The Sleep Blogger
When a nap becomes news
Ken Griffey Jr. is a famous baseball player. He took a nap one recent afternoon, and from all the furor it created you’d think it’s the most notorious case of shut-eye since Mexican General Santa Anna and his troops took an afternoon siesta on April 21, 1836 — and lost Texas as a result.
Griffey: Thanks for the applause, but it was just a nap
Griffey, one of the best to ever play the game — he ranks No. 5 on the list of all-time home-run sluggers — is a designated hitter for the Seattle Mariners. A few days ago, during a game in which he was expected to bat, Griffey was nowhere in sight. When a newspaper reporter later asked why Griffey hadn’t appeared in the game, here’s what he learned from two of Griffey’s teammates:
“He was asleep in the clubhouse,” one player said. “He’d gone back about the fifth inning to get a jacket and didn’t come back. I went back in about the seventh inning – and he was in his chair, sound asleep.”
The other player, who knows Griffey a little better, tried to rationalize.
“He doesn’t sleep well at night, he’s away from his family, he’s comfortable in the clubhouse,” he said. “They could have awakened him …”
Griffey was asleep on the job. Literally.
On the scale of work-related sins, this would seem to be a minor one. Not so for the crew of ESPN’s Baseball Tonight, however. A quartet of talking heads — that’s right, four of ‘em — convened to debate the significance of Griffey’s nap, hashing out its meaning with the serious tones of diplomats hammering out the Treaty of Versailles. Mariners officials, for their part, scrambled to explain that things weren’t quite as they seemed. Comments from fans lit up the various baseball Web sites.
But the best reaction came from a Seattle Times columnist, who exercised his formidable powers of research to come up with an “All-Sleep Team” of professional baseball players. Some of the best: Hall of Fame second baseman Nap Lajoie; minor-league journeyman James Yawn; ’90s-era minor-league catcher Derek Dreamer; and a guy who played a single season in Richmond, Va., 100 years ago named Ed Sandman.
As the Times columnist points out: “You can’t make this stuff up.”