Monthly Archives: February 2024

Al McBean, RIP: Always leave ’em laughing

Posted on by
1
Elroy Face, Al McBean

Stepping up when relief ace Elroy Face (left) struggled in 1964 earned Al McBean (right) the Sporting News Fireman of the Year (NL) Award he displays proudly with Face here.

Al McBean was both major league baseball’s first Virgin Islander by birth and a first class character. The righthander with the hard sinkerball who died at 85 at home Wednesday seems never to have met a situation he couldn’t clown his way through. Even opponents didn’t seem to mind.

He was “the funniest man I have ever seen in a baseball uniform,” Hall of Fame second baseman and manager Red Schoendienst once said of him.

Even the way McBean came into a game from the bullpen got laughs. “Whatever those walks mirrored,” wrote the Philadelphia Daily News‘s Sran Hochman in 1963, “concentration, determination, or intoxication, nobody walked into a game the way Alvin O’Neal McBean walks into a game.”

Writing McBean’s full name may have been drawn from longtime Pirates broadcast Bob Prince, who seemed to love referring to McBean that way. But about those walks in from the pen, McBean’s manager Danny Murtaugh said, “You’d have to say McBean saunters in.”

He never apologised for enjoying life and the game. “My thing was fun,” McBean told Society for American Baseball Research biographer Rory Costello in a 1999 interview.

I liked to do little crazy things, something different for the fans, they see the same thing over and over and over. Like crawling over the foul line and not touching it. Throwing the first pitch underhand, pulling on a big red bandana and wiping my face with it. Something the fan can feel a part of.

But the guy who went to a Pirates scout’s tryout in 1957 as a press photographer (he was goaded into trying out and ended up signing with the Pirates for a $100 bonus) also liked to learn as much about the game as he could. One of his teachers was Elroy Face, the Pirates’s star relief veteran.

“I used to go to his house, barbecue a lot, pal around with his family,” McBean told Costello. “And he would tell me intricacies of the game. You could get a guy on, walk a few guys once in a while, based on how you felt that particular day. Learn how to pitch in those situations.”

Though inconsistency dogged him much of his career, McBean actually got to step in for the main man when Face struggled in 1964. McBean had posted a brilliant 1963 (2.57 ERA, 2.81 fielding-independent pitching rate, over 122.1 relief innings pitched in 58 games), then went out and all but equaled it in ’64. (1.91 ERA, 2.97 FIP, 1.04 WHIP, 89.2 innings in 58 games.)

That earned him the Sporting News‘s 1964 National League Fireman of the Year award, placing McBean in some very distinguished company: the American League winner was Red Sox legend Dick (The Monster) Radatz. And Face himself won the NL award two years earlier.

Not that McBean’s prize win was simple. Four attempts to send McBean a commemorative trophy to his Virgin Islands home resulted in broken goods in shipment. When an unbroken trophy finally arrived, McBean “erupted in mock outrage,” Costello recorded—he’d wanted the head to have a fireman’s hat atop it.

That was the least of his problems. He went to Puerto Rico to play winter ball after the ’64 season and became the subject of rumoured death threats. Heavy bettors among fans were said to have suffered heavy losses in McBean’s games and were reported to be considering shooting the effervescent righthander.

McBean continued his stellar relief work in 1965 while Face missed much of the season with a knee injury. Then Face returned healthy for 1966 and McBean lost plenty of chances to nail down Pirate wins. He had three more decent seasons for the Pirates before they exposed him to the second National League expansion draft and the newborn Padres took him.

Oops. The Padres weren’t prepared for McBean’s freewheeling kind of fun. Costello records that he asked where to find the nearest spa—and worked out in a dance leotard. McBean ended up getting one start for those 1969 Padres . . . and traded almost promptly to the Dodgers for a pair of no-names. It was the only trade between those two teams for almost three decades.

But he got a return engagement with the Pirates when the Dodgers released him a year later and the Pirates picked him up. After looking nothing like the way he once was at age 32, McBean got what proved his final release. He played winter ball in Puerto Rico again in 1970-71 before the Phillies signed him and sent him to their Eugene, Oregon (AAA) affiliate with an apparent promise to bring him up if he did well.

He did well enough at Eugene, but the Phillies opted instead to bring up a far younger pitcher named Wayne Twitchell, about whom the most memorable thing (other than a nasty knee injury that compromised his career) was getting an All-Star appearance and a public compliment from Hall of Famer Steve Carlton before Carlton went completely silent to the press.

When the Phillies demoted him to AA-level ball for 1972, McBean retired and went home to the Virgin Islands permanently. He once claimed his sole regret was making the Pirates after one World Series championship and leaving them before another: “I have never seen myself pitch,” alluding to the broadcast highlights now ubiquitous on YouTube.

He joined St. Thomas’s department of housing, parks, and recreation, and co-founded the city’s Little League program, before becoming the housing, parks, and recreation department’s deputy commissioner. He never lost his zest for life or love for baseball even if he became critical of changes in the game in the years that followed his career.

He bemoaned guaranteed big contracts compromising players’ hunger for the game; he zinged the vaunted Braves starting rotation of the 1990s for their corner life (only Hall of Famer John Smoltz escaped his snark: “At least he comes after you”); he dismissed Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn as “a [fornicating] banjo hitter”; he swore Hall of Famer Frank Thomas would be putty in his sinkerballing hands. (“The Big Hurt, my ass. I would eat him up.”)

