Batting Stance Guy: A Love Letter to Baseball
By Gar Ryness and Caleb Dewart
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About this ebook
Gar Ryness
Gar Ryness, a.k.a. Batting Stance Guy, is a Bay Area native whose lack of coolness has allowed him to spend most of his time perfecting the art of loving baseball.
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Batting Stance Guy - Gar Ryness
BATTING STANCE GUY
SCRIBNER
A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
Copyright © 2010 by George A. Ryness IV and Caleb Dewart
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
First Scribner trade paperback edition May 2010
SCRIBNER and design are registered trademarks of The Gale Group, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, Inc., the publisher of this work.
For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or business@simonandschuster.com.
The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.
Design by Brian Chojnowski, illustrations by Natalie Long, and photographs by Caleb Dewart
WIFFLE®, WIFFLE® Ball, the image of the WIFFLE® ball are registered trademarks of
The Wiffle Ball, Inc., of Shelton, CT, and used here with permission.
Topps baseball cards are used courtesy of The Topps Company, Inc.
Manufactured in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2010005865
ISBN 978-1-4391-8113-3
ISBN 978-1-4391-8172-0 (ebook)
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Stepping Up to the Plate . . . with a Plastic Bat
TOP 20 OF MY LIFETIME
PLAYER / TEAM INSERT
KEVIN YOUKILIS
Boston Red Sox
CRAIG COUNSELL
Arizona Diamondbacks
TONY BATISTA
Toronto Blue Jays
JULIO FRANCO
Tampa Bay Rays
RICKEY HENDERSON
Oakland Athletics
GARY SHEFFIELD
Florida Marlins
MICKEY TETTLETON
Detroit Tigers
CAL RIPKEN JR.
Baltimore Orioles
PHIL PLANTIER
San Diego Padres
ROD CAREW
Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim
JEFF BAGWELL
Houston Astros
ICHIRO SUZUKI
Seattle Mariners
Japanese Baseball
MOISES ALOU
Montreal Expos/Washington Nationals
JACK CLARK
San Francisco Giants
OSCAR GAMBLE
New York Yankees
JOHN WOCKENFUSS
CHUCK KNOBLAUCH
Minnesota Twins
GARY MATTHEWS
AARON ROWAND
MO VAUGHN
BEST OF THE REST
DAVE KINGMAN
New York Mets
BRET BOONE
JIM LEYRITZ
PETE ROSE
Cincinnati Reds
JAY BUHNER
CARNEY LANSFORD
MICKEY RIVERS
Texas Rangers
MARQUIS GRISSOM
Atlanta Braves
ERIC DAVIS
BEN OGLIVIE
Milwaukee Brewers
LENNY DYKSTRA
TONY EUSEBIO
COCO CRISP
DON BAYLOR
RYAN HOWARD
Philadelphia Phillies
TONY PHILLIPS
DISCO DAN FORD
JOE MORGAN
ALBERT PUJOLS
St. Louis Cardinals
SEAN CASEY
JOHNNY DAMON
Kansas City Royals
RON CEY
Los Angeles Dodgers
BRAD HAWPE
Colorado Rockies
ALFONSO SORIANO
Chicago Cubs
JIM THOME
Cleveland Indians
KEN GRIFFEY JR.
TIM SALMON
CARL EVERETT
JASON KENDALL
Pittsburgh Pirates
BRIAN DOWNING
Chicago White Sox
BASEBALL BEFORE I WAS BORN
EPILOGUE
My Walk-Off
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
GUESS THE STANCE
GAR RYNESS IS THE BATTING STANCE GUY.
And, if you ever meet him or watch him perform you’ll understand that he’s just a regular guy with an amazingly deep knowledge of baseball and a supremely odd and funny talent for mimicry. However, Gar did not create the Batting Stance Guy phenomenon alone. His co-conspirator, the guy who first turned on the video camera, is Caleb Dewart. Since posting the first video online, Gar and Caleb have worked together to share Batting Stance Guy and a love of baseball with the world. Even though this book contains Gar’s stance imitations and his personal stories told first person, Gar and Caleb wrote the book together. With that said, now world powers can get back to solving the world’s issues.
