There are some games where everything just seems to go right: good pitching, timely hitting, tough defense — and a nearly untouchable bullpen. The Nationals’ 6-3 win over the Braves on Saturday was one of those games, with Rich Ankiel’s heroics (one home run and a successful suicide squeeze) a sign that he’s healthy and ready to produce. Ankiel’s first home run of the season landed one row up in right field and his suicide squeeze energized the Nats dugout. “Look at the guy. He is awesome,” Werth said of Ankiel after the win. “What other player other than Babe Ruth who can play both ways? He could pitch and is a successful hitter. I can’t think of another other than those two. I think Rick is one of the purest athletes in the game.

The Nationals got a good outing from John Lannan, who pitched through the 5th, but was removed after a rain delay — what skipper Riggleman attributed to different movement on some of his pitches. While newbie Chad Gaudin struggled, the bullpen remained masterful, with Tyler Clippard pitching out of a jam and Sean Burnett finishing up the game with some slick on-the-mound fielding. The only negative was the weather, which caused two delays and drove the nearly 22,000 fans back into the stands. The Nationals match up against the Braves again tomorrow, before heading to Florida.

Reporting From The Natmosphere: We’ve always contended that the Nats have the best NL East blogsphere, perhaps the best team blogs in all of baseball. A trip around this verbal diamond shows that nearly everyone is excited by the new look of the team: Federal Baseball asks “Where have these Nats been hiding,” Miss Chatter gives a run down on the new guys on the team and reports on what happened to the old guys, Nationals Baseball talks about what can be expected “from this bunch of mediocre mashers” (and answers the question), Mike Henderson over at Nationals Daily News has a nice piece on Danny Espinosa, Nats 320 runs down the interesting changes at Nationals Park, and The Nats Blog goes through the ups and down of Opening Day.

That’s a lot of coverage, and we’ve only touched on about half of the total number of Nats blogs out there. If you surf around looking at the blogs of other teams, you’ll notice that very few have the same kind of coverage, or fanaticism, as the Natmosphere. The Cubs are right up there, and the Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers and Cards. But not too many others. Actually, it’s pretty impressive. Of course, CFG — with its team of reporters, researchers and worldwide coverage — outstrips them all.

Those Are The Details, Now For The Headlines: Topps baseball cards is celebrating its 60th anniversary by pumping out special promotions, television shows and rewards for lucky fans who open the right pack at the right time. Included in the celebration is a fan vote for the top 60 Topps cards of all time. Some of those receiving votes are puzzling. The Topps Bo Jackson 1986 card would not have gotten our vote, nor would the 1983 Wade Boggs entry. And the top Topps card (so to speak) was hardly a surprise — the 1952 Mickey Mantle. It’s the most popular card in the Topps collection and it is (after all) a Mickey Mantle card. But it’s not a rookie card: that card (a prize for any collection, if you can afford it) is the 1951 Bowman Mickey Mantle. Which is a thing of beauty. And which (if you’re really in the market for one) most recently sold for $165,000.

When he was introduced to the media as the new Yankees’ wunderkind, Mickey Mantle was asked whether he had a favorite Yankee as a boy playing ball back in Oklahoma. Flashing his lopsided grin, he nodded. He sure did, he said. The Yankee he admired most was “Stan Musial.” The Yankee brass scrambled to correct “The Mick,” who sat smiling, entertained by it all. What Mickey meant to say, Yankee G.M. George Weiss told the media, was that his favorite Yankee was Joe DiMaggio. Mickey happily complied and so it was: from that day forward, Mickey’s favorite Yankee was “the Yankee Clipper.” The Mantle-Musial anecdote (related with relish in Jane Leavy’s new bio of the Yankee great), might tell us all we need to know about Mantle and his grip on his own myth. Mantle was much more a savvy player of the New York media and much less the guileless country bumpkin than we might otherwise think. Thus: Mantle bathed in the sunlight of his role as “Mr. Yankee” while rolling his eyes at all the gabbing about his place in history — he just wanted to play baseball.

