TORONTO – Depending on who’s on the mound, a catcher may need to be anything from a cheerleader to a shrink to get the most out of his pitcher on a given day. Interactions in the midst of competition can be delicate, of course, which is why J.P. Arencibia relied on a tried and tested routine when heading out to chat with a high-strung, thinking-non-stop type.
“What I would do, I’d stand on the mound and read all of the signs around the stadium,” the former Toronto Blue Jays catcher says over the phone from Miami. “For example, I’d go, ‘Pizza Pizza, Budweiser, West Jet,’ all the different advertisements, literally not say one word about baseball, not say anything that comes close to making any sense, and then turn around and walk away.
“I did it to make him go, ‘What the heck was that?’ That’s enough of a space, mentally, to get him back into the present moment. When your mind is spinning, it’s tough to stop the little hamster. But if you do stop the hamster for a second, it can give you perspective.”
Zany enough to sound like a scene pulled directly from Bull Durham, Arencibia says he used the approach with several pitchers, including a few in the big-leagues. That actual baseball chatter could seem like it belongs in the 1988 baseball comedy is reflective of how well the movie depicted the idiosyncrasies and eccentricities of the game.
“There are things that are stretched in the movie,” says Arencibia, who first watched the movie growing up and in 2015-16 played for the triple-A Durham Bulls, depicted in the film as a single-A squad. “But it was well done.”
Bull Durham stars Kevin Costner as “Crash” Davis, a veteran catcher assigned to the club to nurture Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh (Tim Robbins), a loutish bonus baby prospect blessed with a “million-dollar arm” and a “five-cent head.”
The story cleverly sketches out the travails of minor-league life in small-town America, sifting through the soup of competing interests, players on the make, broken dreams and various hangers-on inherent to that level of the game.
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Its finer moments come not only in the way it humanizes the player living the grind, but also in the brilliant on-field exchanges that so closely mirror the actual game.
Much like Davis and his memorable banter in the movie, Arencibia was a big-talker on the field, both with teammates and opponents alike.
Typically, he’d be engaged in ongoing dialogue with the home-plate umpire, sometimes to the point of enraging the hitter in the batter’s box. “One time Mark Reynolds said, ‘Why don’t you take him to dinner,’ after he struck out, obviously pissed that we had been talking the entire time,” Arencibia recalls.
Other times there was more friendly back-and-forth.
“I remember Miguel Cabrera, when I was with the Rays,” says Arencibia. “Drew Smyly threw him a changeup and he took it. He goes, ‘Ooh, throw that again and I’m going to crush it.’ I was like, ‘Oh, really?’ I threw down the changeup again, he hit a groundball to the shortstop and running down to first base, I was like, ‘You really crushed that one!’”
His favourite talker, however, was Adam Jones, for years the Baltimore Orioles centre-fielder who had a special greeting for Arencibia.
“Every time he’d come to the plate, he’d be like, ‘What’s up, my favourite F8 in the league?’” Arencibia says laughing. “For whatever reason, I crushed at Baltimore (.338/.366/.662 in 82 plate appearances over 22 games at Camden Yards), so I’d be rounding the bases and be like, ‘How was that F8?’ Then when he’d come up to the plate, he’d say, ‘Yeah, you hit that one alright, but you’re still my favourite F8.’ So we’d go back and forth.”
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Familiarity can breed both rivalry and relationships, and Arencibia remembers Jones and Blue Jays left-hander Rick Romero enjoying countless friendly exchanges, too, chatter after pitches fouled off or jabs on groundballs as the outfielder ran up the line.
Orioles slugger, first baseman Chris Davis, was another rival Arencibia enjoyed seeing in the box.
“We used to quote Step Brothers lines the entire time he was hitting,” he says. “We’d literally have conversations back and forth in movie quotes.”
Super meta, which is why to this day there’s an enduring art imitating sport imitating art tie between Bull Durham and baseball. Major League, The Natural, Eight Men Out, Field of Dreams and Mr. Baseball are among this writer’s other favourite baseball movies, but none capture the spirit of the game in the same truthful and incisive manner.
“We gravitate to the dumb little things that bring joy to you,” says Arencibia. “My biggest thing from the movie was the bull sign (in the outfield), which is dumb. But when I played there, all I wanted to do was hit the bull and watch the bull blow smoke.”
Arencibia hit 37 homers in 177 games with the Bulls, including one off the bull that made it happen.
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