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OK, here's a hypo-hypothetical for you.  Had I been watching Travyon Robinson make his ML debut for a team I don't care about -- say, the Kansas City Royals -- and getting paid $200 for a one-game, trial-basis crosscheck?  

Here's what I'd a seen in that one game, and filed, if I'd a had no preconceptions going in.

Well, maybe I'd of left the part about the fan-thread out of it.  The stuff after the anti-censorship /vent, we mean.

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=== The Catch ===

Dave Sims mentioned, during the broadcast, that Trayvon Robinson had been a huge baseball fan since the age of three.  This interest in baseball "kept him out of gang activity" and the like, and sports took his life in a constructive direction.  Coming from Sims, apparently this observation was not "subtle racism."  You shudder to think what would have occurred, had Mike Blowers made the same observation.

I'll take a slightly different tack, one that I am fairly sure is approved in this year's PC "gotcha" manual.  ... Not all of us grew up under the same circumstances, and the personality aspect is important to understanding the fearlessness in a player like Robinson.  Or in a player like Chris Snelling.

Somebody else looks at Trayvon's catch in LF and admires his grace and body control.  True enough.  Grace and courage around the wall is one of the first things that baseball people say they look for in center field.

SSI looks at the way that Trayvon unhesitatingly went airborne into a wall he'd never seen before ... the way he went into the (low) elbows and mitts pointed against him like a line of halberds ... the way that he GRABBED the ball and then aggressively presented his triumph back in to the ML umps ... slight scowl, chin set, while standing next to hostile fans ... and the way that, after the out call, he went back into the stands and demanded his Mariners cap back ...

I look at all that and I'm not really thinking about whether the athleticism is unusual by MLB(TM) standards.  I'm thinking, Fearlessness.  

.. or, Desire.   A desire that means danger doesn't enter into your thinking.  Chris Snelling had this kind of desire.

Rickey Henderson did.  Pete Rose did.  Brendan Ryan does; Josh Bard has it, though their talent grades out differently.  Some players' aggression borders on controlled violence.  This aggressiveness that is not going to be beaten out of them, even if they plays until they're 40.

You're not going to tell Trayvon Robinson not to go to war.  You're not going to scare him, period.  

***

For the Royals :- ) obviously that catch, over an unorthodox LF fence that he'd never seen before and didn't look at, at any time, during his run for the ball, showed a Gold Glove CF's courage and body control around the wall.

It was the kind of run-and-catch, in unfamiliar surroundings, that the top 10 or 20 outfielders are comfortable making.  Robinson was comfortable making it.

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=== Offensive Aggressiveness and IQ ===

In Trayvon's at-bats, also, he looked slightly angry, very unintimidated, completely interested in imposing his own will onto ... um, Jered Weaver.

It was an intelligent, controlled aggression, again in Rickey / Pete Rose style.  

For me, the theme of the day was Fearlessness.  Robinson exuded it, defensively, at the plate, in the way he glared around, head and eyes up, walking back to the dugout after a called strike three.

***

His first swing of the game was on pitch 3 -- for the first and last time in the game, he used the AAA swing, the 440-foot swing, and fouled back a 91 fastball.  

After that, he dialed it back and matched his ambitions to the context around him.  In his second AB, he swung within himself, and he lasered an opposite-field line drive off exactly the same pitch that had struck him out looking in the third inning.  

(In the 3rd inning, Weaver threw him a sidearm, swerving fastball that had Trayvon jumping out of the way, even as the fastball broke over the heart of the plate.

But in the 6th inning, Weaver threw him the same jam-pitch-breaks-back-over and Trayvon crushed the ball to LF.)

***

In the 8th inning, Trayvon impressed the stuffing out of me.  Weaver quickly put him down 0-2, but Trayvon held off three straight "tease" pitches to work a 3-2 count.

Weaver's sequence was brilliant:  Weaver started with two outside 78 mph changeups for the 0-2, and then came back with a 90 fastball JUUUUUSSSSSSST a little high, right in his eyes.  Great!  Here's the fastball!  Go get it!

Trayvon had to be jittery -- his ML debut -- but he didn't lunge at the pitch.  Holding up on that one was Dustin Ackley impressive.

#4 and #5 were offspeed, low, and if Trayvon had drunk one more pregame cup of coffee he'd have jittered over the top of those, too.  He hadn't.

Finally, pitch 6, low-away change ... a Jered Weaver change, inside the strike zone, called strike three if you take it.  The bottom fell out of it and Trayvon two-bounced it to second base.  Jered beat him, fair and square, just as he would have beaten Ichiro or Mark Teixeira on that pitch.

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