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Angell is 89 now, at some complain that he's got an air of things-were-better-in-my-day about him. Alex Belth cherrypicks a few of the piece's great quotes regarding Alex Rodriguez, Reggie Jackson, and Hideki Matsui, and they all contain a hint of disdain for the present as opposed to the past. Nonetheless, even if he weren't still such a master of prose, Angell's perspective would be a valuable one simply because the breadth of baseball history he witnessed firsthand — back to the days of Ruth and Gehrig, or the Gashouse Gang, or Willie Mays in his prime in the Polo Grounds — grants him an authority on the subject that's virtually unmatched. If he sounds a bit crotchety at times, well, where the hell else are you gonna get a comparison like this:
He throws with an elegant flail, hiding the ball behind his hip or knee and producing it from behind his left shoulder, already in full delivery. His finish brings his left leg up astern like a semaphore, while his arm swings back across his waist. This columnar closing posture — he's not twisted off to one side, like other pitchers, but driving forward, with the back leg still aloft, as his eyes follow the pitch — is classic and reminded me strongly of some fabled pitcher from my boyhood. He looked a little dusty and work-worn out there, which may have contributed to this impression. I thought about Dizzy Dean or Lon (the Arkansas Hummingbird) Warneke, but they were righties. Then I remembered Hal Newhouser, the Tigers' lefty ace in the nineteen-forties, who ate up batters much in the way that Lee does. Later, I put my question in a phone call to Seymour Siwoff, the dean of the Elias Sports Bureau. "Hmmm," he said when i mentioned the flying back leg, "let me think about this for a minute." There was a pause, and then he said, "Why do I think it was somebody on the Tigers?"
A few other favorites... On the American League Championship Series:
Nothing much about the Championship Series with the Los Angeles Angels feels like fun in retrospect, even from this distance. Mostly, it was terrifying. I remember calling home once in mid-game from the Yankee Stadium press box, and hearing "I can't stand any more of this!" when my wife picked up the phone. Did anyone actually enjoy Game 5, out there in Anaheim, when the home-team Angels went ahead by four runs in the first ininig, watched that lead disintegrate in a six-run Yankee seventh, and came back with a winning three of their own in the bottom half? Top and botom, that inning required forty-four minutes, and it felt like a colonoscopy."
On the Yankees' outsized ace:
Too bad, but I'm not going to get around to C.C. Sabathia's sunny looks and pavillion-sized pant and weird, white-toed spikes, or ask batters how they feel about his fastball-cutter-changeup assortment that arrives (he's six-seven and two hundred and ninety pounds) like a loaded tea tray coming down an airshaft.
On Derek Jeter: "Just when you think you appreciate Derek enough, you don't."
One could say the same thing about Angell. My only beef with the piece was that it felt too short, lacking a grander perspective on the regular season and rushing to a close with the suddenness and finality of Game 6 itself, leaving us to face alone what Ken Burns termed "the hard facts of autumn." I wanted to read Angell's unwritten digression about the new Yankee Stadium and his deeper thoughts about Sabathia; when exactly are we going to get those from the nearly nonagenarian bard, whose output is down to these annual summaries? I realize that print is his medium and that the contraction of magazine advertising and the high cost of paper restricts his space. Why not produce a double-length piece for the web that we can, as Alex did, print out and read at our leisure? It seems like an opportunity missed for a guy who's got all too few innings left.
That said, it's still a damn good excuse to plunk down $5 and enjoy one of the old masters. Get thee to a newsstand while you still can, my friends.
Wishing a happy thanksgiving to family, friends and readers. Here's hoping you're enjoying your turkey and stuffing among those whom you love.
Sadly, no, I don't think so. I had the pleasure of interviewing Miller for a Baseball Prospectus feature a year and a half ago. Still feisty and sharp as a tack at 91 years old, he had just announced that he was fed up with the Veterans Committee's election process and wished to be taken out of consideration for all future voting:
As former executive director of the players' union that negotiated these changes, I find myself unwilling to contemplate one more rigged Veterans Committee whose members are handpicked to reach a particular outcome while offering a pretense of a democratic vote. It is an insult to baseball fans, historians, sports writers and especially to those baseball players who sacrificed and brought the game into the 21st century. At the age of 91 I can do without a farce."
Alas, the Hall has not abided by his wishes, as the VC's screening committee has put him up for yet another vote — and likely another defeat.
In our interview, Miller noted that the deck was stacked against him because nine of the 12 members on the VC had management ties. "[On]e thing a trade union leader learns to do is how to count votes in advance," he told me. "Whenever I took one look at what I was faced with, it was obvious to me it was not gonna happen."
Specifically, Miller was referring to the fact that three of the members of the VC — Bill Giles, Andy MacPhail and John Harrington — were front office executives and management hardliners during the late-Eighties collusion era.* Frustrated by getting their asses kicked by Miller, they tried to break the union by conspiring to chill the market for free agents after the 1985, 1986, and 1987 seasons. Their crime wound up costing teams $280 million dollars in damages, according to the 1990 settlement (pdf). From my BP feature:
In the 2007 election, [former commissioner and Miller adversary Bowie] Kuhn had garnered just 14 out of 84 votes, well behind not only Miller but six other candidates. In fact, of the elected, only [former Dodger owner Walter] O'Malley had received significant support beforehand:
2007 2008 Barney Dreyfuss ---- 83.3%* Bowie Kuhn 17.3% 83.3%* Walter O'Malley 44.4% 75.0%* Ewing Kauffman ---- 41.7% John Fetzer ---- 33.3% Marvin Miller 63.0% 25.0% Bob Howsam ---- 25.0% Buzzie Bavasi 37.0% <25.0% Gabe Paul 12.3% <25.0% John McHale ---- <25.0% Bill White 29.6% ---- August Busch Jr. 16.0% ---- Charley O. Finley 12.3% ---- Phil Wrigley 11.1% ----
The reason for that stunning reversal was a deck stacked significantly in favor of Kuhn and against Miller. Of the 12 men on the committee, only Monte Irvin, Bobby Brown and Harmon Killebrew ever played in the majors, and none of them played a single game in the post-Reserve Clause era. Along with three writers — Paul Hagen (Philadelphia Daily News), Rick Hummel (St. Louis Post-Dispatch) and Hal McCoy (Dayton Daily News) — the committee contained no less than seven owners or executives: Brown (American League president), John Harrington (Red Sox), Jerry Bell (Twins), Bill DeWitt Jr.,(Cardinals), Bill Giles (Phillies), David Glass (Royals) and Andy MacPhail (Orioles). If anyone needed further evidence that the vote was reliant on the Old Boy network, it's worth noting that DeWitt, Giles and MacPhail are legacies whose fathers (and in MacPhail's case, a grandfather) were on the management side during the Reserve Clause era. Worse, Giles, Harrington and MacPhail were all on the management side during baseball's disgraceful collusion saga in the Eighties.
"Now I took one look at that committee and I didn't have to have any help. I couldn't possibly get nine votes out of that committee," says Miller, noting not only the taint of collusion among those ranks but also more subtle links to management. "Just take Monte Irvin. Fine player, et cetera, but after he was a player, he worked for Bowie Kuhn for more than 10 years. Would you expect him to vote for me?"
Were this a jury, Miller could have demanded a mistrial due to the slate's bias, but Hall candidates have no such recourse. As Jim Bouton succinctly summarized, "Essentially, the decision for putting a union leader in the Hall of Fame was handed over to a bunch of executives and former executives. Marvin Miller kicked their butts and took power away from the baseball establishment — do you really think those people are going to vote him in? It's a joke."
According to Brown's article, Bell, DeWitt, Giles, MacPhail and Glass — a bloc of enough stooges to prevent Miller's election right there — are all still on the VC. The three players have been replaced... by two players, Robin Roberts and Tom Seaver. Both were among those who declined a seat on the committee the last time around, and while perhaps they can more eloquently state Miller's case to the rest of the committee, that's still one fewer vote than he had going in.
I'm torn here. While I'm 100 percent convinced that the man should be in the Hall of Fame, I also respect his wishes. I suppose I'd rather see him tell the Hall exactly how far to shove it if the election were to somehow turn out in his favor. Given the makeup of the VC, I simply don't see that happening. The bottom line is that we're in for another farce.
* In the interview transcript, I mistakenly listed the three collusion-linked execs Miller was implicating as DeWitt, MacPhail and Harrington. The feature, which was published a few days prior, gets it right.
