Any Day Ellsbury #3: Where I Ramble About Stephen Crane and Ellsbury the Killer Robot
Inspired by Ted Walker’s “Every Day Ichiro” over at Pitchers & Poets, I’ll be chronicling the 2011 Red Sox season by paying close attention to outfielder Jacoby Ellsbury.
I’ve always been drawn to people in the middle of things. One of my former literature professors called them “characters on edges.” Stephen Crane’s Jack Potter, town marshal of Yellow Sky in “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” has always been one of my favorite characters because of how he had one foot in the diminishing Wild West and the other in the more civilized West. Newland Archer—despite his Hamlet-esque waffling in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence—is another, simply because he was torn between two smoking hot babes who apparently represented old Victorian values and a new age of American modernism. If you’re not yet wondering what this has to do with Jacoby Ellsbury, then congratulations, you are just as nerdy as I am. I wrote before that I’m drawn to Ellsbury’s extremes; he struggles badly and goes on crazy hot streaks. Ellsbury constantly hovers on the precipice of greatness and mediocrity.
Ellsbury’s ridiculous speed and athleticism might be all that keeps him from sliding into mediocrity. He is, in all other aspects, a rather generic baseball player. He’s an outfielder who is decent at reading the ball off the bat but makes up for bad jumps by being super fast, and he has a below-average throwing arm. His streaky hitting is usually caused by his mechanics getting a little out of wack. In short: Ellsbury is close to being a replacement level player. Maybe this doesn’t surprise a lot of people. I know a fair amount of Boston fans were ready to ship him out last season. But when he’s on his game (which he has been lately), Ellsbury looks less like the generic, Randy Winn-type outfielder and more like the electrifying Carl Crawford-type player.* Maybe that’s an unnecessary shot at Winn, but the point is that Winn is an entirely unremarkable player.
*While discussing this post with a friend of mine, he said Randy Winn wishes he could be as good as Carl Crawford while Crawford is currently playing like Randy Winn.
Since Ellsbury’s athleticism is what separates him from the pack, it’s what I find myself focusing on. I look for smiles, laughter, and other facial expressions, even the slightest burst of anger at a bad call or a swing he’d like to take back, but there’s almost never anything there. It’s as if Ellsbury has learned his on-field demeanor from JD Drew, who is only notable in that he never expresses any emotion. He is often robotic, and Ellsbury has adopted Drew’s machine-like qualities. Ellsbury is always stone-faced and sometimes seems cold, which makes his speed that much more fun. Everyone knows that, once he’s on first, he’s going to steal second. It’s a programmed decision, and Ellsbury is only calculating the precise pitch to run on. Sometimes he teases the pitcher into throwing to first a billion times, making the pitcher think maybe he’s held Ellsbury close enough to prevent the theft. And when he steals anyway, I like to imagine it crushes the soul of the pitcher, because he’s less of a replacement level player and more of a killer robot designed to crush spirits.
*Photo courtesy of Keith Allison via Creative Commons License
