Joe Posnanski

So, I promised to get back to you on this quirky Brian Bannister day-night split issue. First, just as a reminder, here are Banny’s day and night splits for this year.

Brian Bannister by day (this year):
– 4-0, 0.62 ERA, 29 ip, 12 hits, 3 runs, 2 earned runs, 0 homers, 7 walks, 18 K.
Batting average against: .126; OPS: .320; OPS+ -10(!)*, Babip: .156.

Brian Bannister by night (this year):
– 0-4, 8.02 ERA, 21 1/2 ip, 33 hits, 19 runs, 19 earned, 5 homers, 5 walks, 11 K,
Batting average against: .344; OPS .960; OPS+ 158(!), Babip: .350.

Obviously it’s a very small sample size. Still it’s weird and, as mentioned here, his career numbers (also a relatively small sample size, though he is 10-1 during the day) are also quite skewed toward day baseball.

So, I asked Banny about this (through the magic of phone texting*) … his answer in a moment. First a quick look at the whole question of day-night splits … I have always been led to believe that it’s easier for hitters in the daytime. I think that’s just something as baseball fans you grow up believing. Well, it only makes sense. You would expect the light to be better.

*I don’t know … sometimes I wonder why old farts my age do not want to embrace new technologies. I keep hearing about people who hate phone texting … it’s moving us apart and all that. You know what? I love the phone text. I’m really not bothered at all that people aren’t talking as much as they used to talk … it seems to me that before there was a lot of POINTLESS talk going on. You wanted to call someone to ask one question, and you ended up having to talk about a lot of about the weather and gas prices and shallow family updates (“Yep, the kids are growing up all right!”). If I want to talk to someone, I can do that. But if I just want an answer, whammo, phone text … one question, one answer, no fuss. Nobody types more than they had to in a phone message — it’s a monument to conciseness.

But, as Bill James often asks: Is it true? Do hitters have more success in the daytime.

And as Bill James often finds out: No. It’s not true.

Major League Baseball averages for day games, 2000-2007: .265/.335/.425
Major League Baseball averages for night games, 2000-2007: .267/.335/.426

There you go. So … forget that whole line of thinking, please. Teams scored very, very slightly better at night, are just slightly more likely to hit doubles and triples at night, and strike just an itty-bitty bit less often at night. Everything else, best I can tell, is identical. I don’t think this says batters hit BETTER at night … it seems likely to me that more often starting players play at night (managers seem likely to use backup catchers and rest some of their stars in a day game after a night game). I would guess that if you could ever remove the noise, day and night work out to be the same thing.

I think that if you really consider the factors, this makes sense. Lights are now so much better than they ever were before. Maybe hitting during the day was an advantage, you know, when they were playing night games in the Negro Leagues and the lights were roughly about the same height as Eric Montross. Plus, these players play more than twice as often at night so that becomes more the norm. Plus, there are advantages to hitting at night too — less glare, maybe, a more consistent light, and whatever else.

In other words, I don’t think any crazy day-night splits can be easily explained by baseball talk like “He hides the ball better at night” or whatever. Many point to the strange case of Bronson Arroyo, who ever since he has arrived in Cincinnati has had extreme night-day splits.

This year:
Night: 2-2, 4.46 ERA
Day: 0-2, 15.43 ERA

Last year:
Night: 8-9, 3.93 ERA
Day: 1-6, 5.35 ERA

2006
Night: 9-5, 2.52 ERA
Day: 5-6, 5.29 ERA

Well, a couple of things. For one … before he got to Cincinnati, he had not shown this nutty day-night tendency. So maybe it’s a lifestyle change. Maybe the day problems gotten to his head. Maybe he has vampire issues. Maybe it’s just a weird fluke. Or maybe there’s something deeper. I don’t really know. But I have a strong suspicion this doesn’t have much to do with hitters seeing the ball better against him during the day or whatever.

To Banny. I texted him the question: So what’s the deal with the day-night split? He texted me the sort of answer that, once again, explains why he’s the coolest guy in the game:

“The hitters tell me my fastball looks faster when they’re still a little hungover.”