Last week, Bronx Banter's Alex Belth put together a three-part series (one, two, three) on some of the greatest ledes — the opening sentences or paragraphs of newspaper or magazine articles — in sportswriting history, lines which pack a wallop that's stood the test of time. A student of the genre, Alex called upon great works by some of the heaviest hitters of bygone eras, including Red Smith, Heywood Broun, John Lardner, W.C. Heinz, Grantland Rice, Roger Kahn, and Shirley Povich. Here's Smith, on Bobby Thomson's "Shot Heard 'Round the World":
Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it, The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly implausible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.
Baseball wasn't the only sport represented in that Murderer's Row; football, boxing and horse racing were prominently featured as well. There was even one devoted to auto racing, courtesy of Jim Murray, who devoted this immortal lede to a column on the Indianapolis 500: "Gentlemen, start your coffins."
Though I actually didn't get to read a ton of his pieces while growing up, Murray was a favorite of mine based on the handful of Los Angeles Times columns which crossed my path in my travels, and the occasional one which would show up closer to home via syndication. Thanks to the magic of Google, I located the first Murray column that I remember reading. It's from 1982, written on the occasion of the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, and yes, it's got a hell of a lede:
You folks all know my opinion of the Pebble Beach golf course. If it were human, they'd hang it from the highest yardarm in the British fleet. It's the golfing equivalent of the Spanish Main. Or the Spanish Inquisition.
These 18 holes were not cut in the picturesque countryside of Carmel Bay. They were dragged out of British prisons and shanghaied onto this hell ship. They are a classic band of cutthroats, blackguards without mercy, kindness or compassion.
Every one of them has murder in his heart, a knife in his teeth, hate in his soul, and a bottle of rum in his pocket. He'd kill you for your parrot.
Further down the article, where Murray decries the obscurities in the Open's field of players, is a classic requiem for a duffer that's stuck with me for more than a quarter century: "Stan Stopa is here. He's from Wilshire Boulevard. That's Wilshire Boulevard in Metaire, La., not the one in Los Angeles. Stan should be back early, folks."
I own a few Murray anthologies, so in a bit of downtime, I sent Alex a representative selection of his great baseball ledes, which he compiled into yet another entry in his Bronx Banter series. The first four of them hail from The Great Ones, the fifth from The Jim Murray Collection, both of which can be had for less than five bucks a pop via your friendly online used bookseller.
Apropos of the recent World Series, here's a pair of 'em, one on Reggie Jackson from October 19, 1977 ("Reggie Renames the House That Ruth Built") and one on Orel Hershiser from September 28, 1988 ("They Won't Call Him Dr. Zero for Nothing"):
NEW YORK-Excuse me while I wipe up the bloodstains and carry off the wounded. The Dodgers forgot to circle the wagons.
Listen! You don’t go into the woods with a bear. You don’t go into a fog with Jack the Ripper. You don’t get in a car with Al Capone. You don’t get on a ship with Morgan the Pirate. You don’t go into shark waters with a nosebleed. You don’t wander into Little Bighorn with General Custer.
And you don’t come into Yankee Stadium needing a win to stay alive in a World Series. Not unless you have a note pinned to you telling them where to send the remains. If any.
• • •
Norman Rockwell would have loved Orel Hershiser. The prevailing opinion is, he wasn't drafted, he just came walking off a Saturday Evening Post cover one day with a pitcher’s glove, a cap 2 sizes too big and a big balloon of bubble gum coming out of his mouth.
You can read the entirety of the Reggie piece here via Google Books, and the Orel piece here via a cache of the L.A. Times's archived version.
Upon Murray's passing, Sports Illustrated's Rick Reilly eulogized him in the magazine's pages, writing, "He wrote the nation's best sports column for 37 delicious years at the Los Angeles Times, but, come to think of it, the column was about sports sort of the way Citizen Kane was about sleds." That piece, along with Reilly's moving tribute from 12 years earlier, "King of the Sports Page," are both worth reading. Don't miss them — this means you, Dad.
A note from somebody at the New York Times alerted me to this new-found footage of Babe Ruth swinging a bat and playing Yankee Stadium outfield circa 1928. The footage comes via 90-second silent 8-millimeter clip shot recently unearthed by a New Hampshire man from his grandfather’s home movie collection. It won't win any awards for clarity, but the Bambino's distinctive swing and gait are apparent, and the expert researchers at the MLB Network archive have verified it.
Babe Ruth has struck out looking. Displeased, he leans on his bat, right hand on his hip, and looks back at the umpire. He utters something that can only be imagined. Lou Gehrig, on deck, leans on his bat, too, as if he has seen this act before. Ruth finally shuffles away, head turned to the umpire, dragging his bat through the dirt.
...The newly arrived Ruth film is part of the video collection of Major League Baseball Productions, the league’s official archivist, which spans more than 100 years and includes about 150,000 hours of moving images. Most of the collection is stored in plastic cases that line metal shelves of a room labeled “Major League Baseball Film and Video Archive.” The overflow rests in storage a few miles away, in Fort Lee, N.J.
...He is shown in right field, hands on his knees, glove on his right hand. To a casual fan, it appears unremarkable. But it represents the archive’s only game action of Ruth playing in the outfield — where he spent more than 2,200 games — other than a between-innings game of catch.
Nick Trotta, baseball’s manager of library licensing, took a look at the newly arrived Ruth clip first. He quickly realized it was something he had not seen before.
When others saw it, it was “wow, wow, wow,” Mr. Trotta said.
Many of those myths surrounding Paige, of course, were of the pitcher's own making via interviews and as-told-to autobiographies, and they were a crucial part of his public relations strategy. In his preface to the book (published as an excerpt at Bronx Banter), Tye explains Paige's obfuscation about his birthdate:
Satchel knew that, despite being the fastest, winningest pitcher alive, being black meant he never would get the attention he deserved. That was easy to see in the backwaters of the Negro Leagues but it remained true when he hit the Majors at age forty-two, with accusations flying that his signing was a mere stunt. He needed an edge, a bit of mystery, to romance sportswriters and fans. Longevity offered the perfect platform. "They want me to be old," Satchel said, "so I give 'em what they want. Seems they get a bigger kick out of an old man throwing strikeouts." He feigned exasperation when reporters pressed to know the secret of his birth, insisting, "I want to be the onliest man in the United States that nobody knows nothin' about." In fact he wanted just the opposite: Satchel masterfully exploited his lost birthday to ensure the world would remember his long life.
It was not a random image Satchel crafted for himself but one he knew played perfectly into perceptions whites had back then of blacks. It was a persona of agelessness and fecklessness, one where a family's entire history could be written into a faded bible and a goat could devour both. The black man in the era of Jim Crow was not expected to have human proportions at all, certainly none worth documenting in public records or engraving for posterity. He was a phantom, without the dignity of a real name (hence the nickname Satchel), a rational mother (Satchel's mother was so confused she supposedly mixed him up with his brother), or an age certain ("Nobody knows how complicated I am," he once said. "All they want to know is how old I am."). That is precisely the image that nervous white owners relished when they signed the first black ballplayers. Few inquired where the pioneers came from or wanted to hear about their struggles. In these athletes' very anonymity lay their value.
Playing to social stereotypes the way he did with his age is just half the story of Satchel Paige, although it is the half most told. While many dismissed him as a Stepin Fetchit if not an Uncle Tom, this book makes clear that he was something else entirely – a quiet subversive, defying Uncle Tom and Jim Crow. Told all his life that black lives matter less than white ones, he teased journalists by adding or subtracting years each time they asked his age, then asking them, "How old would you be if you didn't know how old you were?" Relegated by statute and custom to the shadows of the Negro Leagues, he fed Uncle Sam shadowy information on his provenance. Yet growing up in the Deep South he knew better than to flaunt the rules openly, so he did it opaquely. He made his relationships with the press and the public into a game, using insubordination and indirection to challenge his segregated surroundings.
While Tye digs deep — the book's bibliography and end notes are both at least 35 pages long, and he interviewed more than 200 Negro League and major league opponents and teammates — and lays waste to some of the tall tales surrounding Paige, what emerges is an altogether more nuanced and ultimately more compelling version of the ageless pitcher. Some of Paige's embellishments, such as his account of his pitching the championship finale for Dragones de Ciudad Trujillo in the Dominican Republic in 1937, don't stand up to the light of day. Others, such as the masterful control which allowed him to throw the ball over a chewing gum wrapper with amazing consistency or his brazen penchant for calling in his outfielders and then getting the crucial strikeout(s), he finds well-documented.