BATTING STANCE GUY
A Love Letter to Baseball
STEPPING UP TO THE PLATE... WITH A PLASTIC BAT
MY NAME IS GAR RYNESS AND I LOVE BASEBALL. I love my wife and children more, but they haven’t been around as long as baseball, so there’s a good chance that my memory of Sid Bream’s slide in the 1992 NLCS and Dan Gladden’s 1987 mullet are more vivid than the two things my wife just told me to remember at the grocery store.
But I never really understood the gravity of my love for the game until I started deconstructing my fan origins while writing this book. In first grade I repeatedly got in trouble with the teacher during coloring time because I was ruining all the green crayons. Each day I simply chose to draw a baseball field, leaving my classmates without any green to highlight their nonbaseball-related drawings. Every penny I earned from my paper route was spent on baseball cards. My second-grade Halloween costume was Pete Rose. My third-grade costume was Gary Carter. It’s only now when I say these things aloud that it sounds strange. What Northern California kid went as a Montreal Expos catcher for Halloween? Ever?
We had a rule in our house. My brother, sisters, and I were only allowed to watch seven hours of TV a week. This Week in Baseball and NBC’s Game of the Week took up the bulk of that time, with The Cosby Show and Family Ties taking the rest. When the TV was off, I’d take a random set of 25 baseball cards, go to the living room, draft a lineup, and fictitiously reenact an entire game with a Wiffle bat, glove, and my imagination. Daryl Boston would lead off in left field, Ken Landreaux in center field, Greg Walker at first base, Mike Schmidt at third base, Ken Singleton in right field, Dave Engle at catcher, Dickie Thon at shortstop, Jerry Royster at second base, then the pitcher. That lineup is insane, no rhyme or reason, not all AL or NL, not heavy with players from a particular team, not a bunch of All-Stars. In fact, you might never have heard of some of them. Oh, here comes Al Cowens to pinch-hit for Jerry Augustine.
A: Halloween 1980. This answers the question about how long I’ve been imitating stances.
B: What eight-year-old in Northern California wasn’t Gary Carter for Halloween in 1981?
C: For those of you wondering: my dad was not a Middle Eastern dictator.
Most kids pick one team, usually their home team, to follow. As you can see, I had a rather confused baseball identity.
When I was 12 the most important thing in my life was taken away from me. I was a starting pitcher for our Little League 10- and 11-year-old All-Star team. It was a league that twice had teams play in Williamsport for the Little League World Series, so there’s a chance that I had a promising future with limitless possibilities. Right around my twelfth birthday I felt a tremendous pain in my right shoulder. Ten months of tests revealed that I had a rare bone tumor the size of a golf ball in my right humerus—something that is not humorous at all. I was crushed to miss a quarter of seventh grade and have my right arm in a sling while on a crutch. They took bone out of my back to place in the shoulder where the tumor had eaten away the bone, so walking was difficult. The only bright side to the surgery was that my parents got my favorite player, Kent Hrbek, to wish me well with a letter that I should probably get framed someday. Most days some combo of Andy Gustafson, Kevin McCready, Mike Russello, and Todd Harlow would play stickball in my front yard. Not wanting to sit out, I began to pitch left-handed while my normal throwing right arm was in a sling. Senior League (13 to 15 years old) tryouts came two months after the surgery, and the doctors said it would be impossible for me to play right-handed. I didn’t hesitate in my decision to play the entire season left-handed. Parents and coaches found my story heartwarming and courageous and fully supported my decision. Sadly, the ball didn’t cooperate, lacking the courage to go where I aimed it. Though they were supportive, I’m also not sure my teammates found being on the receiving end of my throws very heartwarming. I got through the season but, in the cold, harsh reality of Little League, it wasn’t very pretty. I wasn’t exactly Jim Abbott.
My right arm healed enough for me to play the following year as a righty. I made the team all four years of high school as the last guy on the bench. Occasionally getting into a game, I was mostly there for comic relief and emotional support for a group of players who were much better than I was ever going to be.
When I went away to college, my baseball career ended, but, as a resident of Northern California attending Syracuse University, I started to take some cross-country road trips. Andy McHargue, a classmate from Oakland and a fellow baseball fan, joined me for these adventures. On those trips we saw 19 baseball games. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the beginning of my journey to see a game in every stadium.
No longer buying baseball cards or needing autographs, I began to interact with females and see the world. I learned quickly that wearing a Kent Hrbek jersey to college parties wasn’t the best way to impress the ladies.
