---

They are bringing Lebowitz in

the eighth inning but the game

is already 9 to 1
By Gustavo Coronel

December 2, 2003
 

---

 

Left hander relief pitcher Mike Lebowitz walked slowly to the mound of the Caracas baseball stadium. He had been brought at the last minute from Havana, from the Vedado neighborhood to be exact, where he had been living for a while, trying to understand Latin American baseball and politics. As he  walked to the mound  he felt like a beached whale. He had no knowledge of the opponents, not even a good feeling for his own team. He had been reading a book by Marta Harnecker, "Harnecker" as he calls her, but he knew that Chileans do not play baseball. Furthermore the book was in Spanish. From what little he had seen so far, his team was not even revolutionary in the orthodox sense of the word. At best the game was being played by two teams of the bourgeoisie, not by a truly revolutionary team opposing the hated o! ligarchies. And there he  he was, coming in to pitch for a team which seemed to be simply looking for a political reshuffling and not for a true change. "What am I doing here?" he thought. But as he thought that, it was already too late. Manager Gregory Wilpert was handing him the ball.

The problem with Lebowitz is that he is not a baseball player. He probably plays good hockey, at least he looks like a hockey player,  but they brought him to Caracas to play a game he did not know anything about. His knowledge of Latin baseball was only theoretical. In the case of Venezuelan baseball it was only based on whatever books Marta told him and this is not the proper way to play the game. The pitcher he was relieving, Greg Palast, had gone back to London in disgrace, after allowing several runs by the opposition. Manager Wilpert only had Lebowitz left in the bullpen. The star of the team, first baseman Chávez, has had a disatrous performance. He committed several costly errors which allowed the opposing team to build a comfortable lead.  Lebowitz felt this was unfair. The game is already lost, he felt, and no matter how good I look in relief I will not get any ! credit.

He decided, therefore, to do the minimum possible effort on behalf of a team he did not trust. For all he knew, the good guys were the others. He would be going back to Havana, where he would write an esay on the unusual type of baseball played in Venezuela.

The main problem with Lebowitz is that he lives in a predominantly theoretical, academic world. If you pitch "this way," theory says, the batter will strike out. But whenever he tries to put this theory into practice, he gets clobbered. Considering his significant cultural limitations, he did as well in Venezuela as a Venezuelan would have done shoveling snow in British Columbia.

 

© 2003 Gustavo Coronel