Imagine a World Series primer narrated by Kenny Powers, the mullet-headed hero of the HBO comedy series “Eastbound and Down.” When we first meet Kenny in Season One, he’s a hard-living slob, once gifted with a great arm, who has wasted his athletic talent and not-so-hard-earned piles of money. In the very first episode, in a craftily concise montage, we see Kenny’s transformation from hungry rookie to bloated has-been—a closing pitcher whose closed-circuit self-regard keeps him from understanding why other people don’t worship him. In Kenny’s mind, the fact that he once achieved real fame—a manly, American kind of fame—ought to be all the credibility he’ll ever need. But he’s learning (although learning may be too strong a word here) the hard truth. Kenny has fallen from the Major Leagues and is living in the suburbs with his brother, planning an extremely unlikely comeback. We often see Kenny sitting in his pick-up truck, listening to the audio-book version of his own memoir, narrated by himself. (In a moment that defines the show at its best, we think that the monologue coming out of Kenny’s car speakers is coming from his head, before we realize that what seems like spontaneous human thought is actually the most canned, bland brand of thoughtlessness: a pro athlete’s autobiography-on-tape.)
There was a Kenny Powers moment in Game One of the World Series on Wednesday night, when the Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Cliff Lee caught a pop fly without moving from his position on the mound. Lee stood there watching as the ball reached its apex somewhere above him; when the ball began to fall toward him, Lee practiced utter stillness, as though the baseball’s whereabouts didn’t really matter to him or anyone else. Then, at the last second, like a prankster character from an old Warner Bros. cartoon, Cliff Lee flicked his glove under the ball and caught it. Dismissively, arrogantly, as though he was totally expecting the stupid Yankee batter (who happened to be Johnny Damon) to hit a stupid pop-up.
The Catch (or almost the Anti-Catch) was representative of the kind of night Lee was having on the mound: he didn’t seem to be working very hard, but his pitches were consistently filthy, and he dominated one of the best lineups in baseball. It all just came to him. He struck out ten. He pitched a complete game. He cooked a four-course feast in the dugout, for all I know. The Yankees couldn’t do anything about it.
So what would Kenny Powers, the protagonist of “Eastbound and Down,” say about this? Perhaps something along the lines of, “Dude, that was hilarious—and trust me: I know what it feels like to be the best player on the field, so good you barely have to try.”
But was Cliff Lee’s Kenny Powers moment really such a Kenny Powers moment?
The thing about prankster or trickster characters—Bugs Bunny, or the Spider in West African folktales, or Cliff Lee—is that they have some amount of control over the story. They manipulate, they deceive, they change shape, they throw off-speed. Even their sudden moves are planned. And that was the kind of act that Cliff Lee pulled off on the mound last Wednesday. It seemed like he didn’t care if anyone caught that pop fly, but he was just pretending. Lee, like Kenny Powers, was full of self-regard when he did what he did. But he knew what he was doing.
Part of what makes the Kenny Powers character fascinating is that he’s no prankster. He doesn’t have the subtlety or the wit (and one of the graces of Danny McBride’s performance of the character is that we believe in this lack as we watch). Kenny reminds me more of those daft medieval men in Chaucer who think they know what’s going on around them, until they wind up having their wives stolen, or getting rolled off the roof in a barrel, or getting a hot poker—you get the idea. Kenny is absolutely convinced that he has all a man needs to control the world. If he could just convince the world of the same, he’d be golden. In the meantime, though, the subtlest prank he’s likely to pull off is throwing a brick through someone windshield.
Thursday night, in Game Two of the World Series, the Phillies sent another wily pitcher to the mound— this time Pedro Martinez, whose dark, curly mini-mullet is perhaps an inspiration for the one Kenny Powers proudly sports. As good as Martinez was—unlike Kenny, he can and did pull out all the tricks that a veteran pitcher needs to stay in the game—the Phillies lost. The series is tied 1-1, with the Yankees headed to Philly to see if they can muster a victory on the road. Winning is tough, though, when the other team has a cast of characters savvy enough to fool you.
