Can A-Rod Save Baseball?

I don't know about you, but The Referee tends to be the sort of person who is not at the centre of things. I am generally the last to know when something important happens, and I'm probably not there at the time.

So it was recently when I slipped out to Australia for five minutes (see my message of 8 August 2007) that, whilst I was over there, or under there if you prefer, two important and long-awaited baseball records were broken back here in the US of America.

Now, you might actually have heard about the first of these record-breaking incidents, which received a good deal of media worldwide, including in Oz, a country which takes about as much of an interest in baseball as Americans take in Australian Rules football. However, unless you live in my adopted country and take a keen interest in these things, you are less likely to have heard about the second piece of baseball news I am about to report. But I suggest that this other news will ultimately become more important in the great sweep of history. And, this being The Referee, dear reader, I am not going just to suggest this - rather, I will demonstrate it using complicated math(s). Oh yes.

The first piece of news, of course, is that, on 8 August, Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants hit the 756th home run of his career, thus breaking the record of 755 held by Hank Aaron since 1974. You might be interested to know (!) that the third person on the list remains the great Babe Ruth, who hit 714 homers in his career, and headed the all-time HR list from 1921 until Aaron overtook him.

(By the way, although the record was broken at AT&T Park, San Francisco, in a game against the Washington Nationals, the record-breaking ball was caught by one Matt Murphy, a Mets fan from New York who was there only because he was on the way to Australia. Spooky, or what? In case you are looking to make an investment, the ball is currently up for auction and is expected to fetch half a million dollars.)

Those who are not close to these things might reasonably expect that this amazing record-breaking effort might have been accompanied by celebrations across the world of baseball. This was not the case, only because Bonds is one of a group of players widely suspected of taking performing-enhancing substances from the late '90s until the baseball authorities began testing for them, which was amazingly not until 2003.

Let me make it clear that The Referee is not going to comment on the veracity of these allegations. I have nothing to offer in that department. All I know is that the record books on the single-season HR records make interesting reading. The record for home runs in a single season is also held by Bonds, an amazing 73, set in the 2001 season. The odd thing, statistically, is that the next five records in that list were also all set between 1998 and 2001, all of them by Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, both of whom have also been alleged to have been involved with inappropriate substances. It seems odd, to say the least, in a sport with a history of more than 100 years, that the HR records should be bunched in a span of just four years. (Ruth's best ever in a single season, by the way, was 60 in 1927 - the 8th best all-time.)

On the other hand, there can be no doubt that Barry Bonds is a great player and one of the best hitters of all time. I can only speak for myself on this point, but I have no doubt that, even if The Referee was to take a good quantity of every performance-enhancing substance known to man, I would never be able to hit a baseball out of a stadium 755 times or anything close to it. In fact, just watch a live major league baseball game as hitters face a small, rock-hard ball arriving at over 90 miles per hour, and you'll be amazed that they ever hit it at all.

But, you are thinking, what was the second record I promised, and how can it be more important that Bonds' new record? I'll tell you.

On 4 August, just three days before Bonds hit number 756, one Alex Rodriguez of the New York Yankees hit the 500th home run of his career. Rodriguez, universally known here as A-Rod, thus entered the fabled "500 club", becoming only the 22nd player ever to do so, and the youngest. (As I write, A-Rod has 45 home runs this season so far, and has now entered the top 20 list for career home runs.)

Bonds is now 42 years old, which is about the time most baseball players hang up their romper suits, even those who have pickled their vital organs with human growth hormone - allegedly. A-Rod, however - and this is where it gets interesting (I promise!) - is only 32, and can expect to play for another decade, if he stays healthy. None of the other current players near the top of the career HR list is anywhere near as young as A-Rod. In fact, one has to go down to 64th on the list (Andruw Jones, currently on 366) to find someone younger than A-Rod.

