Three weeks removed from the biggest snowstorm of the year here in western Michigan, I stood in my driveway in sandals and a T-shirt, the barely identifiable golden orb of the sun warming the brown, muddy earth and compelling neighbors to exchange the first greetings after winter's long hibernation. In a sort of hysteria of possibility, I ended up playing basketball, Frisbee, driveway tennis, and Nerf football, each in about 5-minute bursts, punctuated by kids leaping onto bikes, skateboards and Ripsticks (no sane adult should ever step on one of these tools of orthopedic destruction!) and just bolting around the block in sheer frenetic joy. But Spring did not truly arrive until my neighbor girl pulled from the garage potpourri the giant red plastic bat and the wiffle ball, and asked if I'd pitch to her. Aha! The moment of truth had arrived, as I limbered up my increasingly suspect shoulder (is that dull pain the dreaded rotator cuff tear?) and offered up a few "straight balls" to build her confidence. She smacked one off the side of the house, so I told her to watch out for my eephus pitch, and lobbed one in at a shrewd, timing-wrecking arc. She hit it over the house (and kindly retrieved it for me—have I talked about my sore knees and reduced mobility yet??). I came back with my curve, a wiffle-ball junk staple, and she hit it. Without my best stuff, I moved shrewdly to the knuckleball, which generally is enhanced by whatever bizarre wiffle-physics is in play, and has become my strikeout pitch. She fouled it off, getting more plastic on it than I would have liked, and then she fired the ball back to me such that, were I a lesser competitor, I might have admitted she stung my ungloved hand with it. Her innocent comment, "Wow, the ball whistles when I throw it!" bore, for me, a tacit rebuke to my own absence of velocity.  All the spring training clichés of the aging hurler were at my behest—"I'm working the arm back into shape. I'm rehabbing naturally from last season's wear and tear (not clear what I did that qualifies as wear and tear). I'm expanding my palette of pitches" (viz. knuckler, scuff ball, 65 mph Tommy John fastball located 4 inches off the plate as an imploring offering to a hopefully genial umpire)—but I remained stoical. If baseball is mostly a mental game, with occasional outbreaks of physical motion, hey, at least I had the right mound attitude! Take no prisoners! Offer the unbroken glare in at the plate, from that the menacing proximity of 60'6'' (though I was only about 16 feet away) I prepared to launch the beanball (forgivable in waffle-ball, and I was probably going to toss it underhand anyway), but the winds of primaveral change had blown in and the kids all decided to climb the apple tree. That confrontation averted, I was left to ponder the struggles and humiliations (and, perhaps, triumphs) available only to those willing to work in the splendid public isolation of the pitching mound.

This is the theme of Tim Wendel's quirky new book High Heat: The Secret History of the Fastball and the Improbable Search for the Fastest Pitcher of All Time; more than a comparison of velocities, it is a psychological survey of what the "gift of heat," the capacity to throw a baseball incredibly hard, has meant to its various practitioners. Although Wendel casts the book as a sort of detective search, the structure is a bit inchoate, with the framework of various aspects of the pitching motion (Ch. 1 "The Windup," Ch. 2 "The Pivot," etc.) not really guiding the reader forward. Indeed, Wendel admits, in his account of Walter Johnson's early years, that "At its best, baseball is an enticing swirl of numbers and stories," and when I surrendered myself to just take these things as Wendel dealt them, the book emerged as an intriguing and entertaining frolic. I think that Wendel's accomplishment is remarkable in a twofold way; he instructs us substantially on the early and unexpected aspects of the familiar fastball figures we all know: Walter Johnson, Bob Feller, Sandy Koufax, Nolan Ryan. But he also, and maybe more important for the overarching narrative, uncovers for us such rough jewels of the fireballing world as 19th-century hero "Pud" Galvin, Negro League great "Bullet" Rogan, and the key figure of the whole enterprise, the star-crossed antihero Steve Dalkowski (more on him in a moment).

