Weekend Viewing Sated an Appetite for Baseball

Hot dogs and baseball on Fourth of July weekend. ESPN had all America pretty much covered.

Hot dogs and baseball over the long holiday weekend, and we’re not talking about Reggie Jackson in the 1977 World Series on ESPN Classic on Saturday.

Shortly after Reggie took his 27-year-old bows, ESPN Classic continued the rewind a full 118 years, televising a live “vintage baseball” game between the Hartford Senators and the Pittsfield Hillies played with 1886 rules, uniforms and equipment.

A day later, ESPN jolted viewers back to the present, to the stomach-rumbling “sport” of competitive hot-dog eating, where wiry Japanese men, Americans the size of sumo wrestlers and 98-pound women gorge on grilled franks and water-soaked buns for 12 minutes or until they “suffer urges contrary to swallowing,” whichever comes first.

The soaking of the buns is a strategy employed by Takeru Kobayashi, the Sultan of Sausage, four-time champion of Nathan’s Famous hot dog-eating contest after forcing down a record 53.5 dogs in a dozen minutes Sunday at Coney Island. Mustard isn’t allowed in competitive hot dog eating. Neither is ketchup. But water-logged buns are OK. Supposedly, they help ease the transportation from pie hole to gullet.

Not to mention urges contrary to swallowing.

As 420-pound Eric “Badlands” Booker battled the urge, appearing to choke in the clutch, analyst Richard Shea sounded worried: “Oh, the big man ... almost a reversal! He’s fighting it!”

Why do they do it? Earlier, long before the onset of gastro-intestinal distress, Booker explained in an interview that “The hot dog is the pinnacle of competitive eating. Because you’re dealing with two substances. You’re dealing with the bun. And, also, the dog.”

So true.

“I’ve just got to stay focused,” Booker continued. “And stay hungry.”

Goes without saying.

“I have the appetite,” he insisted. “Now, I’ve just got to focus my mind -- a mind-meld between me,” ... Booker taps a contemplative finger against his left temple “ ... and the dog.”

Why do they do it? Gary Miller had to be asking himself a similar question as he called the dog-by-dog play-by-play. Had it really come to this? What was he doing here?

While everybody else at ESPN hunkered down over the Mike Krzyzewski story, Miller found himself studying a graphic comparing Kobayashi to Babe Ruth, noting how Kobayashi had once almost doubled the world record, from 25 1/8 dogs eaten to his mark of 50 set in 2001.

“It would be as if Barry Bonds hit 146 home runs, I guess, a couple of years from now,” Miller said.

Shea pounced on the straight line with Kobayashi-like relish.

“I don’t want to take anything away from Bonds, but to compare Kobayashi to Bonds is a slight against Kobayashi,” he quipped.

There really is nothing like the broadcast call of a rare athlete lifting his sport to unprecedented heights.

“He is focused!” Shea declared as Kobayashi hit the 50-dog mark. “This man has eaten 17.7 pounds of pan-seared calf brains in 15 minutes! Can he do it?”

While history was being made at Coney Island, history was being replayed at Pittsfield, Mass., where two amateur baseball teams tried to recreate the way the game was played in 1886. Except for the ESPN Classic technicians on the field holding coils of cable. And the Pennzoil ad on the “Vintage Baseball, Live” pop-up graphic. And the “Cheap Seats” guys doing shtick down the right-field foul line at Wahconah Park.

Some things about baseball games were better in 1886.

The uniforms back then were baggy and hot and numberless. After 118 years of advances in design and improvements in materials, they still look better than anything the Toronto Blue Jays wear.

There was no pitcher’s mound, only a “pitcher’s box,” a four-feet-by-six-feet chalked rectangle located 50 feet from home plate, level with the plate. Batters could choose their own strike zone, high or low, and instead of four balls, it took seven before a hitter was awarded first base. Kaz Ishii would like vintage baseball.

Baseballs were slightly softer, bats were slightly thinner and the object of the game in the 1880s, as recounted by ESPN commentator Ron Thulin, was “not to swing for the fences, not to lift the ball in the air, but to place the ball artfully between the infielders. The sure single was much better than the chance of a double or a home run.”

Unless there had been a “SportsCenter” back in 1886. How many artfully placed singles could one watch during a sepia-toned “Plays of the Day” highlight reel? ESPN Classic televised an inning or so in those sepia tones, prompting Thulin to muse, “We’re going to do this the way you would have probably seen the game in the 1800s.”

Former big-league pitcher Bill Lee, providing color analysis, then cracked, “From the center-field camera, huh?”

The modern-day Senators and Hillies grappled mightily with the mitts of the 1880s, which were roughly no bigger than gardening gloves, resulting a 14-12 final score not much different than what you’d find in a typical 2004 game.

By game’s end, Jim Bouton, the “Ball Four” author instrumental in the planned refurbishment of Wahconah Park, and Tim Robbins had stopped by the booth, joining Lee in an off-the-wall commentary team ESPN might want to sign to a long-term deal. And Bouton later came into the game as a Pittsfield pitcher, and Lee as a Hartford pinch-hitter and reliever, another concept the network might want to consider.

Or how about competitive vintage eating? Stun the beast and bring him to Kobayashi and start the clock now. Sounds like ESPN programming with a future.