Who Are These Guys Again? The Colorado Mountains? Is That a Real Team?

This, ladies and gentlemen, is Mike Celizic. I'm not sure if he's been made fun of here before or anything, but he sure is a bad journalist. That...thing...on his head is the reason I'm going to call him HatGuy, which is an original nickname that I just now made up for the first time ever, and definitely isn't copied from some really funny website. Ol' Hatty usually dabbles in writing about baseball twice a month. Yesterday was once such day. Let's check out the column.

Rockies would be royalty if on East Coast
Amazing run by no-names is like nothing we've seen in baseball before

Oooh, a Rockies column. That bunch of no-namies that plays is Colorado. 25 men who don't have names (and a manager who may or may not have one). This looks intriguing.

This is a terrific team that’s stormed out of the thin air of Denver and into the even thinner national TV ratings they’re drawing from an audience that has no idea who the Colorado Rockies are.

A play on words making fun of the nationwide popularity of a small market team? Genius! No one has ever done that before!

It’s doubtful that any team has ever arrived at the World Series with less cachet and name recognition than the Rockies.

I'll see your 2007 Rockies (a team that likely contains both the NL MVP and the NL Rookie of the Year, despite both of them lacking a name), and raise you the 2003 Marlins. Granted, they have a lot of players who are famous now, but we're talking about when they arrived at the World Series. And at that time, other than Ivan Rodriguez and ROY Dontrelle Willis, it was 23 guys who weren't given names at birth (some people on the team made up names mid-season, in case you were wondering how they communicated with each other, or why there was a player on this team listed under the alias "Tim Spooneybarger").

Most of the team’s players couldn’t be more anonymous if they were in a witness protection program.

Ah ok, thanks for writing this sentence. I really didn't know where you were going with this before now, especially because the title and first two sentences did not have the same essential meaning as this one.

And it’s not like many fans are bothering to get acquainted. Those TV ratings for their NLCS romp over the equally unknown Arizona Diamondbacks?

Hockeyesque, folks. Hockeyesque.

Who are these guys?

Get to the point, please. That's 4 statements, 2 rhetorical questions, 2 fragments, and one subtitle saying the exact same fucking thing. Maybe if you watched baseball before (minus Yankee games, and I'm still not sure if you even watch those), these players wouldn't be so foreign. You see, that's the important thing about being an "analyst". You learn about the entire league of teams so that if one of the lesser-known ones makes it to the World Series, you have more important and interesting things to say than, "BREAKING NEWS: World Series Team Not As Famous As Country Initially Hoped".

Brad Hawpe? Is that a right fielder or a typo?

Typo. Definitely a typo. (Side note: typo of spelling what word, exactly? Hawke, I guess?)

Tulowitzki — that’s a tropical disease, right?

Yep, death tolls from Tulowitzki virus are reaching the thousands in Hawaii.

Josh Fogg? Is he any relation to Phileas?

No, actually, but we're still trying to figrue out if he's the distant cousin of Kirk Fogg, the host of the ever-popular kids' game show "Legends of the Hidden Temple"

Then there’s Yorvit Torrealba. I know Torrealba — that’s a resort in the Yucatan, or maybe Majorca, right? But Yorvit? Sounds like one of those designer Scandinavian vodkas that comes in a frosted bottle and costs $12 a shot. Even their manager, Clint Hurdle, is named after a piece of track equipment.

Yadda yadda yadda, we get the point. This is so stupid, and can be done to the players on any Major League Baseball team.

It is a shame, because the Rockies are on an amazing winning streak, a roll like nothing baseball has ever seen. And that’s part of their problem: until the last couple of weeks of the season, they weren’t even in the playoff picture.

If I'm reading this right, Celizic thinks that the Rockies aren't getting any attention becuase they've been on a miraculous comeback run. Makes sense to me!

By the time they went on their almighty tear down the stretch, winning 13 of their last 14 games to force a playoff for the NL wild card with the Padres, sports fans around the country had already moved on to football.

What? Football happens every year. Why is this specific to the Rockies?

Besides, it was all taking place in the NL West, the games starting too late and the division too weak to make more than a ripple in the dreaded East Coast media.

Division too weak!?!??!???! The division with the highest winning percentage in the NL and 4/5 teams finishing the season over .500 is too weak???? Really?

