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Wild Thing, or, Poem For Matt Anderson, Attempting a Comeback

Posted by Angela Wittrock on January 25, 2011 · 2 Comments 

They said he looked like Jesus, his beard full. They said he looked like Jesus when he walked in the gym, six years out of the major leagues and what, exactly, does that mean, like Jesus?

Did they mean he was starved, like Jesus in the desert, forty days and whatnot and desperate to make good on his 1999 potential, a little bit of the crazy-eyed glee that comes when you start to behave like the animals you live among?

It could have been the flip flops, certainly, that made him look like Jesus, but really if he were barefoot that would have been closer, would have fit more squarely or overlapped in a Venn diagram sort of way, depending on how you think of these things.

And they said he was like Wild Thing, the fictitious character in Major League, the pitcher with a temper who can’t control his stuff, played by Charlie Sheen who, I saw today, recently spent $24,000 in one weekend on hookers, cocaine and hotel rooms, and is often seen in the company of a woman best known for winning “Best Anal Sex Scene, 2008.”

And I said he was like the original Joel Zumaya, a pitcher with triple-digit velocity and an orthopedic surgeon on speed dial, one landing on the disabled list after too much Guitar Hero, another (and this is just a myth) after tossing an octopus into a bucket during a pre-game celebration.

But Jerry Crasnick, who wrote the story I saw on ESPN.com but forgot to email to Boog, said he was a little more like Mickey Rourke’s character in The Wrestler, down on his luck and primed for an epic comeback, but I confess I’ve not seen Mickey Rourke in anything but 9 ½ Weeks and I don’t know that any of that material applies here, or squares or circles like Venn diagrams, whatever you please.

But he’s hitting 97 on the radar gun, and he seems to really love his children, all four of them, for what it’s worth, or whatever that means, or whatever you want to call it, if any of this is at all the measure of this man.