So there you go. And then, because he is Banny, he delved a little deeper. “I don’t change anything,” he wrote. “The reasons have to do with:

1. Facing lower OPS lineups during the day.

– There could be something to this. Look at the lineups he’s faced in day games:

April 2: Threw seven shutout innings against Detroit — Edgar Renteria was the only Tigers player who got a hit the whole game (he got three). This was more or less the regular Tigers lineup, but Curtis Granderson was out, and Jacque Jones was still with the club.

April 8: Five tough innings against New York — really fought off the Yankees, allowing five hits and four walks. Derek Jeter did not play.

April 14: Complete game three hitter against Minnesota, which played without Joe Mauer and Michel Cuddyer.

May 11: Eight innings, two hits, zero runs against Baltimore … Brian Roberts did not play.

2. The difficulty of sweeping a team.

– Brian believes, a lot of people believe, that most teams play differently when they’ve won the first two games of a series (or, in the case of Baltimore, the first three). Maybe they get content. Maybe they lose a little edge. I’m not sure I completely into this … I haven’t really studied how teams do in third games after they’re won the first two. I probably wouldn’t know how to study it. I do know that Pete Rose says the same thing … he said what those great Reds teams had (did I mention this book … oh, never mind) was a killer instinct and this sort of unquenchable desire to win games just because they just really, really liked winning games, and really, really hated losing them.

Anyway, Brian has pitched a couple of times with his team facing a potential sweep, and he thinks that’s given him an edge. And he’s been on the other side of it too, and that’s given the other team an edge.

3. And it’s a small sample size, plus the day conditions have generally benefitted my pitching style so far this year (No Texas and hurricane conditions).

- This part is definitely true. Banny’s struggles at night are, in large part, due to two games. He got hit pretty good by the California Angels … I thought the Angels basically attacked Banny early in the count, had a good plan, and hit him a little bit. The other tough performance was in Texas, a home run park, and the wind was howling out, horrible conditions for any pitcher and especially Banny. He has given up five homers all year, three of them in that game. In those two games combined, he pitched 9 2/3 innings and gave up 12 runs. Take away those two games, Banny’s ERA is 1.99 this year.

Which just goes to show you how small a sample size we are dealing with here. I think it’s something worth watching because, hey, it’s baseball, and it’s Banny. But my opinion is that this is more or less just small sample size talking.

So, I started to write this blog post on my six weeks as a radio talk show host. And then I got off on this long tangent about my friend, Miami columnist Dan Le Batard. It is, in fact, SO long, that I’m posting it as a separate deal. I’ll get that radio thing done at some point. Also, more baseball coming. And hey … no kidding, BUY THE BOOK! (please?) It’s still $5.99. You guys have pushed it all the way to No. 393 on Amazon. We’re trying to get it into the Top 100. It’s a quest. Can’t everyone in the blog world see the worthy cause here?

* * *

OK, so, I HAVE to tell you my Dan Le Batard story. I’ve been friends with Dan for quite a few years now, respect the heck out of him, wish him well while he takes some time off to find himself and all that. But … yeah, so this was at the Super Bowl in Miami — that’s 2007, right? I’m eating in this cool little restaurant in South Beach, and there’s Dan. And he says to me, “OK, do you want to eat the best Italian food you’ve ever eaten in your entire life?”

Now, seriously, you don’t say something like that to someone like me. This is like saying, “OK, would you like to find the six fingered man?” to Inigo Montoya. This is like saying, “Hey, how would you like two decent starting pitchers?” to a Texas Rangers fan. This is like saying, “OK, how would you like a good acting part again” to Robert DeNiro. It’s almost cruel.

I mean, seriously, the best Italian food of my life? Look: I’ve long thought that there are two kinds of people in this world: There are people who go to eat on vacation. And there are people who go on vacation to eat. I am very much the second guy. Hey, I’m fine for a few minutes with the sound of the waves crashing into the shore, fine going up high in the Eiffel Tower, or looking at cannons at Fort Niagara or snorkeling or spending a preposterous amount of money to see a Broadway show or waiting in line to actually meet the Disney Princesses or whatever it is that this vacation brings. I’m fine with all that stuff, really.