 The stories of all these pitchers revolve around the fragile balance that a blessed arm requires. Wendel contends that "Throwing a baseball hard—really, really hard—remains a God-given gift. In the end, though whether this gift will be remembered as a blessing or a curse depends on the individual player and what luck, judgment, and good friends he finds along the way." For the Hall of Fame greats, the pieces fall into place, sometimes in fantastical ways. Walter Johnson's "Plan A" minor league journey was utterly derailed by the April, 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which threw the Pacific Coast League into chaos just as Johnson was moving into the professional ranks as a 19-year-old. About to return home to California, Johnson pursued a last-minute tip to pitch in the backwaters of Weiser, Idaho, and ended up on the grudging last stop of a Washington Senators scout's westward loop. The story is mostly luck to this point, but then the gift kicked in. After Johnson's first major league game, against the Tigers, Ty Cobb (not one to dispense compliments lightly) issued this judgment: "Every one of us knew he'd met the most powerful arm ever turned loose in a ballpark."

For Nolan Ryan, the friendship of faithful Mets' scout Red Murff was the key. Wendel relates the shocking story that "As Ryan's sophomore year came to an end, Murff paid a visit to Alvin High School. He told Jim Watson, the baseball coach, that he had 1 of the 10 best arms in the country on his team. On his third guess, Watson finally realized that Murff was talking about Ryan." From this outlandish neglect by his own coach (not some major league front office), Ryan's journey of proving himself over again at every level commences. A fortuitous link with catcher Jeff Torborg, when the Mets had dumped him to the California Angels, allowed Ryan to learn from the man who'd caught Sandy Koufax's perfect game as a young Dodger. Tweaks and mechanical adjustments under the tutelage of a patient coaching staff in Anaheim allowed Ryan to get his delivery right, and then those kindnesses and connections paid off. The dominance of Ryan a year later, in 1973, showed the unbelievable potential of a gifted arm rightly fostered: two one-hitters and two no-hitters in a single season, including the second one against the Tigers when their erstwhile manager Billy Martin "began to needle him" (no great surprise), and in which a bizarre final out was recorded: "Detroit's hope of breaking up the no-no rested with Norm Cash. As he stepped into the batter's box, Ryan noticed that he wasn't exactly holding a bat in his hands. The Angels' pitcher gestured to Luciano to check it out. Upon closer inspection, the bat was determined to be a leg ripped off the snack table in the Tigers' clubhouse. Cash, ever the wily veteran, argued with the umpire that he should be permitted to use it. The debate lasted several minutes and perhaps would have broken the concentration of another pitcher. But Ryan was sure of himself now. Several of the most flamboyant figures in the game were center stage on this day—Luciano, Martin, the showboating Tigers hitters—and none were able to get under his skin. With the debate over, and Cash forced to swing a conventional bat, Ryan got him to pop out on a 1-2 fastball." Ryan's maturation, and his eventual mental dominance, are on display here, but Wendel's deeper point, throughout the volume, is that the fastball itself is the thing which, properly harnessed and unleashed, changes the game more than any other factor.

But, oh, how difficult to harness, and what a curse the gift can be when the lack of luck or friendship, or some deeper character flaw, gets in the way. Wendel ruminates on this dark side at length, reflecting in his section on the rapid demise of "Smoky" Joe Wood that, "As often is the case in the realm of high heat, … the line between tragedy and triumph can be a fine one." And because our imaginations are always more drawn to the tragic sensibility, the main character of Wendel's book ends up being the greatest pitcher who never made the big leagues, Steve Dalkowski. Upon first reading, many of the stories and statistics about this slightly built, bespectacled young man from Connecticut sound like the stuff of fancy. He pitched multiple no-hitters in high school and Legion ball, but also lost a few of them because of unconscionable control issues and double-digit walks. He struck out twenty in the opening game of his senior year (a no-hitter), but ominously "he did get the local crowd buzzing in the middle innings by throwing a ball ten feet over a batter's head." In the minor leagues, things were even wilder: "The season was 1958, when Dalkowski fanned 17 and walked 16, throwing 283 pitches, in a single game." So much for pitch counts on top organization prospects! Not until his stop at Elmira in 1962 did Dalkowski improve his control, this time with the help of an up-and-coming manager in the Orioles system, Earl Weaver, who exercised tough love on Dalko's control issues and his carousing. The first tactic was more successful than the second, with Weaver simplifying things down to a reduced-speed fastball and a hard slider that allowed the pitcher (whom Weaver claimed had a verified, tested IQ of only 65) to not think too much about blowing people away, and voila: "In his final 57 innings of the 1962 season, the left-hander gave up one earned run, struck out 110 batters and walked only 21." Then, at the cusp of "arriving" at last, Dalkowski felt his elbow pop in spring training of 1963 while in the midst of striking out a bunch of Yankees, and his speed was gone. Dalkowski stoically observed, "I think a higher power took it away from me when I had it all together. I'm not mad. It was my own fault." It was no great surprise to find that the screenwriter and director of Bull Durham used Dalkowski as his model for Nuke LaLoosh.