Put all the above together, and you can see why many commentators believe it is just a matter of time until A-Rod takes the HR crown from Bonds, which would be widely popular, including amongst those who believe it still really belongs to Aaron, because it would be aided only by the unnatural number of sunflower seeds which players are able to consume during games.

But how long will we have to wait? I'm glad you asked that.

A-Rod has phenonemal numbers, as they say. His single-season record is 57 home runs, whilst playing for the Texas Rangers in 2001. And his season average, in the 14th season of his career, is 44. That includes hitting no homers at all in his first season (with the Seattle Mariners) and only 5 the following year.

Let us suppose, for the sake of this scientific experiment, that A-Rod keeps up his average of 44 for the rest of his career. If he does, The Referee calculates that he would reach Bonds' record-breaking 756 after another 5 and a half seasons, or in the early summer of 2013, to be precise.

On the assumption that Bonds will hit a few more this season and then retire, A-Rod might just need until the end of the 2013 season to top the list.

Of course, it's quite possible that he will not keep up his impressive average for that long. But The Referee prefers the view that we have yet to see the best of A-Rod, whose average may even improve over the next few years, as he climbs up the top 20 list, passing such greats as Mickey Mantle (13th), Reggie Jackson (11th) and Willie Mays (4th) on the way.

And so, there you have it. Keep your eye on the HR top 20, but don't hold your breath. And remember that you heard it here first.

As we often say in our house, "Let's go, A-Rod!", whatever that means.

The Referee Down Under

The Referee finds himself in Australia.

I don't mean by this that I am undergoing some sort of spiritual awakening which was possible only by travelling halfway around the world and wandering off into the outback. Oh no. I mean only that I find myself in Australia for a period, for reasons which are not important for the purposes of this message.

For the purposes of this message, let's assume that I have made all the effort of travelling over here for the sole purpose of writing pithy and erudite comments about the cultural differences between opposite corners of the New World. This is, of course, not the reason, at least not the only one, and you are not about to read any such comments, but please see if you have it in your heart to humour me on this point, at least for the time it takes to read the next few lines.

After considerable research and analysis of empirical evidence, The Referee can reveal the shocking and unexpected news that not all corners of the New World are the same. It turns out that, rather like babies and pet guinea pigs, each former colony has its own personality, distinct in interesting and subtle ways from each other as well as the Motherland.

And so, for your edification and delight, gentle reader, The Referee is pleased to present Interesting Cultural Differences Between the New Worlds, or Ways In Which Australia Is Not The Same As America.

1. Chocolate

I'm sure you'll agree with me that there are few cultural barometers which are as important (or as good to eat) as the stuff our American friends insist on calling "candy". Imagine my delight then, when arriving at my first Australian supermarket, to find that a good 90% of fare in the confectionery department was just the same as that which might be found in a similar establishment in the UK of Blighty - Kit Kat, Dairy Milk, Turkish Delight, Bounty, etc. I immediately bought up a job load of my personal favourite - Maltesers - and scuttled hurriedly back to my hotel room to devour them in peace. Better still, the establishment in question was good old Woolworths and, even better, I noticed that the locals referred to it as "Woolies". I realised I had landed in civilization.

2. Football

Regular readers (imagine that!) will not be surprised to find that I was keen to investigate the health of the Beautiful Game over here, as well as the terminology employed by the locals to refer to it. I had an idea that this was another corner of the world given to using the s-word but, given the seriousness with which I take my role as your correspondent, dear reader, I wanted to hear it for myself. I was therefore very pleasantly surprised to learn that the world's most popular game is commonly called football over here.

But this discovery was soon tainted slightly when I realised that almost all other sports here are called football as well. In fact there are four Oz footballs: Association, Rugby League, Rugby Union and Australian Rules. In other words, almost everything is football unless it's cricket (and the less said about that the better).