But I GO on vacation to eat. I went with my wife to London and Paris three or for years ago, best vacation of our lives, and this is how I remember the experience:

1. We ate at a restaurant owned by Michael Caine. It wasn’t very good. I ate a lot.
2. We ate at Rules … the oldest restaurant in London. Margo ordered the kidney pie because it sounded traditional and it wasn’t at all what she thought it would be. I ordered something British. I ate a lot.
3. We sat down on a doorstep on the Champs Elysees with a box of macaroons bought from the bakery Laduree. When we got up, we had no more macaroons in the box. It was one of the six greatest experiences of my life — certainly behind the wedding day and the birth of my two daughters and Duane Kuiper’s home run, but ahead of just about everything else.
4. We bought ice cream at some nondescript looking ice cream place in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, and I got a chocolate cone, and I don’t know if it was the location or what but it’s pretty close to the best ice cream cone I’ve ever had.
5. We went to this great Indian restaurant … ate a lot.
6. We went to this Chinese restaurant sort of hidden away … ate a lot.

And so on. Any time my wife brings up that vacation, she will say something like, “Oh remember the Ceremony of the Keys at the Tower of London,” and I’ll say, “Absolutely, I had the pasta at that one restaurant right before that, and it was really good, it was just at some plain only pasta house but I thought the sauce was homemade though the salad wasn’t much and …” Then she says, “You know what was great about the Louvre, when we went to the … ” I’ll say, “well, not the cafeteria, because I thought the sandwich I had there was pretty dry …”

in other words, when Lebby asked me if I wanted to eat the best Italian food of my life, my first thought was, “OK, who do I have to kill? Is it someone I know? Because if it’s someone I don’t know, then yes, for the best pasta of my life, absolutely, I’m ready to do what has to be done, but if it’s someone I do know, then no, I’m not killing someone I KNOW just for Italian food, you know, unless they have a really good chocolate dessert too.” I managed to compose myself and say, well, yes, I would like to eat the best Italian food of my life, absolutely.

So he said: I’ll call you tomorrow. There’s this place. It’s impossible to get into. It’s kind of far away. But I know people there. I’ll have to call the guy for you special. But I’m telling you it will be great. It’s like, you know, a connected place. It’s incredible.”

A connected place. This made the whole thing sound even better. I was about to go to a far away to a crowded Italian place inhabited by Mafia types. That sounded to me like a place where I really might get the best Italian food of my life, a place that made sauce as good as Paulie and Vinnie and Henry Hill’s sauce in jail. I was so excited I could hardly sleep, man. This was going to be AMAZING. Once I went to Chicago with a friend, and we went to an Italian restaurant that looked really good — this is absolutely true, or at least it is how I remember it — and we walked up to the door, and it was like 7 p.m. And the guy at the door said, “We’re closed.” Closed? At 7 p.m.? And I looked inside … there was one guy eating in the whole restaurant. One guy. The door guy then pointed to another restaurant and then (I might have imagined this part, but I believe this is true) gave us money to leave. I’ve always wanted to go back to that restaurant … I can only imagine what the Chicken Parm or Manicotti tastes like in that place. And I’ve imagined it a lot.

So, this was going to make up for the missed restaurant in Chicago. Dan did call me up the next day, and he said that I was in — me and a couple of friends — and then he had very specific directions about what we had to do to get in. That only made it better. He said that we had to ask for some guy (can’t remember the name, let’s call him Brian) and that Brian would take care of us and that at the end — this was very important — we had to slip 100 bucks to Brian.

Man, was I excited now. The best Italian restaurant in the world. A place where we had to tip a guy a c-note just to get a table. Are you kidding me? I didn’t eat all day because I was just ready to eat some serious Italian food. And then we headed out. Dan warned us before we left that this place would not look like much from the outside — it’s in a strip mall — but he told us not to be fooled. He was guaranteeing Italian food like no place else.

This place was pretty far. It was like 45 minutes away from where we were staying, maybe an hour. And we got to the place, well, Dan was right. It was one of those strip malls. We drove up, and we were like — come on. You’re telling me the best Italian food in the world is in a Florida strip mall?* Is this possible?

*I have another friend who is convinced the best Chinese food in the world is in a Houston strip mall. Maybe the problem is I don’t have the right friends.

Then we noticed there were people standing outside this restaurant. LOTS of people standing outside this restaurant. There was a Depression Era bread line snaking up to this restaurant. And this chill came over me — Yes! We found it! THE BEST ITALIAN FOOD OF MY LIFE WAS MOMENTS AWAY. We had to park a pretty long way off, and we started walking to the place, and I could already taste that food, I mean, seriously, there’s Sinatra music playing in my head, and my stomach is already growling instructions, “Start off with a Caesar’s Salad, you have to do that, and then, you know, maybe some Calimari, and oh, I’ll bet that bread will be amazing and …” All because of my friend Dan!