As always, there are the quotes, most of which really did come out of Paige's mouth in some form or other. Asked by his manager if he threw fast consistently, he replied, "No sir, i do it all the time." Asked about his philosophy of pitching, he warned, "Bases on balls is the curse of a nation... throw strikes at all times. Unless you don't want to." Of course, it's interesting to learn that the six rules for staying young for which he's credited were partly the work of Collier's Richard Donovan, as the sidebar to a three-part profile from 1953. And, as Tye notes, not always taken to heart by the font of wisdom from which they supposedly flowed.
Through it all, Tye meticulously tracks Paige's peripatetic ways, noting not only his myriad stops both on his way up (he began pitching professionally in Chattanooga in 1926) and down (his last major league appearance was with the Kansas City A's in 1965; his last regular duty was with the Triple-A Miami Marlins from 1956-1958) but also his numerous barnstorming tours, not to mention the countless times he jumped teams to collect a bigger payday, often by less-than-honorably walking out on his contract. The book's appendix even has a well-compiled statistical thumbnail, collecting the best-researched data on Paige's time in the Negro Leagues, majors, minors, East-West All-Star Games, North Dakota, California Winter League and Latin leagues (though it misses two late stints in the minors in Portland and Hampton, Virginia).
The author offers a good deal of insight into the conditions Paige played under and the men he played for, such as Pittsburgh Crawfords owner Gus Greenlee and Kansas City Monarchs co-owner J.L. Wilkinson (whose business partner, Tom Baird, was a member of the Ku Klux Klan). If I have a quibble about the book it's that he doesn't go into great enough detail about many of the men he played with and against, particularly Josh Gibson, though the portraits of barnstorming rivals Dizzy Dean and Bob Feller do stand out. He's acutely aware of the generation gap between Paige and Robinson, or Paige and Indians teammate Larry Doby, who broke the American League color line in July 1947, and doesn't sugarcoat Paige's mixed emotions at being passed over as the man to break the majors' color barrier.
In all, Tye's created an impressive work that never feels bogged down by its lofty ambitions or the weight of the author's research; his prose is a breeze, for the most part. He makes a convincing case for Paige not only as one of baseball's all-time greats but as an agent of social change, covering seemingly millions of miles as he lay the groundwork for the game's integration, delighting fans and winning over doubters and even the occasional bigot while building a legacy that might be matched only by Babe Ruth's in its importance to the game and the nation. This one's a keeper.
Today's Baseball Prospectus/ESPN Insider double dip concerns the Rockies' Todd Helton, and in particular his Hall of Fame chances. If you were quietly minding your business by not thinking about Helton's Cooperstown case, you weren't alone; I was somewhat surprised when I was offered the assignment:
Is Todd Helton bound for the Hall of Fame? On the surface, that's not exactly a burning question, even given the resurgent Rockies first baseman's .323/.400/.505 showing to date. At 35 years of age, under contract through 2011, and approaching no major milestones, it's not as though his moment of reckoning has arrived, though he did recently become the 50th player to reach the 500-doubles milestone. That has to count for something, right?
When it finally arrives, Helton's Cooperstown candidacy will be built upon numbers compiled under what have been arguably the most optimal conditions ever afforded a hitter over an extended period of time. He did his best work in high-altitude Coors Field at a time when scoring rates soared higher than they had been in seventy years. His monster performance of 2000 — 42 homers, 147 RBI, and a .372/.463/.698 line — was produced while playing half his games in a ballpark that increased scoring by 25 percent relative to the league, this in a year when the league average of 5.0 runs per game was higher than any year since 1930 (although it did match 1999's rate). His decline from that lofty peak has been masked by his hitter-friendly park, to the point that his career rate stats are still a sterling .328/.427/.569, numbers he hasn't exceeded since 2004 (save for a .445 OBP in 2005).
The first line of that second graf now has some additional information to back it up. Via Baseball-Reference.com's Sean Forman, I've obtained a long-sought leaderboard for B-R's AIR stat, which indexes the combination of park, league and era scoring levels into one number to provide an idea of how favorable or unfavorable the conditions he faced were, scoring-wise, with 100 being average. Helton tops the list:
Player PA AIR Todd Helton 7494 124 Neifi Perez 5365 123 Vinny Castilla 7305 120 Dante Bichette 6777 118 Fresco Thompson 2780 117 Mel Almada 2702 117 Beau Bell 2997 117 Terry Shumpert 2159 117 Larry Walker 7958 117 Garrett Atkins 3002 117 Brad Hawpe 2620 117 Ed Morgan 3205 116 Jack Burns 3900 116 Ski Melillo 5402 116 Earl Averill* 7160 116 Rip Radcliff 4398 116 Quinton McCracken 2700 116 Matt Holliday 3420 116 Don Hurst 3681 115 Dick Porter 2790 115 Max Bishop 5678 115 Odell Hale 4057 115 Moose Solters 3651 115 Joe Vosmik 6007 115 Mike Lansing 4486 115 Rusty Greer 4370 115 Jeff Cirillo 6026 115 Chad Tracy 2493 115 Sammy Hale 3067 114 Gene Robertson 2415 114 Butch Henline 2331 114 Bing Miller 6675 114 Mickey Cochrane* 6055 114 Mule Haas 4749 114 Marv Owen 4147 114 Billy Rogell 5819 114 Bruce Campbell 5337 114 Charlie Gehringer* 10096 114 Eric McNair 4805 114 Luke Sewell 5896 114 Jimmie Foxx* 9599 114 Danny Bautista 2681 114 Darren Bragg 2790 114 Pokey Reese 3082 114 Chris Stynes 2539 114 Jeffrey Hammonds 3354 114 Richard Hidalgo 3884 114 Tony Womack 5299 114 Todd Walker 4991 114 Henry Blanco 2480 114 * Hall of Famer
Eight of the top 11 players on the list spent some amount of their careers with the Rockies. Of the four Hall of Famers who make the list, it's interesting Averill ranks as one of Helton's top 10 comps via Bill James' Similarity Scores method; I listed the three HOFers who are among his top four comps (Johnny Mize, Chuck Klein and Hank Greenberg) but didn't mention Averill in the actual article.
In any event, the older Jamesian metrics (Similarity Scores, Hall of Fame Monitor and Hall of Fame Standards) suggest Helton is a Hall of Famer and provide a chance to (re)introduce JAWS in on the ESPN site. I've written about JAWS for SI.com (not once but twice), and former BP colleague Jonah Keri used JAWS for an ESPN piece a few years ago, but this breaks a small bit of new ground for me, which is exciting.
According to JAWS, Helton makes for a decidedly below-average Hall of Fame candidate at present. He entered the year with 54.6 WARP for his career and 46.1 for his peak, for a JAWS of 50.4. He's currently on pace for a season WARP of 4.4, which would not only boost his career total but rank as his seventh-best season, upping his overall JAWS score to 52.6. The average Hall of Fame first baseman, by comparison, scores at 75.8 for career, 48.4 for peak, and 62.1 overall. Just four of the Hall's 18 first basemen score lower than Helton, and three of them—Frank Chance, Jim Bottomley, and George Kelly—were elected by the much more permissive Veterans Committee. Helton needs to defy age and his bad back to produce four more seasons equivalent to this one to reach the career average for Hall first basemen, and even then his peak would rate as slightly below average.
JAWS is a prescription to improve the Hall's rolls via the election of above-average candidates. It is not, however, a predictor of what the voting body will do, as the 2009 balloting clearly illustrates. While Tim Raines (94.3 career/54.9 peak/74.6 overall JAWS) is clearly ahead of the Hall's established standard for left fielders (84.2/.52.5/68.4) in career, peak, and JAWS, but Rock received just 22.6 percent of the vote. On the other hand, Jim Rice (55.1/39.6/47.4) was elected with 76.4 percent on the ballot, a result that has as its foundation the lack of recognition of the influence that hitter-friendly Fenway Park had inflating Rice's statistics (to say nothing of inflating his legend). Indeed, the Hall is littered with hitters who accumulated hefty stats in favorable environments, though many owe their elections not to BBWAA voters but to the cronyism of the VC, which made a habit of grabbing flash-in-the-pan offensive stars from the 1930s, including the aforementioned Klein, whom JAWS ranks as 20th out of the 22 right fielders in the Hall.
