Tempe, Tempe, Tempe

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roncollins

Tempe, Tempe, Tempe

#1 Post by roncollins »

Written by Casey Neal
Daily Log of a Fresh-faced Graduate
April 26, 2013

It's 11 o'clock in the morning and we're flying south with Annie on Highway 95 down toward Vegas. The sun is out, it's 75°, and I'm sipping a Corona when I get to finally thinking about my future.

Don-o is guiding Annie over the asphalt jungle and smoking a crap cigar he bought in a Quik-Pick back in Tonopah. He looks strange smoking; it's not really his thing. But he's driving and we're tuned into a weird electronica station with some band that's done a mod-cover of "Smooth Operator". Don-o's got his sunglasses perched on the end of his nose, his hair all flowing in the wind that Annie don't go nowhere without.

I'm scrunched down in my seat, glancing at the text message I got ten minutes ago.

"What's the matter?" Don-o says.

I put the phone away and try to sit up straighter. It's harder than it sounds because both of us are slathered in enough sunblock to keep a Middle East sheik in Rolls Royces for awhile.

"Some dude back home wants me to come work for him."

"Raaaight-ho," Don-o says in his best Kevin Klein version of a British accent. "Next round is on you."

"Nah," I say. "It's just a grunt work in a warehouse." Before we had left, I had gone around the city in a panicked job rush and dropped my applications about everywhere. Sofa Center had finally gotten around to clearing out their backlog, I guess.

"Still could be good grunt."

I think about I for a bit. The Nevada sun warms my legs and the tiny hair on my now sun-browned legs flutters.

"Can't do it," I say.

Don-o isn't paying attention, though. He's already swaying his head back and forth to the robotic strains of the music. I watch the cactus and the Joshua slide past as Annie's engine roars. I really can't do that. Pushing sofas into trucks… it… well, it doesn't appeal. And I realize it's not the money or even the work itself. Being a warehouse grunt sounds like it's about my lot in life, I figure, so I suppose I could get used to the basic work. But the idea. The idea of being in a building or needing to be in a building all day, then going home and eating a frozen dinner and watching a game on the tube and passing out at the end of the night just to wake up and do it all again the next day. That idea. It stuck in my gut and I couldn't get it out without bolting the whole of my Corona.

I tossed the bottle in the back. My turn to drive wasn't coming for another two hours. I could handle it.

#

The way the PEBA schedule works out, we had a day between games, so we stop in Vegas, get a comped room and head to the poker tables. Cards is something I get. It's all odds and game theory, a lot like the match-up between a hitter and a pitcher. "Show me what you got, meat," I find myself thinking when I'm at a table peering at an opponent. "Bring me that heat."

I get a run of cards about an hour into the game and I fish a couple hundred bucks out of a couple marks when I get meat hooks down and play them into full boat. I tell Don-o he can put his credit card away for a bit. It feels good to be able to pay more than my share at the bar.

#

Game time in Tempe is 7:05, but we want to be sure to see BP because we want to see the park up close. So we leave Vegas in mid-morning, me driving and Don-o napping through Bullhead and Lake Havasu City. The dude can snore, I'll tell you that.

It’s a beautiful day, just a dusting of clouds. I feel a roll of cash in my pocket against my right thigh and my phone that rang again last night with a notice from the Sofa Center against my left. The job's going to someone else if I don't reply today.

The radio is playing an old Ke$ha hit.

#

Knights Stadium is the Texas of ballparks. Yes, Kingpin Alley has a deep centerfield, but at 483’, Knights is a big stone's throw deeper. And at 460’ and 454’ to the alleys, it's a place that smothers homers. I've always wondered… if Tempe ever got a guy who cold really run – like, say, Kalamazoo's Raúl García – would that guy manage to get double-digit inside-the-park homers or not? If I were Chris Van Hauter, I figure I would acquire someone like that just to watch him.

Probably why I wouldn't be much of a GM, I guess. Me and my Russian history degree seem pretty much bound for a place like Sofa Center, which is an idea that has been growing on me. I admit I like the feel of cash on my leg.

The Knights are contending strongly for a Desert Division title this year, and you can feel it in the Arizona air. They are 14-8 as this game begins, locked in a struggle with Bakersfield and Aurora. They've been upper-division for the past three seasons and were a wild card league champion last year. This is a team that rides with Don-o's favorite hitter of all time; the beastly Jason Kirkland. True to form, the left-handed Kirkland ends his BP by launching three straight laser beams over the fence in right-center. Dude has prodigious power.

But all you can really think about when you first think Tempe is a kid named Markus Hancock, the 2012 SL Golden Arm award winner and a 26-year-old with three straight 20-win seasons. Sure, Tempe's got lots of guys who can pitch. Conan McCullough needs no introduction, and Barney Sharp and Luis Peña are solid enough to pitch about anywhere, but Hancock is my personal crush. In my secret world of ultimate desire, Bill McKenzie would sell the farm to bring Hancock to Duluth. I mean, seriously, the guy's fastball and splitter alone would make him tough to hit, but when you add that exquisite change and a wrinkle of a curve, you get a guy who is like Marc Chagall on the mound.

We're going to stay to see the entire Yuma series, ostensibly because the next step is to follow Tempe to Palm Springs, but my personal goal was to see Hancock pitch, and he's slated for game three of the series – a fact you can tell because most of the Yuma hitters are looking like they might come down with some flu-like symptoms come Sunday.

