
, originally pitched the idea, and it was put into words by John Swartzwelder, a charter member of the show's writing staff, who would eventually pen 59 episodes, more than anyone else. On a staff full of fantasy baseball junkies, Swartzwelder was the über-geek, a fanatic who had rented out stadiums for hours at a time so he and his close friends could play ball. (Years after Swartzwelder's departure from the show, it's easy to see his influence endures. During the episode's roundtable DVD commentary, the word “Swartzweldian” is used with a deference and awe usually reserved for long-dead Nobel laureates.)

If you're somehow unfamiliar with the episode, the premise was relatively simple: Mr. Burns's company softball team, having lost 28 of 30 games the previous season, goes on an incredible run when Homer starts hitting, well, homers with his WonderBat, carved from the fallen branch of a lightning-struck tree. (Sound familiar?) As the season winds down, it becomes a two-team race for the pennant: Springfield vs. Shelbyville. While dining at the Millionaires' Club with the owner of the Shelbyville Power Plant, a cocky Burns agrees to a handshake bet worth (you guessed it) $1 million.

To fix the game and secure his victory, Burns orders Smithers to enlist ballplayers like Cap Anson, Honus Wagner, and Jim Creighton. (Swartzwelder's choice of Creighton was particularly inspired. The ace pitcher for the Brooklyn Excelsiors in the 1850s and '60s, Creighton supposedly didn't strike out once while batting during the 20 games of the 1860 season. Creighton died two years later. He was 21.) Upon learning that his entire suggested lineup is dead, Burns instructs Smithers to come back with real ballplayers. And so he sets off across the country: nabbing Jose Canseco at a card convention, accosting a Graceland-touring Ozzie Smith, nearly getting shot in the woods by Mike Scioscia, and stopping by Don Mattingly's pink suburban house to interrupt his dish-washing.

Before “Homer at the Bat,”
The Simpsons
had used guest stars only sporadically—and never more than four of them in a single show, that I can remember. Recognizable voices popped up now and then, but no athlete had appeared until Magic Johnson on October 17, 1991, five episodes into the third season. (Exactly three weeks later, Johnson held a press conference to announce he was HIV-positive and would immediately retire from the NBA.)

Now it was using nine guests, some of whom were obvious baseball Hall of Famers. The end result was not only an iconic piece of pop culture but a loving satire of baseball that looks downright prescient today, here on the other side of the Mitchell Report. Our heroes got drunk in bars, ingested odd substances because they were told to, and mindlessly clucked like diseased poultry. “Homer at the Bat” felt vaguely forbidden, like an animated addendum to
Ball Four
. This was the side of the sport we never saw.

We couldn't pull our eyes away then. We still can't.

 

Despite all the planning and prep, “Homer at the Bat” wasn't easy to put together. Of the players with guest-starring roles, only the Dodgers' Darryl Strawberry and Mike Scioscia were local. The script was pretty much locked down by summer 1991, but the writers and producers had to wait throughout the season for players to swing through Los Angeles to play the Dodgers or the California Angels so they could record their lines.

Aside from the Yankees' twofer of Don Mattingly and Steve Sax, each athlete coming to the Fox studios was booked for a single voice-over session, which often got cramped when friends and family tagged along. Ken Griffey Jr., then 21 and easing into his third season in the majors, showed up in early August with his father and Mariners teammate, who was a few months from retirement. (In the show's DVD commentary, show-runner Mike Reiss recalls Griffey Jr. laboring through his lines and getting increasingly upset. He “looked like he was going to beat the crap out of me,” Reiss says.)

St. Louis Cardinals shortstop Ozzie Smith stopped by in early September with his Bart-impersonating son Nikko, who himself wound up on Fox television 14 years later as an
American Idol
finalist. “I knew he was a
Simpsons
fan and had the Bart thing down pretty good,” Smith told me, “but I didn't know he could do
anything
like that.” Smith also made sure to work through his script beforehand, unlike his peeved center fielder. “I worked on those lines, even though there wasn't really a whole lot of them,” he says. “I just wanted to get the inflections in the right place.”

