Monthly Archives: May 2019

These foolish things

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MLB: Atlanta Braves at Miami Marlins

Braves catcher Brian McCann with the ball that just zipped behind Jose Urena, squarely in his mitt, squarely behind Urena’s leg . . .

It didn’t take even an eighth as long as it took Hunter Strickland to let Bryce Harper have it over a pair of monstrous postseason home runs. But it took long enough, and was just as stupid. The other difference is that the Braves’ Kevin Gausman threw behind, not into the Marlins’ Jose Urena in the second inning Friday night.

If you need to know what Gausman intended, you don’t remember what happened last 15 August. When Urena threw what ESPN Stats & Info determined was the hardest and fastest pitch he’d thrown all year to that point right into Braves Rookie of the Year in waiting Ronald Acuna, Jr.’s elbow to lead off the first.

Urena simply didn’t like Acuna treating the Marlins like batting practise pitchers. If they couldn’t get him out, Urena was going to try to take him out. And the warnings were handed out immediately after the umpires then tossed Urena on the spot.

Friday night, there were no warnings issued going in, not until Gausman—who’d just surrendered the tying run on an infield ground out after hitting Marlins third baseman Jon Berti with a pitch—sailed one behind Urena’s thighs.

When Urena drilled Acuna last August, he was condemned almost universally but quite rightfully for hitting him after he’d put on a long distance show for two nights running. Gausman himself suggested there might be consequences for that after that game.

“I think he decided he was going to handle it a certain way,” Gausman said after that game, which the Braves went on to win 5-2. “I don’t agree with it, but it’s his career and he’s going to have to deal with the consequences.”

You might have thought the consequences would have come sooner than Friday night. Usually though not exclusively someone else in the Marlins lineup might have faced a message pitch. On the same night. Even despite the warnings.

But none went forth that night last August. Or, in the subsequent set between the Braves and the Marlins in Miami later that month, one of which games Gausman himself started. Urena got a six game suspension for drilling Acuna, which a lot of people thought was impossibly lenient in the circumstance, and didn’t face the Braves in that Miami set.

Having sort of telegraphed it after last August’s postgame remarks, Gausman didn’t exactly deny premeditation after the Braves banked their 7-2 win Friday night, either. “Obviously, the umpire thought that there was a reason behind it and decided to throw me out of the game,” the righthander told reporters. “Obviously, MLB’s going to look at it, investigate it, so I’m not going to really comment anything further than that.”

Obviously, too, Gausman had his chances to send the Marlins a message last August if he wanted to. He could have replied in kind when the Marlins batted in the top of the second after Acuna was drilled, despite the warnings, sending one up and in just enough to drop the hint.

If those warnings were too much for him to think about, he could have sent the message later that month when the Braves went to Miami and he started one of the games.

He didn’t do it either time. Whether it was a mutual agreement among the Braves’ pitchers to wait until they might face Urena himself again isn’t known as I write. Just as Urena looked to one and all as though committing a premeditated act last August, Gausman looked the same Friday night.

At least Urena got the start for the Marlins this time, a mere eight months after drilling Acuna. It’s not as though Gausman had three years to plot revenge.

But the late Don Newcombe had a policy of going after the opposition’s hottest lineup hand whenever he thought they needed an immediate message to be sent, whether it was over their pitcher knocking down or hitting a Dodger batter or—as he did once with the Phillies—silencing a bench coach throwing racial insults at the Dodgers’ early black players by dropping Del Ennis, at the time the Phillies’ hottest hitter.

When Cubs pitcher Bill Hands opened a critical September 1969 showdown with the onrushing Mets by knocking Tommie Agee down leading off, Mets starter Jerry Koosman—following Newcombe’s policy—sent one up and in tight to Hall of Famer Ron Santo in reply the next inning.

“I knew right away I was going to go after their best hitter,” Koosman said years later. (Santo led the National League with 112 runs batted in at the time.) “You mess with my hitters, I’m going after your best one. I’ll go after him twice if I have to.” Santo got hit on the wrist as he fell away from the chin music.

“If it didn’t hit his arm,” Mets outfielder Ron Swoboda said, “it would have hit him onside his head.” Mets bullpen coach Joe Pignatano had another verdict: “Koosman won the pennant for us that night.” (Agee didn’t exactly shrivel, either: when he faced Hands again in the third that night, he sent one over the fence.)

Urena looked cowardly drilling Acuna last August after Acuna’d been a wrecking crew at the Marlins’ expense. But Gausman had his chances to send the Marlins a message last year and he didn’t take a one of them. He doesn’t look all that much better than Urena did. And there’ll be those saying his possible five- or six-game suspension won’t be sufficient, either.

The old school, which is discredited often enough and with cause these days, says there do come times to take one for the team. Especially when the season is still young and you’re less likely to cost your team something critical that you would be down the stretch of a pennant race. The Braves may be lucky it happened the third night of May.

If you doubt Gausman’s or the Braves’ premeditation, be advised they called up pitcher Touki Toussaint before Friday night. Guess who went out to pitch for the Braves after Gausman got the ho-heave, stopped the second inning bleeding, and pitched four total innings of one-run, six-strikeout ball to give the Braves’ bullpen a respite.

