Author: Melanie

A catcher and his body are like the outlaw and his horse: He’s got to ride that nag til he drops.
— Johnny Bench

Because it means Braves games aren’t on TBS every ten seconds, and since I don’t live in Atlanta, I don’t get to see many games on TV anymore, which means I missed this on Thursday night:

That is, as you may have realized, my baseball boyfriend Brian McCann, legging out his first major league triple. I must have watched it 15 times already, and I still laugh every time. That’s some funny stuff. The article that led me to search for footage of it began this way:

Chipper Jones had another birthday to remember, right down to teammate Brian McCann’s belly flop of a slide.

So it turns out that Chipper, in his major league career, is batting .500 on his birthday, which I think is kind of cool. As you can see in the video, Chipper got a kick out of Brian’s baserunning:

Jones nearly buckled over in the dugout, laughing at McCann’s inelegant work on the basepaths.

“That was just pure poetry in motion,” Jones said, still chuckling about it in the clubhouse. “That’s pretty much how Pete Rose used to draw it up.”

Later, the article cracked me up:

McCann’s triple was his first since he had two for Double-A Mississippi in 2005.

“There’s no cameras?” he said after arriving at his locker. “I may never get another triple in my life, so I’m excited.”

Is your base-running underrated?

“No,” McCann replied. “I’m as slow as it looks.”

Yeah, that about sums it up. Catchers are generally the slowest runners on a baseball team, and Brian is, I would wager, one of the slower catchers in the league. I didn’t realize that he’d never hit a triple in the majors before, though.

My favorite part of the video, besides the actual slide and Chipper cracking up, is that you can see the third base coach take a knee to tell Brian to slide, but you also see that the second baseman cuts off the throw from right field and never even makes an attempt to throw to third, and the third baseman isn’t anywhere near the bag looking for a throw. The play was never going to be close, so the slide was entirely unnecessary. That’s kind of a mean trick to play on a guy!

I’m just going to write because I cannot help it.
— Charlotte Bronte

(Hat tip to Chris Brogan for the topic idea – I had a bit of writer’s block and googled “things to blog about.” Yes, I am a dork, we’ve established that.)

1. Letters I Never Sent: This is actually a real idea I have for a book, and I even started it several years ago, but never finished, and I think I lost the disk it was on, which breaks my heart. I’m a writer by nature – it’s much easier for me to write things than to say them out loud (which is why I do appellate work as a lawyer rather than trial work: more writing, less talking) – and since high school, I’ve saved letters I’ve written to people but never sent. I thought it might be a neat idea as a work of non-fiction, but seeing as I’ve run out of letters – somehow I stopped writing them and never sending them a few years ago; I guess I got brave – to be a complete work, it might have to become fiction.

Most of the letters are to guys, not surprisingly; they’re the ones I generally have the most trouble communicating openly with, because I tend to get nervous around them if I like them. Plus, I blow everything out of proportion. A lot of them are to J, many of them to M, a couple to P, and there are numerous letters to “random” other guys (random only in the sense that you all haven’t heard about them, not like I write letters to strangers on the street or anything). There are some to my female friends – I came across one I’d forgotten I’d written a few days ago looking through old documents on my computer – but not many. I have a much easier time saying exactly what I think to the women I am close to.

2. A book of short stories: I lack both the creativity and the patience to craft a novel, but give me 10 pages and I can go to town. I’ve got a bunch of half-finished stories rolling around my hard drive, and a couple that I really love; I’d like to take some time to sit with them again and see if I can’t reach a conclusion.  One of them I re-read recently, and when I got to the end, I thought, “I can’t wait to see what happens next!”  And then I remembered that it’s, um, ME who has to figure that out.

3. A book of poems:  I’ve been writing poetry as long as I can remember.  I have them all saved in a particular notebook that has a color coded key to remind me who they’re about.  The really good ones need no explanation, but more than 15 years removed from some of them, I have no clue who I was thinking of when I wrote them.  Some of them are truly terrible, and I’m a little ashamed of them, and they will NOT be in my book.