I took the assignment thinking Helton really had no chance in Hell at the Hall, and while I remain unconvinced that he belongs — barring an especially productive late-30s run — I did come away with more respect for his accomplishments. Guys with .307 EqAs, excellent plate discipline (1095/862 career K/BB) and defense worth about five runs above average per year don't grow on trees. That doesn't mean we should put them all in the Hall of Fame, however. Consider the contemporary first base/DH types who rank above Helton according to JAWS:
Player Career Peak JAWS Frank Thomas 105.4 66.4 85.9 Jeff Bagwell 97.2 62.8 80.0 Albert Pujols 78.7 71.9 75.3 Rafael Palmeiro 96.0 52.6 74.3 Jim Thome 84.7 50.6 67.7 Mark McGwire 79.7 52.4 66.1 John Olerud 79.9 50.2 65.1 Will Clark 74.4 50.2 62.3 AVG HOF 1B 75.8 48.4 62.1 Jason Giambi 64.3 50.3 57.3 Fred McGriff 65.6 45.8 55.7 Carlos Delgado 61.3 42.8 52.1 Mark Grace 60.2 41.0 50.6 Todd Helton 54.6 46.1 50.4
Helton's surpassed Grace and has more or less pulled even with Delgado, but it will take one outstanding year or two OK ones to move past McGriff, and yet another one to top Giambi -- and he'd still be shy of the Hall standard. Suffice it to say, he's got his work cut out for him.
Last week's Hit List, submitted for Thursday publication prior to my departure for Milwaukee (hence the holiday traffic title reference) but alas, not run until Friday. The list marks the first time since Opening Day that the Dodgers were not #1; they were one point short of the Rays. Ouch.
Meanwhile, at a Fourth of July barbecue in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, my in-laws challenged me to repeat a recent feat of box score archaeology. As White Sox fans during their pre-Milwaukee days in Chicago, they rarely frequented Wrigley Field, but they recalled a rare visit. It was a game where the Expos' Warren Cromartie led off with a home run, but only after Cubs third baseman Steve Ontiveros dropped a pop foul and was charged with an error. "That might have been all the scoring," said my father-in-law.
Bingo: July 4, 1979 — thirty years to the day! It was a low-scoring affair, with Cubs starter Bill Caudill allowing just one other hit besides Cromartie's homer, an Ellis Valentine solo shot. He wound up on the short end of a 2-1 decision, with Spaceman Bill Lee getting the win. Years later, my brother-in-law recounted, he was getting Caudill's autograph after he'd moved on down the line and said he'd seen him pitch a good game in Chicago. "Is that the one where Ontiveros dropped the ball?"
Of course, I couldn't resist going back to find the box score for that game, and lo and behold, those details were just as they'd remembered. Garr was indeed thrown out by Hisle -- that actually happened on the game's first at-bat. Gamble homered off Twins starter Paul Thormodsgard in the sixth, the second homer of a back-to-back tandem following Lamar Johnson. In fact, the ball must have been jumping off the bat that day, because there were actually six homers hit, three by the White Sox (Jim Essian being the other), and three by the Twins (Hisle, Lyman Bostock and Craig Kusick).
As it turns out there would have been a seventh home run. According to Baseball Toaster's Bob Timmermann, who randomly exhumed the box score and wrote about the game a few years back, Garr came up in the third inning with two men on:
Third baseman Eric Soderholm led off with a single and catcher Jim Essian reached on an error by shortstop Roy Smalley. Garr then hit a deep fly to right that Ford made a leap for against the wire fence in Bloomington. Ford crashed to the ground and first base umpire Nestor Chylak ran out to make the call and seemed to take a while. While this was happening, Soderholm and Essian went back to their bases, thinking that Ford had caught the ball. But Ford hadn't, the ball had gone over the fence. However, as Essian went back to first, Garr passed him on the bases. So Garr was credited with a single, but was then called out for passing Essian. Soderholm and Essian did score to cut the lead to 5-2.
As it turns out, the Sox needed Garr's extra run, as they wound up falling to the Twins, 7-6.
Anyway, given how often memory proves faulty when it comes to recalling old games, I was pretty impressed that the details which were relayed to me did match the picture this time. Fun stuff.
Blight's self-deprecating style and skill as a raconteur made for a winning combination, so I circulated the article among friends, who found it as hilarious as I did. One of his best anecdotes still pops up in our conversations. With the alumni magazine having recently digitized its archives, I'm finally able to share Blight's piece with a wider audience, augmenting it with data from Baseball-Reference's recent expansion into older minor-league stats.
After attending Michigan State, the 19-year-old Blight was chosen by the Tigers in the 19th round of the 1966 draft, the 374th overall pick. It was not a round brimming with major-league talent. Ron Cey, who was selected by the Mets to start the round but who wisely chose to attend Washington State before being drafted by the Dodgers two years later, was the only pick from that round to ever reach the bigs. Three future major leaguers were chosen in the prior round, while five, including Dave LaRoche, were chosen in the following one. Such was the crapshoot nature of the amateur draft, which was only in its second year. Hell, that year's overall number one pick, catcher Steve Chillcot, never even made the majors. The Mets chose him while passing on Reggie Jackson, who was snapped up by the Kansas City A's with the second pick, apparently because they were concerned the latter was dating a white woman (actually a Mexican-American, and Jackson's future first wife).
A 6-foot-3, 180-pound righty, Blight didn't draw rave reviews from scouts ("decent heat but not much movement on it, real good overhand curveball, good control..."), and he drew guffaws when he went into duck-and-cover mode while pitching batting practice to Tigers' big-leaguers like Willie Horton during spring training. He soon discovered that his lack of heat and movement made him "the perfect natural batting-practice pitcher. That was not a compliment: "In the jargon of the pros, I threw watermelons. Coming from my hand, the ball looked big and easy to hit." Ouch.
Blight's mediocrity would soon help him carve a spot in the record books:
As one of my catchers indelicately put it, I didn't just suck, I "swilled." ... Even my brushes with baseball immortality were of the "swilling" sort. I am, in fact, represented in the baseball record book for one accomplishment. It happened in 1967, during a game in the Florida State League. I was the starting pitcher for the Lakeland Tigers against the Miami Marlins, which at the time was the Baltimore Orioles farm club. After the manager, "Stubby" Overmire (at five-foot-two, possibly the shortest pitcher in modern Big League history when he pitched for the Tigers in the 1940s), gave me the ball and I took the mound, he did what he always did: he walked down to the left-field foul pole, ducked into our makeshift clubhouse, and lit a cigarette, smoking being prohibited in the dugout. The details of what followed blur in memory, but this much is clear from the record book: the lead-off man for Miami, Moses Hill, hit a solo home run to start the game. The same man, Moses Hill, also hit a grand slam later that inning during his second at bat, bringing in runs seven, eight, nine, and ten. There was still nobody out. The usual crowd of several dozen drunks, whores, and pimps was, on this particular night, joined by a couple dozen prisoners from the local road gang. State troopers brought a group once a week, in chains, clanking into the stadium, and whenever our team fell behind, the prisoners clanked their chains rhythmically. After the grand slam, everyone was screaming, clanking, and getting generally unruly as they shouted for Stubby to come and get me the hell out of the game.
After Moses Hill took me deep for the second time, Stubby at last put out his cigarette and headed to the mound, accompanied by the boos and the clanking. I watched him all the way in, and thought, Jesus, at last he's coming to get me out of here. Stubby reached the mound and, as a former pitcher, he (as usual) picked up the resin bag with his left hand and tossed it down. But this time he just stood at the bottom of the mound and looked up at me with a big grin on his face, which reached roughly to the height of my belt buckle. When I bent down to hand him the ball, he handed it right back, and said, "If you think I'm going to waste another pitcher on this game, you're crazy. Man, you are in for nine. Good luck. I'll be down in the clubhouse suckin' weed." And so he left, to more booing and clanking.
I did eventually get someone out, then someone else, and someone after that. At the end of nine innings, I had given up twenty-two earned runs on thirty-one hits. As far as I know, no pitcher has before or since, in the recorded history of baseball, given up two home runs to the same player in the same inning. The reason is obvious: in every case but mine, the manager removed the incompetent pitcher before such a feat became possible. In their way, my teammates understood the significance of the evening. As they filed into the clubhouse after the game, each, in turn, looked me solemnly in the face and then began to laugh uncontrollably. So did I. So did Stubby. So, I imagine, did Mo Hill. Even the prisoners must have yucked it up as they clanked back to the state prison. I was beginning to see the implications of being a natural batting-practice pitcher. I didn't suck, my catcher said, and I didn't even swill. Tonight, he said, I "chugged." For the remainder of my brief career in the minors, Chug became one of my nicknames.
"If you think I'm going to waste another pitcher on this game, you're crazy," has since become a touchstone of conversation any time my friends and I have seen a pitcher enduring an interminable shellacking, not an infrequent occurrence in this slugfest-heavy age. The irony, in fact, is that in the same month that Blight's article was published, on April 23, The Cardinals' Fernando Tatis bashed two grand slams in the same inning off the Dodgers' Chan Ho Park.
