The Best American Sports Writing 2013

by Glenn Stout

  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.

  Beyond these aesthetic and creative challenges, The Simpsons was in the midst of fighting off a ginned-up national outrage over the show. A backlash was on. Retailers became saturated with growing piles of Simpsons merchandise, and some licensing deals were abruptly dropped. Elementary schools from Ohio to Orange County started banning Bart Simpson T-shirts that had been deemed offensive. The show even became a point of contention during the 1992 presidential election. George H. W. Bush, struggling to boost his bona fides with conservatives, took the stage at the annual convention of National Religious Broadcasters on January 27, three weeks before “Homer at the Bat” aired.

  Bush ran through the usual Republican talking points, emphasizing “sanctity of life,” working hard, sacrifice, and so forth. He then pivoted and started hammering nameless folks who would promote injustice and incivility.

  “I speak of decency, the moral courage to say what is right and condemn what is wrong,” Bush said. “And we need a nation closer to The Waltons than The Simpsons.” The partisan crowd inside the Sheraton Washington Hotel roared with laughter, but it was priceless publicity that put the show square in the national conversation.

  Bush, meanwhile, repeated the shot in August at the Republican National Convention. This time, it backfired. Though the next scheduled episode was a repeat, the Simpsons staff cobbled together a new show to open in just three days. In it, the family gathers around the TV to watch Bush’s address, and Bart wryly observes how they’re just like the Waltons: “We’re praying for an end to the Depression too.”

  Bush really should’ve picked his battles more carefully. His wife was criticized in 1990 for calling the show “the dumbest thing I had ever seen.” In return, “Marge Simpson” wrote her a letter in reply, explaining how she was deeply hurt by the comments. The situation was put to rest with the First Lady, amazingly, writing a letter back to the fictional TV mom, apologizing for her “loose tongue.” It’s hard to fathom now, two decades later, with the show ensconced in a family-hour time slot, but The Simpsons was once dangerous.

  “Homer at the Bat” was not remotely close to what you might consider a typical Simpsons episode. You have Chief Wiggum (sounding more like an Edward G. Robinson rip-off than a fully formed character) acting responsibly, ordering his team to stop shooting in the air in post–home run celebration. Ralph, of all people, outwits Bart at picking players for sandlot baseball. Lisa, normally so moralistic and holier-than-thou, taunts Darryl Strawberry and brings him to tears. These weren’t the conventional character patterns that had worked so well, and one could see why cast members Harry Shearer and Julie Kavner openly hated Swartzwelder’s script.

  Then there’s the title of the episode, borrowed from “Casey at the
Bat,” the titular character being the ultimate symbol of baseball failure. In the end, Homer wins his team the pennant, albeit through inexplicable and unconventional means. But to see Homer excelling at anything flies in the face of the standard Simpsons script. In 22 minutes, he morphs from underdog to hero, and the contrast with the character we know from the rest of the series is more unnerving than welcome. The show was about inverting TV tropes. Homer’s ineptitude was as vital to the show as Fred MacMurray’s pipe was to My Three Sons. So when Homer smacks a bottom-of-the-ninth grand slam with his team down three runs, how the hell are we supposed to process that? Homer doesn’t fail miserably; Bart doesn’t quip his way out of trouble; Lisa doesn’t roll her eyes in judgment. It was like watching some avant-garde, one-night-only experiment in ad hoc television.

  Ratings might have had a little to do with that. Chasing Cosby was a priority for the Fox suits, and a splashy ensemble of ballplayers was likely to bring in big numbers. If the show had to tweak its own formula a little to do so, it was still young enough that it wouldn’t look desperate; there were no sharks to jump, at that point. Die-hards might cringe a little, but in retrospect the episode looks a lot like a well-timed, what-the-hell swing for the fences.

  And for all the “very special episode” feel of “Homer at the Bat,” it certainly doesn’t go easy on its targets. This wasn’t Mel Allen doing bloopers on This Week in Baseball. Nor was this the game “designed to break your heart.” This was a far more bemused look at the putative national pastime. Coaches’ inspirational talk is often clichéd gibberish? You bet. Ballplayers sometimes drink too much and get into barroom trouble? Hell yeah, they do. Acute radiation poisoning, cranial gigantism, and pits of eternal darkness? Meet your 2011 Red Sox. And because there were actual, living ballplayers in the show, every manic twist carried the added fillip that we were looking in on something we weren’t supposed to see, something funny and unauthorized. This was Ball Four’s demented stepson.

  When the show aired in 1992, baseball was on the verge of a remarkable transformation. You could see hints of it in “Homer at the Bat.” There is a meta-commentary on rising player salaries—Canseco’s $50,000 game check to play softball would’ve been a raise, not a pay cut, as he claimed. Two years earlier, remember, the last of owner collusion cases had been settled, setting the stage for the 1994 strike. Two of the Springfield Nine, Canseco and Clemens, would be closely associated with PED use in years to come.

  And maybe there’s even a whiff of the jock-nerd culture war that would overtake baseball a decade later. With the bases loaded and the score tied 43–43 in the bottom of the ninth, Mr. Burns benches Strawberry, who has hit nine home runs in the game to this point. Burns explains to his increasingly incredulous star—and viewers at home, by extension—that he’s pulling him for a right-handed batter, since a left-handed pitcher is on the mound. (Never mind that the Shelbyville pitcher is clearly shown holding the ball in his right hand just seconds before.) “It’s called playing the percentages,” Burns explains. “It’s what smart managers do to win ball games.” The joke would come full circle in 2010, when the patron saint of sabermetrics, Bill James, appeared on a Moneyball-inspired episode and exuberantly took credit for making baseball “as much fun as doing your taxes.”

