Dr. Metablog

Even moderately serious baseball-watchers know that we've just experienced a disaster of the Mickey Owens-Willie Davis-Bill Buckner variety. Poor Brooks Conrad, a journeyman infielder, playing for the Atlanta Braves in an important playoff game, committed three horrible errors. He bobbled a ball, dropped a popup, and then, with the game on the line, let a routine grounder go right through his legs. He was nutmegged, as they say in soccer. Game over, Atlanta eliminated. The hi-def TV camera focussed on him, allowing millions of Americans to lipread the poor guy's puzzled, exasperated, embarrassed, "What the fuck." Interviewed after the game, Conrad was more decorous but no less defeated: "I wanted to dig a hole and go to sleep in it."

Sleep won't do it, because Conrad's errors will be re-played forever and ever and ever.

The play that lost the game was one that Brooks Conrad has made time and time again — at Arizona State, during his ten years in the minors, and during his three-year (229 at bats, 53 hits) and now completed major league career. He wouldn't have been in the game — as a substitute for the injured Martin Prado — if he didn't have the ability to put a glove on a pop fly or handle a ground ball. One of the announcers called it accurately:  "they say you make errors with the glove but in this case the problem is right between his ears."  Brooks Conrad somehow lost the ability to do things that should have been entirely routine  – which is why I feel so sorry for him, and why I identify so strongly with him.  It could happen to anybody, anytime. I remember once driving along on a big four-lane and for a second I forgot which foot operated the accelerator and which the clutch.  I panicked, momentarily, but I recovered, and no one ever knew.  didn't have millions of people watching me and clucking.

I'm glad to say that the next day, when Brooks took the field during warmups (he was mercifully held out of the game), Atlanta fans gave him a big cheer. "We are all frail," as Angelo says, and it's not wrong for us to be reminded of it once in a while. But poor Brooks, condemned to a lifetime of waking up in the middle of the night, Buster Posey's grounder skidding past his glove and through his legs, runners endlessly, one after another, in an infinitely loop, crossing home plate to the deafening roar of the crowd.