The Hitter

My pal J-Dogg forwarded me this Washington Post story about Rick Short, a baseball player who is hitting .392 and having the best season a minor leaguer has had in 44 years.

The article, by Les Carpenter, is one of those heartbreakingly evocative baseball stories that make you think of "The Natural". Empty parks, bad lighting, early mornings. And a quietly aging player suddenly having the best season of his life. (I am pretty sure this is the same Les Carpenter who used to write for The Seattle Times.)

Short did have a moment of glory earlier this year when the Nationals called him up for one game, against Seattle no less. This passage is typical of the bittersweet story:

He got a hit that night, a line drive single to left field. And there was this great roar at RFK Stadium, so long and loud that he had to wave his hat to the crowd as he stepped back into the dugout. In the clubhouse Nationals officials gave him a DVD of the single and he looked so happy that they couldn't bring themselves to tell him he'd been sent back down again until the next day.

Oh, and Dave at Garfield "Dump Guzman" Ridge should appreciate this tidbit: on the night he got his big hit for the Nationals, Short had been using a bat discarded by Christian Guzman. Short liked Guzman's unwanted bat so much, he took a whole box of them home with him.

Which of course brings delicious irony to this story -- while Guzman is having the worst offensive year of any big league regular in nearly two decades, Short is using his bats to chase something that hasn't been done in the minors since 1961.

UPDATE: I very lightly edited out some typos and grammatical mistakes. Also, head over to the Mayor's place to see his shameless rip-off of this piece and smack talk about my hyperlinks.