October, 1993
I’m just as much a Braves fan as the next Atlanta chop-chop yahoo, but I’ve got to admit I’ve come to like the Philadelphia Phillies, too.
You know why? Because the prissy pots don’t.
They quoted this woman at a hair salon in the Atlanta papers recently. She was asked what she thought of the Phillies after watching the first two games of the National League Championship Series.
She said, “The tobacco chewing was pretty gross … I’m an environmentalist and so I just can’t understand the tobacco in terms of putting it into your body. There was also some pretty bad hair out there.”
Go shampoo a goat and leave the Phillies to look as they damn well please.
You hit something white with a stick and then you run and slide around in the dirt. You sweat and you spit and you curse.
In “A League of Their Own” Tom Hanks was trying to explain to one of his female baseball players about the game. She was crying.
“There’s no crying in baseball,” he said.
Of course there isn’t. There’s yelling and screaming and belching and John Kruk of the Phillies reminds me of the kind of guy who probably still thinks it’s funny to make escaping gas sounds by cupping his palm under his armpit.
That is still funny. It’s funnier than “Married … With Children.”
What to do with the prissy pots?
“I’m an environmentalist, so I just can’t understand the tobacco in terms of putting it in your body.”
That’s why they invented chewing tobacco, lady, so baseball players could spit in color. Take Len Dykstra of the Phillies.
Here’s a guy who would put up with Somalia for about as long as he would a hanging curveball. Len Dykstra is trying to win ball games, not get a GQ cover. He doesn’t care if tobacco juice dribbles out of the side of his mouth and onto his uniform. He wants it to do that. He wants to gross you out. It’s what he lives for.
Back to John Kruk. Ol’ John Kruk from West (by-God) Virginia. You look at this guy and you think outdoor plumbing.
He gets a raise, he buys a new satellite dish to put outside the trailer, so he can get all the stations when he isn’t making sounds with
his armpit. There was a quote from him once in Sports Illustrated. A woman saw him smoking a cigarette in the dugout during a spring training game.
She said something like, “Aren’t you ashamed? A professional athlete smoking.”
He responded, “I ain’t a professional athlete. I’m a baseball player.” The man’s a p-l-a-y-e-r.
I like that crazy relief pitcher, too. Mitch Williams. He’d give Queen Elizabeth a hotfoot. Hair? He styles with Kruk’s cigarette lighter.
I’m not on the sports pages anymore, so I can be a homer and root for the Braves.
But I would take the Phillies in a fight, a riot, a war. Send those guys to Somalia.
The only thing wrong with the Phillies is their name. Calling that crowd Phillies is like calling the corner barbershop, Christophe’s.
Call ’em the Muds or the Bloods. Or the Nightmare from the North.
I just happen to like my baseball teams a little on the trashy side.
The Grit Tree 