mind over matter

wading through all the shrill sox-yankees hype this morning, i found a nice bit on our ebullient el duque in the new york times:

Hernández seemed to be glowing, a bundle of positive energy. He looked nothing like the moody pitcher who had a clubhouse shoving match with Posada in his final month with the Yankees in 2002. "He seems more at peace," Cashman said.

Told of that observation, Hernández was bemused. He is always at peace, he said, because he understands himself - even when others do not.

"When I don't respond the way people would like for me to respond, I can read it in their faces," he said. "It's not just here, it's in life. My mother sometimes doesn't understand me, too. It's from birth."

Hernández enjoys cultivating an air of mystery. He is enthusiastically contrary. Presented with Posada's theory - that since the surgery, Hernández treats every start as if it were his last - Hernández again resists.

"Why would I think that?" he said. "My last one will be at 105 years old. That's how long I'm going to live."

and 'course satchel paige flashed through my mind like a leggy ageless neon sign. google gave me this, written in 1998:

Here is the reincarnation of the spirit of Satchel Paige, with a record of twelve and four.

Toiling in the media obscurity of Castroland, El Duque became the best pitcher on the island, the kingpin of the powerful national team. If he's twenty-nine years old now, as he claims, then he was on the national team at age fourteen. "I want a shot at redemption," sang Paul Simon on the Graceland album. "How old would you be if you didn't know how old you were?" asked the ageless Paige way back when. With a high leg kick which he learned from watching Dwight Gooden on television, El Duque mixes it up, throwing a wide assortment of pitches, at a wide range of speeds, utilizing a number of different deliveries, keeping the batters off balance, making them "understand too late," as the poet Robert Francis said. "He's making it up as he goes along," observes Barbara Shinn, the Hall's executive director of retail marketing. The fact that what she says is plausible is just another weapon in El Duque's repertoire. Part Paige, part Tiant, part Gooden, and part Hernandez, he makes the batters resemble blind men describing an elephant. This is pitching.