And Yes, His Back is Against the Wall

By Rick Horowitz

It's not what he didn't do. It's what he didn't say when he didn't do it.

Is there anything in sports quite like a pennant race in baseball? Is there anything else that compares to the rhythms and the pace of the thing? From the promise of springtime through the harsh realities of summer's dog days, and then on to the cool, crisp tension of late September, when an entire season can hang in the balance on any pitch, any swing --

I wax lyrical, but what choice do I have? Waxing lyrical is precisely one half of the options available to you when you feel the urge to talk or write about baseball. The other option is spouting cliches. (The good ones, of course, can do both at the same time -- spout lyrical, waxy cliches.)

Where were we?

The pennant race. We were talking about the pennant race. This wasn't that, exactly, but it was close enough. This was for the "wild card," for the back-door route to postseason glory, and the New York Mets and the Florida Marlins were going at it a couple of days ago as if it were the genuine article. They were battling for the National League wild card, and with two outs in the top of the ninth inning, the Mets had two men on base and the tying run at the plate.

Todd Hundley.

Hundley was just the man for the moment. Last year, he set the major-league record for the most home runs -- 41 -- by a catcher in a single season. He'd hit another 30 this year despite a damaged elbow on his throwing arm that will probably need surgery.

As he stood there at the plate in the ninth inning, Hundley had his 30 home runs, and he was looking for a fastball from reliever Robb Nen to help him launch No. 31.

Hundley got his fastball. He swung at his fastball. And he...

Popped up. End of ballgame. End of story.

Except for what he said -- and didn't say -- when it was all over and the reporters gathered around him in the clubhouse.

"I just missed the son-of-a-gun," Hundley explained. "It's a game of centimeters."

No. No. No. No. NO!

Baseball is not "a game of centimeters." Baseball is "a game of inches!" Everyone knows that baseball is a game of inches, just like they know that "Pitching wins pennants," just like they know that "You have to play 'em one at a time."

Baseball is not "A game of centimeters"?! A rookie shouldn't make that kind of mistake, let alone an All-Star catcher whose father was a major-leaguer, too.

Up to now, I've always figured metric was a harmless distraction -- in baseball, in life. If the owners wanted to paint metric distances on the outfield fences right next to the real distances, that was their business. The things that mattered stayed the same; it was still ninety feet between bases, still sixty-feet-six from the pitcher's mound to home plate.

Now I'm not so sure. If metric can degrade the absolutely central principle underlying our totally national pastime, if metric can so debase the locker-room chatter that a slugger like Hundley can toss conversions around like pine-tar rags, we're in deeper trouble than we ever imagined.

What's next? "Give him a centimeter, he'll take a meter"? "A miss is as good as a kilometer"? These do not work for me. These do not work for you. We have to stop them -- right now.

They start messing with our maxims, they start sticking metric in there in place of good old perfectly hackneyed American, they might as well shut the whole thing down. Baseball. Society. Whatever.

So what do we do? I know what I'm going to do. I'll be watching the playoffs and the World Series, and I'll be trying to listen to every word the players and the announcers utter. One peep about centimeters or milliliters or hectograms, and I'm on the phone to the networks.

It's a lot of work, protecting our sacred cliches, defending our embattled culture, but don't worry: You'll get from me what you always get from me.

One hundred and ten percent.

9/25/97