It’s not that Mantle didn’t love the Yankees and their history (he did — and diligently studied the lives of the Yankee greats), it’s that if Mantle had not played in New York he would have still be Mickey Mantle: with a prodigious home run swing (536 in all), a breathtaking OBP (.421 for his career), and an eye for driving in runs (1509 in 18 seasons). Which is simply to acknowledge that while Mantle’s place in baseball lore is underlined by all the attention he received in the Big Apple, his place in baseball is not a function of where he lived, but how he played. Which is why fans my age (that generation who actually saw Mantle play the game), tend to overlook the “other Mantle” that has gotten so much attention since his death — the drinking, brawling, promiscuous Mantle who was great but, because of how he lived, could have been so much greater.

We don’t care.

There is an idea abroad that the story of “the real Mickey Mantle” — the player who spent his post-game hours boozing and sleeping with women to whom he wasn’t married — has somehow diminished his greatness. That, when we millions of his admirers learned the real story behind “the boy with the lopsided grin,” we recoiled in disbelief and began to rethink our admiration for his feats. Really? Even as a kid, I could have told you that a handsome boy from Oklahoma with a bat in his hand probably lived life as fully off the field as he played it on the field. And that rather than being a man with a halo, The Mick was probably a man with a drink in his hand. So while the strength of Jane Leavy’s new book on Mantle is that it explores this point, its weakness is that Leavy is shocked when she discovers that one of baseball’s greatest players was a gin-drinking womanizer. It makes me want to scream: “don’t you get it?” The fact that Mantle was who he was doesn’t detract from his myth, it is his myth. So please . . . forget who you think Mickey Mantle might have been. If you want to find out who Mickey Mantle really was, do what every fan does — take a look at his numbers.

There’s something in each of us that doesn’t like a showboat. Muhammad Ali had a hard time catching on back in the early ’60s for precisely this reason and it’s why I never took to Eric Byrnes — who made several ostentatious attempts to collide with walls in pursuing deep fly balls. He once flapped his arms going backwards, just to show how hard he’d hit the bricks. Puh-leeeez. But, for some reason, showboating never bothered me when it came to Ricky Henderson or Mickey Rivers. And it doesn’t bother me when it comes to Mannywood either, though his case is a little different: Manny isn’t a showboat because he plays hard all the time and in every situation, but because he doesn’t. You can think of dozens of similar examples: I couldn’t stand Pete Rose’s “Charlie Hustle” routine, but loved it when Mark Fidrych sprinted off the mound. Fidrych was believable, Rose was showing off. Then too, I would have hated it if, say, Will Smith had done backflips at shortstop, but Ozzie Smith? Not so much.

Now then for the case of Hanley Ramirez, who is not only the most talented shortstop in the N.L., but probably the best shortstop in the N.L. Ramirez is as far from a showboat as possible, but he’s been accused of “dogging it” during games — which is widely interpreted by baseball pundits as hinting that he thinks he’s more important than the guys around him. That is, he’s a kind of showboat in reverse, an Eric Byrnes at half speed, a Mannywood of Miami. Back during the third week of May, for instance, Ramirez ran at half speed to first on an infield hit and then, the next day, he booted a ball and trotted after it . . . and after it . . . and after it. Fredi Gonzalez, the then-manager of the Marlins had had enough. He benched Ramirez and told him to apologize to the team. Cameron Maybin, Wes Helms and Dan Uggla all thought that would be a good idea. Ramirez refused. The situation was apparently cleared up after two days of sullen silence, when Fredi and Hanley “cleared the air.” Five weeks later, Gonzalez was gone.

