Eric Byrnes isn't even close to the first man to end up eating his words when it was all over for himself and his club. The Arizona Diamondbacks' outfielder and resident character might be the first man to end up eating dirt in the same mouthful, though.
That was Byrnes, with a glorious enough chance to tie it up with one swing in the top of the ninth Monday night, diving futilely to and past first base when his grounder ended up going from Troy Tulowitski to Todd Helton with the National League pennant attached to it, marked for the Colorado Rockies.
Byrnes, who tried firing up his mates during a Saturday night commentary in which he didn't suggest but said right out that the Rockies hadn't outplayed the Diamondbacks, that they got the bounces and the calls and the breaks, oblivious enough to the salient point that while the Snakes might have out-hit the Rockies just enough, they didn't out-exploit the Rockies when it mattered the most.
And there he was, face down past first base while Todd Helton and his mates swooped into the celebration swarm, left to ponder, perhaps, that maybe Branch Rickey, that ancient master manipulator, had a point about luck being the residue of design.
Byrnes will probably shake it off before these words are finished. As well he should. Even if he's joining a decently distinguished lineup of men who found themselves having to eat words, if not dirt, when the final results were tabulated.
Casey Stengel had to enjoy such a diet once upon a time. Managing the Boston Braves before World War II, the Ol' Perfesser fumed when a rookie left-hander refused on direct orders to knock down Brooklyn Dodgers shortstop Pee Wee Reese. Stengel ran the kid back to the minors with the no-guts tag.
Two decades later, the kid earned the right to say he'd played for Casey before and after Casey was a genius, thanks to spending part of the end of his career with the hapless 1965 New York Mets. And Stengel earned the right to say, about Bronze Star winner and Hall of Fame pitcher Warren Spahn, "I said 'no guts' to a kid who went on to become a war hero and one of the greatest pitchers anybody ever saw. You can't say I don't miss 'em when I miss 'em."
Charlie Dressen knew the feeling, too. His Dodgers stood 13 games up after beating their single most hated rival in Ebbets Field, where the walls between the opposing clubhouses were about as thick as the density of the lineup card.
Dressen still couldn't resist. "Roll out the barrel, the Giants is dead," he led his players in chanting. Did I mention the season was 1951?
Lew Burdette learned the hard way about putting a little understandable hubris into a few badly chosen public words. After he beat the New York Yankees in Game 2 of the 1958 World Series — a year after his Milwaukee Braves won the Series in seven, with Burdette winning three of the needed four — the prankish right-hander (he was usually Warren Spahn's partner in comedy crime) flapped his yap.
"I wish the Yankees were in the National League," Burdette drawled. "They'd be lucky to finish second." That was Burdette losing his next two starts, including the deciding game, as the Yankees were so amused by his pronouncement they went on to win the Series in seven.
Oil Can Boyd, a pitcher once renowned for learning things the hard way, had to learn such lessons before Game 3 of the 1986 World Series was a third of an inning old. Before the Series moved to Fenway Park, with the Red Sox up two games to none, the stick-figure right-hander just couldn't resist predicting, "I will master the Mets."
The problems only began when Lenny Dykstra couldn't resist hitting the third pitch of the game into the right field seats. They continued when Wally Backman just couldn't resist lining a followup single to right, Keith Hernandez just couldn't resist lining a first and third making, opposite field single to left, Gary Carter just couldn't resist hammering an RBI double to the back of center field, Ray Knight just couldn't resist beating one out to load the pads, and Danny Heep — a reserve in the DH slot — just couldn't resist lining one up the pipe to send home Hernandez and Carter for a game-opening 4-0 lead.
The Mets went on to win the game, 7-1. You know the rest of the story of that Series. I think.
Let's put it this way about Jose Canseco. He didn't learn a thing from the manner in which his first major braggadocio prediction was answered. Bragging that his Oakland Athletics would bludgeon the Los Angeles Dodgers in five in the 1988 World Series got him nothing but the A's getting flattened in five by the Dodgers.
Well, it got him Dave Parker's promise "to clean, stuff, and mount" him (Thomas Boswell's translation) if he so much as breathed the wrong breath from then on. Sure enough, the A's swept the San Francisco Giants in the 1989 Series, with or without a little help from a tragic earthquake.
A year after that, there was Canseco predicting another Series sweep, and there were the Cincinnati Reds to make the prediction come true. The only problem with that was that the Reds disagreed with Canseco as to the sweeper and the sweepee.
There was no Dave Parker to promise to clean, stuff, and mount Canseco this time. The A's decided they couldn't afford to re-sign Parker after 1989. It turned out they really couldn't have afforded to let him go just yet.
And the Diamondbacks probably don't have anyone with the experience or the authority to promise a cleaning, stuffing, and mounting of Byrnes if he so much as speaks above the tone of a pregnant pause while he's on the Diamondbacks' time in 2008.
Livan Hernandez? A decade after he stood as the World Series MVP, the former Senor Octobure didn't look so good running out of gas enough in Game 3 that Yorvit Torrealba — Yorvit Torrealba?!? — couldn't hit a two-out, three-run homer to bust a one-all tie and give the Colorado bullpen all the lead it needed to keep the Snakes to one hit the rest of the night.
Manager Bob Melvin? The skipper already looked dubious enough when he argued, futilely and foolishly, that Justin Upton had done the right thing by sticking an arm up into the leg, if not the crotch, of Kaz Matsui in Game 1, trying to bust up a double play that got called anyway thanks to interference.
And he looked a lot more dubious by declining to send Brandon Webb out for Game 4, three days' rest or not, then letting Micah Owings — a good-hitting pitcher — hit for himself with Justin Upton on second (a one-out double off the tricky right field scoreboard and fence angles), producing a swishout and a bottom of the fourth they won't forget as long as they play baseball in Colorado.
You can admire Melvin for standing by his man, even as you ponder just what he was really thinking when he said of Byrnes's Saturday belch, "He's a vocal guy. He's going to say what he wants. I don't know that everybody reads everything that's out there in this clubhouse, anyway. It used to be that there was a lot of fodder for bulletin boards and so forth. Nowadays, you see guys being a little more vocal about things, and I don't know if it matters one way or the other."
They may not have read it in the Diamondbacks clubhouse, but they probably framed it in the Rockies'. And if they didn't, the Coors Field fans made the Snakes only too well aware of it, and not merely by booing lustily every time Byrnes batted or cheering madly when it was he who made the final out of the set.
Byrnes is locquacious and witty enough to have himself a neat broadcasting gig on the side with ESPN. But he may not be that cognisant of not-too-ancient history. Jose Canseco wasn't the only one to whom the 1988 Dodgers fed his own words. David Cone, then a Mets pitcher, was foolish enough to say in a ghostwritten newspaper column that his Mets were bound to beat the Dodgers and that high school pitcher they had for a closer.
That was Cone who got ripped in two innings in Game 2 of that LCS after Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda got hold of the column, highlighted in the right places, and tacked it up in the Dodger clubhouse. "Lasorda," wrote Boswell, "should have been awarded the poor kid's ears."
And with Byrnes — finishing an 0-for-8 run in the two games following his schpritz — on his belly like a parched snake past first base, a perfect if heart-rending analogy for the manner in which the Diamondbacks' striking season came to its bitter end, you wouldn't have been too surprised to find enough Diamondbacks fans prepared to award someone something more than mere ears. Maybe Byrnes's head on a plate.
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