Shouldering the Load (One Sixty-Two: Day 64)

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 Sixty-Four: Yovani Gallardo, Milwaukee Brewers

With just one week to go before he can sign as an NBA free agent, LeBron James is most definitely weighing his options. When you find yourself carrying your team, it’s hard to feel great about your championship options. You start to wonder what it would be like to play with another franchise.

For the past seven years, James has been the dominant player on the Cleveland Cavaliers, and he has lacked the caliber of supporting players enjoyed by Kobe Bryant of the champion Los Angeles Lakers. Of course, whatever James has had in Cleveland is far better than what he’d have with the New York Knicks next year. But, after five straight playoff disappointments, James just might feel as though he needs a change.

For more than five years now, the Milwaukee Brewers have danced on the periphery of baseball playoff contention. Milwaukee has always had the hitters; it’s the pitching that has slowed them down each year. In 2008, the Brewers made the daring move of trading for starting pitcher CC Sabathia during the summer playoff race. The addition of this front-line starter was a difference-maker, and Milwaukee made its first playoff appearance in 26 years.

In 2010, the great Brewers hitters are still in that lineup – Ryan Braun, Prince Fielder, Rickie Weeks, Corey Hart, and others. However, the pitching is absolutely pitiful – except for one man. And that’s just not enough.

Yovani Gallardo, a 24-year-old flame-thrower, has started 16 games, won seven of them, and compiled a 2.36 earned-run average to go with 115 strikeouts. These are superb, All-Star numbers. But to show you how far removed Gallardo’s performance is from the rest of his team’s, check this out: Every other Brewers starter has yielded at least twice as many runs per nine innings as Gallardo. No Brewers starter has even half as many strikeouts as this man. The Brewers have two complete games and two shutouts from their starting rotation – both coming from Gallardo.

This is simply not enough. Starting pitchers get the ball once every five days. The way Gallardo is throwing, he’s as good a bet as any to win with that lineup. But there are four other games in between his starts. As a team, the Brewers are giving up five runs per nine innings. No one in the National League scores as many runs as Milwaukee; and yet, even this offense can’t score as many runs as the pitching is giving away for free. This is why the team is 32-40 nearly halfway through the season.

Sadly, it doesn’t look like a championship year for the Brew Crew. As for Gallardo, he’s not yet eligible for free agency. But when that time comes, you have to wonder if he’ll be willing to stay around Wisconsin if there are no other decent pitchers around him. The Brewers have time to re-tool; LeBron would surely advise them to get started.

Sammy Sou-sa

Throughout their lives, my mother’s parents shared a deep love for baseball with my brother and me. Warm, compassionate grandparents, they often expressed their love to us through animated conversations about the Yankees, Mets, or our own Little League and high school teams. One of the most enjoyable aspects of these baseball talks was my grandparents’ incredible ability to destroy the pronunciation of players’ names. This side of Babe Ruth, there wasn’t a player whose name they didn’t butcher.

That new outfielder the Yankees had just signed from Japan? Mat-soon-i. The home-run-hitting outfielder for the Cubs? Sammy Sou-sa. The clutch lefty pitcher in pinstripes? Penn-itte.

My brother and I would joke good-naturedly with my grandparents about this, and they’d laugh along with us. I wondered to myself whether these mispronunciations were due more to their education level (one had graduated from high school, while the other had left high school before earning a diploma), or whether it was due more to geography and ethnicity (a combination of Irish-German-English descent placed on the North Shore of Staten Island – a place where you’d hear many a native ask for earl and vinegar in a restaurant, and where you’d hear them say the gas was cheaper in Joisey). When I heard them say the words “Derek Jeey-ta,” I wondered whether this mispronunciation was due to a real deficiency in literacy or to a simple combination of genetics and learned behavior. Whatever the reason, I felt sure that my brother and I – writers both – would not have such struggles.

My grandparents have both passed away in recent years, leaving us with just memories of hearing about “Joe Gir-al-di” or “Jorge Po-san-a.” Until …

My mother. She was talking to me the other day on the phone. She wanted to know if I thought the Yankees would trade for that Cleveland pitcher.

“Which one, Mom?”

“Sa-na-thee-a.”

Silence.

“Mom, do you mean C.C. Sa-bath-i-a?”

“Yes, him.”

More silence.

“Mom, you’ve inherited it.”

“What?”

“The name gene.”

She is almost 62, and I see now that she is well on her way. My mom is fast becoming a major-leaguer at mispronouncing names. We shared a laugh over this realization, and then moved on to other things. But as I hung up the phone, I thought about it some more, and started to get nervous.

When will I start doing it?

I pore over the names in box scores, and say them over in my head. “Fukudome. Pierzynski. Francoeur. Gallardo.” I will not succumb, I say. Genetics or not, I can stave off this grammatical glitch.

From their lofty perch, my grandparents smile. “Just you wait,” they surely say. Just you wait.