They won the playoff and then seven straight playoff games, removing any sense of drama and competition from the NL playoffs, shrinking their audience even more.

Those IDIOTS!

They arrived too late and too quickly to pay grasp what they were doing

There is definitely something wrong with the 2nd half of this sentence.

especially since for nearly six months before the middle of September, there wasn’t any reason for the country to pay attention to them. Their line-up was made up of kids — a gang of first- and second-year players too new to the business to know that what they hoped to do is impossible.

Welcome back to www.doesnoresearch.hatspot.com

We'll throw out the fact that this last sentence doesn't make any sense. Rather, we're going to count the number of seasons that players in the Rockies' starting lineup have played in the major leagues, removing seasons in which they've played less than 50 games. Sound good?

Taveras - 3 (WS 2005, shoulda known that one, Mikey)
Matsui - 4
Holliday - 4
Helton - 10, a relative dinosaur
Atkins - 3
Hawpe - 3
Tulowitzki - 1 (HE GOT ONE RIGHT!!!!!)
Joetorrejessicaalba - 6 (dude's been bummin around the league since like 2001)

If these kids, who are so fresh and enthusiastic and devoid of braggadocio and bluster, were busting into the game in Boston or New York, they’d have been on the cover of Sports Illustrated by the All-Star break.

Unlikely, seeing as how they were 44-44 at the All-Star break. If they were in Boston or New York, people would be doing nothing at the All-Star break but bitch about how bad they are.

We’d have hailed them as the new faces of a game, the standard-bearers for a new generation of stars who are taking over the game.

Intelligent baseball minds have already done that. Ignoramuses like yourself are still trying to find out how you can suck Joba Chamberlain's proverbial dick.

This year, Troy Tulowitzki, Matt Holliday, Brad Hawpe, Josh Fogg and company were learning their trade and putting up their big numbers in Denver, where the game of choice is football.

It's time to play dan-bob's favorite game! One of these is not like the others.....

Josh Fogg, 2007: 4.90 ERA, 1.46 WHIP.

Hmmmm...well I guess these numbers are technically sort of "big".

And it’s not as if the Colorado franchise is wrapped in a mantle of heroic history and legend. It’s known for its mile-high home park, which is to ERAs what Denny’s Grand Slam breakfasts are to cholesterol levels. It’s not known for its great accomplishments in the regular season, much less the playoffs.

Gotta love it....Hatguy continues to put allusions to unhealthy foods in his columns.

The Rockies have one player with a national reputation — Todd Helton. He’s also the team’s only player making more than the $4.4 million that Holliday, the National League batting champion and the best outfielder most fans don’t know much about, pulls down.

Holliday, to the casually-informed fan, has more of a reputation than Helton. And he still hasn't touched home plate!

The team payroll is around $54 million — one of the bottom five in the game, and if you take away Helton’s $16 million, the other 24 guys are making a combined $38 million, which isn’t enough to pay the left side of the Yankee’s infield.

That’s another reason we don’t know much about them — their salaries. We live in a society that equates income with importance — what other explanation is there for the national obsession with Donald Trump and Britney Spears?

That's just a weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee bit of oversimplification there, Mikey. Is Prince Fielder really less "important" than Jason Kendall because Kendall makes more money?

The average salary in major league baseball this year is $2.7 million. The Rockies have at least 15 players making less than that, 11 players making under a million, and 10 — including starting outfielders Hawpe and Willie Taveras and starting infielders Tulowitzki and Garrett Atkins — making $400,000 or less. That’s not even enough to buy a house in one of Denver’s pricier suburbs.

"Willy". And where is this going?

None of that should diminish what they’ve accomplished or lessen the luster of the terrific crop of kids the team’s management has assembled. In an ideal world, which is one in which people are celebrated for the accomplishments and not their bank accounts, their presence in the playoffs would swell the national television audience instead of shrinking it.

If this is true, then you, Mike Celizic, are one of the chief reasons why we do not have an ideal world.

Go ahead and ignore them if you can’t be bothered to get to know who they are. Then sneer at the ratings they bring to the World Series, if that’s how you get your jollies.

I've made it clear several times that YOU haven't bothered to get to know who they are. And I'm reasonably sure that you think Josh Fogg is the only pitcher on the team. Nice choice, by the way. Fogg. I hear he's the best one!