OK, so I have now described the restaurant to pretty precisely the way Dan described it to me. You have an image in your mind of what it looks like, right? It’s a Mafia joint with the best Italian food in the world, right? What’s your image? Are you imagining a dark place, dark wood, a little bit of red velvet, maybe some tapestries on the wall, some candles going, a couple of fading photographs of Venice, personalized photo on the wall from Joe DiMaggio (“Food’s great! Signed: The Clipper). I mean this is precisely what I was imagining.

Um. No.

How to describe the place? OK, think about the loudest bar you’ve ever walked into. OK? You with me? I mean the loudest bar, one that’s so loud the light fixtures are shaking, and the organs in your chest are thumping, a flock of birds fly away in terror, ear doctors are on call outside to treat busted ear drums. OK? You envisioning that? Great. Now double it. OK? So, we’re now at Black Sabbath concert levels, only you are actually inside Tony lommi’s guitar. Right? You with me? OK, double it again.

That should get you pretty close to half the volume of this place. Wow. Airplanes could land in this place and no one would notice. Dick Vitale could call the action and no one would hear him. Garbage trucks could collide inside and no one would detect it for days. And it was very much a BAR. And not just any BAR but a MIAMI BAR. Put it this way: We walked in just as they were projecting scenes from “Pulp Fiction” on the wall. Music was pounding and then suddenly it would STOP and the dialogue from the movie would break hard into the music whenever Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta started killing people. Seriously. Now, look, I’m reasonably fine with the incredibly loud bar scene … when I know I’m going to an incredibly loud bar. But, you know, when I think I’m going to Louis’ Restaurant in the Bronx, when I’m hoping to go to the bathroom only to see Michael’s untraceable gun … it’s pretty jarring to walk into a Crocket and Tubbs scene. You belong to the city, indeed.

Well, fine. It was a bit surprising. And yes, I’ll admit it, I mentally gave up on this being the best Italian food I’ve ever had. I mean, seriously, what are the odds that I’m going to get an Osso Bucco from heaven while they’re showing the ear-cutting scene from Resevoir Dogs on the wall behind us. Still, I’m thinking it will be GOOD Italian food. Dan had never steered me wrong before (though, I was now realizing, Dan had never steered me right before either … he had never steered me at all).

So, next step, I have to find this guy, Brian. It takes about 20 minutes of jumping up and down and screaming at everyone before he notices us … then I smoothly drop Dan’s name (DAN LE BATARD SENT US .. NO DAAAAAN LE BA … YOU KNOW THE SPORTS … NO NOT DAN MARINO … LE BATARD!). He said something like, “OK, wait here, I’ll get you in.” Of course, it might have been, “Wooger, Mooger, Life’s A Booger,” I mean, we couldn’t hear a thing.

Still, we waited. And we waited. And we waited. This how much I wanted that food. I’m not exactly sure how long we waited — an hour and a half maybe — but I can tell you that at some point the noise just started popping my brain cells. They say that one way you can torture and break a prisoner is to play really, really loud and random music at him for a long period of time. Well if I someone had asked me for any national security secrets at that moment, I would have spilled it. My head was throbbing. I kept getting shoved around by people trying to get to … I don’t know where they were going. There was nowhere to go. There were no open tables. There was no place to stand. And did I mention it was loud.

And MAN were my two friends getting ticked off now.

As you no doubt expected, Brian disappeared. Gone baby gone. Well, hey — it had to be expected a hot Miami bar/restaurant (I guess) the Friday night before the Super Bowl, supermodels and pro football players were rushing in, I’m thinking that three shlubby sportswriters with a letter of transit from Dan Le Batard were pretty low on the priority list … in retrospect maybe we were supposed to tip Brian the $100 BEFORE he sat us down. Well, hell, I don’t know how to do that stuff. A tip won’t get you very far at Denny’s. Whatever, finally, we just had to go. There would be no unprecedented Italian food, not on this night. As we were leaving, we ran into Brian in the parking lot. I started to go up to him to say that we were leaving. He saw me coming and immediately walked off in another direction.