While Ramirez has always claimed that his dust up with Gonzalez had nothing to do with his firing, you have to wonder. The Marlins have been down in the standings before and stuck with their manager. And Gonzalez was universally viewed as a top baseball strategist, all-around good guy and friend of the owner. In the end it didn’t matter. Just days after the firing, Bobby Valentine (another friend of the owner) was rumored as his “sure thing” replacement — but that never panned out. Was Valentine deep-sixed because of his view of the Ramirez situation? We can just imagine Valentine’s interview with fish owner Jeff Loria. “Hey Bobby, would you have benched Ramirez for not hustling?” And Bobby’s smiling answer: “You damn right.” The owner nods, squints, fiddles with the things on his desk and then gets up from his chair. “Thanks for coming.” As for Cameron Maybin, Wes Helms and Dan Uggla — well, they’re either headed back to the minors or they’re headed out of town.

Uncomfortable as it is, and as hard as it is to swallow, Hanley Ramirez probably has this right: he’s the best player on the team and maybe even in the NL East. And therefore (therefore), the rules that apply to Maybin, Helms and Uggla shouldn’t be applied to him. In fact, that’s what he said when asked if he’d lost respect for Gonzalez after he was benched. Yeah, he said. A little bit. “We got 24 more guys out there. Hopefully they can do the same things I can do. They’re wearing the Marlins uniform.” Here’s a rough translation: all baseball players are equal, but some are more equal than others. Or perhaps this — if you want to bench someone for dogging it, do it to a player who’s hitting .225. If Casey Stengel had actually benched Mickey Mantle for showing up for a game with a hangover (or worse), who do you think would have been out the door? And don’t claim that Hanley Ramirez is no Mickey Mantle. That’s not the point. The point is that Casey would never have benched Mantle. Ever. Because Casey knew what Gonzalez didn’t: managers don’t win batting titles.

It’s a well-known story, but bears repeating — particularly now that Nats’ ace Stephen Strasburg’s name is being mentioned in the same sentence as Herb Score’s. On Wednesday versus Kansas City, Strasburg eclipsed Score’s MLB record for strikeouts in a pitcher’s first four MLB starts. Strasburg has 41 strikeouts in his first four starts — Score had 40. But it will take some time for Strasburg to equal Score’s considerable achivements, even if the former Cleveland hurler (he passed on in 2008), battled injuries nearly his entire career. Like Strasburg, Score made his mark  as a rookie phenom; he came up with Cleveland in 1955 and set the American League on fire, going 16-10 with a 2.85 ERA. But unlike Strasburg, Score was surrounded by a team of All Star hitters and pitchers — Bob Feller and Bob Lemon had already made their mark on baseball, and Feller was a legend. The Tribe of ’55 were a powerful mix of slap hungry hitters and long-ballers: Vic Wertz, Bobby Avila, Ralph Kiner, Larry Doby. Score struck out 245 hitters that first year, a mark that stood until it was broken by Dwight Gooden in 1984.

In one of baseball’s well-known in-game incidents, in May of 1957, Score was hit by a Gil McDougald line drive that broke his cheekbone and sent him to the DL. It was said that Score never recovered his pitching motion and remained intimidated by the batted ball — the reason for his fall-off in production. But Score set the record straight in an interview with a baseball writer in 1987, saying that his career was cut short not by McDougald, but by a torn tendon in his pitching arm. “The McDougald line drive had nothing to do with my career ending prematurely,” he said. Score took a year to recover, but when facing the Senators in a game in 1958 a tendon in his arm snapped. Score visited a specialist in Baltimore and took three weeks off, then came back — again against the Senators. “I went in as a reliever, struck out five or six and ended the game on a popup to the outfield,” Score recalled. “But I hurt my arm again on that pitch. After that pitch, I was never the same again. My pitches never had the same movement on them. I had no snap.” Score was out of baseball after 1962. He spent 35 years as a Cleveland Indians radio announcer, before dying in his home town in Ohio in 2008.