But don’t turn around and whine about how the game has been ruined by all the spoiled-brat players who are making more money than third-world countries. And don’t ask what happened to innocent kids who play the game for the sheer joy of it.

Ummmm...those "spoiled-brats" were once "innocent kids". Did A-Rod make $20M his first few seasons? A lot of these Rockies players are very good, and will make a lot of money, and will be (mostly unjustly) thrown into the "spoiled-brat" category. Are these Rockies so innocent that they're going to say when they're 30, "No Mister GM, I want to play for less money than I'm worth in the market, because I'm innocent"?

They’re right in front of you. Playing in the World Series. Turn on the television and enjoy the show.

Scene: Celizic's living room, Game 1 of the 2007 World Series.

Celizic: (turns on TV) "Who the fuck is Francis?"

Isn't that some sort of species of fruit fly indigenous to Uruguay?

We Have an "articles that didn't need to be written" Label, Right?

Just checking

I'm so sick of the coverage of Barry Bonds blanketing the baseball pages at all the major sports web sites (at least msnbc.com has the decency to divide the news into two distinct sections titled "Baseball" and "Barry Bonds"). Every article's the same. Gregg Doyel decided to write some sort of piece on the guy that fills in for him.

SAN FRANCISCO -- They came for Barry Bonds.

They dragged a kayak into the Bay, dumped it into the water and paddled a mile to McCovey Cove. They got in their car in Carson City, Nev., and drove 300 miles to AT&T Park. They fought rush-hour traffic in downtown San Francisco, paid $30 to park in a dirt lot, walked a quarter-mile and paid $25 or more for a ticket.

They came for Barry Bonds. They came for history.

They got Fred Lewis.

My problem with anyone with complaints about this situation is that anyone who follows Bonds closely enough to care that much about seeing him play already KNOWS that he's not an everyday player, and that they run the risk of not seeing him play when they go to a Giants game.

"I never thought of it that way," Fred Lewis tells me, "until you mentioned it."

See, this is an idea that never needed to be developed, Doyel.

That's me. I am buzzkill. Or rather, Fred Lewis is buzzkill.

Right the first time.

Nobody came to AT&T Park on Wednesday night to see Fred Lewis play left field for the Giants, but there he was in left against the Atlanta Braves.

Fine, screw you Fred Lewis, it's all your fault, you uninteresting bag of nothingness.

Of course it's not Fred Lewis' fault. He plays when and where he is told to play. Bruce Bochy is the manager, and he's the one who draws up the lineup card. He drew it up Wednesday with Lewis in left and Bonds on the bench.

Hey yeah, nevermind, screw you Bochy, it's all your fault....don't you understand what the fans want to see?

Of course it's not Bruce Bochy's fault, either. Bonds is the 43-year-old behemoth whose torso is too big for his legs. When Bonds was put together -- by God, by Victor Conte, by someone -- he wasn't built with 240 pounds of skull and muscle in mind. His legs cannot take the grind of playing every day, and certainly not playing every day at such an unnatural weight.

So he needs more days off than the average ballplayer. Last week he took three consecutive days off. This week with the Giants at home for seven games, he might play five of them. After playing all 13 innings of San Francisco's 7-5 loss Tuesday night, he rested Wednesday.

Hey yeah, nevermind, screw you Barry, for being so big, which is the whole reason you became this interesting in the first place.

I'm REALLY missing the point, if there is one, of all this.

This came as a downer to me, since I flew across the country Wednesday to start what could be a four-week vigil. Until Bonds hits home run No. 756 to pass Hank Aaron and become baseball's all-time leader, I will follow him. I will follow him from San Francisco to Los Angeles to San Diego, then back to San Francisco, then to Pittsburgh, Atlanta and Florida if it takes that long.

Wednesday was my first day in town, first day on the Bonds watch, and he's off. Terrific.

So this is just one giant (no pun intended) Gregg Doyel complaint. This is not a blog. This is a sports column.

Could be worse, though. Imagine being Fred Lewis, the guy nobody wants to see.

Could be worse. Imagine being a professional baseball player being paid six figures to play a baseball game, in front of a lot of people, with the painful drawback being: you aren't famous.