(By the way, The Referee was lucky enough to attend an Aussie rules game the other day - a local derby between two Melbourne teams, Carlton and Collingwood. It was fast, physical and exciting. The pitch was enormous and there were roughly 300 players on each team. But the (oval) ball bobbled all over the place in an ungainly fashion, as did the players, who often ended up in a heap of bodies - the Beautiful Game it ain't.)

3. Body Odour

I can't really pretend that I have discovered an empirical difference between New World body odours as such, but equally I can't resist sharing with you the following story. For reasons that will become obvious, some of the details have had to be obscured.

The Referee was travelling the other day between two Australian cities, let's call them Adelaide and Melbourne, with a certain national airline beginning with Q, let's call it Qantas. Although it's a very short flight, I was mildly dismayed to find myself in a B seat on a Boeing 737 (which, as you jet-setters out there will know, is to be avoided for the same reason as E seats - ie that you are squashed in the middle between two fellow passengers, who tend to be either rather larger than the space afforded by the seat, or taken to spreading their elbows out of their own space and into yours, or both).

On this occasion, neither of these appeared to be the case, and I thought for a moment that my luck was in. How wrong I was. As I settled into my B seat, I noticed almost immediately a very odd smell, which at first I couldn't place. After a couple of minutes I realised that I was dealing with two smells mingled together in a very unpleasant way - it turned out that the chap in A was emitting a very strong mixture of tobacco and body odour. The result was nauseating and almost sweet. (If I was one of those people who write the labels on the back of wine bottles, I would say that there were strong notes of chocolate, but that would of course be ridiculous.)

I realised that I wasn't going to be able to deal with this for the whole flight and that I would have to employ defensive tactics. I reached up to the little air nozzle that sits above aeroplane seats and turned it up full, pointing directly at my nose. I calculated that perhaps this would direct the offending odours downwards before they reached my olfactory awareness. It didn't.

Becoming desperate, I decided that I would have to go on the offensive and turn the nozzle to the left to point at the chap sitting in A. But clearly that might have looked a little odd to say the least. So I compromised by pointing the air slightly to my left, but not so far as to suggest that I was actually pointing it at him. Needless to say, it made no difference at all.

Mercifully, by the time I had finished fiddling we had arrived in Melbourne and I dashed into the airport terminal, gasping lungfuls of lovely, fresh air.

And so, there you have it. The Referee encourages his fellow country-persons to remember that not all the colonies have panned out the same.

Please also remember never to sit in the middle seat.

Hand in Glove

I don't know about you, but The Referee has never been terribly interested in those official days throughout the year which we're all supposed to observe with some reverence but which most of us suspect were made up five minutes ago by people with a significant financial stake in the success of greetings card companies. This includes Fathers' Day, which has never done a great deal for me, despite the fact that I have now qualified to be honoured for more than a decade.

(Those in doubt about these sorts of things should note that it is properly "Fathers' Day" - the day belonging to fathers plural, not "Father's Day" - the day belonging to one father, unless of course one is of the view that everyone currently alive is the offspring of just the one man, in which case the latter would be correct, if a little unlikely. (Fill in your own joke here about which man it might be, and the fact that he must be very tired, etc.) Alternatively, those who are uncomfortable with having to calculate precisely which day belongs to whom might like simply to opt out of the possessive by using "Fathers Day" - ie the day which nods generally in the direction of fathers without actually belonging to them as such. I hope that helps.)

Anyway, unlike my previous nine qualifying Fathers' Days, this one was a pleasant surprise, for two reasons. Firstly, I received from my two sons the best Fathers' Day offering I have ever received, or could reasonably expect to, of which more in a moment. Secondly, the gift came with a mystical tale, elevating it instantly to the stuff of legend, at least in our house.

The gift in question was a baseball glove. Not just any old baseball glove, you understand. To be precise (and vegetarians, vegans and other cattle-lovers should look away now) it's a Rawlings black leather 12.5 inch Instinct series with a pad lock, dual wings and basket web. I have no idea what any of that means, but I do know that there is something undeniably manly about going out into the yard (how can a place almost exclusively comprising grass, trees and wildlife be called a "yard"?) and throwing an implausibly hard ball with all one's might in the direction of one's junior male offspring, only for them to smile as they catch it in their glove and return it just as agressively as it arrived.

