Free The Soul of Baseball by Joe Posnanski

talking about, Roger! You go! That’s baseball!”
    Buck settled back into his seat. He offered a quiet commentary on the game.
    “No need to cheer that one, folks,” he muttered when the crowd shrieked after a lazy fly ball. “That’s an easy out.”
    And to a hitter who complained to an umpire after striking out against Maddux: “Sit down, young man. You’re not the first man to strike out against Greg Maddux. You’re not the best man to strike out against Greg Maddux. Just sit down.”
    And to a young pitcher who kept throwing fastballs and kept giving up hits: “Put something on the ball. You’re not going to be able to throw the ball by them. This is the Major Leagues.”
    And to another pitcher who kept walking people: “Throw some strikes, dummy.”
    And when Houston outfielder Jason Lane sprinted toward the right-field found line and made a diving catch, Buck was out of his seat. He screamed, “Did you see that? Did you see that? What a game! What a great game!”
     
     
     
    B ASEBALL SCOUTS WATCH players’ rumps. They study human anatomy. Scouts can talk for hours, often over pretzels and beer, about a pitcher’s arm angle or the way a batter points his toe. And they will try to unravel all of baseball’s mysteries by watching the twitches and turns of a batter’s gluteus maximus. If a hitter is confident, Buck said, his rump will stay put while he swings the bat. Playing and scouts call that “staying in there.” But when a hitter feels unsure, when he’s been expecting a fastball only to be dealt a curve, when his timing has been wrecked by a particularly nasty pitch, his butt will go flying one way or another.
    A Houston player named Willy Taveras came to the plate. “Man, he looks like Willie Mays,” Buck said, and he meant that literally. He thought Taveras’s face bore a resemblance to Mays’s face. As a hitter, Taveras looked nothing at all like Mays. Taveras’s leading attribute was his speed, so his swing was built to chop the ball downward, into the ground, so he could then run hard to first base. Chicago pitcher Michael Wuertz threw his pitch, and Taveras was badly fooled. He chopped with his bat, missed, and almost fell down.
    “His heart was willing” was Buck’s scouting report, “but his rump was gone.”
     
     
     
    S OMETHING IS ALWAYS going on at the ballpark. Baseball marketing directors worry about baseball losing touch with the times. They worry that the pace is too slow for the kids raised on video games and the adults who check their e-mails on their phones. So the baseball people constantly invent new things to fill in the quiet spaces between innings and at-bats—trivia contests, dance-offs, beer gardens, children’s play areas the size of amusement parks, pizza promotions, and blooper videos that show baseball players colliding into each other. In Houston, there was also “the Great Hummer Race.” This was a hot baseball trend—an animated race that would be shown on the video board every night. Every stadium had one. On the Kansas City video board, for instance, animated hot dogs representing those popular condiments ketchup, mustard, and relish raced around the bases. Mustard generally drew the loudest cheers. In New York, animated subway cars raced to Yankee Stadium. In Oakland, animated dots raced. In Milwaukee, real people dressed up like sausages (one bratwurst, one Polish sausage, and one Italian sausage) sprinted from left field to home plate. In Pittsburgh, pirogues raced.
    On this night in Houston, animated Hummers plowed through mud and guzzled cartoon gas. The crowd, which included the first President Bush, stood mesmerized and then, when the black Hummer crossed first, the entire stadium erupted in cheers. Houston likes black Hummers.
    You might guess all of these baseball sideshows would drive Buck crazy. Truth was, he loved every bit of it. He cheered loudly for the black Hummer. He laughed happily during the bloopers video. In one promotion,