{"id":19469,"date":"2022-07-19T20:30:50","date_gmt":"2022-07-19T20:30:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/no-one-will-ever-have-a-worse-all-star-game-than-dan-uggla\/"},"modified":"2022-07-19T20:30:50","modified_gmt":"2022-07-19T20:30:50","slug":"no-one-will-ever-have-a-worse-all-star-game-than-dan-uggla","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/no-one-will-ever-have-a-worse-all-star-game-than-dan-uggla\/","title":{"rendered":"No One Will Ever Have A Worse All-Star Game Than Dan Uggla"},"content":{"rendered":"
We are each of us allotted a certain and finite number of hours on earth, and there is no law or rule or norm dictating that any of those should be spent watching the Major League Baseball All-Star Game. Even if you are among the Americans who still go to an office, and even if that office has not replaced its water cooler with something motion-activated and perpetually on the fritz, and even if the cultural siloing and antisocial tendencies that go a long way toward defining the present era have not obliterated old rituals around that gurgling totem, I can promise you this: you will not find yourself out of the loop with your coworkers if you can’t break down the \u201cBattle of Luises\u201d contested between Castillo and Arraez in the fifth inning.<\/p>\n
Still, on the off chance you steered to this blog for viewing advice: the MLB All-Star Game is deeply lame. It offers the public worse baseball played for lower stakes by more skilled but less interested players, against a backdrop of mawkishness on one end and pitiful relevance-hunting on the other. At some point Tuesday night, John Smoltz will get weepy about Sandy Koufax; at another, Kyle Schwarber will record history’s least viral TikTok. But occasionally there comes a man who can elevate the Midsummer Classic not by transcending any of that, but by leaning\u2014or, more accurately, by falling ass-over-teakettle\u2014into it. This perfect marriage of medium and artist is rare, but it has happened. In July 2008, Dan Uggla was the dope with the paintbrush.<\/p>\n
As an emblem of the changes baseball underwent in the aughts\u2014the slow-then-sudden embrace of certain statistics, the abandoning in response of long-held aesthetic conventions\u2014Uggla was unassailable. He played second base, at the first moment in history when someone of his proportions, skill set, and temperament was allowed to do so. Into the position staffed traditionally by some of the most graceful and intuitive athletes the sport has known stepped this snarling and wildly overvascular rectangle, his name a Pynchonian bullseye, his swing a mad-at-dad uppercut. He tended to either rocket a homer or corkscrew himself thorax-deep into the batter’s-box dirt. He did not hit many grounders or convincingly field them. He was an anthropomorphized energy drink reared on Gary Sheffield highlights, a mitt affixed to a blocking sled.<\/p>\n
As it happened, Uggla was also an All-Star in ’08, for the second time in his three years with the Florida Marlins. He deserved it. Over the first 95 games of that season, he socked 23 homers and put up a .978 OPS, paying out the bet the Marlins made when they claimed him in the White Elephant Party of the Rule 5 Draft back in 2005: that whatever glove- flailing and-shoelace-stepping indignities he own defensively would be made up by his pioneering work in the field of forearmference. Uggla was who he was, and when he showed up at Yankee Stadium, both the worst-case and the likeliest scenario seemed to be that he’d strike out a time or two while Tim McCarver talked about Joe Morgan.<\/p>\n
Instead, Uggla, as part of the last wave of position players off the National League’s bench, entered in the sixth inning of a game that would, heinously and hilariously, go 15, wrapping up well past one in the morning. These were the days when the All-Star Game determined home-field advantage in the World Series, so for whatever anti-competitive decisions had been made in the spirit of inclusion\u2014Joe Crede replaces Alex Rodriguez<\/em>, reads a cursed snippet of the Baseball-Reference log\u2014it had to declare a winner. Uggla got nine and a half frames, therefore, with which to author what is still an unparalleled All-Star Game masterpiece: an oh-for-four with three strikeouts and three errors, a ballet of musclebound misery.<\/p>\n Top of the 8<\/strong>th<\/sup><\/strong>1 on, no outs, NL 2, AL 2\u2014<\/strong>K<\/strong><\/p>\n Our hero survived his first inning and a half without incident, even snagging a pop-up, before he came up to bat against Jonathan Papelbon in the eighth. Papelbon threw a high heater; Uggla swung late and under it. Nothing too shameful, all told, but he received a lovely intro from Joe Buck, who called Uggla \u201cmaybe one of the best hitters you at home have never heard of.\u201d Buck went on, \u201cAll this guy does, a former Rule 5 pick from Arizona, is pound home runs.\u201d<\/p>\n Top of the 10<\/strong>th<\/sup><\/strong>runners on first and third, one out, NL 3, AL 3\u2014<\/strong>GIDP<\/strong><\/p>\n In the tenth inning, Russell Martin worked an eight-pitch at-bat for a single off of Mariano Rivera. Miguel Tejada then pushed Martin to third via a hit-and-run, with an assist from the shortstop stylings of Michael Young. (Just a tremendous sampling of stiff-hipped gentlemen, here.) Better hitters than Uggla have chunked Mo’s cutter into the dirt, in bigger spots. Still, boy did Dan ever chunk it. Anything but a double-play, and Uggla could have been\u2026well, if not a hero, the dude who let everyone go off and get up to whatever they wanted to get up to on a work trip in New York. But despite huffing it down the line, Uggla couldn’t beat out a (not particularly smooth or quick) relay from Ian Kinsler and Young. The game stayed tied. The game kept going.<\/p>\n Bottom of the 10<\/strong>th<\/sup><\/strong>bases empty, no outs, NL 3, AL 3\u2014<\/strong>E4<\/strong><\/p>\n The reason marsupials have such short arms, according to Jim Cooper of Syracuse University, is that, as little ‘roo tykes, they need those things close to full power pretty much out of the gate, for hauling themselves up into their mother’s pouch. There’s a tradeoff involved: What is strong early stays stumpy later. \u201cThe idea is that since they need the forelimbs to climb across their mother’s belly at birth, they end up ‘stuck’ with this forelimb shape in later life,\u201d Cooper said. I like to imagine a similar dynamic at work between four-year-old Daniel and the Uggla family bench press. Anyway, in the bottom of the tenth, he couldn’t quite reach a Young bouncer. The official scorer ruled it an error.<\/p>\n Bottom of the 10<\/strong>th<\/sup><\/strong>one on, no outs, NL 3, AL 3\u2014<\/strong>E4<\/strong><\/p>\n On the very next pitch, Carlos Quentin rolled a routine double-play grounder right at Uggla, who, as you might by this point guess, did something not at all routine with it. That it was hit smack between his feet set off a recognizable oops! oops! <\/em>response, the ball and Uggla two smartphone-sunk pedestrians meeting mid-crosswalk. Uggla lurched down after it in a manner that, watched back now, triggers in me a flare-up of sympathy sciatica. The ball skidded under his glove, Uggla toppled over, and Buck said, “Wow.” <\/p>\n