(By the way, anyone reading this (as if!) who is in need of work could do worse than get into the US patent business. I notice that the Rawlings Dual Wing has US patent number 4,853,975, and the Pad Lock has number 5,457,829. But I still don't know what either of them are.)

Even better than the glove, however, was the story of its purchase. The offspring had visited the local branch of a well-known US sporting chain, let's call it Sports Authority. After deciding that their old dad was a Rawlings 12.5 inch Instinct black leather kind of chap, the offspring stood "in line", as New Yorkers insist on calling it, when they noticed something of a kerfuffle (a much under-used word, I'm sure you'll agree) at the check-out. It transpired that a number of other small boys were jockeying for the autograph of the one and only Mariano Rivera, who was in the middle of paying for something.

American readers will need no further explanation. Others need to know that Rivera is the principal closing pitcher for the Yankees - ie the most accurate and reliable pitcher of all, who is brought on only for the last inning, if that, to ensure that the lead is not squandered or - more often this season - that things don't get any worse. Suffice to say that Rivera is perhaps the most senior and respected closer currently playing. For British readers, you'll not be far off if you imagine nipping into your local J&B Sports for a pair of shin pads and finding yourself in the queue behind John Terry.

Being enterprising sorts, the offspring joined the kerfuffle and each came away with an autograph of the great man who is, by all accounts, a thoroughly nice chap.

On the morning of Fathers' Day, the glove was handed over and the story was recounted. One way or the other, I was informed, the glove was blessed by having been bought in the presence of the great Rivera.

We then set off to our local church, where there is a Fathers' Day tradition of an impromptu men's choir, in which fathers, sons, nephews, uncles etc are all invited to join in the enthusiastic singing of hymns which are either sexist or employ military imagery or, preferably, both.

Afterwards, the junior boy pointed out to me that the announced number of males in the impromptu choir - 42 - was also the Yankees shirt number worn by Mariano Rivera for more than a decade. Not to mention the number of our house. And, for fans of the late Douglas Adams, the answer to life, the universe and everything.

Perhaps, I pondered, the glove was pointing us towards what physicists call the Grand Unification Theory.

To put it another way, as we often say in our house: spooky, or what?

The Age of Aquariums

One of the good things about so-called Middle Age is that it is so poorly defined. And so, if one is in danger of approaching this stage of life, or indeed is in danger of having reached it already, one can simply move the goalposts - as we fans of assocceration football like to say - and so pretend still be to "young", even if, in moments of totally honesty, one would admit that all the messages being received from ones elbows, knees, teeth, bowels, children and birthday cards suggest otherwise.

(I should clarify at the outset that Middle Age is in no way to be confused with The Middle Ages, which is something else entirely. The latter was a brutal period of human existence when people with rotting teeth worked all the hours God sent and never had any fun. The former, on the other hand, ...Oh, never mind.)

Now, just like Ebeneezer Scrooge, and indeed the Baby Jesus, The Referee has recently been visited by three wise messengers, each bearing clues which suggest that You-Know-When is perhaps approaching. And so, despite the considerable personal risks of self-revelation, I have decided to introduce you, dear reader, to my three messengers, in the hope that you might later recognise them, should you experience a visitation at some point.

1. Gluten

I don't know about you, but I had no idea what gluten was until, relatively recently, with no apparent provocation that I can recall, it started an argument with my lower intestine, causing all sorts of digestive chaos. After the argument had been going on for a while, I decided to admit defeat and simply give up eating anything involving wheat, which turns out to be the host of this sinister gloop. The improvement in my health was almost instant, but so was the sense of missing lots of things I liked to eat. However, the good news which awaits one in Middle Age is that there are lots of tempting foods which are made especially for those who find themselves in these circumstances, including disability bread, disability cakes and disability cookies. These "speciality" foods may have looked and tasted like cardboard a few years ago, but now, I am pleased to report, scientific improvements mean that they are almost edible.