That was it. Dan called the next day to ask how it went. What can you say about that expeirence? I’m sure I’ll forgive him someday. No, really. Someday. I will tell you that nght, me and my two friends (who, I’m sure, have not forgiven me) ate at some fried fish place where the shrimp, lobster, mahi mahi and paper plates all taste precisely the same. It was depressing and greasy and our eardrums were bleeding. Anyway, I ate a lot.

We’re going to try and put a blog post tonight off the Royals-Tigers game. Lots to talk about in baseball. Chipper’s .400 run. Lance Berkman’s absurd streak. Justin Verlander’s collapse. My Tampa Bay Rays. The correct pronunciation of Luke Hochevar. Lots of stuff.

In the meantime though, I happened to go to Amazon and I noticed something.

They are selling the hardcover version of my book, The Soul of Baseball, for $5.99.

That’s $5.99.

Did I mention that it’s $5.99.

Now, I’m not really quite sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, I don’t think any author likes seeing their book in the bargain bin next to all those books like “1001 Racist Jokes” and “Cats Are People Too”* and all that. On the other hand, you know, well, no, there is no other hand. They are selling my book for $5.99 now. I mean, uh, ouch.

*I think there are three very small but brilliant lines from the amazing “Annie Hall” that you can use often in every day life. They are:

So, frankly, here’s what you have to do. You have to buy the book now. You have to buy lots and lots of copies. You are getting sleepy. Come on! This is our chance to push the book into the Top 100 on Amazon. I mean, seriously, it’s FIVE DOLLARS AND NINETY NINE CENTS. There are GREETING CARDS more expensive than that. That’s not a discount … that’s a yard sale price.*

*Have you ever seen that great Jake Johannsen bit about yard sales. He talks about how you really don’t have much negotiating room when you set a price. You price a shirt for $1, and the guy only offers you a quarter, you’re pretty much stuck. You have to say something like, “Hey, listen, you either give me a dollar for it now … or you fish it out of the trash later.” … That really hits home for me. My grandfather was the king of yard sales. He would offer a quarter for anything. I mean, ANYTHING. He’d be like, “This thing is a piece of junk. It’s not worth anything. Look at this, it’s broken. I wouldn’t take this if you gave it to me for free. But, I’m here, I’ll give you a quarter for it.” And someone would say, “Um, sir, that’s my car.”

You can buy four copies for the regular marked price of one. You can give books to your family, to neighbors, to friends, to that hot girl or hot guy you’ve been eyeing at the office, to the person who mows your lawn. You can just put it on your desk and start conversation with it:

Mr. Wilson: “Um, did you finish the McKinley Report yet?”
You: “Hey, boss, did you know that this book won the Casey Award for best baseball book of 2007.”
Mr. Wilson: “You didn’t finish the report, did you?”
You: “Well, uh, no, but hey, you know Buck O’Neil was the first African American coach in baseball history?”
Mr. Wilson: “No didn’t know that.”
You: “It’s true.”
Mr. Wilson: “Great. You’re fired.”
You: “Um … I got you a copy.”

We can do it. Top 100. We can make it happen. I probably won’t make a dime off it because, I mean, they’re selling the book for $5.99. But we can make history here, people!

And no, this will not absolve you of your duty to buy The Machine next year. But that is next year.

For fun … here’s my greatest day in sportswriting:

So, this was at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney. I mentioned here earlier that the Olympics are like nothing else in sports journalism. You become entirely and inexplicably consumed by the Games, especially at the Summer Olympics where there are always about twenty different things going on at once. It really is hard to explain the absurd enormity being in the middle of it all. From home, I always thought, the Olympics seemed pretty big. But when you are there, diving is like the World Series, water polo is like the Super Bowl, rhythmic gymnastics is like the Masters. Yes, from afar these are still diving, water polo and rhythmic gymnastics … but there, at the heart of it, you are blinded to perspective. You are bumping shoulders with reporters and fans from pretty much every country in the world. You are surrounded by sellout crowds, including many people who may have actually paid a scalper a lot of money to see that day’s beach volleyball match. You are talking only to athletes who have DEDICATED THEIR ENTIRE LIVES to be their for that one moment. You are also pretty much shut off from pennant races and NFL training camps and golf majors and presidential news and anything else that might be distracting. You are living, breathing, drinking, sleeping Olympics. It is everything.*

*I’ve always thought that after three weeks of Olympic immersion, reporters would blindly kill after being shown the Queen of Diamonds.

