WORCESTER, Mass. Spring is in the air in New England, even if the ground is still too soggy in some places to play baseball. "Like Yogi Berra said, 'April is the cruelest month'," notes Little League dad Todd Schwab. "The spring chill really makes you hungry," he says as he and son Todd, Jr. slurp giant sodas while waiting in line for their turn to meet former Red Sox pitcher Rich Garces, a right-hander whose weight was officially listed as 250 pounds during his playing days, but who was believed to be much heavier. "That was with one foot off the scale," says his former pitching coach Joe Kerrigan.
El Guapo: "You keep eating like that, someday you'll be in the big leagues!"
Garces, also known as "El Guapo" or "The Handsome One" during his major league career, is part of an outreach program on the part of Major League Baseball designed to keep fat kids from quitting the sport so that they will eventually realize their potential as pitchers. "We have a program for black kids," says Commissioner Bud Selig," referring to the RBI or 'Reviving Baseball in the Inner Cities' initiative, "but we've never done anything to link today's victims of childhood obesity with the overweight greats of the past."
Wells: "The lunch buffet was picked over, so I ate a batboy."
In San Diego, obese pitcher David Wells has signed on with the Padres for a victory lap to end his career, and he spends time before each game giving kids tips on proper diet. "You've got to learn to pace yourself," he tells Ronnie Dalrymple, a porky twelve year-old who weighs in at 180 pounds and is a set-up man for the Hungry Crab Marlins, an A-level Little League team sponsored by a local restaurant. "When you come to the park, get your protein and carbohydrates first with a couple of hot dogs or three and a soft drink, then get an ice cream bar or sundae." "Uh-huh," the boy says as he nods his head up and down like a bobble-head doll. "Then and only then do you switch to the low-mass, high calorie foods such as cotton candy."
Livan Hernandez: "Do you mind if I get something to eat at the seventh-inning stretch?"
The connection between weight and pitching prowess was often suspected, but never confirmed until a study by Kyle Rayl, a member of SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research. "If you plot the statistics of pitchers going back though the late 1800's," he notes, "you find that the higher the weight, the lower the ERA."
Antonio Alfonseca and his six-fingered hand.
Back east in suburban Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Antonio Alfonseca is instructing some local youngsters in the finer points of fielding his position. "Those slow-rolling grounders, you want to let your little second baseman or your big first baseman get them for you," he says before agreeing to allow the kids to examine his unique hands, each of which has an extra finger. "I don't know if it's been a help to me in baseball," he says, "but it allows me to shovel food in my mouth much faster."
Jesus was the son of a carpenter. Mohammed was apparently a merchant of some sort. (Don't make me draw you a picture, okay?) So why shouldn't the founder of the world's next great religion be a former major league catcher with a lifetime batting average of .245?
Religious seekers, meet Darren Daulton.
FoxSports.com yesterday reported that Daulton, who played fourteen seasons with the Philadelphia Phillies and the Florida Marlins, has devised his own personal system of metaphysics that is based primarily on the Bible but includes elements taken from primitive cosmologies as well.
Daulton predicts that the world will end at 11:11 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time on December 21, 2012, the last date on the Mayans' calendar.
I don't know about you, but I waited until February for prices to go down before I bought my 2006 calendar. Daulton has been granted the power to see into the future, and wants to share his vision.
With the apocalypse set to arrive in six years and ten months, you can forgive Daulton if he's making the most of his time left on earth. He went public with his views after a recent round of golf in Dunedin, Florida. St. Paul got into the evangelical game after he was struck from his #### on the road to Damascus. Why shouldn't the godhead reveal itself to mankind over by the ballwasher on the seventh tee?
Daulton penned his new testament--working title: If They Only Knew--while in jail last summer. He has had problems with the law before, including a drunken driving arrest following an accident in 1997. A member of two World Series champions, the 1993 Phillies and the 1997 Marlins, Daulton claimed at the time that he was run off the road by nefarious henchmen (to borrow a term from Rocky and Bullwinkle) sent by the White House and the FBI as a result of a business deal gone bad.
For guys like me who can't plausibly use the excuse "I'm pregnant and rushing to the hospital!" to beat speeding tickets, this does, in fact, open up a new dimension. "I went long on pork bellies and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission is after me, officer!"
Daulton told the Philadelphia Daily News he realized he'd been chosen as a medium for divine purposes during a 1997 game against the Cubs in Chicago, when he got the game-winning hit for the Marlins. "I didn't hit that ball," he told his wife after the game when he broke down in tears. "Something happened, but it wasn't me."
There have been plenty of tears shed in Wrigley Field over the past 98 years; none but Daulton's were caused by divine possession. Daulton says that experience was his first inkling that "for whatever reason," he has been "awakened to other realms."
Like all true eccentrics, Darren Daulton is beyond parody. Don't look for his book to appear in stores anytime soon. Then again, don't buy that 2013 calendar just yet.
Con Chapman is a Boston-area writer. He is the author of "The Year of the Gerbil: How the Yankees Won (and the Red Sox Lost) the Greatest Pennant Race Ever," a history of the 1978 AL East pennant race, and a number of plays, including "Number One Hockey Mom," "Please, Pope," and "What Mickey Belle Isle Told You," a trilogy about hockey (JAC Publishing). His work is available on Amazon Shorts (at 49 cents a dowload), and he writes on sports for Flak Magazine.
