Idiots Write About Sports

I’ve been too busy — or perhaps too indifferent — to comment on Oakland sending Eric Karros on his way with a laurel and a hearty handshake. Karros was signed in the off-season under the theory that he would mash lefty pitching, thus sparing Scott Hatteberg and Erubiel Durazo the indignity of watching their hitting statistics plummet thanks to southpaws.

It probably seemed like a good idea at the time. Instead, Hatteberg and Durazo are hitting left-handers just fine, thank you very much. And Karros wasn’t really hitting anyone at all — .194 average, .243 on-base percentage, .311 slugging in 103 at-bats.

Karros’ Oakland tenure is really just a rumor to me. Of the Oakland games I’ve seen live and in person this year, he played in just two of them. He went 0-for-4, with a run, a walk, two strikeouts and one inexplicable stolen base. (Hang down your head, Bobby Estalella, for allowing Karros to advance a base on your watch.) So it’s not like I had a chance to get that attached to him.

But I do have some connection to Karros, having been in Southern California when he came up through the Dodger system. In one of those weird little things that mean absolutely nothing in the greater scheme of things, Jason and I were in attendance for Karros’ first major-league home run. (In another one of those weird little things that means even less than the first thing, that game also featured an at-bat face-off God (Jim Gott and the Devil (Tim Teufel) — at least, it did if you speak German.)

Karros wasn’t supposed to make the team that year — I think the Dodgers were going to hand first-base duties over to Todd Benzinger, which seems nuts in retrospect. But Benzinger got injured, and the Dodgers started the season with Karros. I remember Karros was so convinced he was going to be sent down to Albuquerque on a moment’s notice, he took his laundry with him on road trips. But Karros wound up earning the gig and winning the Rookie of the Year award that season. Presumably, he started leaving the laundry at home.

That story kept coming back to me a few years later, after Karros was an established star and a notoriously slow starter. “I’ll get my numbers,” Fabio would tell reporters inquiring about another tepid early-season performance. Somewhere along the line, he went from a guy who didn’t take anything for granted to a guy who felt like he had nothing to prove.