Sock Puppet Night

Sunday was Sock Puppet Night at Pepsi Field for my Nashville Hounds. Don't ask me who thought it up, just like don't ask me why we had a Sunday night game when we had to leave right after to get to Oklahoma City for a Monday night game. Thank God we could fly since it would have taken us 10 hours by bus. The AAA level isn't as bad as it used to be - better stadiums and clubhouses, slightly better pay (although I'm on my big league contract, so I'm fine), somewhat nicer hotels. But still, we arrived at our hotel outside of Oklahoma City a little after 4:30 AM on Monday. I can't sleep on planes. I try and try, but the pressure is too much for me. Ask me to throw a strike with 2 men on and 2 men out in the bottom of the 9th in front of 55,000 fans and I can do it without sweating. Ask me to fall asleep on an airplane at two in the morning and I suffer performance anxiety. I become more wired than a an old telephone company. Plus, the excitement from attending a Sock Puppet Night kind of carries over for a few days, don't you think?

Sock Puppet Night was sponsored by Champion, which makes tube socks. In an effort to get the city of Nashville to by more socks, I guess, Champion sponsored Secret Puppet Night for fans to come out, in the seventh inning stretch, onto the field and show off their sock puppets. Some people got pretty elaborate with their designs. The winner, a woman named Pam who turned her two hands into soft, cottony replicas of Byrne Cassa, who holds the team record for home runs in a season with 39, and Jose Tomas, who once struck out five men in one inning here (true story - happened in 1969). I thought it was a little unfair that Pan won, since in her day job she has her own business hot-gluing sparkly beads onto clothes. Sock puppets are in this woman's blood. I believe her prize was a year's supply of Champion tube socks. Lucky lady.

I did not pitch over the weekend. After throwing Thursday and Friday in my first relief back-to-back days, we decided to give me two days off. My ERA is a solid 36.00, which means I've gotten off to a slow start. Still, it's only two games for me. The team is 1 and 3. We're only 1 game out of first place, so I'm not going to lambaste myself for blowing my first save opportunity which, if I had been successful, would have put us in a three-way tie for first. If a player is suicidal 4 games into the season, he's in store for a very long year.

The pleasant surprise we had on Sunday was the arrival of Felipe Castro. He missed all of spring training because of his mother's being kidnapped and held for ransom in the jungles of Venezuela. She's still there. And Felipe's here on minor league assignment in the hopes he can use baseball as a diversion. There's nothing he can do to help his mom, he was told, so someone somewhere convinced him to come to the States and try to hit a ball really far. The plan is for him to play with us for a few games (as few as possible, the big club is 2 and 3 with little offense) to get the timing on his swing back. He pinch hit on Sunday night and struck out. His face was twisted in pain when he came back to the dugout. It was obvious that his body was in Nashville but his heart and mind are in Caracas.

Most of the guys here tried to keep their distance from Felipe. Not because they didn't like him, but they didn't know what to say. Felipe is a big star here in America and an even bigger star in Latin America. I'm sure some of the Spanish-speaking players didn't want their image of Felipe tarnished by getting to know him at this time in his life.

So, since I was in the dugout and not the bullpen, I made it my job to try to infuse Felipe with a love for sock puppets. I asked him about his childhood sock puppet collection. He just looked at me. I told him the story of Juanes, the Sock King, who used to bring all the little Latino boys and girls sock puppets if they did all of the chores for madre and padre. Did Juanes the Sock King ever pay a visit to Felipe's house? He just looked at me.

A clubhouse boy, for fifty bucks, was able to get his hands on Pam's prize winning sock puppets (literally - get it? since these are sock puppets?), brought them over to me. I slipped my calloused mitts into the Cassa and Tomas replicas (quite lifelike) and put on a sock puppet show for Felipe. No performance anxiety here. It was quite graphic, in a number of different ways. I especially liked the part where Cassa and Tomas got married in a Venezuelan oil factory.

Felipe got a kick out of my show and gave me $5. I thanked him and told him I'd give the money to Pam, who did such a good job with set design.

He sat by himself, eyes closed, on the flight to Oklahoma City. I can only hope he did so with a little bit of hope in his heart, hope that he'll be okay and his mother will be found. That's all any of us can ask for.