We’ve reached the Naked Lunch point of the Fantasy Baseball season—that moment when everyone sees what’s on the end of every fork. That of course doesn’t mean that we all know where we’re going to finish in our leagues. But it does mean that we know pretty much whom we’re going to finish with or be finished by. Sure, there will be unforeseen September call-ups galore, and also some waiver deals that send role players to contenders. But except for the prime prospects—Hector Olivera isn’t in the majors to sit on the bench, and Javier Baez probably isn’t either—no one knows which of the newly-summoned hitters might play regularly, or which pitchers might get plugged into a starting rotation and have some chance of success there.
Anyway, we certainly don’t. And this created a quandary for us, in our capacity of would-be timely bloggers. Thirty blog installments in, we’ve already told you about the guys we like and don’t like who’ve been around during the season. We don’t know any more than you do about who among the newbies is going to (a) play and (b) be good. And if you’re reading this, need stolen bases and nothing else, and thus can afford to have an otherwise-uninhabited spot in your starting lineup, you’ve probably already acquired the amazing Quintin Berry and his spotless SB record; you don’t need our input.
So we had nothing to blog about, until we heard that one of our heroes had died. That would be the writer/neurologist Oliver Sacks, the Mickey Mantle of his hybrid profession. Casey Stengel, marveling at Mantle, said that he “has more speed than any slugger and more slug than any speedster.” Similarly, Sacks wrote better than any doctor—we mean English prose, so don’t tell us about Chekhov or William Carlos Williams—and doctored better than any writer. His specialty was describing the strange things a brain can do when its owner isn’t looking or hasn’t been nice to it. And this, needless to say, made us think of Justin Morneau. Read the rest of this entry »