Outside these qualitative judgments—Ryan and Walter Johnson's grueling work ethic, Dalkowski's self-destructive ways—Wendel does spend considerable time on the brute quantitative question, "Who threw the hardest?" The book is about speed after all, the dangers and thrills of speed. Within the dialogue about the suspicious nature of radar guns, former big league catcher Andy Etchebarren offers a mind-numbing comparison: "Take a guy like Steve Dalkowski. He would have hit 107-108 [mph] on the radar gun they use today. I have no doubt about that. You see guys hitting 94, 95 on the gun now that wouldn't have been considered fast at all back in my day." In the end, Dalkowski's velocity is the overwhelming statistic that Wendel uses to draw his moral conclusions about promise and fragility: "By studying still photographs of Dalkowski (to date no footage has been found of the fireballer in action), John-William Greenbaum calculates that this phenom threw as hard as 105-109 miles per hour. Dalkowski's great promise and even his epic failure speak to something deep inside all of us. Dalko was the lovable loser so many of us can identify with." Like the Ring of Gyges or Midas' golden touch, the fastball is the gift that can bless or curse, and Wendel's survey shows how complicated the simple act of throwing heat can really be.

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The complicated simplicity of baseball, and of each fan's relationship to the game, is at the heart of the crafty anthology Top of the Order: 25 Writers Pick Their Favorite Baseball Players of All Time, edited by Sean Manning, with a foreword by the master of the baseball story W. P. Kinsella. This is the sort of anthology where the contributors are all amateurs in the best sense, writers from pop culture mainly, or high-brow journalism, and these vignettes about favorite players often pull from the dysfunctional athletic careers of bookish or counter-authoritarian youths who grow up to write for Esquire and The New Yorker. The results are a bit uneven, but at their best, the essays find the standard grooves of good baseball writing (statistically informed, elegiac yet gritty), and then give a postmodern twist. Let me offer a few examples to show the range and wit of the collection, full of surprise and common sense. Christopher Sorrentino's essay on Dave Kingman is based on the premise that power is as alluring in a batter as in a pitcher, with similar perils that most fans willingly endure: "Power had never been a big part of the Mets' game, so it had undeniable allure. At twelve, I couldn't distinguish between power and hitting, which seemed indistinguishable from winning, so I was easily drawn to the Dave Kingman Show." That simplicity, the occasional but ferocious home run, enough to keep the less tormented souls satisfied—that was the epitome of a player like Kingman, whose "enigmatic personality, a difficult personality," Sorrentino lays out as part of the perilous appeal. Hateful both to the media and to the statistically obsessed Bill James-crowd, a player like Kingman is seen as a pure, rarified baseball being: "I think that within the anecdotal, anti-sabermetric vault of remembrance in which players are forever paired with one defining trait, it's righteous to emblematize that binary homer-or-strikeout struggle of the power hitter." Hear, hear! We need such defenses of the embodied baseball memory!

From the sheer monody of Kingman's take on life and baseball it's a sharp contrast to turn to the essay by Robert Whiting, who—from his émigré vantage point in Tokyo—has written for the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, and Time about the esoteric world of Japanese baseball. I'd never heard of Yutaka Enatsu before, and his quixotic try-out with the '83 Brewers, his only tangible contact point with the American big leagues, tells nothing of his chaotic, heroic pitching career. The strikeout king in the Japanese professional leagues throughout the late '60s and early '70s, Enatsu had a fierce rival, home run king Sadaharu Oh (against whom he set the single-season strikeout record in an act of braggadocio); a reckless personal life ("He smoked 100 cigarettes a day and spent his nights playing pachinko and mahjong and drinking in Osaka nightclubs," and was close friends with several members of the Osaka organized crime community); and amazing durability (including pitching on no day's rest during the pennant race): in short, the stuff of legend, such as Steve Dalkowski could only have dreamed about. Certain things about Japanese baseball culture elude the Western mind. I scratch my head and wonder at the plaudit offered Enatsu by Masaichi Kaneda, Japan's all-time winningest pitcher: "'Enatsu was good because he knew how to use the Ma [a term for a dramatic pause in Kabuki theater]. He waited for just the right moment—a lapse of concentration by the batter—to deliver the pitch. In a sense, he could really read the batter's mind." Hmm. Glancing back through the book one last time, I would specially recommend the irreverent Jim Bouton's essay on Steve Demboski (not to be confused with Dalkowski, though neither ever made the big leagues), the consummate artist of being beaned with a baseball while in college at Farleigh Dickinson in the 1970s (and later Bouton's Sunday over-the-hill league teammate). The outlandish stat line from Demboski's senior season is an anecdote unto itself: "a .375 batting average, with thirty-nine walks, forty-one runs scored, twenty-seven stolen bases in twenty-eight tries (second-best in the nation), twenty-one RBIs, and four home runs. What's more, he was hit an additional thirty-six times, giving him a college career total of 112. With all that hitting and getting hit, the most incredible statistic of all was the Hit Man's on-base percentage: .729." Yet, absent luck or crucial friends, such a singularity of gift heightens the fragility and ends up driving luck or advocacy or understanding away. Such is the tenuous balance the game demands.