Even moreso than Park, Blight's plight recalls that of Aloysius "Allan" Travers, the poor schlub who was torched for 24 runs, 14 earned, in an eight-inning performance while pitching for the Tigers on May 18, 1912. Travers was one of seven St. Joseph's University players whom the Tigers recruited to fill out their lineup for a game against the Philadelphia A's after Ty Cobb had been suspended (for beating a leather-lunged heckler who'd lost both hands) and his teammates had gone on strike in protest of the decision. For a $50 fee, Travers dutifully took his pounding -- manager Hughie Jennings hadn't recruited any relievers -- and faded into oblivion, never to play in the majors again.
Thanks to the recent addition of pre-1990s minor league stats to Baseball Reference, we can now see Blight's minor league record in its full glory. He went 2-9 with a 4.96 ERA for Lakeland in 1967, striking out just 40 hitters in 78 innings, but if the numbers recounted from his legendary beating are accurate, that would leave a 2.79 ERA in his other outings, not too shabby in a league with a combined 3.61 ERA. Furthermore, he gave up just five homers for the year, so aside from Hill's two, he allowed just three more in his remaining 69 innings. Not that his record was exactly sterling; for his career he went 11-22 with a 4.23 ERA, never making it higher than a five-game stint in the High-A Carolina League and in fact spending most of his three seasons in the Florida State League.
While making the Florida scene, Blight was forced to bat against a 20-year-old, heat-throwing Nolan Ryan, hardly a fair fight for a career .085 hitter. Ryan had gone a combined 17-4 with a 2.36 ERA and 307 strikeouts in 202 innings with two Mets farm teams in 1966, and had even gotten a cup of coffee in the majors, but he was limited to just four appearances in 1967 due to a elbow troubles and a six-month stint in the Army Reserve. While the details Blight recounts (such as facing Ryan in the ninth inning of a meaningless game) don't square with the fact that Ryan's sole official FSL appearance was a four-inning start, there's no doubt that he speaks the truth about his harrowing experience:
...I saw absolutely nothing, other than Ryan's arm coming toward me. I heard a faint whoosh, then a pop behind me that sounded like gunfire, followed by "Steeee-rike one!" from the umpire. My knees started shaking. My palms began to sweat profusely. I will never forgive Nolan for the next pitch. It was a slider or curve or something like that. It started out behind me, or so it seemed, and then broke hard over home plate for strike two. As the ball crossed the plate, I was flat on my back on a pile of dirt, in a needless effort to avoid being hit.
The notoriously contact-shy Blight understandably reached an epiphany at that point, surrendering his major league dreams for a different path, one that led him to settle in as a research professor at Brown's Watson Institute and author a dozen books on U.S. foreign policy, most notably The Fog of War: Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, later turned into a documentary directed by Errol Morris. Blight's expertise brought him face to face with the likes of Fidel Castro and North Vietnamese leaders, but quite understandably, nothing ever scared him as much as facing Ryan did.
He's also somebody I count as a friend, so I won't pretend to offer an objective review here (full disclosure: this site is generously included in his bibliography). Instead I'll note that even for a grizzled Dodger know-it-all such as myself, this book has plenty to offer. Leaning mostly on the key events and personalities (the Know, as opposed to the Do), Jon's selected 100 of the most important in the team's history across their Brooklyn and Los Angeles residencies and offered three or four well-researched pages on each. Not all of the players he profiles are Hall of Famers like Sandy Koufax (#3) and Duke Snider (#28); cult favorites like Pedro Guerrero (#40), Wes Parker (#64) and Manny Mota (#71) get their entries, as does the Fernandomania phenomenon (#7). Not all of the highlights are warm and fuzzy, either — hey, this is Dodger history we're talking, full of reckoning with what it means to wait 'til next year, so the painful endings to the 1980 and 1982 seasons (#42 and #48) are recounted, as is Mickey Owen's dropped third strike from the 1941 World Series (#54) and Al Campanis' disastrous Nightline appearance from 1987 (#39).
If I have a criticism of the book, it's that the Brooklyn side of things gets a bit of short shrift, with very little on longtime mananger Wilbert Robinson ("Uncle Robbie"), Dazzy Vance and Babe Herman. While Zack Wheat (#58) and Burleigh Grimes (#74) get to stretch their legs out, those three larger-than-life personalities — who helped define the Daffy Dodgers of the Twenties and Thirties — are all squashed into one entry, tenement style at #81. They're an essential, colorful part of Dodger history, because their antics, such as the time Herman, Vance and another baserunner all wound up at third base (briefly recounted here), made the team's evolution into National League powerhouse all the more surprising.
That still leaves plenty to cheer about, starting with the authority with which Jon stakes out his top two spots: Jackie Robinson and Vin Scully. By Jon's reckoning, the former still provides the best reason to celebrate the Dodgers and their history, and the latter is the strongest existing link to that history given his 60 years of service for the club. I was particularly struck by the combination of those choices when I sat down to watch the April 15 Dodgers game, the one where young Clayton Kershaw whiffed 13 Giants on the 62nd anniversary of Robinson's breaking of the color barrier. Though the event was noted with considerably less fanfare than on its decennial anniversaries, Scully interwove details from Robinson's debut with his account of the action at hand, providing both historical gravitas — particularly during his usual "this date in history" spot at the top of the sixth inning — with enthusiasm for the moment he was watching. Such a delicious combination, and so well suited to the top two spots of this book.
Here's how Jon starts the Robinson entry:
From beginning to end, we root for greatness.
We root for our team to do well. We root for our team to create and leave lasting memories, from a dazzling defensive play in a spring training game to the final World Series-clinching out. With every pitch in a baseball game, we're seeking a connection to something special, a fastball right to our nervous system.
In a world that can bring frustration on a daily basis, we root as an investment towards bragging rights, which are not as mundane as that expression makes them sound. If our team succeeds, if our guys succeed, that's something we can feel good about today, maybe tomorrow, maybe forever.
The pinnacle of what we can root for is Jackie Robinson.
Robinson is a seminal figure — a great player whose importance transcended his team, transcended his sport, transcended all sports. We don't do myths anymore the way the Greeks did — too much reality confronts us in the modern age. But Robinson's story, born in the 20th century and passed on with emphasis into the 21st, is as legendary as any to come from the sports world.
And Robinson was a Dodger. If you're a Dodgers fan, his fable belongs to you. There's really no greater story in sports to share. For many, particularly in 1947 when he made his major league debut, Robinson was a reason to become a Dodger fan. For those who were born or made Dodgers fans independent of Robinson, he is the reward for years of suffering and the epitome of years of success.
If that's not reason to pick up a copy and dig into the other 99 entries in this book, I don't know what is. Perhaps two entries a day will help the time between now and Manny Ramirez's return pass more quickly.
Rock out to the SF Seals' wonderful "Dock Ellis," a song that for my money is the best rock song about baseball ever written.
• • •
Over the weekend, the news came down that one of my favorite baseball eccentrics, Dock Ellis, is critically ill due to cirrhosis of the liver, fighting for his life in the hope of getting well enough to be put on a transplant list. He's had some problems with health insurance in recent years; Yankees president Randy Levine has pledged the club's support in helping with his medical expenses.
Ellis had a few big years pitching for the Pittsburgh Pirates, notably in 1971, when he went 19-9 with a 3.06 ERA for a team that would win the World Series. That was the only season in which he made the All-Star team or received Cy Young consideration (he finished a distant fourth behind Fergie Jenkins, Tom Seaver and Al Downing), but he was a solid, intimidating pitcher who won 138 games in the majors and a key hurler on five division winners over the course of his 12-year career. He's got a few other claims to fame:
• In the summer of 1971, Ellis was named to the NL All-Star team. With Vida Blue set to start for the AL, Ellis declared that there was no way NL manager Sparky Anderson would dare start him to create a matchup of two black pitchers. Wrote Kevin McAlester in a lengthy, worthwile profile for The Dallas Observer in 2005: "This launched the inevitable national sportswriters' debate about how racism didn't exist in 1971, and how dare he and why would he and so on and whatnot. The flap had its intended effect: Anderson, grumblingly, started Ellis, and the pitcher soon became one of the most reviled players in the league, branded a troublemaker and miscreant." Ellis received a letter of praise from Jackie Robinson following the incident.
• On September 1, 1971, Ellis took the field as the starting pitcher for the first all-black lineup in major league history. It wasn't one of Ellis' better outings; he was knocked out in the second but the Pirates came back to win 10-7.
• In 1973, following a profile in Ebony magazine on his hairstyle, Ellis took the field for a pregame workout wearing hair curlers, a move that drew the wrath of stuffed shirt Bowie Kuhn. Said curlers were donated to the Baseball Reliquary upon Ellis' induction into the iconoclastic museum's Shrine of the Eternals in 1999.
