I was eating a cold meatloaf sandwich over the sink Tuesday night when the broadcaster said the words “travel fatigue” out loud, on television, about a 27-year-old man who had taken a chartered flight roughly the length of a dentist appointment. I put the sandwich down. I had questions. None of them were answered.
The center fielder, I am told, was “unavailable.” He was unavailable because the team flew from one American city to another American city in a private plane with leather seats and a guy who brings you a warm towel. They landed. He went to a hotel. The next day, around suppertime, somebody decided that the cumulative human toll of all this was such that he needed to sit in the dugout and watch.
Coach DiMaggio used to put us on a school bus in Erie at 4 a.m. for a wood-bat tournament in Altoona, and if you complained about your back he would tell you a story about his uncle who fell off a roof in 1953 and went to work at the foundry the same afternoon. I’m not saying that was right. I’m saying nobody on that bus ever invented a phrase like “travel fatigue” and then said it into a microphone with a straight face.
The current list of acceptable reasons a major league baseball player can take a Tuesday off, as best I can reconstruct from a summer of broadcasts: travel fatigue, scheduled rest, a load-management window, lower-half tightness, upper-half tightness, a personal day, a mental reset, a “soft tissue concern” that has not yet manifested as an actual injury but might if asked, and what one announcer last week called “general body.” General body. The man had general body.
Ray Kowalczyk called me at 9:40 last night, which is roughly when Ray calls about anything that has personally offended him. “Duke,” he said, “I drove a meat truck for 31 years. I drove a meat truck through a blizzard in 1986 with a hernia.” I said I knew that, Ray, I have heard the meat truck story. “Then explain to me,” he said, “how a man making 14 million dollars cannot play a baseball game on a Tuesday because of an airplane.” I told him I could not explain it. We sat on the phone in silence for a respectful amount of time.
August used to be the month where pennants got decided by guys who probably shouldn’t have been playing. Catchers with one good knee. Outfielders who’d been spiked in June and were just chewing through it. The phrase the old beat writers used was “playing hurt,” which is now a phrase a doctor will sue you for using. The new phrase is “managing the body,” which sounds like something an undertaker says to a widow.
I will grant — and you will not see me grant much, so mark it on a calendar — that today’s players are dealing with cameras and apps and a contract structure where one weird MRI can cost a man 40 million dollars. I understand the math. The front office understands the math. Everybody understands the math. What I can’t get past is that we have collectively decided to call it “travel fatigue,” out loud, like adults, instead of admitting we just don’t want him to play on Tuesday because Wednesday is the getaway game and there’s a left-hander going.
The kid in the lineup instead of him went 3-for-4 with a double off the wall, by the way. Made a sliding catch in the seventh. After the game a sideline reporter asked him how his legs felt, and he said, “Great, I love playing baseball.” Coach DiMaggio would have hugged him. Coach DiMaggio would have also told him to get a haircut, but that’s a separate column.
Denise is bringing pierogies over later. She says she got the recipe off a podcast hosted by two guys who used to play for the Pirates. I am going to eat the pierogies. I am not going to ask follow-up questions.