So, with that background, it was the day of the gold medal baseball game. Tommy Lasorda was manager of that team, you might recall. I wanted to go somewhere else. It wasn’t personal. We had someone going to the game, and I had already written about Lasorda and that team, and anyway — I don’t like baseball at the Olympics. I don’t like tennis at the Olympics. For a while they were trying to add golf — I’m glad they didn’t. I like it when the Olympics are CLEARLY the most important event in your sport.

So, I was looking for something cool to write about — this is a big thing at the Olympics. The thing is so vast that most of the time when something cool happens, you are 10 miles away watching something decidedly uncool like the ancient Pocket Hercules failing to lift weight*.

*OK, quickly, have to tell this Olympic story. So in 1996, in Atlanta, I saw the great weightlifter Pocket Hercules win a gold medal in front of a wild crowd and it was one of the cooler sports moments of my life. I’m not going to go into that except to say that for the next four years, I kept telling my buddy Vac how great this Pocket Hercules story was. I mean I PEPPERED him with Pocket Hercules teasers. “Oh man, you should have been there.” So in 2000, Vac basically went to the Olympics for one reason only — he was GOING TO SEE Pocket Hercules lift weights.

So we go to the event and … well, it’s not the same Pocket Hercules. Now, the guy’s out of shape, uninterested, going through the motions, sort of like a weight-lifting version of Roger Dorn . If I remember right, he did not have a single successful lift. And the everlasting image from that Olympics was not the cheering crowd or the triumphant Hercules holding an impossible amount of weight over his head. No, it was a fat Pocket Hercules smoking cigarettes in the parking lot outside after he was disqualified. “Yeah,” Vac said. “Great story.” I don’t believe he has ever forgiven.

Anyway, while everyone else was heading for baseball, my friend, the impossibly cool Chuck Culpepper, told me about the unbeatable Russian wrestler. It seems there was this Russian wrestler who had never lost a an Olympic match. Ever. He had won like three Gold Medals already and, if I’m remembering correctly, he had not given up a single point in years.

Now, as someone raised on the power of Ivan Koloff and who had seen Rocky IV at least 12 times,, I was of course drawn to the story. What could be better? An unbeatable Russian wrestler. This guy was so good, there were many scalpers outside the arena. He was so good, the president of the IOC was there to give him some sort of special Olympic medal. He was apparently a very big deal in those countries that don’t have baseball, and so I thought he could make a great story.

We showed up in the arena, and like I say, it was absolutely packed. And it was loud. It was like Boston Garden hockey crowd loud. Now, I should say at this point that I did not understand the rules of Greco Roman wrestling them … and I think this should be pretty easy to believe because I don’t understand the rules of Greco Roman wrestling NOW. I just watched this Russian guy grapple with this other guy for a few seconds, and I guess it was impressive enough, though no one seemed to be reaching for a metal chair. And then suddenly, without warning, everyone in the crowd all at once shouted “OOOOOOOOH!”

“What the heck just happened?” I asked Chuck.

“I have no idea,” Chuck said.

“Something happened,” I said.

Then we looked up at the scoreboard. It turned out the other guy, whoever he was, had gotten a point. I didn’t know how he got the point then. I don’t really know how he got the point now. Apparently he broke a hold or something. Whatever — even I understood this was a big deal. The Russian had not given up a point in forever. I thought I heard the Rocky trainer saying, “You see? He’s not a machine! He’s a man!” So, I now expected the Russian to pick up this poser, fold him up into one of those paper fortune tellers* and be done with it.

*Remember those things — those little origami crafts girls in school would do, and then they would move it around with their fingers, ask you to pick a color, then a number, and then tell your fortune was “You’re ugly.” Or maybe that was just in my school.

Only … that didn’t happen. The Russian couldn’t budge this guy. And the crowd sensed that something magical was happening. They were getting louder and louder, and the clock was draining, and the Russian was trying to move this kid but nothing was happening. and the sound roared even higher, and people started stomping and clapping and going crazy, and the score was still 1-0 unknown guy, and the clock kept going down, and then I saw what to this day is one of the most emotional sports things I’ve ever seen in my life. I saw Jeter hit the homer after midnight. I saw the Rams tackle a receiver at the 1 as the Super Bowl expired. I saw Tiger Woods chip into a sunlight spot at the 16th in Augusta and watched the ball roll backward, stop for an early curtain call, and then drop into the hole. I saw a young girl land on one leg to help America win a gold medal. I saw Mario Chalmers make a three-point jump shot to tie the national championship game in the final seconds. I saw a journeyman from Japan throw a perfect game (for eight innings — then the closer finished it off) to clinch the Japan Series.