[I visited the Reliquary this summer, shortly after this piece was initially written, for a fantastic retrospective of past exhibits called "The Tenth Inning," one that included the curlers and so many other cool mementos. If you're ever in the LA area, a stop to see the Reliquary's wares at the Pasadena Central Library is a must.]
• On May 1, 1974, attempting to light a fire under his team, the Pirates, Ellis drilled the first three Reds' hitters to come to the plate. Pete Rose, the first batter, actually rolled the ball back to Ellis upon being hit. Joe Morgan got plunked, as did Dan Driessen. Tony Perez was nearly hit as well; he walked. Finally, with a 2-0 count on Johnny Bench, Ellis was pulled by manager Danny Murtaugh. Bronx Banter has an excerpt of the story behind this from Ellis' entertaining biography, Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball, (written by future US Poet Laureate Donald Hall).
• In December 1975, Ellis was traded by the Pirates to the Yankees for pitcher (and real-life MD) Doc Medich. Also in the deal was a second base prospect named Willie Randolph. Ellis would go 17-8 with a 3.19 ERA during his only full season with the Yankees, helping them to their first pennant since 1964. Randolph took over the starting slot at the keystone and hit .267/.356/.328 while stealing 37 bases. The deal, engineered by Yankee GM Gabe Paul, ranks among the best in Yankees' history.
After being traded by the Yankees -- to Oakland, in a deal for Mike Torrez -- early in 1977, Ellis bounced around to Texas and the Mets before finishing his career with a few more games as a Pirate in late 1979. They would again go on to win the World Series, though he played no part in that. Drug and alcohol problems had hastened Ellis' departure from the majors -- he later said he never pitched a game without the aid of amphetamines -- but upon leaving baseball, Ellis checked into a rehab facility and cleaned up. He went on to become a drug counselor.
Back in 1993, a band called the SF Seals, led by baseball fan Barbara Manning, released a three-song EP on Matador Records (run by Can't Stop the Bleeding domo Gerard Cosloy). Two songs were covers, one devoted to Denny McLain, the other to Joe DiMaggio. The sole original "Dock Ellis," is a chugging psychedelic rock number memorializing some of the pitcher's signature moments. Rock out to Dock and spare a moment for him in your thoughts today.
All the wrong people are dying, and this weekend, Bobby Murcer's number came up. A 17-year veteran of the majors who moved up to the broadcast booth when his playing days were done, he was 62 and had been battling a malignant brain tumor for the past year and a half, sporadically appearing on YES Network broadcasts and promoting an autobiography, Yankee for Life.
Heir apparent to Mickey Mantle as Yankee center fielder -- and like Mantle a native of Oklahoma and a shortstop when he began his career -- Murcer never lived up to the insanely high expectations set for him during the dark age between the Yankees' 1965 and 1976 World Series appearances. Nonetheless, he was a star for an extended period and enjoyed a very good career with the Yankees, Giants, Cubs and then the Yanks again. He had decent pop and good plate discipline (a lifetime line of .277/.357/.445 with 252 home runs), though he was considerably overrated as a fielder; he won a Gold Glove in 1972 but Baseball Prospectus' numbers show him as -142 runs overall. He made the All-Star team every year from 1971 to 1975, the first four years as the American League starter. His best seasons were 1971 (.331/.427/.543 with 25 homers, 94 RBI and 9.4 WARP) and 1972 (.292/.361/.537 with a career-highs of 33 homers, 96 RBI and 9.7 WARP). He led the league in OBP in '71 and finished second in slugging, and led the league in total bases in 1972 while finishing third in slugging. The guy could play.
I don't have particularly vivid memories of Murcer as a player other than a couple games with the Cubs and then as a reserve with the Yankees at the end of his career. He went 0-for-3 with a sacrifice bunt as a pinch-hitter in the 1981 World Series against the Dodgers, most memorably bunting foul into a double play in the eighth inning of Game Three and flying out for Tommy John to end the fourth inning of a 1-1 tie of the decisive Game Six. Rough stuff for a guy who only got to that one Fall Classic.
I wasn't a huge fan of Murcer's broadcasting work in my early years of watching the Yankees, but gradually, his good ol' boy charms won me over, particularly his self-deprecating sense of humor when it came to talking about his playing days. Yanksfan vs Soxfan's Mark Lamster says it best:
As a broadcaster, Murcer did not have the deep reservoir of anecdotal material of Jim Kaat, and he wasn't especially skilled at breaking down the tactical game. But he had that most important quality for an announcer: an easy affability that made it a pleasure to spend a couple of hours with him, watching the game. His voice was a sweet Oklahama drawl; the aural equivalent of a lazy summer afternoon.
A couple of favorite Murcer stories come to mind. In one, he spoke of a time during the Yankees' exile to Queens amid their renovation. Talking with management about his 1975 contract soon after the 1974 season ended, he complained about the prevailing winds which made playing center field in Shea Stadium a challenging task, and which contributed to his drop from 22 homers to 10. As the story goes, the Yankees quickly traded Murcer to the Giants for Bobby Bonds, thus forcing him to endure the notorious winds in Candlestick Park. After two more seasons he was traded to the Cubs, where he found himself in... the Windy City. "Shoulda kept my big mouth shut," he sheepishly admitted. Broke the boys in the booth up.
In the other story, Bonds recalled a game in the early Seventies in which Yankee outfielder Ron Woods went over the wall in an attempt to prevent a home run, and in doing so momentarily knocked himself unconscious. Murcer climbed the wall and retrieved the ball, ceremoniously holding it up as though it had come out of his prostrate teammate's glove, and the ump called the hitter out. On the air, more than 35 years after the fact, Murcer admitted that the ball had been a couple of feet from his KO'd teammate.
Fellow YES announcer Michael Kay was aghast. "That's cheating!" he sputtered.
"Naw, that's not cheating," drawled Murcer. "That's heads-up baseball!"
Damn straight. Rest in peace, Bobby.
• • •
Murcer's YES colleagues have a nice tribute here. Pete Abraham tracks some official Yankee responses here. Rob Neyer discusses his underrated playing career here. More good links as I find them.
Update: Joe Posnanski reminds us that Murcer had been bumped to right field in 1974 by the arrival of Elliot Maddox and supplies some eye-popping translated numbers to express how underrated Murcer was:
So nobody could appreciate just how good he was those two years. Murcer’s core numbers didn’t look that special. Still don’t.
Of course, nowadays we can hit one button on Baseball Reference and neutralize those numbers to see how they would look in an average run scoring environment. Hint: They look at lot better.
We can go to Baseball Prospectus, take a look at their translated stats, which places everyone in the same run-scoring environment. Hint: These numbers also look a lot better.
...But, my sense, is that he was not viewed as as GREAT player, and here’s a final reason why: He was one of those players cursed with the power of pushing imagination. No matter how good he was, people imagined he could have been better. He came from Oklahoma, just like the Mick. He played center field at Yankee Stadium, same position at DiMag. He had a sweet left-handed swing — seems that there was a fairly famous Yankees somewhere who had a sweet left-handed swing.
Pos also goes on at length about how the Bonds-Murcer deal was the rare trade that hurt both players. There's too much great stuff to figure out what to excerpt here, so just go RTFB.
Alex Belth, who played no small role encouraging me to talk to Miller, was less lucky when it came to Eliot Asinof, and he recently lost a valued correspondent in the far younger Jules Tygiel. He fared much better, however, in talking to Ray Robinson, author of the biography Iron Horse: Lou Gehrig in his Time as well as a host of several other sports books.
Alex not only got to meet Robinson, an octogenarian who's luckily still very much alive, but to examine his pair of 75-year-old scrapbooks containing autographs and pictures -- cut out of newspapers, magazines and baseball cards -- of ballplayers of the 1920s and 1930s. At Bronx Banter yesterday he shared his account of their meeting while offering numerous photos of those unique mementos. Also included is a link to a recent New York Times piece written by Robinson about his volumes and his experiences hunting autographs from the likes of Honus Wagner and Connie Mack. You can't go much deeper into baseball history than that. Amazing stuff.
The Grim Reaper's hitting streak continues. In the three weeks since I wrote about Eliot Asinof and a host of others, we've lost Tim Russert and George Carlin. Via Baseball Toaster's Bob Timmermann, today's box score is bad news, too. Jules Tygiel, professor at San Francisco State University, author of Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and his Legacy and Past Time: Baseball as History as well as a host of non-baseball books and perhaps the game's top social historian, died of cancer on July 1. He was just 59 years old.
