Arrivederci, Italia

Paradise Isn't Lost. It's Right up That Hill

Manarola, Cinque Terre, Italy (Photos: Me)

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Buongiorno, Mobsters.

How’s it goin’? Just checkin’ in on youse.

I have a screaming case of jet lag. Since June 17, I have no knowledge of anything that has occurred outside my immediate field of vision. You want a classic in-the-moment vacation, you could do worse than Italy. The locals might have some extended perspective. The turistas just want to know where the chianti is.

Ciao, y’all.

We’ll get back momentarily to the extended trip report.

It was my fate to miss the best run of Reds baseball since Lou Piniella last threw a base. That was 1990, when Lou still had a better fastball than Tom Browning, bless him. The Club was 35-35 when I left town 16 days ago. It’s 10-4 since, with one win by a starting pitcher (Andrew Abbott).

Alex Young and Ian Gibaut are 5-0 since then, of course they are. Hunter Greene, Nick Lodolo and Graham Ashcraft are 0-1. The pitching staff is 14th in the NL in ERA, runs allowed, homers allowed and walks given up.

In between photographing ridiculous scenery and hanging out with Bacchus, I spent a few seconds looking at Reds stories on my cell phone. Every game, the Reds won or made the outcome interesting. The current run seems beyond magic. That’s too easy an explanation for death defiance night after night.

Magic is magic for a reason and it does not explain an 18-9 June. It doesn’t account for the absolute deftness of David Bell’s work at running that bullpen. The Reds might be America’s Team. They’re also Google’s. Tell me, paisans, who exactly is Eduardo Salazar.

Randy Wynne? Come agin’?

Things go right with Jake Wong.

I’ve made no apologies for my defenses of Bell this year and last. Now, perhaps we are seeing why he’s worth more than a simplistic dismissal for a pitching change youse didn’t like.

Ever since Davey Johnson ran the Club in the mid-90s, I’ve talked about his philosophy of putting his players in a position to, quote, express their talents, unquote. A manager’s most important function is tone-setting. How do you like the tone now?

This group synchs nicely with this manager. Bell understands players. He grows on them, same as (perhaps) he is growing on you. It’s not easy to keep a ship of kids on course. Their confidence in this confounding game is like an egg rolling around the edge of a table. Pushing the right buttons for Run-DLC and Joey Votto isn’t for amateurs.

I don’t know how much credit to give Bell for the aggressive playing and thinking that has characterized this team and contributed to its success. Some, definitely. The Reds have played with such zest as to embarrass on occasion the flat-footed dudes in the other uniforms. First-to-3rd isn’t a goal here. It’s a lifestyle.

We feel the asterisk, Doc. . .

Well, it is baseball, permanent home for the Yeah-Buts.

It’s still not hard to look at these Reds and see the cards toppling. Bell’s masterful chess moves in June could be his downfall by Labor Day. It’s not fair to expect this pitching crew to maintain its current success. David rolls through relievers like a mustang on a four-day drive.

Chuck Berry, amici?

Si.

Winning 11-10 is not sustainable for any club playing above Whippy-Dip Level.

Wily, his ownself

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We underestimated the abilities of Steer, Fraley, Friedl. We went the whole month of March without hearing the name Abbott. A Wily Mo Pena bobblehead to anyone who knew Matt McLain would be an offensive force.

Good seasons require big years from unexpected sources. And yet feel free, if only for the sake of self preservation, to question the Reds staying power.

That said, they have re-proven the Ball axiom:

In baseball, you don’t know nothin’. (Yogi)

Or, if you prefer,

“Don’t think, Meat. You’ll hurt the ballclub.’’ (Crash)

In March, I wrote this:

This is a training-wheels season for Greene, Lodolo and Ashcraft. Don’t look at the scoreboard for proof of the team’s progress. Look at the lines of those three pitchers.

A personal favorite, typed by me many times, starting last winter: These Reds will lose a lot of games 3-2. Where’s the offense coming from?

You can’t get that sort of insight just anywhere.

This team will win 70 games, give or take. A n improvement over last year, but not a convincing sales pitch for a never-ending rebuild. . .

The Reds would have to go 25-53 starting today to do that.

The idea that they’d be in the buyers club at the Break could only have been inspired by blindness and a bottle of Eagle Rare. But here we are.

Somewhere between the impossible beauty of the ancient Italian Riviera and the insanity of Italian drivers (stop lights in Italy are a suggestion) the Reds turned the corner from Why? to Why Not? There’s some reason to believe the next three months won’t look like the last three, but why bother looking?

All that and Taylor Swift, too. In a gesture as selfless as it is magnanimous, I agree to take one for the town and go on Italian holiday more often.

Now, then. . .

OUR BELLISIMO ITALIAN JUNKET. . .

Tuscan grapes to be harvested in October

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I could go on for days.