I’m not sure I ever saw anything quite like this: With the clock running out, the great Russian wrestler bowed his head and held out his hand in defeat.

Mayhem. Madness. Insanity. I turned to Chuck and asked. “What the heck did we just see?” But he couldn’t even hear me. It was that loud. Chuck and I started working our way through the crowd and to the press room, and we kept just looking at each other in sheer disbelief. This American — it turned out he was an American — had beaten the unbeatable Russian. It was like all the Rocky movies combined into one. Of course, at the time we knew NOTHING about the American — just his name. Rulon Gardner. But that was enough. What a story.

So we got into the press room, sat in the front row, and Chuck whispered to me, “This is amazing. I hope this guy’s a good story.” Then Rulon Gardner walked up on the podium, and he turned to the guy running the show, and he said: “Wow, this is pretty cool. I’ve never done a press conference before.”

Chuck and I looked at each other. Holy cow. This thing was getting better.

The first question came, and it was something like: “So, did you think you had it in you to beat the great and unbeatable Russian?”

And Rulon Gardner said: “Well, when I was growing, I used to wrestle cows on our dairy farm …”

Um. Yeah, Guy wrestled cows. Seriously, sportswriters, you DREAM of moments like this. I mean that literally. You go to sleep after having interviewed another boring golfer who started playing because his Dad was a member of the local country club or some bland pitcher who was the star of his high school team, got drafted high, got paid a sweet signing bonus, played two years in the minors and then got called to the show — and you DREAM about an American farm kid who wrestled cows and ended up winning a gold medal by beating an invincible Russian.

“He mumbled something in Russian at the end,” Rulon said. “I think it was ‘I give up.’”

So Chuck and I were dizzy when we left that press conference. It was flat incredible. The kid was funny and charming and modest and he had wrestled cows. The story could not get any better. And then we walked out, and we ran into this woman, and it turns out that she was Rulon Gardner’s mother. So we asked her when she knew that her son had a chance to be an Olympic champion. And she told us that she knew when, at a very young age, she saw Rulon carry four milk buckets at one time.

Our cup runneth over. The Mom turned out to be as great as Rulon — she invited Chuck and me up to her part of Wyoming to go fishing because, “that’s where Wilford Brimley fishes — you know, the Quaker Oats guy?” This was the story that just did not stop giving. We said good bye, and we raced back to our chairs, and sat behind our computers, and we looked at each other, and Chuck said, “How the heck do we even write this? It’s too great.”

I said, “Hold on, I need to find out a little bit about Rulon’s town … see if they’re excited back home.” There was obviously a huge time difference … it was morning, I guess, back in Wyoming. Rulon, as I recall, was from a place called Afton, Wyoming, so I called an Afton radio station to find out what the mood was like. And here’s what happened — the DJ picked up the phone, but he did not answer it. Instead, he put it down right next to him. He was on the air and could not talk.

And here’s what I heard him say: “OK, well, it’s time for the birthdays. Happy birthday to Steve Johnson over there on Coventry Road, he’s 41 today. Way to go Steve. Happy birthday to little Timmy Wilkins, can you believe he’s already 11 …”

And then, suddenly: “We’re going to have to dispense with the birthdays. We have some breaking news …”

I wobbled back to Chuck. He said, “What did you find out?” I said: “You wouldn’t even believe it. We have wandered into the middle of Bedford Falls.”

And then it really was time to write. It was impossible. We had too much stuff. We had too much GREAT stuff. This guy was like a character out of Yankee Doodle Dandy. It couldn’t be real. Chuck and I were laughing and trying to write and laughing more … never had a story like it in our lives. People often ask me how I handle writer’s block — well knock on wood, thank my lucky stars, I’ve never had it. My thought about writer’s block is basically that my Dad worked in a factory almost his whole life, and he never had “factory block.” Sometimes the words don’t come as easily as others, but you do what you have to do.