“In the end, the biggest failure in this situation has to fall on the umpiring crew,” says Call to the Pen‘s David Hill. “Anyone who saw that the Braves called up Toussaint, and that Urena was the opposing starter, had to know what was going to happen. That both benches were not warned prior to the start of the game, or that Gausman was ejected after throwing that pitch, is entirely their mistake.”

Not theirs entirely.

“From the beginning, they were saying I did it on purpose,” said Urena about the Acuna drill and Friday night’s festivities, “but look at how they did it. That’s the way they claim they are professional?” Unfortunately, when it comes to professionalism, Urena isn’t exactly in any position to talk.

Red Sox and White Houses

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2019-05-03 BostonRedSox2018Series

The Red Sox start celebrating their 2018 World Series conquest in Dodger Stadium . . .

On purely baseball terms the season barely a month old hasn’t been outstanding for the defending world champion Red Sox. There are small signs of them turning a corner, but small is the key word. So far.

They’re 14-18 to open, after a bullpen faltering led to a one-out, game-winning three-run homer by Nicky Delmonico of the White Sox in the bottom of the ninth Thursday night. It left the Red Sox six and a half games out of first in the American League East, while their eternal rivals from the south Bronx—battered as they’ve been so far—sit a mere two and a half out.

On terms just outside the lines these are interesting days for the Olde Towne Team. They’re scheduled to visit the White House next Thursday, after finishing a set with the Orioles in Baltimore, which is one sort of convenience. Maybe the only sort. Not that every last Red Sox plans to be there, but the club didn’t make the visit mandatory and offered their personnel the option to join or not.

The Athletic believes that traces back to an incident that followed their 2004 triumph, when co-owner Tom Werner turned up at a rally for presidential candidate John Kerry wearing a Red Sox jacket. He’d been criticised heavily for wearing the jacket at a political rally, and he says accepting the Trump invitation is simply a question of a presidential honour regardless of whom the office holder happens to be.

“To me, having sort of reflected on it, this is something that is an honor that’s been bestowed by the president and the White House on the Red Sox, and it’s not a mandatory event for the players,” Werner told the magazine. “Many players are excited to go, and many players have elected not to go, but we feel as an organization that we are appreciative of the invitation and we look forward to the experience.”

Werner, co-owner John Henry, their organisation, and their players are mindful enough that no matter who decides what it could be taken the wrong way, considering the political climate. Massachussetts isn’t exactly a bastion of unquestioned support for President Tweety, but the invitation did put the Red Sox in a kind of metaphysical bind, as The Athletic notes:

[A]ccepting or declining the invitation could have been spun as a political statement. In that sense, the Red Sox were in a lose-lose situation. If they turned down the invitation, the decision would have been cheered by many as a strong rebuke of the Trump administration, but it would have been derided by others as an overreach of political ideology. By accepting the invitation, the Red Sox have allowed their players a perhaps once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, while disappointing some of their blue-state fan base who will see, perhaps not an endorsement, but a tacit acceptance of the president’s more extreme statements and views.

The individual Red Sox are a mixed group when it comes to who will or won’t be at the White House next week. And Werner prefers it that way.

Manager Alex Cora still hasn’t decided whether to go; he’s been critical of how the Trump Administration dealt with hurricane relief in his native Puerto Rico. Pitcher Chris Sale and still-ailing second baseman Dustin Pedroia plan to be there. J.D. Martinez, the Red Sox designated hitter/outfielder, is an open Second Amendment supporter and is liable to be there, too.

Some observers may fear Trump himself will take those absent personally. or his supporters may take it as an indication the Red Sox need to be brought to heel. Maybe it ought to be made plain that accepting an invitation to the White House after a World Series or other triumph shouldn’t be assumed a concurrent gesture of support for a particular White House’s policies or politics, no matter who happens to occupy it.

Regardless of how many Red Sox actually show up next week, they’ll be the first baseball team of the 21st century to have met three sitting presidents. The stupefying, actual-or-alleged curse bust in 2004 plus their 2007 followup got them two meetings with George W. Bush. Their 2013 triumph, the first time they’d won a World Series in Fenway Park itself since Babe Ruth was still one of their pitchers, got them a meeting with Barack Obama.

The Yankees have some catching up to do. For that matter, so do the Giants: their Series conquests this century got them meetings with only one president (Obama), albeit three times. The way things are now, with the Giants in painful need of a remaking/ remodeling, the Yankees have a better chance to meet either Trump or his immediate successor.

Baseball and the White House were casual acquaintances for the most part since the Grant White House hosted its first professional major league team—the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings. Ronald Reagan—who began his professional life as a baseball broadcaster in Iowa and remained a baseball fan for life—turned inviting World Series winners to the White House into the tradition it’s become.

The Dodgers (twice), the Cardinals, the Orioles, the Royals, the Mets, and the Twins visited Reagan after their 1980s World Series wins. For his part, Reagan preceded those visits with calls to their managers (Tommy Lasorda, Whitey Herzog, Joe Altobelli, Dick Howser, Davey Johnson, Tom Kelly) immediately after they won those Series.

When Pete Rose broke Ty Cobb’s career hits record, the Reds’ then player-manager got a congratulatory telephone call from Reagan, who said, “You know, Pete, I’ve been rooting for you your whole career. Come to think of it, I used to root for the fella whose record you broke.” Had he still been in office when Hall of Famer Nolan Ryan blew Hall of Famer Rickey Henderson away for his 5,000th career strikeout (Ryan’s, not Henderson), Reagan would likely have called the Express.