Italy is like painting watercolors while drinking red wine while breathing original air from the 12th century. It’s a rocky beach, a hairpin curve on a road built when the Caesar boys were doing extended roadies across Europe. It’s houses hanging from cliffs like icicles from a January roof.

It’s crazy as a Vespa driver on a brick sidewalk, calm as a full moon over a Tuscan vineyard.

I spent two weeks with my mouth open in Italy. That was useful when eating gelato and pizza margherita, and the tagliatelle pasta we’d made ourselves minutes earlier. Mouth-wide-open was especially helpful when sampling chiantis from local wineries. The only bad thing about drinking reds in Italy was, reds anywhere else will be a comedown.

Mostly, my mouth hung slack from the beauty. Its variety, its audacity. Its color. Its color is everywhere, from the flowers blooming effortlessly from the vines that cling to the walls and trellises like first love, to the paints of the sky as the sun strolled from this horizon to that one.

Remember the scene in The Wizard of Oz? Dorothy emerged from the black-and-white of her Kansas farmhouse to the riot of hues that was Munchkinland?

Italy was like that, for the rookie and his disbelieving eyes.

I’m not exaggerating. I saw lots of the world on Mother Gannett’s dime, covering Olympics in South Korea, Spain, Australia and Greece. I’ve seen lots of what the US has to offer. Italy beats them all like a five-alarm sunset over the Mediterranean.

We stayed a week in Santa Margherita on the Ligurian coast. Santa, as the locals call it, was a jumping-off place for the Cinque Terre region we wanted to see. The train station was a 10-minute walk.

We’d spend each day hopping from one coastal, gravity-defying Cinque Terre town to the next. The pace was brisk, the crowds thick. Think Hilton Head with mountains, and pizza from the source. Seeing the town of Manarola from the hills above evidently was not a unique idea.

View from our balcony in Santa Margherita. Like a Hollywood back lot.

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Just as we’d had our fill of humanity, we retreated from it. We took the train to Florence a couple hours down the coast, rented a car to a villa in the Tuscany hills. The beauty of the Riviera was raucous and deliberate. The beauty of Tuscany was subtle and classy. Tuscany knows it’s hot. It doesn’t have to flaunt it.

We spent a week visiting towns as old as time. Siena, San Gimignano, Montalcino. Our own town, San Casciano in Val di Pesa. We became so enamored with the laid back-ness, we blew off world-famous Florence, 20 miles from our villa. Too congested.

Lunch

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That said, the best thing we did in Tuscany was gather nightly on our terrace that overlooked the curves of the hills spread before us like the folds of an unmade bed. Kerry, Kelly and I absorbed the panorama. Mouths fully open, we reviewed our day.

So much stuff to see, observations to make. The big, practical ones:

Credit is accepted, cash is king especially in the smaller towns.

Car not needed on the coast. The train gets you where you need to go. It also eliminates the nightmare of parking and the insanity of driving. I will not miss the 1 1/2-lane country roads and the tailgating locals, who don’t seem to appreciate that the beauty of where they live is an excuse to slow the F down.

Eat anything.

Except maybe octopus, which looks, well, like octopus and is like eating a rubber band.

Drink anything red and fermented. Anything.

The tap water is fine to drink.

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I have a new favorite cigar. The Toscano Classico, its wrapper made from fire-cured K-Y tobacco, its price a Johnny Thinwallet-pleasing $7 or so for a pack of 5. These are the rough-edged guys Clint smoked in all the spaghetti westerns. Very tasty.

Other random observations from the Tuscan location of the Three-Dot Lounge:

Italians dress nicer than we do, all the time. Women mostly wear dresses at night, men don’t ever wear baseball hats, usually wear linen pants. Italians are far slimmer than we are, maybe because they walk everywhere.

Pasta is a side dish. Don’t ask for meatballs.

Patience is a strategy except when driving. People take their time. Shops and restaurants take the middle of the afternoon off. If you hurry or get agitated, you’re missing the point.

90 degrees is more an annoyance than a discomfort. It was 90 at least, every day, but low humidity, like a hot day in San Diego. The miracle happens maybe an hour before sunset, when the breeze picks up and the temps drop like a rock. We had no AC in the Tucsan villa. Never needed it.

Color. Deep green hills like Ireland, golden wheatfields like Kansas, waterways that change color, from green to blue and back, literally in midstream. Italy is where flowers go on vacation.

From what we saw, all of Italy is one big Kodak Moment.

These were days I will remember when my memory is no more.

The view from our villa. Photo: Kelly Daugherty

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PROGRAMMING NOTE. . . Thanks for hangin’ around in my absence. I hope you enjoyed or at least tolerated the Greatest Hits lineup of Morning Lines. I noticed a few missed the pre-vacation memo, and decided the re-runs symbolized the general decline of mainstream media, not simply my sloth. Nope. Just a lame try at cheap page views.

If you didn’t mind it, I might try it again sometime. Lemme know.

TUNE O’ THE DAY. . . Nice to be home, reelin’ and rockin’. Rollin’ like a mustang.