But this wasn’t writer’s block. This was a writer’s overdose. I had no idea how to sum up a Wyoming farm boy who wrestled cows in a small town where a disc jockey reads the morning birthdays near Wilford Brimley’s fishing pond and grew up to defeat the indestructible Russian in perhaps the greatest Olympic upset going back to the days when Greeks ran naked through the …

“Excuse me,” a man said to me.

Oh boy. Who was this guy? “Yes,” I said. “Can I help you.”

“I was looking for the Gardner party,” he said. “Do you happen to know where they went?”

“Yes,” I said. “I think they went to celebrate at the Hard Rock Cafe.”

“Oh,” he said. “I have to catch up with them. I’m Rulon’s father.”

Oh oh. No. Not the father. I really, really don’t need to talk to the father right now. Why is it that when dealing with the deliberately boring athletes that fill the sports pages on a regular basis, I’ve never had a father just walk up to me.

“Well sir,” I said. “You must be very proud.”

“Oh, absolutely,” he said. “I’m just so happy to be here. I didn’t think were going to make it.”

No. Don’t ask him. Just point him toward the Hard Rock …

“Really,” I said. “Why’s that?”

“Well,” he said. “You know, we don’t really have a lot of money. So in order to raise enough money to get here I had to sell my world famous sausage stew at the Lincoln County Fair.”

And that broke it. That’s when my head exploded. The father then started telling us about someone who saved him in Korea, but I wasn’t even listening anymore. I couldn’t hear anymore. It was like being in the chocolate factory and having to eat your way out. In the end, it was a match between two men I had never heard of before, in a sport with rules I did not understand, in a place 9,000 miles away, the other side of the world. And I’ll never cover anything like it.

“Can you believe this?” Chuck said to me as we hysterically tried to finish up our stories.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” I said. “I really didn’t need that stew.”

Wow, as someone who claims to be one of the nation’s leading Brian Bannister scholars, I am embarrassed to say I missed this. But I did. It is brilliant reader PC who points this out:

Brian Bannister by day (this year):
– 4-0, 0.62 ERA, 29 ip, 12 hits, 3 runs, 2 earned runs, 0 homers, 7 walks, 18 K.
Batting average against: .126; OPS: .320; OPS+ -10(!)*, Babip: .156.

Brian Bannister by night (this year):
– 0-4, 8.02 ERA, 21 1/2 ip, 33 hits, 19 runs, 19 earned, 5 homers, 5 walks, 11 K,
Batting average against: .344; OPS .960; OPS+ 158(!), Babip: .350.

*I may have mentioned here earlier that my father was quite the chess player — Dad says he’s lost his chess edge now, but in his younger days he won the Cleveland Open and had pretty close to a Master rating. Because of this, I grew up around chess. And even though I’m quite pitiful the few times I actually play game (as Priest Holmes will tell you) there are a few things in the game that I think carry over beyond the chess board. One of those cool things: In algebraic chess notation — that’s chess play-by-play — if someone makes a great and unexpected move, you put an exclamation point after it. And if someone makes a REALLY great and brilliant move, you put TWO exclamation points after it. Conversely, if someone makes a horrendous move, you put a question mark afterward, and if someone makes a bizarre, Matt Millen, “I’m not sure you understand the basic rules” move, you put TWO question marks after.

Sorry, back to Banny and this day/night craziness. Look at those numbers. Now, you can say: Well, sure, but that’s nothing, it’s a small sample size, it’s a fluke. Maybe. But as PC continues to point out … here are his career numbers:

Brian Bannister by day (career)
– 10-1, 2.65 ERA, 88 1/3 ip, 67 hits, 28 runs, 26 er, 4 homers, 23 walks, 38 Ks.
Batting average against: .212; OPS: .576; Babip .226.

Brian Bannister by night (career)
– 8-13, 4.58 ERA, 165 ip; 168 hits, 88 runs, 84 er, 20 homers, 55 walks, 87 Ks.
Batting average against: .261; OPS .763; Babip: .275.

Again, we’re not looking at a big sample by any means. But I think it’s big enough to say: “Wow, that’s kinda weird.” For whatever reason, it seems like Brian’s stuff is just much harder to hit during the day. I’m going to ask him about this, if there’s anything to it, if it’s something he’s noticed (I’m guessing yes) … we’ll try to report back.