4. A book of my family’s history:  There are so many stories that have become sort of family lore, and the people who tell them won’t be around forever, and I would be so sad to lose the touchstones of my family’s life.  My grandma often sends me long emails about different things – sometimes just what she did this week, but sometimes about her mother and siblings, and I save them all.  My grandfather is forever telling stories around the holiday dinner table, and while I’m listening, I’m trying to will myself to remember every word, so I can tell the Princess and the Conductor and my own kids someday.  The thing I can’t do, though, is formally go and ask them to tell me these stories so I can record them, because the thought of it – what it really means – makes me unbearably sad.  I know that’s foolish – ignoring their mortality won’t make them live forever – and I know I’ll regret it when they’re gone if I don’t do it, but I don’t even know how to broach the subject.  Even just writing about it here is bringing tears to my eyes.  Have any of you done this?  Do you have any advice for me?

5.  If I ever get to be famous and fabulous, I’ll write my autobiography.  Oh, who am I kidding?  Once I’m famous and fabulous, I’ll have “people” to do that for me!

What books do you want to write?

“My pitching philosophy is simple: keep the ball away from the bat.”
— Satchel Paige

A few moments ago, John Smoltz, future Hall of Fame Braves pitcher, became the 16th man in baseball history to record 3,000 strikeouts.

(Shockingly, Wikipedia has not yet been updated to reflect this information.)

He’s also the only pitcher ever to record 200 wins and 150 saves (which he was able to do because he took the closer’s role for three seasons before returning to the starting rotation in 2005). He’s an 8-time All-Star, a 24-game winner, and, by all accounts, a top-notch golfer and all-around nice guy.

He’s been pitching for my Braves as long as I can remember rooting for them, and watching the ovation he received at Turner Field tonight after #3,000 brought tears to my eyes. It also made me extra-happy that my baseball boyfriend Brian McCann is catching the game – he’s from Georgia and grew up watching Smoltz and dreaming about catching him, and that he gets to do it on such an historic night must be a great feeling for him. I found this picture a couple years ago online – Smoltz meeting McCann when he was just a kid (that’s Brian in the middle):

Kind of makes me love baseball that much more. Congratulations, John. Here’s hoping you’ve got another couple hundred left in you.

The loveliest tinkle as of golden bells answered him. It is the fairy language. You ordinary children can never hear it, but if you were to hear it, you would know that you had heard it once before.
— from Peter Pan, by James M. Barrie

Nate sent me this picture yesterday morning, which promptly ousted Joey and Company from my desktop:

All’s right with the world.

“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying.”
— Woody Allen

1. Outside Baltimore, some big linoleum tile-like things flew off the back of a poorly covered flatbed and landed on the hood of my car and skidded off and caused me and others to swerve onto the shoulder at 65 mph. When I stopped to inspect the damage, I was relieved to see that there were no scratches or dents on my hood and that I hadn’t, you know, crashed. It wasn’t until I stopped for lunch later that I realized it popped the emblem off the grill in front. Since I’m ok, I can afford to be pissed about the fact that my pretty car is now imperfect again.
2. On the Jersey Turnpike, two different 18-wheelers cut me off at 75 mph without using a signal, causing me to swerve into the (luckily empty) left lane.
3. On the Southern State Parkway on Long Island, a dumbass waiting to merge onto the highway (there are no merging lanes) decided that the best time to do it was when I was 500 feet from him and there was someone tailgating me.

I’m in New York for a long weekend to visit law school friends. I left NoVa this morning around 9:30 and arrived at my hotel around 3, amazingly in one piece. I just woke up from a nap, and I’m about to start getting ready for the annual Law Review banquet, which is the reason I chose this weekend to come up. I never said I wasn’t a nerd.

I’m coming home Sunday, I think, and I have my computer with me, obviously, but I’m not anticipating any more new content before Monday, so have a great weekend!