It is unwise to expect too much from August baseball. The new car smell of a season built on hope is gone, the daily grind of playing in 102-degree heat and 98 percent humidity has become oppressive, and the significant stuff doesn’t start until next month. The most you can really expect from the fauna who bring us baseball is strictly improv. Not pure athleticism, which we can see every day in every other sport, or jaw-slackening power, which we see every day from Aaron Judge, or even child-searing heartbreak, which is implicit if we are for whatever macabre reason watching Little League baseball on television. And this doesn’t even include the White Sox, who are plenty weird but also exist in context and in any event are still 19 losses away from their own version of nirvana. What you want, and the best you might get, is something inconsequential that you will most likely never see again.
So we should start with Danny Jansen, who became the first player in MLB history to play for both teams in the same game on Monday. You likely already know this, because we've had days to prepare for it—and, given that it’s August and all, because there has been plenty of coverage from a baseball media reduced to waiting for its local team's next soon-to-be-failed phenom to be promoted from Double-A. Jansen had just fouled off the first pitch he saw while batting for Toronto against the Red Sox in Fenway Park on June 26 when a storm blew up the game; when it was resumed 61 days later, Jansen found himself catching the conclusion of his at-bat for those very Sox, who acquired him at the trade deadline exactly a month earlier. He struck himself out, with Daulton Varsho playing the role Jansen originated; Jansen convinced Nick Pivetta to beat Faux Jansen with a four-seam fastball and a slider in the dirt.
The whole game was time machine stuff, all the way down to Leo Jimenez and Will Wagner of the Jays making their Major League debuts for a second time, this time as substitutes for players from that June lineup who weren’t around for the August sequel. This, with apologies for the brain picture we are about to inflict upon you, is the purest possible Jayson Stark porn. Less disturbingly put, it embodies the one thing that baseball should cherish the most: its complete dissimilarity to anything else in sports.
It is also, we should hope, some indication that the people who run this 150-year-old scam are starting to fall back in love with idiosyncrasy. This isn’t just about Jansen’s two-track journey through time, either. There was also another development this weekend, and it involved our pal Mike Baumann, who became the second player in MLB history, after this guy, to be on five different rosters in a single year when the Miami Marlins picked him off the Los Angeles Angels waiver list and slapped him on the roster alongside the son of famed Mr. Marlin, Jeff Conine. The Conine call-up has obvious promotional value, as most nepotism hires tend to do. This is said with all due respect to Alexis and Edwin Diaz, who Sunday became the first brothers to give up walk-off homers in the same afternoon.
But the Baumann decision was a baseball one, and reflected Miami's exhaustion of pitchers. Baumann will be the team's 37th pitcher this season, meaning they've assembled three full pitching staffs over the course of a year in which they have still managed to lose three out of every five games. But they still need to play those games, and needed a fully staffed bullpen for their frantic late season push to beat the Colorado Rockies in one of the most howlingly inessential reverse pennant races imaginable. Baumann has already been an Oriole, Mariner, Giant, and Angel this year; his tenure has had no noticeable effect for any of the franchises, though he might be up for playoff shares with the first two. The only other North American pro anything ever to manage this was Bobby Jones in 2008—in his second and final NBA season, he played for the Nuggets, Grizz, Rockets, Heat, and Spurs—and he is better known for not being the Hall of Famer of the same name.
But maybe the clearest example of a light being shone on the folly of baseball's desire to make each team more like every other team is the MLB Network's new Greg Maddux documentary, One Of A Kind. It's the tale of a player who learned how to be his own pitcher, catcher, manager, mind-control expert, and all around genius; the only other player to have done so much, so well was this guy, who is not in the Hall of Fame despite doing this.
The things Maddux for which Maddux is now remembered and celebrated, from the way he called his own pitches through the way he caught the throw back from the catcher, or how he set up hitters three months ahead of time, or how much hitters had to do to set him up, are all signs of how much thought once went into pitching from the pitchers themselves. Other pitchers did what Maddux did routinely, though clearly not as well. There’s less of this, now. In fact, there is almost none of this now because pitchers are restricted to throwing as hard as possible until it is time to get someone else into the game doing the same thing.
The documentary is a celebration of Maddux, but it also plays as a condemnation of what the game has become—a study in optimization and orthodoxy that permeates the scouting, development, and broader strategy of seemingly every team. Maddux was an inside-the-game weirdo, a creature of pure idiosyncrasy all the way down to urinating on teammates' feet if they came into the shower without shower shoes; they don’t make documentaries about boring guys even when they’re great. But because he led, and won, with his cerebral cortex, he feels doubly antique in an era when top-down baseball management, in all its malignant uniformity, is mass-producing pitchers who throw 100 for three innings and then get replaced by someone else who throws 100 for one inning, and then four more guys after that. It is not a coincidence that Maddux broke into baseball with Jamie Moyer, a man whose last true fastball was thrown in his imagination. Maddux learned all this stuff from his forebears, who learned and taught baseball in ways from their own forebears that today's corner-office spider monkeys have persistently failed to comprehend, driven as they are to show the owner that they both run all the games as mathematical probabilities and command the deeds of the people who play them.
They’re asking the wrong questions, or anyway trying to trap something that is wonderfully elusive. Baseball works best at the fringes, when nothing is normal and everything laughs at logic; this is true in October, but it is also true in August. Mike Baumann is the game we want. Danny Jansen is the game we want. Greg Maddux and the Diaz brothers and Jeff Conine's kid and the Taiwanese Little Leaguers and the White Sox puking up another lead and a rain-delayed game’s shape-shifting implications getting Jayson Stark off—these are good things to want, and it is good when baseball gives them away. Let that truth land hard on every general manager and every owner: It's not really your game. It's an unscripted comedy show that lasts for seven months, and if you can’t or won't see the healing humor in that, go be the tax attorneys you told your parents you would when you convinced them you needed to attend an expensive college far away rather than the local JC. There’s a game on. That's what we want.
