Why Is The Infielder Pitching?

I waited 18 years and change to be present at an NLCS game.

I think I can wait two more days.

As I'm sure you have heard by now, Game 1 of the 2006 NLCS has been postponed by rain. That is bad news for the Mets, as Tony LaRussa now has the option to bring Chris Carpenter on board for Game 2 at Shea instead of having to wait until Game 3 in St. Louis.

But you know something, it's just as well. Frankly, it wouldn't have been quite the same experience to attend Game 1 of the NLCS with a pit in my stomach.

Because nobody deserves the fate that befell Cory Lidle and his flight instructor, Tyler Stanger, today.

The freshest memories we'll have of Cory Lidle are of him trashing Barry Bonds, trashing the Phillies on his way out the door, and defending himself on the Mike and The Mad Dog show to deny that he was trashing Joe Torre.

He somehow became "Cory Lidle: Lightning Rod".

My memories of Cory Lidle has always been the one where he first came up with the Mets and I thought "what the hell is this middle infielder doing pitching for us?"

If you were to imagine Lidle's future by watching him in his rookie season, 'lightning rod" would not have been a term in the forefront of your mind. After all, he looked like an infielder...was about as tall (or as short) as an infielder...had a pitching motion like a guy called in to finish the wrong end of a 25-3 blowout...like an infielder. But the telling sign was Lidle's number 11. Pitchers don't wear eleven...that's an infielder's number, not a pitcher's number (and certainly not a catcher's number, as the enormity of Fluff Castro's back seems to be on the verge of snapping those two number ones like they were twigs). But here was Cory Lidle...pitching in relief and putting up seven wins and two losses in 1997. Not bad for an infielder, I thought.

Lidle had a future in Flushing, but you can only keep so many players in an expansion draft...so Lidle was picked by the Arizona Diamondbacks and off he went to a decent career with a handful of teams, while finally wearing a pitcher's number.

With the transient nature of role players in baseball, Lidle had friends that wound up all over the league. A pall had certainly been cast over both playoff series as Lidle had teammates on all four teams left this season. From Placido Polanco to Barry Zito...from Mark Mulder to Billy Wagner. As such, baseball fans everywhere lose a small piece of themselves...because where else but sports do we refer to guys we don't know by their first names...or nick names...because we feel like we know them? Ultimately, we root for the laundry. But it's times like these that we remember that there are human beings that wear the laundry, and provide stories for the laundry.

Even the pitcher's laundry that has an infielder's number stitched to it.