2. Myopia

Now, until quite recently, as far as I can remember, road signs and shop signs and the like used to be painted up very clearly and, in the main, were mounted in a sturdy manner such that they would generally keep still, even in windy weather, and so were reasonably easy to read, even from a distance or from a passing car. It has come to my notice recently, however, that such signs tend to present themselves rather more sloppily than previously, such that some of the lettering can be difficult to read, and in some cases tend to move around in a very annoying manner, just at the moment one is trying to focus on them.

Having identified the potential root of this problem, I set off with some trepidation to visit an optometrist. (Have you ever wondered, by the way, what happened to all the "opticians" out there? I like to imagine that their bodies were somehow taken over by an advanced race of "optometrists", rather like Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.) Anyway, after investigating me with a variety of weird and wonderful contraptions, the young and female doctor asked me - and this is true, word for word - "Can you get dilated today, sir?". I have to admit that I was sorely tempted to say something highly facetious along the lines of "I have no idea but, with your help, perhaps we can make sweet music together". Needless to say, I said nothing of the sort. In fact, I said something much more along the lines of "Well, it's not all that convenient just now because I have to go back to my office and read some emails".

Anyway, after returning to be dilated at a more convenient time, I emerged with a prescription for mild shortsightedness and the news that I have a freckle on the back of my left eye. This is obviously important information which is bound to come in useful one day. For example, if I am ever separated from my left eye and need to identify it in a line-up (using my right eye, of course).

3. Young love

There may be many potential measurements to test whether things are going for one or against one in life. But few could be more telling and poignant than this one: Am I getting more or less romance than my children? Although it pains me to admit it, if the answer is "less", one really must be arriving in You-Know-When.

I raise this only because the senior offspring recently announced, with considerable poise for one yet to turn 11, that he has a girlfriend. He then proceeded to explain to me, perhaps thinking that I needed a lesson in these things, that, at his age, a girlfriend is a girl, who is a friend, whom you like. I tried briefly to encourage him to explain how that distinguished one particular girl from many others, but decided not to pursue the point very far. I knew what he meant, and so did he, even if he doesn't quite yet have the vocabulary to express it.

More surprisingly, having announced with some conviction that I knew which of the young ladies at his school we were talking about, it turned out that I was completely wrong. As usual, my finger was right on the pulse. Having spent much of the last few months hanging out, as they like to say here, with a particular young lady, it turned out that he had had his eye on someone else "ever since 4th grade". The tone in his voice had the unmistakable "doh!" of Homer Simpson, as if to say "get with it, daddy-o". I had been put firmly in my place, and, more disconcertingly, in my Age.

And so, there you have it. My advice - offered entirely free of charge - is to watch out for the three messengers of Middle Age and, if you see them coming, run as fast as you can. Followed, obviously, by a little lie down.

A Game of 18 Halves

Not since my message of 16 May 2006 have I mentioned America's pastime, rapidly becoming The Referee's second favo(u)rite sport, and its most famous exponents, who also happen to be my local team, the New York Yankees.

So, in response to what, in my fevered imagination, is mounting demand from you, dear reader, for an update, I proudly present the second in a series which might be subtitled "Why everything that one needs to know about life can be learnt from baseball".

After a deadly dull and frigid winter, when the only sport(s) to watch are football (not assocceration) and basketball (college or otherwise), the baseball season arrives here like the spring - bringing with it the promise of something better just around the corner.

And, so far, one has not been disappointed. Let me explain why.

My kids were keen to see the Yankees again, and this time my wife said that she wanted to come along as well. So, off I went to procure the earliest tickets I could get - at home at Yankee stadium against the Baltimore Orioles (or Oreos, as The Referee likes to refer to them, to the amusement of no one but himself). (You might at this point like to note something I have recently been forced to face up to personally - that, if you can't get your 8 year old child to laugh at a joke, it's probably best not to pursue it a great deal further.)