Reagan himself entered the broadcast booth one more time before his term expired in 1988, joining Cubs broadcast legend Harry Caray. “You know, in a very few months I’m going to be out of work, so I thought I ought to audition,” the president quipped—before delivering an inning and a half of very credible play-by-play.

Try to imagine Trump, Obama, Bush (who was actually a former Rangers co-owner), Bill Clinton, or George H.W. Bush as baseball announcers, even in jest. Don’t ask, don’t tell.

What a difference over half a century made. The Washington Senators (the ancient, not-quite-wholly-accurate legend: “Washington—First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League”) won the 1924 World Series but Calvin Coolidge, who wasn’t exactly a baseball fan, wasn’t in any big hurry to host them at the White House–despite a flood of fan mail begging him to do it.

The Senators won the 1925 pennant and then Silent Cal met the Old Nats—right before they lost the Series in five games to the Pirates. Nobody knew, or dared to suggest, whether that proved any kind of White House jinx.

Coolidge’s successor, Herbert Hoover, was an unapologetic baseball fan who loved throwing out the ceremonial first pitch at Washington’s Griffith Stadium every April. He also made sure to be in the house for Game Five of the 1929 World Series, in Philadelphia’s Shibe Park, as the Athletics finished off the Cubs for whom Hoover was suspected of rooting—the Cubs at the time did their spring training on Catalina Island in California, near where Hoover had one of his two homes.

When major league baseball celebrated its centennial in 1969, Richard Nixon—who loved the game deeply (in his retirement he frequently brought his grandchildren to the field boxes in Shea Stadium)—greeted a large group of incumbent and former players, including Phillies pitcher Grant Jackson. At the time, troubled Phillies star Dick Allen was in a contract holdout. When Nixon advised Jackson to tell Allen to sign already because he wouldn’t make a better living anywhere else, Jackson didn’t miss a beat.

“You tell him, Mr. President,” Jackson said. “He’s making more money than both of us.”

Dwight Eisenhower was a regular at Senators games in the 1950s, as well as a friend of owner Clark Griffith. Maybe his rooting interest (and, perhaps, the popularity of Damn Yankees?) kept Ike from nothing more than a personal letter to Don Larsen when that Yankee righthander pitched his perfect game in the 1956 World Series.

When the Yankees were invited to the White House after winning the 1999 World Series, a band struck up “Hail to the Chief” as Bill Clinton walked into the room accompanied by the Yankees’ then-owner, the (shall we say) Falstaffian George Steinbrenner. It might have inspired the least disingenuous remark Clinton ever uttered as president.

“Don’t get any ideas,” Clinton quipped to The Boss as the music began. “It’s not for you.”

 

When miracle workers re-convene

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2019-05-02 AfterTheMiracleBack in 2001, three 1940s Red Sox—Hall of Famer Bobby Doerr, Johnny Pesky, and Dominic DiMaggio—planned a road trip to visit their Hall of Fame teammate Ted Williams one last time. Friends since their playing days, the trip’s only disruption was Doerr unable to make it after his wife suffered her second stroke.

Fifteen years later, one of the 1969 Miracle Mets, outfielder Art Shamsky, decided it was time to do something similar in visiting his Hall of Fame teammate Tom Seaver, after long-term, lingering manifestations of Lyme disease began curtailing Seaver’s travel away from his Napa Valley, California home and vineyard.

The Pesky-DiMaggio trek and the lifetime bond between them, Williams, and Doerr were recorded lyrically by the late David Halberstam in The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship. Until Harvey Araton’s Driving Mr. Yogi—about the bond between the late Hall of Fame catcher and a later Yankee pitching star, Ron Guidry, as spring Yankee instructors—there was no better chronicle of baseball friendships and their sometimes impenetrable bonds.

Shamsky rounded up pitcher Jerry Koosman, shortstop Bud Harrelson, outfielder Ron Swoboda, and baseball historian Erik Sherman for the journey to Seaver. And he’s  produced (with Sherman) After the Miracle: The Lasting Brotherhood of the ’69 Mets. (New York: Simon and Schuster; 325 p.; $28.00/$18.30, Amazon Prime.) Unlike the Halberstam and Araton books, Shamsky takes the weight of chronicling the final journey upon himself, from the inside, with Sherman’s help. And he delivers it as precisely as Seaver once delivered fastballs.

Shamsky, Koosman, Harrelson, Swoboda, and Sherman didn’t pile into a car and drive east to west for their trip as the old Red Sox did for Williams. The whole thing began over lunch between Shamsky and Sherman, pondering the coming 50th anniversary of the 1969 Mets. And, knowing Seaver—who has since retired completely from public life, after his family announced him diagnosed with dementia—wouldn’t be able to travel for any commemoration in New York.

When Sherman suggested bringing a reunion to Seaver, Shamsky pounced. All he needed was to pick the teammates for the trip. He wanted Harrelson desperately, since the former shortstop himself deals with the memory issues of Alzheimer’s disease. He also wanted Seaver’s rotation mate Koosman, “one of the most gregarious characters I’ve ever known”; and, Swoboda, with whom he competed for playing time in right field as a ’69 Met. “He’s liable to say anything, at any time, anywhere,” Shamsky writes admiringly.

