"We don't have time to get another tent made."

 

Lost, no doubt, in all the fireworks and dancing in the streets over Brian Cashman's deal bringing a 36-year-old statue and A Man Called Falafel to your New York Yankees, was the other key part of that Acquisition That Will Resound Down the Ages.

That was one-half of the critical, Higgy-Rorty platoon to be installed behind the plate. We're talking Ben Rortvedt, folks, pictured here, hard at work at his usual routine. Various Yankee personnel, according to the internet, were apparently so wowed by his artillery that they were kvelling about how the team would have trouble fitting their .169-hitting catcher into an existing shirt.

"We may have to get a whole new shirt!" one of them gushed.

Uh-huh. Hope he clears that expense with Hal first. 

It reminded me of an incident in the 1930s, when Casey Stengel was serving his time in the purgatory that was the old Boston Braves.  

It seems there was a frenzy in Beantown to bring back a beloved, hometown hero, Somerville's own James Francis "Shanty" Hogan.

Hogan was called "Shanty" not as one of the usual ethnic slurs casually pinned on almost all non-WASP Americans at the time, but because, well, he was roughly the size of a shanty.

Or rather, a shanty big enough that most of the west of Ireland would've given their last good potato to live in during the famine.

It wasn't so much that Hogan was huge by today's standards—he was supposedly six-one and 240 pounds, measurements that sound highly dubious in light of the photographic evidence, but still wouldn't come close to a single Fielder, Prince or Cecil. 

(Hogan, on the left. And below, shaking hands with Jack Sharkey.)

It was more that, as the great Steve Goldman once described him, Hogan—who was a terrific hitter—had a body that "seemed to be constructed out of marmots."

(See below.)

Stengel, asked if the Braves really did intend to go ahead and re-acquire Shanty Hogan, replied:

"There's not enough time in the season to get another tent made"—to clothe the Brobdingnagian receiver.

Unkind, to be sure. 

But it leads one to wonder if it's really worthwhile for Hal to get the MLB sweatshop in the D.R. up and running to tailor a whole new shirt for the prodigious Mr. Rortvedt.

You know and I know that this is, alas, yet another modern ballplayer—yet another Yankee—who is playing the wrong game.

Rorty, like somebody else I could mention, seems to think he's a professional bodybuilder. He's not. Ostensibly, he's a catcher. 

And you know and I know that, sure as shootin', come a little regular play in the big leagues those ligaments and tendons will be popping like over-tightened violin strings during a junior high performance of "The Flight of the Bumblebee."

But hey. That new shirt should be able to accommodate a pretty big ad.