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Sunday, July 15, 2007
‘Salty’ gets big boost from fan’s Web site
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
You read the most interesting things on the Internet, some of which might even be true. Just up and running is an advocacy Web site, the intent of which bears the growing ring of truth.
From www.startsalty.com, we read this: “Jarrod Saltalamacchia is the future of Major League Baseball.” This bears more than a passing resemblance to the prescient pronouncement rendered by critic Jon Landau in 1974: “I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.”
Springsteen is from New Jersey. So is the creator of startsalty.com. Coincidence? Surely not.
Andrew Marks is 23. He graduated from Rutgers in the spring. He lives in Princeton, N.J., and has been a Braves fan for as long as he can remember. Why? Because his dad rooted for the Braves in the heyday of Eddie Mathews and does still.
Marks has other Braves he considers favorites — Chipper Jones over time, Kelly Johnson now — but when Marks saw Saltalamacchia report to the Braves in May, he said, “It just really clicked.” He familiarized himself with the spelling of the rookie’s daunting last name “by repeating it about 100 times before I’d go to sleep.”
And then, since Marks does work with both Web design and public relations, he put his vocational skills to outside use. Thus was born startsalty.com, which poses the not-unreasonable question: “Why is this kid currently 2nd tier to Scott Thorman?”
Not content just to sing Salty’s praises, startsalty.com offers a stylized rip of Thorman, who remains the Braves’ primary first baseman even though he’s batting .215 and has more strikeouts than hits. A question on the site asks: “When will Scott Thorman swing the bat without leaving his feet?” Answers range from “tomorrow” to “next baseball season” to “[when he’s] on a different team.”
The top of the page, as you’d expect, features a handsome photo of Salty. The bottom carries a doctored shot from “Titanic” with the faces of Thorman and Bobby Cox replacing the mugs of Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio. (The point being, one assumes, that the voyage in question didn’t end so well.)
Another question posed by startsalty.com: “All-Star Game. In the bottom of the ninth, if Salty was the pinch-hitter, would [Albert] Pujols still be [griping about being left on the bench]?” The most popular of the three answers, with 62 percent of the vote, is this: “No way! Salty’s grand slam would have solved the problem.”
Said Marks: “Some people have said the site looks like it was designed by a 12-year-old, but I like to represent the average person.”
Marks has never spoken to Saltalamacchia or seen him in person. “My dad and I go to the games when [the Braves] play in Philadelphia,” he said, “and we have tickets when they’re there next month — Friday and Saturday night. Nothing would make me happier than to meet him.”
Nor did Marks have any idea whether the man himself had eyeballed startsalty.com. The answer: He hadn’t before Sunday, but he has now.
Saltalamacchia isn’t a Web wizard. He has a computer for “making plane reservations” but scarcely uses it beyond that. “I can’t even turn a computer on,” he said. But viewing startsalty.com on a reporter’s laptop left him partly amused and mostly delighted. “It’s very flattering,” he said. “You play the game because you love it, but the fans make it a lot easier.”
Salty, it should be noted, indeed started Sunday — at catcher, his primary position, and not first base, where Marks would deploy him on a permanent basis — and went 1-for-3 to keep his average at .304. He might or might not be the future of Major League Baseball, but he’s already a better-looking hitter than Scott Thorman.
A lot of nutty concepts populate the Web. This one, improbably launched in the Garden State, makes too much sense to ignore. Stop the madness. Start Salty. Dot com.
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