When he told Seaver he wanted to bring that trio with him, Seaver was all in. “We’ll sit around, laugh a little bit, reminisce,” Shamsky told Seaver, “and tell the same old lies—the balls that we barely hit over the fence that are now five-hundred foot blasts—those kinds of lies.”

“Ahh,” Seaver replied with a chuckle, “but those are good lies.”

Swoboda hesitated at first, in the wake of his wife’s surgery to remove a malignant tumour, but went all in as well. Koosman was eager from the outset so long as he was free when the others could go. Harrelson was in, too, though his former wife (with whom he maintains a close friendship) first thought the tickets sent him for the trip came from a baseball card show promoter. Realising it wasn’t, Kim Harrelson left Shamsky one instruction: take lots of pictures to help him remember the journey.

The group was forewarned by Seaver’s wife, Nancy, that they were taking a small gamble. “We just don’t know how he’s going to feel—he gets foggy sometimes,” she advised. She knew the visit would be good for Seaver and for Harrelson, as well, “but just understand that some days are good and some days are not too good. Every day is different. It’s really a roll of the dice.”

They’d fly across country and have only one day to spend with Seaver. But it turned out to be the winning roll. The five Miracle Mets recalled the key days and nights of their unlikely trek to the World Series championship and some of the details involving their acquisition of several key pieces to it.

They enjoyed remembering things like first baseman Donn Clendenon’s wicked humour (his nickname was Clink), third baseman Ed Charles’s spirit, spare infielder Al Weis’s coverup of the bat logo on the souvenir bat he insisted on using in the Series (it was an Adirondack the feel of which he liked though he was signed with Louisville Slugger), the circus clinic the Mets outfielders put on in the Series, manager Gil Hodges’s deftness at using his entire roster, and, of course, the atmosphere around the team and its unlikely (to everyone but themselves) accomplishment.

Including the atmosphere of the city and the country during the Series. With unrest over the protracted Vietnam War achieving fever pitch, one demonstrator outside Shea Stadium hoisted a sign: BOMB THE ORIOLES–NOT THE PEASANTS! In baseball terms the peasants did indeed bomb the Orioles—not to mention out-pitch and out-catch them—to win the Series in an unlikely four straight following a Game One loss.

Koosman remembered entertainment legend Pearl Bailey stopping him as he paced nervously before his Game Five start. “Kooz, settle down, settle down,” Bailey told him. “I see the number eight, and you’re going to win.” Indeed. Weis’s unlikely blast in the bottom of the seventh, tying the game at three, was only the eighth home run the middle infielder ever hit in the major leagues. And, the last.

2019-05-02 TomSeaverJoanPaysonArtShamsky

Seaver (left) and Shamsky (right), flanking original Mets owner Joan Payson in 1969.

The group also remembered the ribald prank Koosman hatched with a radio bug and a Mets television director named Jack Simon, the latter impersonating sportscasting legend Howard Cosell so dead on it shook Seaver to flip his radio on and hear he was being traded to the Astros—with Mets chairman M. Donald Grant in earshot. That was a prank, but Grant’s eventual purge of Seaver after a contentious contract renegotiation broke the Mets and their fan base in half eight years later.

They reveled with Seaver in his pride over his vineyard and indulged the one habit former ballplayers can never avoid when they reunite at all, never mind renew such friendships as these and other 1969 Mets share—an out-of-the-dugout version of bench jockeying. Consider this exchange, recalling a tough play for Swoboda on a rare day playing left field, with Harrelson in his customary habit of gunning out from shortstop on any short fly as Swoboda shot forward for it.

Swoboda: “I see Buddy and he ain’t stopping. But I didn’t even have time to make the call to say I had it.”

Seaver: “I remember that, too. I was pitching!”

Koosman: “Yeah. Cheech caught the ball and about three seconds later, you ran over him!”

Swoboda: “I know I did. But you didn’t want the ball to fall in, did you? I didn’t know what to do.”

Seaver: “Did anybody bother to use the English language out there?”

Harrelson today looks as grandfatherly as a former athlete can look and admits to writing notes to himself to help with his stricken memory. Koosman, who credited Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax for teaching him a better and more variable curve ball, resembles a portly rancher rather than the machine designer and pilot he became after baseball. Only Shamsky’s gray betrays his age; he still looks like a tapered ballplayer as well as the broadcaster he was and realtor he still is. Swoboda, a longtime broadcaster post-baseball, looks more like a former footballer now but does colour commentary for the telecasts of the minor league New Orleans Baby Cakes (AAA).

They swapped stories about Berra (a Mets coach from 1965-72, before succeeding Hodges as manager following Hodges’ fatal heart attack) and other coaches, including bullpen coach Joe Pignatano. (“Piggy was Hodges’s spy,” said Koosman about the coach Shamsky describes as having one job: “to keep control of the pitchers out in the bullpen who were out of control.”) And they reminded each other that age’s betrayals didn’t have to obstruct life.

Even as they miss the earthly presences of those among their 1969 fraternity long gone. Hodges, Charles, Berra, and Clendenon. (“Hey, remember the Caesar’s Palace act we had after the Series? Donn Clendenon would have himself paged every five minutes just to hear his name.”)

Outfield acrobat Tommie Agee, veteran pitcher Don Cardwell, spare infielder Kevin Collins, spare relief pitcher Cal Koonce, co-closer Tug McGraw. (“I’ll tell you one thing,” Seaver said of the flaky but effective lefthander, “I want him right here in my foxhole, I’ll tell you that!”) Third base coach Eddie Yost. (“I used to tease him all the time,” Shamsky says, “by saying, ‘Eddie, you really look like a ballplayer. You look like you could still play!”) Pitching coach Rube Walker. (“I’d call him even during the winter,” Koosman says. “He had a way of putting up with our BS and still have a smile on his face—just always glad to see you the next day.”) All long gone to the Elysian Fields.

2019-05-02 TomNancySeaver

This Bloomberg photo shows Tom and Nancy Seaver amidst their Napa Valley grapevines in 2017.

Seaver now looks the part of a veteran wine grower especially when he’s paired with Nancy, his wife of almost 53 years, to whom age has been a little more kind. When having a private moment among the grapevines with Shamsky, Seaver admitted quietly that he’s had to ward off anxiety attacks since his condition became more acute than when he first battled Lyme disease while still living in Connecticut.

“I was so frightened,” Seaver recalled about such an attack, while with his wife en route visiting a former Mets announcer. (Seaver himself spent a few years as a Yankee announcer, teamed with Phil Rizzuto and Bill White.) “Man, it just made me breathe heavy like this. We turned around and went home. I mean, this Lyme disease ain’t fun. It can be absolutely frightening. The more cardiovascular I do, the better off I am. And drinking wine helps. I drink about half a bottle of wine per night. I haven’t had a beer in about eight years. But the traveling, no. I just can’t anymore.”

Meaning Seaver can’t be present when the Mets commemorate their first World Series winner come June. Or, at the Hall of Fame, in July, when Yankee relief legend Mariano Rivera, Yankee/Oriole ace Mike Mussina, Mariners hitting clinician Edgar Martinez, the late mound marksman Roy Halladay, longtime relief ace Lee Smith, and longtime outfielder Harold Baines will be inducted.

But you can get Seaver’s presence, and the bond of the biggest surprise champions of the 1960s, in this amiable book, mourning those absent, thankful for those still present, and quietly contented that their baseball fellowship melted into something more enduring than the transience of even the most transcendent World Series triumph.

The ankle, not the hustle

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0000 PantsOnFireJonesHodges

No, Jones didn’t loaf on that ball. And Hodges didn’t demur when Jones told him the reason it looked that way.

Everybody knows Gil Hodges pulled the Mets’ All-Star left fielder Cleon Jones right out of left field in the middle of an inning because Jones loafed on a double by Astros catcher Johnny Edwards. Everybody’s wrong.

The Mets skipper wanted full alert and full hustle. There’s no disputing that. He wanted his men to stay away from self-defeating thinking and play. Hodges wasn’t Leo Durocher’s kind of human time bomb, but that didn’t mean he suffered fools gladly, either.

But what you think you remember about that play, during the second game of a 30 July 1969 doubleheader in Shea Stadium, isn’t quite what went on.

The twin bill itself was a disaster for the Mets, losing both games, 16-3 and 11-5. “They were stealing on us, we were making errors in the field, we looked listless at the plate, [second game starting pitcher] Gary Gentry walked in a run and threw a wild pitch—it was just a real sloppy, lethargic effort on our part,” says Mets outfielder Art Shamsky. “We were a club in need of a wake-up call, and Gil was more than willing to oblige.”

In the top of the third Edwards flared one down the left field line off Hall of Famer Nolan Ryan in relief of Gentry. Jones on a bad ankle ran after it “tentatively,” says Shamsky, who played right field in that game, leaving Edwards on second with a double. Hodges left the dugout at once. In one of the most famous scenes in Mets history, the manager crossed the first base line without his usual skip step over it, which alarmed Shamsky at once.

Shamsky thought Hodges meant to make a pitching change—until he passed Ryan by. Then, Shamsky thought Hodges spotted something wrong with shortstop Bud Harrelson. “I said to Gil, ‘Me?” Harrelson would remember. Hodges replied, “The other guy.” Hodges kept walking toward left field, with Harrelson walking with him about half the way out. And approached Jones, while unnerving Shamsky across the outfield

I said to myself, Oh, shit, Cleon’s in trouble, and thought Jones would be wise to just dash through the visitor’s bullpen gate in left field. That’s because I had a feeling there had to be something stern that the hard-nosed, no-nonsense ex-Marine wanted to say to Cleon. Or worse.

“It was,” says Mets pitcher Jerry Koosman, “a scary walk.”

Jones remembers Edwards hitting the ball right down the line with “no way” to stop him from a two-base hit. “I ran after the ball the best I could but it was soaking wet in the outfield,” he’d remember, referring to conditions after a couple of days of rain. “Plus, I had a bad ankle. So when Gil walked out there, I was as surprised as everybody else. I thought something happened behind me.”

As Jones remembers and Shamsky affirms, Hodges got right to the point and asked Jones what was wrong. “What do you mean?” Jones replied.

“I  don’t like the way you went after that last ball,” Hodges said plainly.

“We talked about this in Montreal,” Jones said. “I have a bad ankle, and as long as I don’t hurt the team, I could continue to play. Besides, look down.”

Hodges did look down. “He could see that his feet were under water,” Jones remembers.

“I didn’t know it was that bad out here,” Hodges then said. “You probably need to come out of the ball game.” Jones assented and player and manager walked back to the dugout together.

The following day, Hodges talked to Jones one on one. Wayne Coffey, in They Said It Couldn’t Be Done, said Mets bullpen coach Joe Pignatano overheard Hodges begin with a raised voice, demanding, “Look in the mirror and tell me Cleon Jones is giving me one hundred percent!” Now, pay close attention to what the manager is quoted by Jones himself as saying:

I wouldn’t have embarrassed you out there, but I look at you as a leader on this ball club. So if I can show the club I can take you out, it sends a message to everyone. Everybody seemed comfortable with this ball club getting its tail kicked and I didn’t like it.

Hodges may well have been alarmed at Jones’s inability to gun it for the Edwards hit, but note all the phrasings carefully. The manager didn’t just walk out to left field and pull his player without a word. Hodges didn’t make his move until after Jones told him the ankle was bothering him on the soaked turf.

But is it unreasonable to ask whether Hodges spontaneously seized a moment to do two things at once—get his ailing left fielder out of a game on a dangerously wet outfield before he ran into further injury issues, while sending his club a message not to be comfortable with getting their tails kicked?

Hodges probably could have picked any other moment that day to send his players that message. Especially in that third inning. This is the game log from that inning, with Gentry starting the inning on the mound for the Mets:

Doug Rader—ground out to second base.
Edwards—base hit to left center field.
Larry Dierker (the Astros’ starting pitcher)—Gentry wild-pitches Edwards to second; strikeout.
Sandy Valdespino—Infield single, Edwards scores on a throwing error by Mets second baseman Ken Boswell.
Hall of Famer Joe Morgan—walks.
Jimmy (The Toy Cannon) Wynn—base hit to left center field, Valdespino scores, Morgan to third base.
Norm Miller—Wynn steals second before Miller draws a walk. Bases loaded.
Denis Menke—Draws a walk, Morgan scores, bases loaded.
Curt Blefary—three-run triple.
Rader—Base hit into center field, Blefary scores. Hodges lifts Gentry for Ryan.
Edwards—The fateful flare double; Ron Swoboda replaces Jones in left field.
Dierker—Two-run homer.
Valdespino—Flies out to Swoboda, side retired at last.

You could point to a couple of other instances in that inning during which Hodges also could have sent his Mets a message, possibly and in particular the Ken Boswell error. But Boswell wasn’t anywhere close to the Mets’ leading hitter; Jones had a nicely swollen .360 batting average at the time, though Shamsky says he wished then (and still) that Jones had sat out the second game of the twin bill to give his bad ankle a rest.

“Gil did it to wake us up,” Jones said, careful to say “us” and not “me.” “That was his motive. If he could do it to someone hitting .360, he could do it to anyone. But everybody misinterpreted at the time what really happened between us.”

Including Hodges’ wife, famously enough. Shamsky says she once told him she called coach Rube Walker before her husband returned home and asked why Walker “let” Hodges make the move. “I really didn’t know where he was going,” Walker told the skipper’s lady. “Besides, Joan, I don’t think there’s anyone on this earth that could have stopped him.”

Mrs. Hodges had no intention of talking about Jones until Hodges insisted she get it off her chest. After initial resistance, she did: “I wouldn’t care if you got Cleon in the office after the game, shut the door, and wiped the floor with him. But whatever possessed you to do it on the field?”

“Do you want to know the gospel truth?” her husband replied. “I never realised it until I passed the pitcher’s mound. And I couldn’t turn back!”

It doesn’t look necessarily as though Hodges thought at once a lack of hustle was involved, especially since Jones reminded the manager about his bad ankle and the soggy ground and Hodges—who took a back seat to few when it came to resisting back talk—didn’t reject either reminder.

Gamesmanship wasn’t alien even to the Mets’ quiet, honest manager. Just ask Jones himself, who’d be the immediate beneficary in the World Series over a certain shoe polish scuff on a certain ball that hit him in the foot. But even Hodges wasn’t above a little gamesmanship by way of a wounded warrior, either.

Note the phrasing Shamsky quotes Jones as using retrospectively about Hodges and the soggy left field incident:

He was tough, but he was thorough. He was just the total package as a manager. If he went out there onto the field and felt like you didn’t have it, you were out of there. He just did everything right. We no longer beat ourselves. And when you don’t beat yourself, it’s harder for the other guy to beat you.

If Hodges knew Jones was ailing on a ball he might have reached faster on an unaffected wheel, who can blame him for seizing a moment to send his team a message about getting too comfortable with getting hammered?

But the deeper you look into the story, through the courtesy of those who were there, the less it looks as though Hodges just poured out of the Mets dugout intent on dragging Jones off the field, by his ear or otherwise. Seeing Jones ailing gave him the opening for a perfect two-fer: get his man off his bum wheel awhile and let his players know it wasn’t a picnic to invite the other guys to hand them their heads.

Shamsky tells the story in, After the Miracle: The Lasting Brotherhood of the ’69 Mets. About which a full review will be forthcoming.

Jones may have been humiliated or infuriated in the moment, but he told Jack Lang, a writer for the Long Island Press and The Sporting News, “If I didn’t respect what [Hodges] is trying to do, I could very easily hate his guts. But I don’t.”

“Hodges didn’t hold any grudges, either,” Coffey wrote in They Said It Couldn’t Be Done. “Jones sat for a couple of games, then got pinch hits in the next two games and was back in the lineup full time. When he was going for the batting title at the end of the year, Hodges batted him leadoff to help him get some extra at-bats.”

Hodges first told the Mets’ press box that Jones had a foot issue. His veteran third baseman Ed Charles, maybe more a spiritual than a baseball presence on the 1969 Mets, and was on the bench when Hodges made his surprise move, translated the manager’s intention this way:

He made it clear to all of us. If there is something wrong with you and you can’t give me one hundred percent, you let me know and I will put somebody else in the lineup. There’s nothing wrong with that. But when you hit that field, I want to see one hundred percent.

It made perfect sense for Hodges to sit Jones out a couple of games to follow to rest his ailing ankle further. Unlike his Cubs counterpart Durocher, who tended to ream his players as quitters if they complained about injuries, Hodges didn’t equate injury with indifference, even if he wanted to send Jones and his other players a message about honest effort.

In no reputable translation of the incident then or now does anyone suggest Hodges took an I-don’t-want-to-hear-it stance when Jones told him on the spot his ankle continued to bother him.

 

 

 

 

A survivor’s milestone

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2019-04-30 CCSabathia

CC Sabathia about to release the changeup that turned into strikeout number 3,000 Monday night . . .

It didn’t happen before the home crowd. It didn’t have to. A Yankee fan made it very clear with the placard he hoisted: “I traveled over 3,000 miles to see CC Sabathia get his 3,000th K. NJ -> LA -> SF -> ARI.” But even the Chase Field audience couldn’t resist the loud standing O after Sabathia fooled Diamondbacks catcher John Ryan Murphy with a changeup in the bottom of the second.

Technically, Sabathia struck out the side to get there. He caught David Peralta leading off, looking at a sinkerball that didn’t sink too far in the low zone. He got Christian Walker to swing and miss on a cutter that wasn’t likely to threaten the stature of his former, Hall of Fame teammate Mariano Rivera.

Then Sabathia was rudely interrupted when a cutter that didn’t quite cut the way he probably hoped met former Met Wilmer Flores’s bat on its way over the left field fence, and Nick Ahmed followed up by doing whatever he could with a changeup and making it work enough to beat out an infield single.

Up came Murphy, a former Yankee who’d caught Sabathia in the past, a righthanded hitter with a little power of his own. Sabathia worked him inside to open, missing with the first pitch before he fouled off a pair. Then Sabathia went a little up in the zone and fouled that one off. That was a quartet of cutters. Then came the changeup taking a neat little dive under Murphy’s swinging bat head.

Sabathia seemed at first to be the only man in Chase Field who looked like it was just another day at the office. His Yankee catcher Gary Sanchez pumped a fist and clung to the milestone ball for dear life. The rest of his teammates swarmed him near the Yankee dugout while his wife and four children roared in the stands with the rest of the crowd. Sabathia made sure to get some hugs from his lady and his kids before letting his mates have at him.

“Count me in,” Sanchez told reporters after the game. “I was one of those that was super excited and happy and desperate for those three strikeouts. Once we were able to get those strikeouts I was able to relax a little bit. Exciting, exciting just understanding what the milestone is and I was just super excited.”

Count Sabathia in, too. The third lefthander in baseball history to cross the 3,000 threshold (after Hall of Famers Steve Carlton and Randy Johnson) came a long way, baby. “Since the end of last year, you coming up short 14 strikeouts . . . it’s the only thing I have been thinking about the last six months,” he told reporters. “So, actually to have it now be over it and I can just worry about the season and try to win games.”

The Yankees so resemble a M*A*S*H post-op ward these days that a lot of people worried how they’d go forward trying to win games, too. But, pun intended, they’ve bloody well done it. So much so that the comparably banged up Nationals in the National League East aren’t earning many sympathy points, which is a little unfair. Except that maybe even the Yankees are a little surprised that they still look like American League East beasts no matter how many key men are still in the ward.

“It was one of those things where it was kind of inevitable, but it’s not something we really talk about,” said manager Aaron Boone, whose own playing career included an exercise in futility against Sabathia: one hit, four strikeouts, and a .167/.167/.167 slash line.

“It was kind of wait and see, see how it happens and it obviously happened at the end of the inning, so we were able to congratulate him coming off the field and not take too big of a break in the game,” Boone continued. “It was kind of fitting that he was leading off the next inning. It’s something that we can really sit down and put things into perspective, you can look back on it as a really, really special accomplishment.”

Special may be a polite way to phrase it. There was a time when nobody thought he would make it far enough to land the milestone he landed Monday night. Including Sabathia himself.

He was a throwback, an innings-eater who thought nothing of going long distance (he led the majors in innings pitched twice with 241 innings or better) while pitching like a dominator, in Cleveland, in Milwaukee (he made the Brewers’ brief 2008 postseason trip possible almost by himself in the second half of that season), and in New York, turning his left arm into considerable money and looking like it was just a question of when, not if he’d get his own set of keys to Cooperstown.

Then Sabathia’s body began betraying him. Most of the betrayal came from his right knee, part of the leg on which he lands when he delivers, and it turned the big, bearish lefthander—never exactly the poster child for a classic male athlete’s physique to begin with (he always looked the way you’d imagine aging Babe Ruth to look if Ruth had remained a pitcher)—into a man whose workhorse days were history.

So were his days as a power pitcher. His once-formidable fastball and his stamina went AWOL. If he wanted to survive long enough to finish what he started, the $161 million free agency deal he signed with the Yankees in the first place, the one out of which he opted and turned into a little more money, Sabathia had to reinvent himself.

Especially after he shocked the game two days before the 2015 American League wild card game, when he went into manager Joe Girardi’s office in the Camden Yards visiting clubhouse and told him he would check into a Connecticut rehabilitation facility. He’d binged so badly during that set in Baltimore that he actually needed to detox first.

Sabathia remains in recovery. Meanwhile, to remake himself as a pitcher, he looked to the classics to do it, the old stereotype of the cleverly crafty lefthander who lived on something close enough to junk, developing a different kind of changeup, adding a cutter that cut just enough to keep him alive, and going to his slider a lot more often than before. He learned to live at the back end of the Yankee rotation and in the junkyard, he worked for his five or six innings’ work every few days, and he survived.

Then he underwent knee surgery this past offseason, not to mention an angioplasty, and he decided going in that 2019 would be the final season of his career. He also decided to enjoy every moment of it as best he could with whatever he had left in the tank. His days as a mound howitzer too far gone to kid himself, nailing number 3,000 testified to something better. His spirit.

The Diamondbacks to their credit didn’t mind the Yankees basking in the moment of Sabathia’s milestone. He’s the seventeenth pitcher to reach it, the first having been Hall of Famer Walter Johnson in July 1923 (the Indians’ Stan Coveleski was his milestone victim) and the last having been Hall of Famer John Smoltz when he punched out the Nationals’ Felipe Lopez in April 2008.

Murphy is a seven-year veteran who isn’t likely to find himself in Cesar Geronimo’s position. (We hope.) That center fielder for the Big Red Machine found himself a Number 3,000 twice before his career ended: Hall of Famer Bob Gibson rang him up for number 3,000 in July 1974—which made Gibson only the second man to cross the threshold—and Hall of Famer Nolan Ryan nailed him in July 1980.

Four more pitchers crossed the 3,000 threshold before Geronimo’s career ended: Hall of Famers Tom Seaver, Carlton, Ferguson Jenkins, and Don Sutton. Their milestone victims weren’t exactly fish cakes, either: in order, Keith Hernandez, Tim Wallach, Garry Templeton, and Alan Bannister. There’s one five-season streak of 3,000th-Ks (1980-84, with Ryan, Seaver, Carlton, Jenkins, and Sutton) and one four-season streak. (2005-08, with, in order, Hall of Famer Greg Maddux, not-yet Hall of Famer Curt Schilling, and Hall of Famers Pedro Martinez and Smoltz.)

“”I want to make sure that I say it loud and clear that if you’re a baseball fan, you have to appreciate what you saw,” said Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo. “You saw somebody that’s been going out there for a long time since he’s been 19 years old and he’s done it at a very high level every single year. There’s never really been a down turn. Maybe when I knew him a long time ago, he was more of a fireballer and now he’s learned how to pitch, and it’s fun to watch.”

“I’ve played against him for 12 years,” said Diamondbacks right fielder Adam Jones, who’d tangled with Sabathia on many a day as an Oriole, “and I can say that the competition against him is always A-1. You always know when you face him that the intensity is going to be high. He deserves everything that’s coming his way.”

Jones is well aware that Sabathia also belongs to a particularly exclusive club: the third black pitcher to punch out 3,000 hitters or more, with Gibson and Jenkins; and, the threesome are known as members of the so-called Black Aces, African-American pitchers credited with 20 or more wins in single seasons. (The founder, Brooklyn Dodger legend Don Newcombe, died earlier this year; the other members are Sam Jones, Mudcat Grant, Earl Wilson, Al Downing—the same Al Downing who surrendered Henry Aaron’s record-setting 715th lifetime home run—Vida Blue, J.R. Richard, Dwight Gooden, Dave Stewart, and Dontrelle Willis.)

Sabathia is, too. “Being a ‘Black Ace’ is something that I take very seriously,” he said. “So to be on that list as one of three guys with 3,000 strikeouts, it’s hard to grasp, it’s hard to think about it. But it’s cool to be on that list.”

He knows that since 2013 he hasn’t been the pitcher he was from 2001-2012. And he’s okay with it. Ever onward and upward. He nailed two more strikeouts before his Monday night was done, including Murphy the second time, yielded to the bullpen with two on and one out in the sixth.

But he couldn’t out-pitch Zack Greinke (strikeout victim number 3,001 if you’re scoring at home, by the way) and could only watch as his Yankees couldn’t overcome what finished as a 3-1 Diamondbacks win. Other than the Yankee loss, Sabathia has only one regret about the evening.

“When I actually got that [milestone strikeout], I didn’t want it to be Murph,” he said. “Me and him are really close, I’ve been knowing him his whole career.”

As much as he thought about it coming out of spring training, getting there was something else entirely. “That’s a hard one to grasp,’’ he said at a postgame press conference with his wife and children at his side. “There’ve been some great pitchers who played in this game, but being the third lefty is just incredible.”

When all else is done and said, Sabathia’s endurance could be called likewise.