Opening day at Comiskey Park. Be advised that Albert Belle says he is used to playing in front of a full house. So spread out and try to look teeming.
Wouldn’t want to get off on the wrong foot with Albert, who is doing his part to be warm and cheery.
It is now up to Chicago to welcome the young man, bygones being not only bygones, but paid in full. Belle has the canceled checks to prove it.
Listen not to the tales coming out of Cleveland about how relieved that city and that team are to be rid of Belle, how ordinary citizens walk with a sprightlier spring in their step and how the clubhouse remains at a warm and fuzzy temperature.
Even if true, it is a rare gift to be able to enrich so many lives merely by moving from one great lake to a greater one.
Accept Belle as a tabla rasa, or as a guy who has done his time, whichever suits the sensibilities.
Belle is, after all, Jerry Reinsdorf’s gift to Chicago, batteries and cork not included, a kiss-up for past sins. The gesture should be taken in the spirit in which it is offered, like the Seurat at the Art Institute, to be admired and not touched.
Heaven knows, Belle cost more.
And Belle comes not just with old baggage but with shiny new credentials, thanks to a two-game preview in Toronto, hitting .444 and slugging at over 1.000 percent. Forget the two failures against Roger Clemens.
It is a measure of significance when a man’s flops are as notable as his accomplishments. The curse and the glory of baseball is the scarcity of success.
If baseball had Clemens pitching to Belle and Frank Thomas all the time, baseball would be, after all, the NBA Finals, or the Olympic 100-meter dash, or Frazier-Ali, then, not now.
Baseball would have what it so dearly wants: urgency, edge-of-the-seat excitement, clear and immediate answers for a generation that won’t wait–not just until next Tuesday, when it could happen again at Comiskey Park, but not wait until the next inning.
A single player’s effect on the outcome of a baseball game is inherently capricious, dependent on circumstance and opportunity.
It is easy to know which Bull will be taking the critical shot (Michael Jordan) or where the football is going to go on third and long (Rick Mirer, sacked again).
Belle or Thomas may never get the chance to do what they are being paid all that money to do, but they come as near as baseball can to providing a place to look and a time to look there.
As is its habit, baseball tried to quantify big moments in the ’80s, establishing for a time what was known as the Game Winning RBI, the equivalent of the buzzer beater in basketball or the sudden-death score in football.
It was not necessarily the blow that ended a game, merely the one that established victory. As far as my research can tell, Harold Baines still holds the Sox, and American League, record at 22.
What is revealing is how infrequent those moments are. In a season, using Baines’ totals, they happen 13 percent of the time, maybe twice a month.
As clumsy and ultimately meaningless as the statistic was, it was a way of identifying memorable moments, those times when, to use Clemens’ phrase, no one would be going to the concession stand.
As a matter of fact, a lot of people were, including me, in a vain search for edible Canadian cuisine, which turned out to be, as Belle was grounding into an eighth-inning double play, something called Chicago Gyros. Ugh and ugh.
Even in Game 2 of a 162-game season, a memory can be made to last, but a bad meal leaves quickly.
If you’re lucky.