College was a blur of intramural softball, cold winters, and occasional class attendance. I think it’s safe to say that anyone who knew me in college will be surprised to find out that I’ve become a published author.
Through all of these experiences, I’ve never stopped imitating baseball players’ batting stances. It’s generally been a silly party trick or just a way to enhance a Wiffle Ball game, but it’s something I’ve never been able to shake. It’s like riding a bike. With that said, as I’ve started thinking about all the details of my life, I’ve started to feel like Chazz Palminteri turning around in The Usual Suspects after Roger Verbal
Kint has told him the incredible tale. Chazz sees all the evidence on the wall after Kint is gone and is stunned. It’s strange to wake up one day in my mid-30s, married with two daughters, working for a nonprofit, balding, athletically past my prime, and realize that I am a completely insane baseball fan. It may sound crazy, but I really never knew until it was all laid out in front of me.
As a kid, I’m not sure there was anything better than getting an entire box of unopened Topps packs.
A: My bedroom in 1988. An obsession with Micro League baseball and trading cards did not help me get a girlfriend.
B: If I’d known that Joe Carter’s Donruss rookie card would be worth $8 25 years later I wouldn’t have used it to make my bike sound like a motorcycle.
So here it is—my love letter to baseball laid out in front of you. If you’re expecting this to be an almanac or something even remotely comprehensive, buy another book. I’m not a baseball expert or an authority with any kind of credentials other than my unfettered love of the game. I hope that this book sits somewhere on the shelf between a Bill James abstract and the ramblings of a madman. I hope it makes you laugh, but more important, I hope it makes you take a deeper look at the game I—and, most likely, you—love. Baseball, if nothing else, is a game full of details. Its wonderfully slow pace allows for the subtleties and nuances of its characteristics and moments to be magnified for everyone to see. But as with most things in life, we all need to be reminded occasionally where to look.
There are a lot of things to love about baseball, but it’s the phenomenon of the stance that caught my attention. It’s the celebration of the individual in a team sport, a quick show of personality and flash in a world that generally looks for conformity. It’s about music and theater and jazz hands and obsession and consistency (or inconsistency). Other sports have quirky actions that players perform when all eyes are on them—free throws, putting routines, end zone dances, high sticking, soccer players feigning injury—but nothing matches what hitters in baseball do at the plate.
As humans, we often brush off what we see in front of us. We sometimes forget to really absorb what’s going on around us. Think of this book as a magnifying glass. A (hopefully) moderately humorous magnifying glass aimed directly at baseball and its cavalcade of personalities.
There are 50 players I’ve tried to honor in this book, so it’s a very loose greatest 50 stances of all time
list. I’ve limited the list to the most interesting hitters of my lifetime. If you’re an older fan and you’re upset that I didn’t include Pete Gray in this book, tough nuggets—I had to stick with who I remember. But I’ve also left plenty of those guys off the list. You might scratch your head when you notice that there isn’t a full chapter on Nomar Garciaparra but there is one for Tony Eusebio. I’m sorry. Nomar’s pre-stance antics are fascinating, but his actual stance doesn’t make the top 50.
Matt Diaz, Joe McEwing, Luis Gonzalez, George Brett, Reggie Smith, Milt May, Edgar Martinez, Mackey Sasser, Dave Chalk, Mark Parent, Chris Stynes, Eugenio Velez, Doug DeCinces, Geoff Jenkins, Carl Yastrzemski, Nick Swisher, David Eckstein, Jesse Barfield, Carl Crawford, Bruce Bochte, Gary Roenicke, Keith Hernandez, Richie Hebner, Mike Schmidt, Mel Hall, Ryan Zimmerman, Carlos Quentin, Darryl Strawberry, Jody Davis, Al Bumbry, Dick McAuliffe, Lonnie Smith, Gerald Perry, Bake McBride, Cecil Cooper, and Cesar Cedeno are all players who didn’t quite make the cut. And that’s just to name a few. The best thing about baseball is that almost every hitter has his moment. Whether it’s the flip of the bat and a rookie’s excited run to first on a walk-off homer or the over-the-top reaction of a utility player to a brush-back pitch, there are moments of individual absurdity that happen every day in baseball.
Just don’t forget to look.
A: The last time the Expos were good.
B: If I send this picture to the Pirates, I like my chances for a September call-up.
C: These are the forearms of a major league utility infielder. I took this picture of