A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

CHOOCH: I've previously acknowledged my love for Sports Illustrated's Gary Smith, perhaps the finest feature writer in America. He has written a profile of Phillies catcher Carlos Ruiz, and it's well worth your time. Here's a snippet:

Cliff's ready. Chooch isn't. He enters the bullpen bathroom as the national anthem begins for his ritual moment of soul searching, and stands alone in the dark ...



... and it all comes whistling back. Who he is. Why he's here. What he comes from. The morning when he was seven, playing baseball in the neighbor's yard in David, Panama, and his mother's scream shattered the quiet. Carlos running into his house and asking her what was wrong, his mother looking up through her tears and ordering him to return to their neighbor's house until she called for him.

He tried to obey her, but his nervous eyes kept watching one car after another pulling up in front of his house, dispatching relatives, friends and strangers: Something in it felt familiar. Forever passed, finally the boy was permitted to go home, and at last came the truth. On his father's last shift before a long vacation, a tire had blown out on Sgt. Joaquin Ruiz's police jeep as he patrolled a nearby town. The jeep spun into a ditch, flipped, flung the unbelted man from his seat and then crushed him. Two weeks after Carlos's grandmother died of cancer, his dad, too, was dead.

Carlos, the eldest of Inocencia's three sons, knew at once that he must become the new father. "Don't worry, I will play in the big leagues one day," he informed his mother not long after, unaware that the odds of that were roughly two in one million. "I will take care of the family." At the cemetery he dug himself an even bigger hole, repeating the promise to his father's spirit. Then he grew silent and watched what men did, so he could become one too. At 10, Carlos became a laborer in the coffee bean fields, filling his apron pockets with beans till the fields were stripped bare. Then he began walking a half hour to a farm to carry crates of tomatoes on his head for three quarters of a mile to the Pan American Highway, turning around and racing back for the next crate. At dusk he'd take the precious three dollars he'd earned to the grocery store to buy flour, tortillas, yeast, eggs and milk, and stand tall, for such a short boy, when he laid them on his family's table. But he knew that wasn't enough, nor ever could be, unless he kept his two-in-a-million promise.