Before we turn to the season to come, a final word on another book not to miss this spring, a book I almost passed over in my foolish New York partisanship, a book with as gripping a narrative and as a rich a panoply of back-stories as you'll read this year: Mark Frost's Game Six—Cincinnati, Boston, and the 1975 World Series: The Triumph of America's Pastime (Hyperion, 2009). This game, often described as the best ever played in the history of the Fall Classic, falls just a tad off my personal radar—the first World Series games I watched were in 1976, as a seven-year-old falling asleep on the floor while my older brother and Uncle Smitty watched this same Big Red Machine decimate the Yankees. But, while sustaining a pitch-by-pitch narrative (and every pitch is accounted for in the game without bogging down stylistically), Frost somehow manages to keep the tension of the actual game intact for almost 400 pages. Along the way, he intersperses the history of both franchises and the journeys, backward and forward, of almost all the participants (including not only the players and managers, but also such supporting cast as sportscasters Dick Stockton and Lesley Visser, who met as newbies in the press box that night and later married). Time won't permit me to recount the reckless moves made by Red Sox owners of the past. (Fenway Park was built as an elaborate money-laundering scheme in 1912! And Tom Yawkey threw his wallet down at his first owner's meeting in the early '30's as a playboy millionaire and offered to buy any talent the others would sell!). Suffice it to say that some of the stories made George Steinbrenner seem much more akin to Gene Autry. Of all the player stories, the central thread really belongs to Luis Tiant, who had won two earlier games in the series and would get a tough no-decision in this one. The fact that he'd been reunited with his parents just a few months before after 15 years of forced separation due to the Castro regime's restrictions (the inclusion of a picture of George McGovern bargaining with Castro about the Tiant case is one of several excellent photos included) deepened my appreciation of Tiant the man, and the meeting of father and son at Logan Airport, as described by Frost, could squeeze tears from a stoic. And then there are the Sparky Anderson stories and baseball-wry-and-grammar-shy quotes. That Sparky that night was only a few years older than I am today (he looked approximately the age of my grandpa!) is stunning, but so too is Frost's account of Sparky defying his gut instinct when Rawly Eastwick had Bernie Carbo behind in the count and barely fouling off pitches: "One more pitch, said Sparky to himself. I'll give him one more." When Carbo unfathomably homers to tie the game (in the back-story, by the way, Sparky had taken Carbo under his wing years before in the Reds organization and often had him over for dinner with his family), we read this wondrous, terrible line: "in the Cincinnati dugout, Sparky nearly doubled over in pain and despair and disbelief that he hadn't listened to the voice. Why? Why? Why?" The book is full of such moments, where the humanity of the game crosses over all the talent of numbers and skill and athleticism and asserts its dominance. Don't miss it.

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And so, what does this new season hold, this complicated, money-drenched, drug-test-laden, media-saturated but ultimately simple and integral set of events known as baseball? Over the years, my spring training predictions for this annual preview have ranged from prescient (didn't we almost see the Cubs-Red Sox tilt of 2003 come to fruition?) to lunatic (yes, I picked Reds-Royals last year, though for the first two weeks of the season, I looked like a prophet). I've resisted picking my beloved Yankees every year because I don't want to wear my lifelong bias too explicitly (if you think Joe Mauer is better than Thurman Munson, those are fighting words), but since they won it all last year, I don't feel bad in overlooking them in 2010.