Bottom line for Tempe fans is that the future could be now. They have Kirkland for one more year before arbitration starts to ramp his salary, and Hancock's arbitration settlement will likely require an armored car to carry away to the bank. The good news is that they have about $30 mil coming off the register next year. The bad news is that they seem to be a mid-market team and, baring some act of PEBA charitable bailout, will be saddled with David Goode's $12-mil contract for… well… for about ever.

The first game of the series is all about Knights shortstop Adrián Romero, who goes 3-5 with a pair of doubles, a triple and 5 RBI. Romero is a kid who got only 38 AB last year, but he's tearing things up this spring. His first double comes with the bases loaded in the second inning and plates them all. It's Peña on the mound today for Tempe, and Yuma gets a run in the third when Nathan Clark pelts a fastball into deep left field for a double that scores José Pérez. Clark is thrown out at third, though, which shows perhaps why Yuma is Yuma.

Yuma starter Roy Hopper doesn't make it out of the fourth, and Romero's two-run triple seems to seal the deal. Steady lefty Ben Truscott closes out the last two innings, and Tempe leaves the stadium as a 7-2 winner.

#

To say Tempe defeats Yuma in the second game of the series is to say the Germans had a little success in 1939 when they stepped into Poland. How bad is it? Just a few facts. First, Kirkland's first-inning homer against Yuma starter Xiong Ci is like a golfer's drive – a liner that keeps rising and rising as it blazes an ionizing path to the right-center bleachers some 460’ away. It puts Tempe up three before the beer vendors have much of a chance to settle into their routines. But Tempe adds four more before the first is over, a blitzed Ci being replaced before getting his three outs.

The 22-year-old Ci comes advertised as having five pitches, but honesty forces me to say the guy needs to be put in AAA before he gets somebody hurt.

It appears that a miracle will occur, though, as Yuma uses a string of three doubles and four singles, capped off with an error, to mark up a seven-spot of their own in the third inning. This represents about a month's worth of output for the Bulldozers.

Alas, the game is nine innings long, and you can hear the Luftwaffe's engines humming on the runway as Jeff Chappell takes the mound for the bottom of the 8th. The extravaganza starts with a single/walk/HBP trifecta. Larry Cox's single plates one run. Yuma's Dave Bignell, a bona fide major leaguer in my book, tries to staunch the flow, but by the time the dust clears, the Knights score nine runs and lead 18-8. Yuma scratches out a run in the 9th, but Tempe takes the second game of the series with ease.

#

The third game is a day stint and, as noted above, the magnificent Markus Hancock is on the mound. He will strike out 16 Bulldozers on this day, throwing a complete game on 124 pitches, each one a thing of beauty when looked at in the framework of the whole.

The Knights get him seven runs, though only six are earned. This means Tempe does the deed and sweeps the Bulldozers, a much needed result for their pennant hopes.

It doesn't matter, though. Not to me.

All I cared about was watching Hancock work. He's only freaking twenty-six. He's masterful and confident and poised and in control and devastatingly effective and only twenty-freaking-six. I'm twenty-three. When Hancock was twenty-three. he was winning 20 games for the first time and posting a 1.96 ERA. When he was twenty-three, he struck out 277 hitters.

I'm twenty-three and I managed to eat three Knight Sticks, which are basically chili dogs on a stick, in a single Sunday afternoon game.

#

It's nearly 5:00 when the game is over. The sun is still out and it's a perfect 78°.

"Wanna hit the bars? Lottsa college girls here," Don-o says. Tempe is home of the Arizona State Solar Angels, and the girls are… well, they're all girls.

"Sure," I say, my brain still cluttered with images of Markus Hancock.

We eat complimentary snacks for dinner and meet a couple chick-os from the Arizona School of Message Therapy, and it's a kick-butt night full of tequila and the smell of incense laced with some wild-weed cactus extract that the girls called "lovely".
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Re: Tempe, Tempe, Tempe

#2 Post by John »

Just for my own edification... and fair warning in advance: This is the stupidest question you're going to hear today... is the title of this article a reference to the music group Tony! Toni! Toné!? I know the boys watched a Tempe three-game series, so I suppose that could be it, but they were also listening to the radio heading into town...
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Re: Tempe, Tempe, Tempe

#3 Post by roncollins »

Not stupid at all. the reason I liked that title for the piece is that it worked on three levels for me.

Yes, one was Tony! Toni! Toné! (though truth in advertising was that I only found that through a lucky-random Googling). The other was the fact, as you surmised) that they played three games. Finally, it echoed the "Tora, Tora, Tora" call of the Pearl Harbor attack that I can see the upstanding residents of PEBA towns feeling when a pair of rancorous college kids appear out of nowhere to descend upon their towns.
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Re: Tempe, Tempe, Tempe

#4 Post by John »

I love double entendres (or in this case, triple entredres). :mrgreen: That being said, I hold you accountable for my irrational desire to link the Tempe logo in your article to the video for "Feels Good", not to mention the fact that it was stuck in my head all last night. :-#

A great article, Ron, even if the series it covered was no classic. ;-D
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Re: Tempe, Tempe, Tempe

#5 Post by Borealis »

I vote Tora, Tora, Tora. From our perspective, that just seems right.
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