Imagine being the guy in the orange kayak in McCovey Cove. He's wearing a bright orange rain jacket with the words BONDS NAVY in big, bold letters. He paddled across the Pacific two hours before the first pitch to get the best spot in the cove, just in case Bonds hits No. 754, 755 and even 756. Those balls could be worth six or seven figures. A man could retire on that kind of money.

Again, he's there by choice.....

I walked out to right field, leaned over the railing and yelled to the guy, "Barry's not playing!" The guy looked like he wanted to flip me off. Maybe he did flip me off. I didn't wait to see because I'm not here for a conversation. I'm a journalist, a deliverer of news, and I'm heading to center field and down the steps to the ballpark's marina entrance. At least 200 people are standing in line, maybe 50 of them wearing Bonds' No. 25. I walk through the crowd whispering the news.

Barry's not playing. Barry's not playing.

Much like a 13-year old girl whispering to all her friends who she has a crush on.

I love the triumphant-sounding proclamation: "I'm a journalist, a deliverer of news". I'm about to whisper something to a bunch of people who will find that thing out anyway in less than an hour. But I'm special, because I'm the first one to tell them! I'm a gossip queen! I mean uh...journalist...

And if you're a deliverer of news, what the hell is this column? So far the only "news" you've reported is "Fred Lewis took Barry Bonds's place in left field Wednesday, and myself and other baseball fans weren't happy." What insight, what genius!

I hear some groans. One person literally gets out of line and walks away. I almost feel bad, like I've ruined the ending of the final Harry Potter book. But this isn't my fault. I'm like everyone else here. I didn't come for Fred Lewis. No offense, Fred.

I love the "this isn't my fault" defense. First he "saves" Lewis and Bochy with it, now he acts as if someone is blaming him for Barry not playing.

"I understand what you're saying," he tells me, "but I don't care about that. I'm a rookie, and I understand nobody is here to see me (in left field), but one day that will be my position."

I love how in an "imagine how bad it would be to be Fred Lewis" column, Fred Lewis is quoted twice saying he doesn't even care.

Last week Kevin Frandsen was the guy nobody wanted to see. The Giants were at Wrigley Field in Chicago and Bonds was off. Frandsen played left. The bums in left serenaded him for three hours: "Bar-ry's back-up ... Barr-ry's back-up."

"I thought it was funny," Frandsen says. "I'm thinking, 'Yeah, I guess I am today. But there are worse jobs.'"

Thank you, Kevin Frandsen, for telling Doyel that there are worse jobs than one involving playing left field in a major league baseball game. I think he's the only one that needed to know (and he still doesn't seem convinced).

Worse than Fred Lewis' job Wednesday night? I'm not sure. It's a cold, windy night. The Giants are 16 games under .500. The Braves aren't the draw they used to be, certainly not when someone named Chuck James is pitching. But still there are roughly 30,000 people here.

The Braves didn't even sell out for some of their playoff games back in the 90's. They have a notoriously indifferent fan base.

They came to see Barry Bonds in left, but five minutes before the first pitch the Giants lineup was posted on the big scoreboard, and after a few seconds, when it became clear to everyone that Bonds' name wasn't up there in lights, AT&T Park deflated.

A murmur went through the crowd.

It didn't sound like, "Let's go, Fred Lewis!"

You essentially said this 6 different ways already.

Tough being Fred Lewis. On the left field wall is a mural shaped like a U.S. highway sign, with the words "Road to History" and a picture of Bonds inside the sign. In right-center field is the official Bonds home run count, with "Bonds 753" next to "Aaron 755." Down the right field line is the counter for "splash hits" into McCovey Cove, the count up to 44. Bonds has accounted for 34 of them.

Bonds is everywhere tonight. Everywhere but left field.

Make that 7.

Jason and Diana Albright drove from Carson City for this game. Husband and wife are wearing Bonds jerseys, and they're not thrilled when I tell them two hours before first pitch that Bonds isn't in the lineup. They don't leave, however. They came 300 miles for this. Maybe they'll see Bonds pinch hit.

"Don't forget," I tell them. "You'll get to see Fred Lewis."

"Who?" Diana Albright says back.

She makes a great point.

Fred Lewis isn't famous. This is Doyel's opinion of what a great point should be.

Again, to recap,

I'm not here for a conversation. I'm a journalist, a deliverer of news.

Then deliver some next time.