Let's start in the A.L. East, and say that the Yankees do take the division. But the more important cue that I will use for this year's choices is to follow the Yankee mystique around the league, identifying its subtle influence in the obscure terrain of various coaching staffs. Hence, when I see that Tampa Bay has Tom Foley as their third base coach, I see them making a run at the Yankees late, fueled by this former-Yankee-now-obscure-coach vibe! (The fact that I may be mistaking Tom Foley for Tim Foli here is of only secondary importance to my system). Next there's the A.L. Central, where the team I now follow day-by-day in the newspaper and on radio, the Tigers, so recently wrenched out the hearts of their fans in their final week collapse last season. (My colleague in the Humanities Division, Michael Pasquale, suffered permanent emotional trauma during the extra-innings one-game-playoff loss to the Twins last year!) The trade of sparkplug centerfielder Curtis Granderson to the Yankees dealt additional woe to Tigers' fans, who are trying to rationalize the hurt away with a rush of forced excitement about the Johnny Damon signing. The real problem for the Tigers is the lack of a former Yankee on their coaching staff. Not so the White Sox, with former Yankee catcher Mark Salas craftily placed on their bench as a coach (the rare player, I recall Billy Martin and Phil Rizzuto noting in a WPIX Channel 11 Yankees broadcast from my teen years, to have a last name that is a palindrome). But the Indians are able to counter here with their pitching coach, Tim Belcher (another last name that bears interest and scrutiny), former middling Yankee hurler. Sorry, Twins and Royals, you don't measure up. I'll take the White Sox edging the Indians, for two reasons. The first is that the Indians are unlikely to recover from the sight of their two best pitchers of recent years (Cliff Lee and C.C. Sabathia) starting Game One of last year's World Series against each other, and neither one, obviously, on the Indians. Such is the nature of the free-agent era. Second, I think the White Sox have found the right mojo in matching Omar Vizquel with Gordon Beckham (a man almost twenty years his junior) on the left side of their infield—a multi-generational affair, full of baseball wisdom and baseball promise.

Out west in the A.L., it's hard to pick against the Angels, especially when I see they've met the requirement, sporting Alfredo Griffin as first-base coach. But the A's can counter with the little-big man, Mike Gallego, as their third-base coach, and for obscure itinerant infield play on the mediocre 1980s and early '90' Yankees, only the presence of Wayne Tolleson could trump these two. And yet, when I see the man who closed out the 1996 World Series, who threw the final pitch of the season that restored Yankee glory, and then who kindly went free agent immediately thereafter to open the door for Mariano Rivera to become the team's closer—yes, I speak of John Wetteland—as the Mariners bullpen coach, I'm compelled to pick Seattle to take the division. Okay, so they also have the twin blessing of a dominant righty, Felix Hernandez, and a dominant lefty, Cliff Lee, to make Wetteland's job easier, but on the other hand, they now have Milton Bradley on the roster to keep a necessary tension in place. Just for the sake of Mike Gallego's gamesmanship, I'll take the A's to win a surprise wildcard spot, though the Rangers will hang around for a while with big bats, young pitching, and former middling Yankee pitcher Andy Hawkins as their bullpen coach. At least, I think he's one of the former Padres who was also a former Yankee; man, if the Rangers had Goose Goosage coaching in the pen, I'd pick them to win it all.

To the N.L. East, and the plot is confused by an apparent lack of former Yankees (by the way, I'm not looking at the Baseball Encyclopedia to verify this, but simply drawing on the memories of my peak fanhood in the mid-1980s), so I might need to default to the Phillies: they have been dominant in their division and league of late, and they still look strong. But a glimpse at the names on the various coaching staffs seems a crucial counterpoint to any statistical or empirical evidence of success, so I'll make the crucial move of comparing first base coaches. The Braves are able to trot out Glenn Hubbard, still the consummate bearded infielder of the early '80s, but the Phillies have the ultra-mustachioed Davey Lopes as counterpoint. The Marlins can only offer Dave Collins, who I sort of remember as a player or at least a Topps card for, say, the Mariners during a bad uniform phase, but this relative blandness can't hold up to the Mets' offering of one of the best names in all of organized baseball, first base coach Razor Shines. The presence of such a name on the staff, coupled with Jason Bay's arrival to augment David Wright and Carlos Beltran in the heart of the order, and with the inevitability of Johan Santana's re-emergence as a dominant starter, gives the Mets the edge, though the Phillies get the wildcard. Oh, ye Washington Nationals, not only does your lineup need a decades' worth of work, but you need to reconsider trotting Dan Radison out as your first-base coach. Might I suggest former Yankee (and Expo, so in the Nationals lineage) Andy Stankiewicz, once considered the second-coming of Phil Rizzuto, but with even less power?