Steve Sax, who retired three years after “Homer at the Bat” and did time as a financial adviser before becoming a life coach and motivational speaker, acknowledges a sizable debt to the show. (The writing staff's early preference for second base was Chicago's Ryne Sandberg.) “Sometimes, fans would yell, ‘Hey, how's Homer?'” Sax told me. “I know they weren't talking about me hitting home runs, but it was a lot better than the stuff I used to hear.”

Before
The Simpsons
, Sax was best known for a much-publicized case of the fielding yips that had dogged him throughout the '80s. His brief TV fame seemed to remove that period of his 14-year career from fans' minds. “Today, I still get people that ask me, ‘What was it like to be on
The Simpsons?
' not, ‘What was it like to face Nolan Ryan?'” (Actually, it's a legit question. Sax hit .265 lifetime against the Express. In their first matchup in April 1982, the rookie went 2-for-4 with an RBI triple. So, please, the next time you pass Steve Sax on the streets of Sacramento, ask him about Nolan Ryan.)

Sax's affability at the recording session also stuck with some members of the staff, with one later admitting (half-jokingly, maybe) that the “closest I ever came to falling in love with a man was Steve Sax. He was so handsome, so sweet.”

Show-runner Al Jean has said the players who committed were more than happy to do the show. Well,
almost
all of them. “They were all really nice,” Jean said on the DVD commentary, “except for one whose name rhymes with Manseco.”

 

Aside from the logistics of recording nine separate guest roles, plot lines had to be rewritten on the fly. Jose Canseco's scene originally called for him and Mrs. Krabappel to engage in
Bull Durham
–inspired extramarital shenanigans. Canseco's wife rejected the scene, and the staff had to do a last-minute Saturday afternoon rewrite when Oakland came south on a mid-August road trip.

Instead of Lothario, Canseco got to play hero, rushing into a woman's burning house to rescue her baby, then cat, followed by a player piano, washer, dryer, couch and recliner combo, high chair, TV, rug, kitchen table and chairs, lamp, and grandfather clock. Requesting the new sequence turned out to be the wiser move. Canseco and his wife had nearly divorced earlier that year before reconciling, and a week before “Homer at the Bat” aired, Canseco was arrested by Miami police for chasing down and ramming his wife's BMW twice with his red Porsche at 4:30
A.M
. After the chase ended, he allegedly got out of his car, came over to his wife's driver-side window, and spit on it.

The Don Mattingly of “Homer at the Bat” hit even closer to the mark. In August 1991, Yankees management ordered the team captain to cut his hair shorter. He refused, was benched by manager Stump Merrill, and fined $250, including $100 for every subsequent day that he didn't cut his hair. “I'm overwhelmed by the pettiness of it,” Mattingly told reporters. “To me, long hair is down my back, touching my collar. I don't feel my hair is messy.”

Six months later, when “Homer at the Bat” aired, Mattingly's story line centered around Mr. Burns's insane interpretation of his first baseman's “sideburns.” Mattingly is booted from the team, muttering as he walks away, “I still like him better than Steinbrenner.”

Most fans assumed that the show had cribbed from real-life events. In fact, Mr. Burns's sociopathic infatuation with sideburns was inspired by show-runner Al Jean's grandfather, who owned a hardware store in the '70s and would constantly berate his employees for their excessive follicular growth. Mattingly had recorded his dialogue a full month before his dustup with the Yankees.

Wade Boggs, who would labor through the worst year of his Hall of Fame career in 1992, was supposed to engage in a belching contest with Barney. As a player, Boggs was known for (among other pursuits) indulging in a bit o' drink from time to time; lore has it that he once drank dozens of beers during a team flight. Boggs tried to play down the story during a 2005 appearance on
Pardon the Interruption
—“It was a few Miller Lites,” he claimed—but his occasional forays into boozy karaoke give the legend at least a little plausibility. For reasons now lost to history, the belching contest was scrapped in favor of a beer-fueled argument over who was England's greatest prime minister.

Still, rewriting plot lines was simple compared with getting the look of the players correct. The show's artists had never before had to tackle such a wide range of new faces on their animation cels. The show's biggest guest star to that point, Michael Jackson, posed no such challenge, as he voiced a morbidly obese white man. Matt Groening later said that “caricaturing real, living people” was the toughest challenge at the time, but they pulled it off, nailing features like Clemens's frat-boy spike, Strawberry's kiss-ass grin, and Canseco's chemistry-experiment-gone-wrong physique.