Along with Tygiel's own top 10, those aforementioned book titles popped up frequently in Alex Belth's recent survey of essential baseball books. Of Baseball's Great Experiment, which rated enough mentions to crack the top 15, Dayn Perry commented, "The exhaustive retelling of Jackie Robinson's breaking of the modern color barrier. The story is much more complicated than some renderings have made it out to be, and Tygiel captures the nuance of the struggle. A great and necessary work." I got Baseball's Great Experiment for Hanukkah back in 1984, when it first came out in paperback, but it was only last winter that I retrieved it from home. Since then, I've used it several times in writing about the small but important roles played by Dodger execs Buzzie Bavasi and Al Campanis in Robinson's rise to the majors. Tygiel's meticulous research covered all the bases and made it the definitive scholarly account of the story.
In the introduction of Baseball's Great Experiment, Tygiel writes of his eureka moment in the book's genesis. Amid his doctoral research in 1973, he made a serendipitous discovery of an unshelved Time magazine volume from 1947:
I realized that the Robinson story, easily the most familiar chapter of American sports history, had never really been told in its entirety. Most accounts, primarily biographies and autobiographies, had stressed events and personalities but had failed to place them into a social or historical context. Robinson's entry into organized baseball had created a national drama, emotionally involving millions of Americans, both black and white. His triumph had ramifications that transcended the realm of sports, influencing public attitudes and facilitating the spread of the ideology of the civil rights movement. In addition, Robinson had only launched the integration process. Surely the heritage of decades of discrimination and ostracism had not disappeared overnight. What were the experiences of the scores of other black players hwo had entered baseball in the 1940s and 1950s? What had happened to the now forgotten Negro Leagues in the aftermath of desegregation? I also realized that numerous sources of information -- black newspapers, personal papers and scrapbooks, and the recollections many of the more obscure pioneers of baseball integration -- had been largely ignored. Here, it seemed, lay a tale still worthy of re-examination and re-telling.
While I revere Baseball's Great Experiment, I instead opted to include the much more recent Past Time in my own top 10, calling it "a concise summary of nine trends that changed baseball, by one of the game's unsung scholars." What stands out in particular within the latter volume are Tygiel's fascinating portrait of the ever-tormented Larry MacPhail, his handy primer on the era of franchise relocations (which came in particularly handy when I wrote about the 1959 NL race between the Boston-to-Milwaukee Braves, Brooklyn-to-Los Angeles Dodgers and New York-to-San Francisco Giants for It Ain't Over), and his discussion of baseball statistics from Henry Chadwick to Bill James and the Rotisserie League craze of the Eighties.
Both books came to mind the two times I saw the wonderful Baseball as America traveling exhibit (now in Boston, and if you've got enough chromosomes to succeed at tying your own shoes, you should see it). The way the exhibit covered the essential bases while yielding fresh revelations and connections no doubt owes something to the influence of Tygiel, who wrote the introductory essay to the exhibit catalog. Here's a taste:
When the turmoil of the Depression and World War II began to challenge the prevailing racial consensus, baseball stepped to the forefront as a vehicle of change. In 1945, Brooklyn Dodgers president Branch Rickey recruited Jackie Robinson to defy the color line. Robinson's dramatic and convincing triumph produced a modern American legend and a blueprint for social revolution. The success of African Americans in baseball offered one of the nation's most compelling arguments for integration, making it a significant precursor of the civil rights triumphs to follow.
Robinson's achievement had such a profound impact precisely because baseball had such an immense hold on the American psyche. As Thomas Wolfe has written, baseball is "not merely 'the great national game,' but really the part of the whole weather of our lives, of the thing that is our own, of the whole fabric, the million memories of America."
No other common activity resonated so regularly and intensely in American life as the national pastime. Played virtually every day over a six-month span and tracked religiously in the mass media, baseball offered its partisans a steady diet of entertainment, drama and controversy. Americans routinely interspersed their language with baseball metaphors. Unexpected occurrences came form "out of left field." People confounded others by "throwing them a curve." Prodigious feats were described as "Ruthian."
In a a"fireside chat" broadcast on the radio in May 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt presented his hopes for his new administration to the American people in a language they would readily understand. "I have no expectation of making a hit every time I come to bat," explained Roosevelt. "What I seek is the highest possible batting average, not only for myself but for my team." In the last days of his life, Roosevelt confessed: "I feel like a baseball team going into the ninth inning with only eight men left to play."
And who can forget Tygiel's scathing open letter to since-disgraced Hall of Fame president Dale Petroskey over the latter's bullshit decision to cancel a Bull Durham commemoration due to Tim Robbins' and Susan Sarandon's criticism of the Bush administration's waging of war in Iraq:
The presidency of the Baseball Hall of Fame is, in effect, a sacred trust. By politicizing the Hall of Fame, you have violated that trust. Your position does not give you the right to impose your own political views on the events at the Hall to the exclusion of all others. One must assume that if people who protest American military actions are not welcome at the Hall of Fame, then Abraham Lincoln who opposed the Mexican War, Mark Twain who opposed the Spanish-American and Philippine Wars, and Martin Luther King, Jr., who opposed the war in Vietnam would not be welcome at the Baseball Hall of Fame. I also must assume that this letter jeopardizes my own future relationship with the Hall.
Like Asinof, James and so many other great writers, Tygiel is worthy of a spot in Cooperstown himself. He will be greatly missed.
A former minor-league ballplayer, Asinof's best-known work was about the national pastime. He's most famous for Eight Men Out, the story of the Black Sox scandal which involved the fixing of the 1919 World Series. I'll cop to never having read the book, but I've seen the movie version several times. Asinof and director John Sayles took what appeared to be a black-and-white (sox) crime and morality tale about the throwing of ballgames and turned it into a much more thorough critique of the forces which created the scandal: power, capitalist inequity and the working conditions of Reserve Clause-era ballplayers. Sox owner Charles Comiskey should have been the first guy to take the fall.
What follows here is a piece I've had on the back burner for ages, with roots that date back to my own childhood. It's written about one of Asinof's lesser-known works, so obscure that it's never been anthologized. Today it seems only fitting to dust off this roundabout tale.
• • •
When I was nine, I got my first subscription to Sports Illustrated, having discovered its existence in the library of my elementary school when we moved across the Salt Lake City valley in the the fall of 1978. For the next decade, I read the magazine religiously, so much so that I still remember specific articles and covers -- right down to the blurbs -- nearly 30 years later.
What a treat, then, that SI.com has made available a massive amount of its archives via the SI Vault, which went online a couple months ago (the covers, many of them icons in their day, had been online for awhile already). Sadly, the great photography hasn't made the transition, but there's still a bounty of riches to be had.
Over the years I've tracked down a small handful of SI back issues with pieces that meant something to my childhood. This Nolan Ryan one ("How Close It Was!"), occasioned by the near miss of what would have been his record-setting fifth no-hitter in the summer of 1979, was one. Tracking down that issue revealed a hidden gem in that week's television column, noting the planned launch of a 24-hour cable TV sports network:
Last winter Getty Oil paid $10 million for a majority interest in a hitherto unknown and practically non-functioning little cable TV company in Plainville, Conn. called The Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, Inc., or, more informally, ESPN. Indeed, Getty's decision to underwrite the firm seems to have had more than a few overtones of extrasensory perception and supernatural insight: ESPN may become the biggest thing in TV sports since Monday Night Football and nighttime World Series games.
ESPN plans to launch the nation's first 24-hour sports network by Dec. 1, a nonstop telethon that will ultimately result in 8,760 hours of annual programming—every single possible hour, and seven times as many hours of sports as the three major networks combined now air in an average year. ESPN will present a mind-boggling (and, perhaps, numbing) flow of games, matches and contests, ranging from live tennis from Monaco shown at 3 a.m. to taped NCAA football games on view from 8 a.m. to midnight on most autumn weekends to a mixed bag of volleyball, water polo, fencing, crew, etc., etc.
As 23-year-old ESPN vice-president Scott Rasmussen puts it, "What we're creating here is a network for sports junkies. This is not programming for soft-core sports fans who like to watch an NFL game, then switch to the news. This is a network for people who like to watch a college football game, then a wrestling match, a gymnastics meet and a soccer game, followed by an hour-long talk show—on sports."
Cool as that was, my favorite find was another 1979 issue which I hunted down only after solving a long-standing mystery thanks to The Baseball Index, SABR's bibliography resource available via BaseballLibrary.com.