The N.L. Central is always a tough division to call, but this task is complexified still further by the presence of former Yankees in the coaching ranks. One would think that the Cubs, with Lou Pinella at the helm of the team, would benefit most from this residual magic, and from my new vantage point of the last decade plus in Michigan, the fact that Lou's bench coach is nonpareil Tiger shortstop of yore Alan Trammell gives a further push. But these guys were too good as players to solidify the Cubs as divisional favorites, as is likewise the case with the Brewers sporting Willie Randolph as bench coach. The Reds are more apt with Chris Speier as their bench coach, since I think he did a brief stint in the pinstripes after his Montreal years. (Didn't every middle infielder in the Major Leagues play for the Yankees in the years between Bucky Dent and Derek Jeter?) But the Reds broke my heart last year as possibly my worst prediction ever, so I turn to the Astros, who have the perfect choice with Bobby Meacham as their first-base coach, the most painful Yankee to watch in the mid-1980s, the man who, along with Dale Berra (avert your eyes, Yogi!) was tagged out in tandem by Carlton Fisk in a base-running gaffe. The man, this Meacham, who accidentally ran past a runner already on base to invalidate one of his handful of career home runs. The man who, despite all his hustle and bustle under the tough glare of the New York audience, will forever represent for me futility in the game. And he's going to take Houston, well, along with Roy Oswalt's fireball and Lance Berkman's big bat, to the postseason! What about the Pirates, you ask, maybe, possibly, as an afterthought—it is not a good sign that, other than Joe Kerrigan their pitching coach, I don't recognize a single name on their coaching staff, and that includes manager John Russell. But, good goats, I barely recognize any of the players on their roster, which likely accounts for the 17 year streak of losing records. Having sojourned in my life a few years in western Pennsylvania, I hope blindly that the Bucco's day will come again—but first, they need to hire Mike Pagliarulo as their hitting coach!

Out west, the N.L. race should be fierce, and not just because every team is competitive and has made a run in the past few years. The real reason is the strong former Yankee vibe out on the left coast, beginning with Joe Torre's presence with the Dodgers, a reality that still seems slightly warped to me. Well, Joe won four World Series with the Yankees, and his uniform number will likely be retired with all the other single digits, but he never wore the pinstripes as a player, so seeing him in Dodger blue doesn't hurt quite as much as seeing my hero, my exemplar, the crucial player to me at the time in life when baseball held its sway upon me, yes, the incomparable Don Mattingly in a Dodger uniform! Why?! What trick of fate put Joe Girardi at the helm of the Yankees and forced Donny Baseball to go west with his mentor and serve as Dodger batting coach? And without the mustache, no less! The pain of this double indignity, sullying my vision of both Torre and Mattingly, sinks the Dodgers this year. The Rockies have Don Baylor at batting coach, who did good service as a Yankee and teammate of Mattingly but also wore many other uniforms and so fits the itinerant profile better. Plus they have young and lively bats, and the best player no one ever talks about (unless it's to mention the Coors Field advantage), the Hall of Fame-worthy Todd Helton. I like the Rockies, just a few years removed from the World Series, to make a run, with the Diamondbacks in the thick too, based on a strong, young lineup and the likes of imports Dan Haren, Edwin Jackson, and Ian Kennedy in the rotation, but most crucially factoring in the presence of former Yankee Mel Stottlemyre as pitching coach. Still, the division will actually belong to the San Francisco Giants, who pull off the rare triumvirate with three obscure Yankees in key positions of influence—well, pitching coach Dave Righetti isn't exactly obscure, having pitched a no-hitter on July 4, 1984 (or was it 1983? I remember playing a Babe Ruth game that day, perhaps the very game where I accidentally took a left-hander's glove with me out into right field, and, not knowing how to call time, actually wore the thing and almost made a diving catch wearing it—such, such were the joys!) and led the A.L. later on in saves. But when you factor in Hensley "Bam Bam" Meulens at batting coach (I think a native of Curacao, a la Andruw Jones), a huge Yankees bust of the '80s, and also the promising, but never culminating, talent of Roberto Kelly, now staffing the Giants first-base coaching box, you have a massive dose of obscure Yankees fairy-dust! As a footnote, the Giants have the phenomenal one-two pitching punch of Matt Cain and Tim Lincecum to back this up, along with an interesting, perhaps suspect set of retreads such as Edgar Renteria and Aubrey Huff on the field. There are some head-scratchers on this roster, but the Hensley Meulens connection will be enough to prevail. The only other possibility, the Padres, can only muster former Yankee Jerry Hairston, Jr. on their active roster, which isn't nearly enough—plus, Jake Peavey's gone, not a good sign.

