Baseball In 2011: Five Stories You’ve Already Forgotten

Baseball seasons are long. So damned long. So many games. It’s beautiful. It’s awful. It’s glorious. It’s painful. It’s amazing. The 162-game season needs to die; long live the 162-game season.

And there are some stories you’ll never forget. Game 6 of the 2011 World Series, for example, will be a game that will inspire baseball writers in 2111, just one year before music is outlawed. But there are all sorts of stories that are used as chum in the daily baseball news cycle. Here are five that were a big deal at the time, but you’ve already forgotten:

5. Will Luis Castillo Report????
Luis Castillo was released by the Mets. Chase Utley’s knee melted. The Phillies, desperate, signed Castillo to a minor-league deal, and he took his sweet time reporting. In retrospect, it was only an extra day. Not sure what people were freaking out about. But at the time, it was a big deal.

He eventually showed up, played like an old Luis Castillo, and was cut. He did have a fallback plan, but this is the first time you’ve thought about this incident since then.

4. Dan Uggla’s Hitting Streak
Dan Uggla is a career .258 hitter. He finished the 2011 season with a .233 average. Somehow, he managed to work in a 33-game hitting streak. And we all followed it at the time because hitting streaks over 30 games are always rare and newsworthy. But when the streak snapped, everyone just wiped their brow, feeling satisfied that the universe wasn’t being ripped off its axis, and they all forgot about Uggla’s freaky streak.

3. Selig: Mets Can’t Wear NYPD/NYFD Caps
The Mets wanted to wear different caps on September 11 to honor the fallen police officers and firefighters on the 10th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center. MLB said no. It was a big deal, but the news faded.

But even though the news faded, it was still one of those things that wormed its way into your brain and chewed on your subconscious. It’s things like this that make you think, “Man, what is up with that guy?” when you’re prompted with little more than a picture of Bud Selig.

2. Yadier Molina Freaks Out
There were angles and alternate angles. There were videos and .gifs. There were articles about what Molina did, and what kind of meal he’d have before the execution. There were whispers of umpire-bumpers on the grassy knoll behind the on-deck circle.

Yet all you remember now is, man, Yadier Molina sure handled that poorly. It hardly came up during the Cardinals’ crazy run through the postseason.

1. Alex Rodriguez Has a Cousin, Or Something, and He’s Totally Bad News and MLB Is Worried
Here’s the headline:

MLB resolves Yuri Sucart issueHere’s the lead paragraph from the ESPN article:

The matter regarding Alex Rodriguez’s cousin being at the New York Yankees’ team hotel has been resolved, Major League Baseball said Thursday.With that lead-in, can you honestly recall the rest of the story? Like, any detail of why this was news? Exactly.

Alex Rodriguez is news when he’s dating Cameron Diaz, he’s news when he’s getting a blood slurry injected into his knee, and he’s news when his cousin hangs out at his hotel. The good news is that our brains are wired to forget about this stuff. Hooray!