Score had two good seasons — his rookie year in 1955 and his sophomore campaign of 1956, when he was 20-9. Mickey Mantle said that he was the toughest left hander he ever faced. It is said that Mantle tried everything against Score, alternating batting righty and lefty against him, but nothing worked. He could never touch his fastball, even after the McDougald incident. Score’s amazing rookie season (227 innings, 245 strikeouts) is a kind of touchstone for baseball statisticians, a model of what it means to be a phenom. But Score was not the only rookie pitcher to have set a league on fire. Dwight Gooden’s 276 strikeouts in 1984 (in just 218 innings) blasted past Score’s mark and Gooden was (arguably) even better the next year, when he fanned 268. Gooden matched this with a head-spinning 1.53 ERA. No one has equaled Gooden’s rookie strikeout record, though Kerry Wood came close, striking out 233 in 1998. Score, Gooden, Wood, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Don Sutton, Gary Nolan, Mark Langston and Hideo Nomo are the only rookie pitchers of the 20th century to strike out over 200 batters in their rookie campaigns.

It’s going to be virtually impossible for Stephen Strasburg to match Gooden’s feat, but only because it’s doubtful he will have a chance to pitch as many innings. St. Stephen is due to pitch every fifth day (not every fifth game) and will likely be shut down in mid-September. Plus, he’s on a strict under-100 pitch-per-game count, monitored by Nats’ skipper Jim Riggleman. Then too, it’s unlikely Strasburg will pitch much over 170 innings in his rookie campaign– if that. This ought to be simple arithmetic (ought to be), but it really isn’t. The Nats know what every Nats fan knows: that if Rizzo and Riggleman had their druthers, Strasburg would pitch fewer strikeouts (and not more) because, arguably, fewer strikeouts mean fewer pitches. Which is to say: Rizzo and Rigs are not so worried about a “McDougald moment” (there’s nothing anything can do about that), they’re worried about a “Score moment” — when a young pitcher throws that one pitch that (cumulatively) snaps that tendon and sends a good arm into early retirement.

Still, Strasburg’s first three outings are not only historic, they’re in the Herb Score/Dwight Gooden range. And better. Strasburg has 41 strikeouts in just 25.1 innings and sports a 1.78 ERA and 0.95 WHIP. He’s averaging 14 strikeouts per nine. That’s better than Score (9.7 per nine) or Gooden (11.4 per nine) or Wood (12.6 per nine). In fact, it’s unheard of. So logically (arithmetically), Strasburg could slap aside Gooden’s ’84 record if he could pitch as many innings (Gooden pitched 218). He won’t. St. Stephen would likely shrug all of this off (as he has, and consistently), by saying that baseball is about winning, not personal records. That’s refreshing (and true), but baseball fans are nuts about statistics not simply because records are there to be broken, but because numbers tell us important things about players. And Strasburg’s statistics tell us that, at least to this point, St. Stephen is a Score/Gooden/Wood once-in-a-generation pitcher.

Back in July, I took a friend – a lifelong Yankee fan — to a Nats game and we sat reminiscing about all the games we had seen as kids. My friend had grown up in New York when the Trolleys, Giants and Yankees were all the rage in baseball, so he had lots of stories: about Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra and Tom Tresh and the games he had seen them play. As it turned out, the game we attended resulted in one of those unlikely Nats’ victories, and near the end of the game my friend issued this judgment: “There are two good things about being here,” he said. “The first is that that Nats are winning and the second is that we haven’t heard “Sweet Caroline.” I laughed and shook my head: “I’m not a big fan of Neil Diamond,” he added, “and that song drives me nuts.” The other thing that he said that struck me came in about the 7th inning, when we were trading stories: “Remember the harmonica incident?” he asked. I blinked, trying to remember. Harmonica incident? And then it hit me: “Oh yeah, geez. Sure, I remember,” I said. “What in the hell was that guys’ name?” He smiled: “Phil Linz,” he said. And then he told me the story.