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So, the postseason shakedown should look like this: In the A.L. Divisional Series round (can't we come up with a better term than the moribund "divisional series"? What's wrong with the lively term "wildcard"?), the Yankees will meet and destroy the A's, though Mike Gallego will get a standing ovation at the new Stadium when he jogs out to the first base box for Game 1. The Mariners will dig deep to beat the White Sox in five, though Omar Vizquel will hit a home-run on his sixtieth birthday (did I get the math right?). Mariners vs. Yankees will be a tilt like the heart-breaker of 1995, when Griffey, Jr. scored from second on a single to hold back the Yankee onslaught for a year, though now Griffey, Jr. can barely run from second to home in one burst. Nonetheless, Junior has at least one more histrionic moment in him, a towering shot into the second deck in the Bronx that propels the upstart Mariners past the Yankees in seven games. What of A-Rod, Jeter, Texeira, Cano? Seattle pitching looks that good, at least in March.

The N.L. postseason will start with the Giants unseating the Phillies from their two-year perch as N.L. pennant holders, as the phantasms of Giants' history begin to merge and mingle in a miracle run. Bruce Bochy will begin to run roughshod over umpires and opposing players' psyches in the spirit of old John McGraw, Tim Lincecum will summon a surf-punk version of Christy Mathewson's mastery of the strike-zone, and Aaron Rowand will patrol the outer reaches like Willie Mays redux. For a few magical weeks, Aubrey Huff's swing will bear with it the unmistakable marks of Willie McCovey. But, not to be forgotten, the Astros and Mets will go five games, in memory of the wild-eyed tussle of 1986, with the Mike Scott scuffballs and the Doc Gooden heaters. The tables turn this time, and Houston wins this round, facing off against the Giants in a ramshackle affair that stumbles to a seventh game matching two little fireballers, Tim Lincecum and Roy Oswalt, whose combined weight is only slightly heavier than C.C. Sabathia alone. Thirty-eight combined strikeouts in this N.L.C.S. game seven will shatter records, but when Aubrey Huff goes deep to McCovey Cove with one of the first non-steroid empowered shots ever to reach there, the Giants take the game and the series and head up Highway 1 for a Seattle-San Francisco series that will horrify East Coast media moguls and create a crisis amongst Oregonians as to which team to root for.

The last West Coast World Series was upended by an earthquake, but this time a specter of volcanic activity in the Cascades provides the ominous backdrop. With ash and flame in the air as a sort of apocalyptic backdrop, the Mariners finally reach the Fall Classic (leaving the Expos/Nationals as the only franchise never to do so, with no promise on the near horizon unless Stephen Strasburg, their new young fireballer, can win 40-45 games next year), and yet even Griffey's six home runs in the series (note: yes, Junior is the same age as me, and so, if you are reading this as a projection of my own baseball fantasies, read on!) and Cliff Lee's continued October mastery can't hold back the Giants and their obscure-Yankees-coaching-staff fueled destiny. As Faulkner might say, "Irrevocable." Lincecum and Cain each throw two complete games in the series (they each had 4 complete games in 2009, co-leading the N.L.), and in the crucial hour of Game Seven, Aubrey "the New Bambino" Huff calls his shot off of David Aardsma (who will, as an aside, clearly supplant Hank Aaron as the first name in the Baseball Encyclopedia, thus ruining one of the finest serendipities in all of sports archiving) and brings the title back to the Bay Area after a half-century. "The Giants win the pennant, the Giants win the pennant, I refuse to believe it"—and now, Red Barber, we'll do you one better: believe it or not, the Giants win it all. With their quirky, countercultural fireballer, Tim Lincecum—the heir of Steve Dalkowski—leading the charge. Long live the four-seamer! Let's play ball!

Michael R. Stevens is professor of English at Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. With J. Mathew Bonzo, he is the author of Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life: A Reader's Guide (Brazos Press).

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