Rapid Force (One Sixty-Two: Day 103)

Writer’s note: One Sixty-Two is a season-long series of blog posts connecting baseball’s major-league players to life’s universal themes. Just as there are 162 games in a season, so there will be 162 posts in this series. Let’s play some ball.

Day One Hundred-Three: Kevin Gregg, Toronto Blue Jays

“Daddy, I have a new favorite word,” Katie said yesterday.

“What’s that, Sweetie?” I asked my 8-year-old.

“Rapid force,” she said. I write it as two words, but perhaps Katie envisioned this as one really cool word: Rapid-force, with an artful hyphen, or even the more direct Rapidforce.

Caught by surprise, I asked where she’d gotten this phrase. She shrugged. My wife said that Katie had started using the word earlier in the day to describe the waves that had tossed her body and hair around the beach. She had loved the bodysurfing and boogie-boarding, and she seems to be developing a healthy respect for the ocean. This, of course, means playing with the rapid force without straying too far from the shore.

So it was a powerful day, one that left an 8-year-old content yet exhausted by day’s end. As Katie settled off to sleep, the Toronto Blue Jays’ Kevin Gregg was delivering his own brand of rapid force to the New York Yankees. There are 30 men appointed to the job of “closer” on Opening Day of each big-league season, and at least one-third of those men lose their jobs at some point over the 162-game slate. Kevin Gregg has taken over the closer’s job in the midst of a season twice – once in 2007, with the Florida Marlins, and again this year with the Blue Jays. For a man who was used solely as a middle reliever in his first four seasons with the Los Angeles Angels, Gregg’s 108 saves over the past four years is quite impressive.

Gregg stands on the pitcher’s mound wearing tight-fitting sports goggles, which make his demeanor all the more menacing atop 10 inches of dirt. His pitches aren’t the fastest in baseball, but they have traveled quickly enough to land him 481 strikeouts in just over 500 innings of career work. Last night, Gregg notched his 24th save of the season despite allowing one run.

Inside Yankee Stadium, the New York fans tried to will their team past Gregg with waves of vocal support. But the power of those pinstripe-clad swingers was not equal to the rapid force of the man in goggles. The Yankees had washed ashore, and Gregg made sure they stayed there.