Anyway, the big day came and we scaled up the steep sides of the stadium in a chill wind threatening flurries of snow. Not all that springlike after all. Sure enough, the early stages of the game did not deliver much seasonal warmth. The debut of new Japanese pitcher Kei Igawa, who promised more than he delivered, was such that we were 7-2 down by the 4th inning.

After that, precisely nothing happened for three innings, except that everyone got colder and I was forced to scale down from the heights to forage for chips - by which I mean chips, not chips - just to keep everyone warm. Despite the fact that I was gone for what felt like several weeks, I missed only a single run for the Yanks, making it 7-3 to Baltimore.

At that point, something odd began to happen. People began to leave. Not just in their ones and twos, but in their droves, whatever they might be.

The senior offspring turned to me in some bemusement about why people were leaving in the 7th inning. "Do they think we're going to lose?", he asked. I explained that they might, but that you should never give up until the end, and perhaps not even then. That response seemed to go down well, mainly because it left open the possibility that something interesting might happen.

By the 8th inning, the stadium was perhaps a little over half full. And then, with just the dedicated faithful left, something interesting did indeed begin to happen. The Yankees found 3 runs out of nowhere, and suddenly it was 7-6 - only one down and an inning to go. What was left of the crowd suddenly realised that we had a role to play and started to make a noise.

The great Mariano Rivera came out to close for the Yankees and finished off the last of the Baltimore hitters without much ado. The crowd was by now feverishly screaming for some action.

The chance of that happening seemed to dissipate as quickly as it had arisen after the next two Yankee hitters were out almost immediately. Surely, with only one out to go, we were expecting too much?

Then someone got to first base. Then someone else did the same. The crowd started to sizzle again. Then Bobby Abreu came out, got hit on the leg by a pitch, and hobbled, rather than walked, to first base.

Bases loaded. Only one out left. And the crowd went wild when they realised that Alex Rodriguez was up next. For those who have not followed his story, Rodriguez is one of the most precociously talented players in baseball, who hasn't always delivered, despite being one of the most highly-paid sportsmen in the world (including players of assocceration football). The result has been a love-hate relationship with the immensely demanding Yankee fans. And the buzz around the stadium said, more or less, "OK, show us what you can do".

You couldn't make up what happened next. He fumbled at the first couple of pitches - two strikes - one more and the game was lost.

As the next pitch came in, he swung at it with everything he had, and the whole stadium followed as it sailed way over the hapless pitcher's head and carried on soaring for a beautiful home run right over the middle of the park.

For those unfamiliar with the game, that's what is known as a "grand slam" - a bases-loaded home run, worth one run for the hitter and one each for the three runners. The Yankees had won 10-7. And this was not just any old grand slam - rare enough - but a walk-off grand slam, ie a grand slam which ends the game.

Everyone in the stadium leapt in the air. Rodriguez skipped around the bases, clapping his hands and beaming as he went, only to be mobbed by his entire team on arrival at the plate. The second that he did so, the stadium speakers belted out the familiar opening strains of Frank Sinatra's "New York, New York". It was a pretty good moment to be a New Yorker, even an adopted one.

The next day, the NY Times reported that, in the 105 year history of the Yankees, they had at that point played a total of 16,116 games, of which this had been only the eighth to end in a walk-off grand slam. If my math(s) is correct, that means that the chances of my wife witnessing such in her first Yankees game were 1 in 2,014, and a half.

I was tempted to conclude that I should immediately send my wife out to buy a lottery ticket. But, instead, I reminded the senior boy about our agreement that one should never give up, nor should one ever leave a baseball game in the seventh inning, even if one is worried about how long it might take to get out of the car park.

As we say in our house, "Let's go A-Rod!". Whatever that means.