Back in the late summer of 1964, Phil Linz was a utility infielder with a Yankees team that was struggling to win its fifth consecutive pennant. Locked in pennant race with the pitching heavy White Sox and upstart Orioles, the Yankees were in chaos: Whitey Ford, Mickey Mantle and Tony Kubek were battling injuries — and new Bombers’ manager Yogi Berra was having trouble in the clubhouse. The problems had started in spring training, when Berra (who was picked by Yankee owner Dan Topping to replace Ralph Houk — that icon, that marble man), decided that he would set down some rules for how he expected the Bombers to behave. Yogi laid out the rules during his first clubhouse meeting, but when he finished his talk the sound of a scraping chair came from the back of the room. Mantle got up, threw up his arms, and shouted: “I quit” and pretended to stalk from the room. His teammates roared with laughter and Yogi smiled – but the tone for the season was set. The Yankees played horribly and by the end of August they were four games behind the surging Orioles and Pale Hose.

In mid-August, the Yankees made a key midwest swing, traveling to Minnesota for a set against the Twins, before moving on to Chicago to play the Pale Hose. The Twins series would be tough, but there was every expectation the Yankees would triumph in Chicago: they had already beaten the White Sox in ten consecutive games during the season. As Yankees second baseman Bobby Richardson would later tell it, in Minnesota he and Tony Kubek (two of the Yankees self proclaimed “milk shake boys”) visited the U.S. headquarters of Billy Graham’s ministries, where they were given a set of chorus books that Graham used in his “crusades.” Richardson (“the Right Reverend Richardson,” to his Yankee teammates) grabbed some of the chorus books and when he and Kubek returned to their Minneapolis hotel room they decided to sing some of the hymns. They were joined by Spud Murray, the batting practice pitcher — who brought his harmonica. The three sang for several hours and two days later, while the team was in Chicago, Kubek went out and bought four harmonicas — one for himself, one for Richardson and one for Tom Tresh. He gave the fourth one to Phil Linz.

As it turned out, the Yankees were swept by the Pale Hose in four games and seemed finished for the season. When the Bombers boarded their bus after the last loss, Berra (whose job was in danger), didn’t feel like celebrating. But in the back of the bus, Phil Linz broke out his harmonica and started to play. He was just learning and was following the instructions in a book that came with his instrument: “Mary Had A Little Lamb.” As Richardson later remembered: “So now we lost the four games in Chicago, and Phil — who didn’t play an inning of any of those games — was in the back of the bus and decided to choose this time to learn how to play the harmonica. When Yogi heard him, he jumped up and yelled: ‘Put that thing in your pocket.’ Unfortunately, Linz didn’t hear him and when he asked what Yogi had said, Mantle, who was sitting across the aisle, yelled: ‘He said to play it louder.’ So Phil kept playing and this time, Yogi jumped up and he was really mad. He grabbed the harmonica and threw it and it hit Pepitone, who started screaming for the trainer.” The bus broke out in gales of laughter — but Berra didn’t think it was funny. Enraged, he returned to his seat.

Inevitably, the incident reached the New York papers. It was a huge story and viewed as emblamatic of the Yankees’ troubles — and of Berra’s inability to handle the team. “In the end,” Richardson relates, “Yogi had the last laugh. The team got together after that and rallied to win the pennant. I think we went 22-6 in September to finish a game ahead of the White Sox.” The Yankees faced the Cardinals in the ’64 Series and lost in seven, but despite their late season success, Yogi was finished. The harmonica incident had convinced Yankees’ owner Dan Topping that Berra couldn’t handle the team and after the season he was fired — and replaced by Cardinals manager Johnny Keane.

After retiring from baseball, Kubek became a television broadcaster and active Wisconsin Democrat. In 1976, when his friend Bobby Richardson (who had become a minister) was a candidate for a Congressional seat in South Carolina, Kubek refused to campaign for him. Phil Linz did not have as nearly as good as a career in baseball as either Kubek or Richardson (.235 BA in seven years), but his dust-up with Berra made his reputation: after the incident was made public, Linz was offered offered $5000 by the Hohner Company to promote their harmonica and after the season he made so much money on the banquet circuit (telling the story) that he was able to open a successful New York bar. ”Yogi never held it against me,” Linz says. ”All my jobs have been because of that; people remember me because of that one incident. I only hit eleven home runs my whole career, you know, but I’m in all the books and all that.”