This week, TCM and I are ignoring all the horrible things we could be complaining about these days and trying to keep things light and positive. Here's the first installment, here's the second.
"Gritty," thanks largely to the brilliant Fire Joe Morgan, is probably the most hated word in the English language to people like you and me. That or "scrappy," or "Plaschke."
I have a confession to make, though: I love gritty players. Not the little white guys who journalists like to praise because they get their uniforms dirty, provide good quotes and have no discernible baseball-related skills. Rather, I mean legitimately good players, who legitimately help their teams in tangible ways, who may or may not be media darlings or even speak English, but who also happen to be the all-out, max-effort, self-sacrificing types. Who crash into walls, play whatever position they're asked, have valuable but particularly unglamorous skills, play (well) through pain, and so forth. And maybe some of it is show -- I do tend to believe that almost all players are "max-effort" guys, or else they'd never get to the majors -- but so what? A lot of the fun of baseball is show.
So here's my own personal top ten list of gritty scrappiness:
