Mike Hampton Is the Human Titanic

Mike Hampton is the human Titanic, lugging a shipload of treasure with a paper-thin hull, a penchant for icy water, and a taste for disaster. So take heed, ballfans and paramedics alike, Mike Hampton is back on the mound, for now.

After more than three years of patchwork surgery for ailments more numerous than he would like to admit to, Hampton pitched a Major League Baseball game once more, recently. It didn't go so badly either. Nothing fell off and nothing came apart.

I watched "the Frail One's" return sympathetically, with a can of disinfectant and a pile of sterilized gauze piled high on the couch, and my cell phone in hand, 911-Philidelphia (where his Braves were playing) pre-dialed into my cellular roaster. 

It is a rare occurrence to see actual self-dismemberment in the course of a baseball game.

I recall myself as a teenaged baseball fan, watching my Giants plow through a rough stretch in August, the lifeless doldrums of the major-league season. All was well and good, and cast in the golden hue of a teenage summer, when to my zitty dismay, my favorite pitcher, Dave Dravecky, coming back from cancer of the pitching arm, which is not at all the joke that it sounds like, had his left arm snap in half during a pitch.

The startling sound of a chopstick echoed through Candlestick Park. My eyes bulged. I was never the same. 

Dravecky had a similar career arc as Mike Hampton. Early success, including playoff victories, and then mid-career crisis, in his case a tumor that claimed much of the muscle in the lefty's moneymaker.

But the preacher needs his pulpit, and the mound called, and pride gives way to no fat, anti-social reliever. For some time, Dravecky's valiant comeback was a success, until….SNAP! Look away! Do not watch the unhinged arm as it dangles to and fro! 

Most people watch NASCAR for this kind of sadism, tuning in only for the spinning, flipping, burning, helmet-punching carnage. These are the same people that camp out near high-volume train crossings and secretly pray for some hot car-on-locomotive action to come their way.

They are instant gratificites that number in the thousands and are a sure sign that our society is in deep doodoo. I do not consider myself one of them.

I only watch the races when I am back in my homeland, the tar-stained Kudzu hills of North Cacalacky, and only then because it is the only way to spend any time with my relatives. Wrecks disturb me. I always imagine myself as the giddy guy heading for checkered glory, only to have some young runt plow my fender and spin me into fiery oblivion. 

Mike Hampton was once a professional baseball pitcher that got things done. He pitched in key playoff games and won. He faced down the juicers and meat heads of the recent foul era alike and racked up over a hundred wins, earning the reputation of a stone-faced surgeon, a stopper, and a feared competitor that no losing streak wanted to meet in a darkened power alley. 

The Colorado Rockies thought so much of his abilities that they gave Mike Hampton an eight-year contract that sill ranks in the top-25 all time fattest in all of sports, signing him to a $121 million contract in the first year of this young century, in hopes that his low-slung cap, fierce gaze, and darting junk could elevate the chronically mediocre franchise to respectability.

In what may have been the biggest blunder in Colorado team-sports history, the Rockies watched as Hampton languished in the thin mountain air, his trademark control vanquished by an atmospheric condition, while his fellow savior, signee Denny Neagle, eventually leapt off of the cliff of sobriety and landed in the seedy ravine of prostitution.

Combined, the contacts of these two pitchers exceeded the gross national budgets of sub-Saharan Africa, and the Rockies faded deeper into the funky dankness of the NL West cellar as a result of their crippling financial gambles.

If not for the freakish development of Generation R, Hampton's gold-rush signing could very well have been responsible for 10 years of cursed gloom and a decade or more consigned to the likes of Neifi Perez and Shawn Chacon.

Luckily, a state Holiday arrived in time for us all to see a glimpse of a hopeful September, a fighting chance. 

And his signing was not all bad, of course. Other than giving a decent, if zombie-boned, man hundreds of millions of dollars to lead the Rockies, the team also, in part, helped to develop baseball fields across the state. Hampton's foundation was a big factor in building Basalt's Field of Dreams, which we can all be thankful for. 

His first start back did not go that well, by baseball standards. He gave up six runs in four innings to a belligerent Phillies lineup in Philly—home of the bandbox field, a real war zone for NL pitchers these days, with a mortar crew of Ryan Howard, Chase Utley, Pat Burrell, and Jimmy Rollins to contend with.

Similar results came against the resurgent Cards this week. Four runs, five innings.

Neither game came at a loss for Hampton though, personally. Appropriately, in both cases he took a no-decision. But look at the numbers. Is that not a distinct pattern? Is it not safe to calculate that in four short weeks, barring disaster, we should be celebrating a complete game no-hitter!?

Anything is possible, especially in the Dirty South. Let's just hope the wheels don't come off. Or the axles, the gas tank, the crankshaft….

Corby Anderson writes Hang Time for the Aspen Daily News from a Major League Free Trade zone near Oakland, California, where rumor has it that he has just been offered to the Toledo Flatlander for a writer to be named later. Billy Beane thinks that this will be an improvement. Send your comments to: Billy Beane, 7000 Coliseum Way
 Oakland, CA 94621