I had remembered the subject of a feature story a man who faked his identity and wormed his way onto the San Diego Padres under the assumed name of Rocky Perone. As it turns out, the story was written by the great Eliot Asinof, author of the seminal Eight Men Out. Though I've seen John Sayles' movie version a handful of times, I've never read the original book, and in truth only own one Asinof book, his first one, Man on Spikes, a novel about a bush leaguer who takes 16 years to make it to the majors. Not far off from the plot of "The Secret Life of Rocky Perone":
It was the greatest feeling in the world — or maybe the worst. Five years ago, there I was in a San Diego uniform about to take a pregame workout with the Padres. Warming up on the sidelines were the champion Cincinnati Reds — Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, Johnny Bench, those guys. This was the big time. This was where I belonged. Nobody ever wanted to be anywhere more than I wanted to be in this spot.
The trouble was, it wasn't me. Or, to be more exact, nobody knew it was me. The guy on the field was known as Rocky Perone, supposedly a 21-year-old rookie from Sydney, Australia. At least, that's who the Padres thought they had signed. Actually, my name is Richard Pohle, and I'm from Lisbon Falls, Maine. And my age, by God, was 36!
Except for Satchel Paige, I probably was the oldest rookie ever signed to a professional baseball contract. But look, at 36 I was desperate. I had to do something. I wasn't some rinky-dink from Pipe Dream City. Over the years, I'd proved myself repeatedly. I had to prove myself again just to be here. I'd had to show them something. The hoax about my age was just a device to get the scouts to look at me, to really look at me. Can anyone picture a scout giving a tryout to an American shortstop who is 36?
God knows the number of places I'd gone for tryouts, how many times I'd hitched to spring-training camps, traveling from Maine to Florida or from California to Florida, and how close I'd come to making it years ago. The trouble with scouts is that they seldom believe what they see. What they want to see is some big rangy kid with a sensational high school rep, a .575 hitter with power, someone destined for a big bonus, someone about whom the scout can tell the front office what it wants to hear. But who was Richard Pohle? Just some dumb kid from Maine, a little guy who was already 18 and no one had ever heard of him. They can really cut a man down. Year after year, I kept coming back for another shot, and then I would end up playing ball in Canada, Mexico, Japan, Cape Cod. It seemed like I was never more than a month or two away from the opening of a season. I even went to England, Sweden and Australia. Name places where anyone plays decent ball, and I've been there.
I had always assumed that Perone, like the protagonist in Man on Spikes (which, to be truthful, I've never read for more than a handful of pages) was a fictional character, particularly because the story is written in the first person. The fact that Perone's game action came not with the Padres but with their minor-league affiliate in Walla Walla -- where my grandparents lived and where I spent a good portion of that summer, ironically enough -- meant that he left no major league stats behind and further strengthened that supposition.
A bit of investigation thanks to the Vault set me straight. The Vault includes both digitized thumbnails of each page of the magazine -- so you can see the ads, yippee! -- as well as the ancillary stuff that makes up each issue, including their weekly letters to the editor column, "The 19th Hole." The issue two weeks after the Perone story was published contained five letters in response, including this one:
Sir:
I remember Dick Pohle from a baseball school we both attended in Cocoa, Fla. in 1957. He impressed me then with his tremendous desire and love for the game. It would be nice if a greater number of the more gifted athletes in the big leagues had some of that burning desire. God bless Dick Pohle. He's beautiful!
ED MCCLOSKEY Pittsburgh
A few minutes in Google led me to an excerpt of a book called When Towns Had Teams mentioning Dick Pohle as one of Lisbon, Maine's better players in the early 1960s. Soon after discovering that, I came across Harold Parrot's often-hilarious account of front office shenanigans, The Lords of Baseball, which devotes a brief passage to the Perone saga in discussing the ineptitude of the mid-Seventies Padre front office, and in particular that of Peter Bavasi (son of Buzzie) and his attempt to bring psychological testing to the realm of player development:
Peter Bavasi often quit his job and went home in frustration, too, but his mother would get him on the phone and talk sense, and get him back to his charts and tests. The whole outfit seemed ready for the psychiatrist's couch.
Not long after that Rocky Perrone [sic] appeared.
The Oglivie-Bavasi mind-reader must have given Rocky a fine personality rating; that, along with creams and facials to take out his age lines and a hair piece to cover his bald head, fooled all the Padre experts. They rated Rocky as a hot prospect at shortstop, and he actually got to play in one game to win a bet he had with the bartender. Then he confessed he was a thirty-eight-year-old busher who had bee knocking around semipro sandlotws since the Dodgers fled Brooklyn.
Further drilling in Google yielded a homepage for Richard Pohle, who's apparently now a baseball instructor in California:
Rich Pohle has been featured in Sports Illustrated, SPORT Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Portland Press Herald, San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle. He has worked as a scout for the Los Angeles Dodgers, Atlanta Braves, Kansas City Royals and San Francisco Giants. Pohle's reputation brings players from all over the country to train under him. He is also available to travel to any location throughout the United States for special consultation sessions and seminars. Pohle (pronounced POE-Lee) has played and coached baseball all over the world, including Australia, Germany, England, Sweden, Mexico, Canada, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. If you want to play professional baseball, Rich can help you in the pursuit of your dream. If your goal is to play college ball, he can also help open that door. Rich will teach you the Pro way - hitting, catching, pitching, infield play and base running.
Pohle's site features a photo of his son Richie, who spent two years in the Phillies and Mariners systems and last year played in the independent Golden Baseball League; he has a stat page at the Baseball Cube. An older version of the site (which has been changed since I began working on this piece) pictured Pohle pupils D.J. Houlton (a former Dodger now playing in Japan) and Phil Seibel (a Red Sox farmhand) -- both of whom I've covered in Baseball Prospectus annuals -- as well as a picture of the original Sports Illustrated article's opening page, and links to the SI article and to a couple of newspaper pieces about him.
The newspaper pieces themselves are missing in action since the site's recent update, but the story gets better. As it turns out, Pohle helped a few other over-age players get contracts under false pretenses, including a 38-year old reliever who signed with the Royals and a pair of players who signed with the Giants. "Flimflam man who gently hoodwinked the Giants," reads the headline of a 1983 San Francisco Examiner piece on Pohle's site. From the article, scanned from the original newsprint:
The San Francisco Giants' front office never knew it. Hardly anybody did. But baseball's perennial flimflam man, Richard Pohle, orchestrated one of baseball's most elaborate and long-running stings, and the club was snookered.
Between that article, one from the Portland Press Herald, and Pohle's own bio it's revealed that baseball lifers like Phoenix Giants manager Rocky Bridges, longtime Giants scout Jack Schwarz, Padres minor league director Mike Port and Padres scout Jim Marshall were conned by the assumed identities of Pohle or his proteges, among whom five such ballplayers are named:
• Barry Stace, the aforementioned reliever, a 38-year-old lefty who was purportedly the first Australian to play baseball in the U.S. He's not listed on the Baseball Cube site (their minor league stats only go back to 1978), but a Midwest League page confirms his presence at Waterloo in 1973, albeit with no birthdate given.
• Tom Rowan, the most successful of the bunch. At 24, he evolved into 21-year-old Tom Anthony and lasted four years (1977-1980) in the Giants system, starring at Class-A Great Falls of the Pioneer League, where he hit .333, drove in 62 runs in 63 games and tied for the league lead in triples. He made it as high as Double-A Shreveport; his Baseball Cube page is here, though it omits the Pioneer League numbers; the Cube's stats for Great Falls begin in 1978, though the franchise was founded in 1969.
• Mark Worley, who at 31 became 21-year-old Nick James and served as Rowan/Anthony's teammate. He hit just .227 at Great Falls in 1977 and drew his release after the season.
• Joe Parga, who at 26 became 22-year-old Jose Hernandez and hit .286 in his first year in the Angels' organization. I couldn't find him at the Baseball Cube, so it's quite possible he never rose above short-season ball.
• Rick Brown, whose age and alias aren't given but who apparently rose from Rookie ball to Double-A in the Braves system according to the Press Herald piece.
Pohle himself went 1-for-1 with a walk and a steal in his sole game with the Walla Walla Padres, but he got another shot in the Northwest League. In 1980, at the age of 42, playing as Richard Perone, he appeared in a game for a Salem club that knew what it was getting, a performance that earned him his own Baseball Cube page.
Anyway, in Asinof's hands, the tale of Rocky Perone is a gripping and entertaining saga, one that I hope is enriched by this bit of back story. You probably don't have time to read Eight Men Out on your lunch hour today, but you could do worse than to check out "The Secret Life of Rocky Perone" (PDF version scanned from original magazine here).
Update: Alex Belth has a lengthy tribute to Asinof including excerpts and fresh quotes from other great writers here.
, (written by future US Poet Laureate Donald Hall).