Goddamn baseball. It’s never enough. No matter what you do, it’s never enough. Most wins out of anyone, best ERA, third most homeruns. Don’t mean a goddamn thing when you get out there and actually step between the lines. Some people think baseball is a kid’s game, a pasttime meant to leisurely wile away lazy summer weekends. These people have no goddamn idea what they’re talking about.

Baseball ain’t a kid’s game. It’s a disease. It’s a mindless amoral blight that turns healthy young men into brittle shells of bone and skin. It’s a dirty, sweaty beast with thirsty teeth and coiled haunches, always on the prowl for fresh blood. They can try to cover this up with picnic areas and pavilion seating and free umbrellas, but that’s like trying to hide a corpse with Wet Naps and some Febreze.

Sometimes I love this bastard of a sport. Sometimes the smell of pinetar and cleat-cleaved dirt reminds me of cool early summer breezes and fresh lilacs and girls in sun dresses drinking lemonade on their porch swings. Sometimes I see a kid like Granderson gather a fly ball in his glove, or that beautiful bastard Verlander’s fastball slice past a batter’s stunned eye, and I forget that I’m a broken old man carrying enough tar in his lungs to fill the cracks in every goddamn one-way street in Manhattan.

Then I look into the stands. I look into the eyes of those smug, satisfied know-it-alls on their cellphones drinking ten-dollar beers wearing Official Major League Baseball hats and jerseys that cost more than the goddamn per-diem some poor kid’s getting in A-ball for the month. I know they’re sitting there in their luxury loge box seats waiting for the seventh-inning stretch and God Bless America to jump into their cars and beat the postgame traffic. I know they can’t wait to get home and dial into the local know-it-all sports talk show and bloviate about why we’re not good enough for their goddamn city. I know they’re waiting for someone to make a mistake. A missed sign. A ball hitting the lip of the infield grass and skittering under a glove. A gust of wind that upsets the flight of a changeup enough to let some muscle-bound bastard throw all his ill-gained weight behind a swing that’s as slow as death. And that’s when they’ll let us hard-working folks on the field know how they really feel.

“Fans.” Ha. Goddamn bastards wait for us in the bush like we’re American Joes kicking back during Tet. They’d might as well be sitting in the stands with voodoo dolls, stabbing them every time Magglio’s at the plate or Ivan’s about to field a pop-up. These are the same damn bastards that rode my ass raw for high pitch counts and sacrifice bunting too much and not sticking it out with goddamn losers like the Rockies. Like I don’t know what I’m doing. Like my players don’t know what they’re doing. They know what this is. They know it’s not a game. They know it’s not a job. This is the goddamn game of baseball, and if there’s one goddamn thing these overpaid jockstraps are gonna learn from Jimmy Leyland, it’s that you leave every goddamn ounce of sweat and blood and muscle that God gave your dead ass on the goddamn field, or else you are never seeing the goddamn field under my watch. This ain’t the playground, and I’m sure as hell not your goddamn nanny.

Yeah, the game’s changed. Things go down nowadays that you wouldn’t see even twenty years ago. Things you never want to see. And I know the game changed me. But I know what you have to do to win. And I know that the goddamn game ain’t gonna beat me. It’s going to be on my terms, or I walk away. I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to sit on a bench and watch guys that weigh as much as an 8-year-old girl hit 500-foot bombs off my goddamn ace and wait for someone in the Commisionner’s Office to get off their sweaty ass and do something about this. I’ll go home before I bow down to that crap, and I did. And I’ll be goddamned if I’m not going to do what I need to do to win some goddamn baseball games.

I don’t care if you’re the first baseman – you’re going to bat eighth when I say you’re gonna bat eighth. I don’t care if you’re 22 or 52 – if you’re out there throwing 145 pitches, I want Pitch 145 to be as high a quality as Pitch 1, and I don’t want to hear any nonsense about your goddamn arm or some goddamn homeopathic rotator cuff horsepuckey. Even if you’re a shortstop with a bat that’d make Jose Lind look like Jose Canseco or that goddamn Bonds, you’re batting fifth if I tell you to, and you’re going to produce like a goddamn hitter in the goddamn five hole. If I tell you to drop trou, stick sunflower seeds up your nose, and sing Yankee Doodle Dandy at full volume, you’d better ask me what goddamn key I want the song in and what hole I want the song coming from.

You don’t win just by being good. If that was all it took, then my goddamn Pirates would be mentioned in the same breath as the goddamn Yankees and the goddamn Big Red Machine. You have to be willing to sacrifice your dignity and pride to this bitch of a game. You have to let the game win in order to beat the game at its game. Sounds like some hippie-dippie bullspunk, I know, but it’s the goddamn truth. It’s the only way to conquer this thing, and it’s taken me a lot of tough losses and tougher wins to find this out.

But go ahead and try to get yourself some hitters and pitchers and leverage your at-bats and don’t give away outs and all that yellow parachute garbage. Go ahead and pretend you can find some way to bend or break the rules, or find some sort of loophole. You’ll end up with a bunch of fat softball players that can’t lay down a bunt when October rolls around and you need to get that guy on second into position for a sac-fly opportunity, and Sally-League pitchers that bend over like A-Rod at a Chippendales.

Goddamn them for bringing me back. Goddamn me for coming back. Goddamn me for loving this goddamn game.

Detroit Tiger manager Jim Leyland, manager of the goddamn 1997 World Series Champion Florida Marlins, smokes Lucky Strike.