Pedro Cerrano, trying to deal with a brutal batting slump in “Major League”: “[My] bats, they are sick. I cannot hit curveball. Straightball I hit very much. Curveball, bats are afraid. I ask Jobu to come, take fear from bats. I offer him cigar, rum. He will come.”
Teammate Eddie Harris: “You know, you might think about taking Jesus Christ as your savior instead of fooling around with all this stuff.”
Pedro: “Jesus, I like him very much, but he no help with curveball.”
Eddie: “You trying to say Jesus Christ can’t hit a curveball?”
Slumps — and the hysteria that surrounds them — make ballplayers do strange things. The Chicago White Sox, for instance, offended sensibilities Sunday by bringing two naked female dolls into their clubhouse and arranging bats around them in an X-rated display. Actually, not all of the bats were around their inflatable guests. One of them was … oh, never mind.
Anyway, this is how the White Sox, last in the American League in hitting at .232 (going into last night), tried to get their offense going again — with some unconditional love from a couple of blown-up Baseball Annies. To complete the picture for you, each wore a sign over her breasts bearing an, uh, inspirational message. Call it a Shrine to the Mendoza Line.
If the dolls had any effect on the team’s fortunes, it was delayed. The Sox managed only four hits that day and four the next before “erupting” for seven runs and 11 hits in a win over the Twins.
It was all just an attempt to “have fun and stay loose,” skipper Ozzie Guillen told the Chicago Sun-Times. “I’m not going to make the players apologize.” Besides, he said, “Those dolls don’t work. Hopefully, we come up with something better.”
Like what, Susan Sarandon giving the White Sox a pregame pep talk — “breathe through your eyelids” — and then dispensing garter belts for the players to wear underneath their uniforms? (Hey, it worked for Nuke LaLoosh, the scatter-armed fireballer in “Bull Durham.”)
Of course, we can’t get too down on the Sox. They’re just looking for any straw to grasp, the averages of several of them — Jose Uribe (.195), Nick Swisher (.196), Jim Thome (.209), Orlando Cabrera (.214), Paul Konerko (.220) — hovering ominously around .200.
And let’s not forget, the day before, they had tried to waken their bats in a much more acceptable — indeed, traditional — way: by shaving the head of one of their coaches. (That was easier, presumably, than having all 25 guys bleach their hair blond … and far more entertaining than having somebody pick a lineup out of a hat.)
Come to think of it, it’s been a season of slumps in the big leagues. David Ortiz started out 3-for-43 before rediscovering his stroke, and Troy Tulowitzki, the 2007 National League Rookie of the Year, is dazed, confused and hitting .152. Robinson Cano, meanwhile, is stuck in a .155 sinkhole, and the Indians (.240 as a team) are probably thumbing through the Yellow Pages as I type, searching for Discount Inflatable Dolls.
The White Sox — and the rest of The Suffering — might find it comforting to know that good things sometimes come from these down cycles. Luis Aparicio, for example, went 0-for-44 early in the ’71 season and still made the AL All-Star team (albeit with a .206 average). He even got to play a small part in history. Remember the titanic home run Reggie Jackson hit in that All-Star Game, the one that went up on the Tiger Stadium roof? Well, Luis was on base at the time — after singling to lead off the inning— and scored ahead of him.
Then there are the 1906 White Sox, the celebrated Hitless Wonders. They batted .230 that year, worst in the league, and won not only the pennant but also the World Series.
This year’s Sox, I’ll just point out, are hitting for almost the same average as those Sox. (What I won’t point out is that in the Dead Ball Era — the Hitless Wonders’ era — the ball was about as lively as an eggplant.)
The more you try to analyze a batting slump, the more mysterious it seems. Am I lunging? Is my bat slow? Do I need to be more selective? Ultimately, it “just runs its course,” as Joe DiMaggio once put it. “It’s like that old story about that city slicker who drove up to the country filling station in a terrible downpour and asked the attendant if it would ever stop raining.
” ’Well,’ said the country boy, eyeing the sky thoughtfully, ’it always does.’ ”
Still, it helps to have a bottle of rum and a good cigar handy — as an offering to Jobu, the God of Lost Hitters. Eventually, he will come.
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