  “Homer at the Bat” was proof you could see baseball in all its silliness and still love the game. Even the stars who were both target and participant in the spoof remember the episode fondly. Ozzie Smith is generally regarded as the greatest defensive shortstop in baseball history. He has played in three World Series, and he’s earned election to the Hall of Fame—and yet he still gets questions from fans about The Simpsons whenever he does a card show or some other event. He can’t escape it, but with no hesitation, he reckons his tumble into the Springfield Mystery Spot to be one of the highlights of his career.

  “It ranks right up there, and people are still talking about it today,” Smith says. “The Simpsons are a part of Americana, so to be part of an episode that featured all of those ballplayers from a special time? I guess it’ll go down in history.”

  BRIDGET QUINN

  At Swim, Two Girls: A Memoir

  FROM NARRATIVEMAGAZINE.COM

  SUMMERS IN THE EARLY SEVENTIES, we tumbled together with my mother’s family, the Peitons, at Flathead Lake. Flathead was our inland sea, a chill green vastness ringed by snowy peaks, even in July. Dense stands of ponderosa and tamarack made the air ample as water, thick with pine and pitch. Behind that lurked smoke, from a distant forest fire out by Glacier or fresh-caught kokanee salmon grilling over nearby flames. Cherries, huckleberries, and blackcaps clotted the roads and lanes above the lake, and everything vibrated with the drone of yellow jackets, hummingbirds, and bees.

  My mother brought most of her nine children to the lake—as did her sisters, who between them had 17 more. Only the first of the five Peiton girls was childless, and she did not come to the lake. Years ago she had become Sister Mary of the Incarnation, cloistered in a Carmelite convent in faraway Michigan. My own sister Padeen had Mary for her middle name, which I believed meant she was special. Smart and pretty, but also good. Chosen. I was ten years younger and could not fathom any burden in such notions. Mostly I worried Padeen might suck up every drop of greatness first, the way our six brothers sometimes finished off the milk before it made its way to the far end of the table.

  I was five years old that summer, standing knee-high in cool water, squinting into the distance. Across the lake, my two sisters and girl cousins were sunning on inflatable rafts. They were like beautiful aquatic birds, bobbing up and down along the waves, swimsuits and hair and rafts of many hues disappearing and reappearing in view. In one hand, I held two or three smooth lake stones. With the other, I tried skipping each stone in the direction of their flotilla, like surface missiles seeking targets. When I finished with one handful, I’d reach beneath the surface and reload.

  “Enough of that,” my grandfather called from shore. “We don’t throw rocks in the direction of other people. Family especially.” I trudged back out of the water and plopped down beside him. He was my keeper that morning, though he couldn’t swim any better than I, which is to say, not at all. I liked my grandfather, whom we called “Pops,” but it was tiresome being stuck on shore with just him. My mother was up at the house with my little brother, a toddler, and with her sisters and the other youngest cousins, a baby girl and twin boys near my age. The twins might have been my playmates that day, but they’d eaten too many cherries the night before, pits included, and were now painfully ping-pinging the morning away on both toilets.

  Across the lake I watched my sister Diane, tanned shoulders glossy with baby oil, dangle her long hair over the side and then flick it quickly back so that water sprayed in all directions, causing loud yelps and an outbreak of furious splashing. Diane was adopted, with dark hair, brown eyes, and warm skin that matched her warm heart. She liked to sweep me up and kiss me on the neck until I screamed, while Padeen and I circled each other, pale, cold-eyed, wary.

  “What can I do?” I said.

  “Do?” Pops said. He was bent over the water now, using tiny stones to shake clean a glass hummingbird feeder, and didn’t look up. “There’s a wide world out there of things to do.”

  I stepped into the lake. It was cold, enlivening, but my feet below the surface were sickly green, a dead Halloween color. More shrieks rang across the water. I stood knee-deep for a while, longing for those lively girls, and then waded in up to my chest, my neck, when the ground suddenly gave way. A chill opaque greenness surrounded me on all sides, a startling change from the senseless transparency of air, but I felt no panic as I sank. I watched the surface of the water as it rose away and noticed the strangeness of sunlight seen from below, bending and cracking as it sifted downward. Underwater plants twisted up from the lake bottom, a surprise. I’d never considered what might live below. A single fish darted above my head, a quick silhouette between me and the light, and then my feet touched
sand and stone and I pushed off hard, suddenly frantic and afraid.

  When my head broke the surface, I heard Pops and young voices shouting. I tried calling out—Here I am!—but water choked any sound. I was under again when Padeen’s moonlike face appeared—soft and ethereal as a Hapsburg Madonna—hovering on the other side of water. Her slender fingers grabbed hard under one armpit and yanked me into the air. I sputtered and heaved, water mixing with snot that I couldn’t manage to wipe away. My cheek was shoved up beneath Padeen’s chin, and she swam us to shore like that, two heads along her own pale shoulders. One strong arm sliced the water, the other held me above it. Her blond hair tangled across my face, and for a short time I saw the world as she did.

  Padeen hoisted me, cold and slippery, into Pops’s arms. She bent her face near mine. She smelled like baby oil and cherry Lip Smackers. “You never listen,” she said, pulling hair off her ashen face, her jaw tight. “Why don’t you listen?”

  “I wanted to be out there,” I said, breathing hard and looking to where the older girls were now scattered, a few still on rafts, two standing waist-deep in the shallows, unsure what to do. “With you.”

  Our eyes locked, blue to blue. Padeen sighed, her breath hot on my cold forearm. “You got what you wanted,” she said, not unkindly. She looked at Pops, holding me tight but starting to scold. “Somehow you always do.” She turned and ducked back underwater, reappearing some yards away, swimming strong and sure back to the other girls.