Most of what you need to know about anything you can learn from baseball.

In real life, when asked for advice or insight or just feeling a need to offer it,  I’m prone to telling a short story about baseball players.  Having trouble adapting to something?  Well, let me tell you about Travis Snider and his problems at the plate. He’s an object lesson in things that work yesterday not working today.   Approaches must change.

Surrounded by problems and unsure what to do?  Did you know that I once saw Roy Halladay put two men on base with no outs then strike out the next three batters?  From this we can learn the importance of focusing on what’s in front of you and in your control.

Need a lesson in aggression? Let us look to Ty Cobb.

You would think that this constant comparison of life’s little problems, like your divorce or the death of a loved one, to the serious drama that occurs on the baseball diamond, would add perspective  Instead it often annoys people.  It’s probably because Toronto is more of a hockey town.  Besides which, most of the art-fags I know can appreciate pig vomit on a canvass but are blind to the beauty is a perfectly turned double play.  They can derive wisdom from menstrual smears on a wall but fail to see the lesson in a sacrifice bunt.

I don’t get it.

But I do get baseball and I tuned into the world series game two between the Phillies and the Yankees.

This was a great game but a gruesome sight.  For starters, the Yankees won and I hate the Yankees.  Everything that’s wrong with the world, society and whomever you happen to hate, is symbolized by the Yankees.  And these bad guys usually win.  That makes it worse.  But what made this game especially hurtful to watch was seeing a pitcher like Pedro Martinez being out-duelled by a pitcher like A.J. Burnett.  I love Pedro.  I can’t stand A.J.

A.J. beating Pedro is a travesty.

A.J. played with Toronto for a few years.  To say that he had a ton of talent would be putting it lightly.  This was never in doubt. But, mentally, he was unavailable.   He only put effort into his last season here and only then because he was becoming a free agent.  In that last season, we finally got to glimpse the A.J. Burnett that could have been.

It drove me crazy.  He was gifted but unable to rise to the level of his gifts.  And all because of a lack of trying.  And trying is the one thing you can control.  A.J. Burnett just doesn’t try.

Pedro Martinez, on the other hand, is everything I like about pitching.  He started off as a power pitcher.  He could just wind-up and throw that fastball right past the best hitters in the majors  But, he got older and lost his speed.  These days, the worst hitters in the majors could smash his fastball out of the park.   Pedro adapted.  He reinvented himself.  No longer able to overpower batters, he started fooling them.  He outsmarted them by changing speed and location.  Having lost the thing that his whole game depended on, he changed up and became a new pitcher.

Did anyone else see him quickstep Jeter?  That, my friends, was a thing of beauty.

So watching A.J. Burnett beat him was disgusting.  A.J. Burnett does not deserve to beat Pedro Martinez.

Yet, in baseball, as in life, deserve rarely has anything to do with who wins.  They both pitched remarkable games and, in the end, the lesser man won.  Because on that day, he pitched better.

There was a moment, however, when I thought the real A.J. Burnett was going to emerge.  Jimmy Rollins had reached base and, being a notorious thief, started playing with A.J.  He faked steals, got into A.J.’s brain and forced pickoff throw after pickoff throw until A.J. was incapable of coming to the plate.  And that’s when real A.J. showed up.

He got wild and couldn’t find the strike zone.

That’s normal.  Someone like Rollins on the basepaths in a high pressure game will do that to a pitcher.  It’s what they do.  But what’s abnormal, what makes me loathe A.J., is how he handled the situation.

After extravagantly missing the strike zone, he started walking off the mound and looking at his hand.  He chewed his finger.  He pretended that he had a blister.  The commentators seemed to fall for it.  They started talking about how throwing a breaking ball can cause blisters on a pitcher’s fingers.  Bullshit, I thought.  A.J. was in trouble, he had lost his focus and he was pretending to be hurt to explain it.  That, right there, is A.J.-Fucking-Burnett.

The pitching coach visited the mound and said something that soothed A.J.’s fragile emotions.  All of a sudden, his finger problem was cured. He bounced back and continued to pitch well.  And I can’t hold that against him.  After all, lacking that sort of bounce, is what I hate about him.

But those of us who watched him in Toronto know the real A.J. when we see him.  It’s not the talented pitcher who held the Phillies to one run over seven innings.  It’s the guy who has a mental problem, falls apart and then plays sick to explain it.  He’s Pussy Finger.  And somehow, in October, Pussy Finger beat Pedro.

The World Series, like the world, can be one fucked up place.