Well, nobody’s perfect. (Though it’s not unreasonable to think that maybe, just maybe, McBean might well have done well against the Big Hurt: Thomas’s lifetime slash line hitting ground balls that good sinkerballers normally get—.268/.268/.293/.561 OPS.)

The guy whose best man at his 1962 wedding to Olga Santos was Hall of Famer Roberto Clemente (McBean once posited that Clemente was a better all-around player than his fellow Hall of Famers Henry Aaron and Willie Mays) didn’t have to be perfect. He just had to be himself.

What I enjoyed most from baseball was the camaraderie that I had with the fans in Pittsburgh. The signing of autographs, then going to people’s homes for dinner. Mt. Lebanon was one of my areas, real nice–I used to wear the little black thing on my head, I didn’t know what it was for, but I wore it anyway! Up at St. Brigid’s Parish, I knew most of the nuns there, they’d come to Forbes Field, they’d come down to the bullpen and we’d talk. I’d go to church up in the Hill District. I would drink dago red. I had fun basically with everybody.

That was the man who is said to have had a run-in with segregated facilities during one spring training by drinking water from a fountain marked “white only” and crowing, “I just took a drink of that white water and it’s no damned different from ours!”

The man who pursued his future wife by showing up at the Puerto Rican drugstore where she worked while he played winter ball, buying soap from her daily until she agreed to go on a date with him. His love affair with Olga endured on earth far longer than his pitching career.

If you thought McBean left some side-splitting memories around baseball, you can only imagine what his Olga, his daughter Sarina, and his three grandsons have to hold until they meet again in the Elysian Fields.

Is the Orioles’ reign of error ending?

Posted on by
Reply

Is a new day really dawning at Camden Yards?

You thought the National League West ogres in Los Angeles had a long World Series title drought? The Orioles haven’t won a World Series since over a week following the premiere of the first Hooters restaurant. (In Florida.) And, since a decade before Peter Angelos bought the team out of bankruptcy court.

“Bankrupt” has been a polite way to describe the Angelos reign of error. Oriole fans celebrated, then cringed too often for comfort after Angelos bought the team from Eli Jacobs. Now they may have cause to celebrate something sweeter than the Orioles’ slightly unexpected return to competitiveness last year. May.

Once upon a time Angelos swore the Orioles would be pried from his literal cold, dead hands, as in upon his death. Now, his son John, who’s been running the Orioles since his father was diagnosed with dementia, plans to sell to two equity billionaires, David Rubenstein (the Carlyle Group) and Mike Arougheti (Ames Management Corp.). The price: $1.73 billion.

This, writes The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal, whose career as a baseball writer began by covering the Orioles for the Baltimore Sun, could portend the turn toward a new direction.

The Rubenstein-Arougheti group won’t take complete control of the team right away. They’re beginning with a minority investment but intend to take complete control upon  Peter Angelos’s death, allowing the Angelos family a tax benefit by waiting to give the group full ownership. (Rosenthal observes they’d have faced a capital gains tax levy on the difference between the team’s 1993 and current valuations.)

Rubenstein is known to have Baltimore ties and to be a significan philanthropic presence in the region. His personal worth is said to be $3.8 billion, while Arougheti’s is said to be $1.8 billion. Rosenthal also cites a Baltimore Banner report saying Hall of Fame shortstop and Orioles icon Cal Ripken, Jr. is going to be part of the new ownership group. Could the future look any sunnier for Oriole fans?

Well, they once thought it was sunny days ahead when the elder Angelos bought the team, too.

Two years later, in the wake of (let’s call it as it really was) the owner-provoked and pushed players’ strike, Ripken made it safe to love baseball again when he passed Lou Gehrig for consecutive games played and marked the occasion with a hefty home run off Angels pitcher Shawn Boskie in the fourth inning.

The Orioles have been to a few postseasons and through a lot more losing in the Angelos era. The elder Angelos became too hands-on despite a lack of common baseball sense. Tom Verducci of Sports Illustrated once described his style as slash-and-burn management, as in burning eleven managers in eighteen seasons before the comparative stability of Buck Showalter (8.3 seasons) and incumbent Brandon Hyde (entering season six).

From 1998-2011 the Orioles endured what was once believed unfathomable for a franchise with a history proud enough: a fourteen-season losing streak. The elder Angelos also dithered on creating an international Orioles scouting operation and presence and let his already chaotic front office mistreat valued players.

Things once hit so far bottom that Verducci reported in 2001 that agents with Oriole clients found those clients telling other free agents, “You don’t want to come here.” That sentiment was inconceivable in the era between their first World Series title (1966) and their last.

Last year’s Orioles surprised the world by reaching the postseason at all. They saw enough of their young talent start coming of age, and they saw a farm system looking plenty good enough for the seasons to come. Right?

Oops. Along the way, John Angelos was stupid enough to suspend his lead television broadcaster Kevin Brown over information on a team-provided graphic comparing last year’s O’s against the Rays to previous seasons in which the Rays seemed to own them. Oriole fans can’t be blamed if enough of them think they can’t have nice things without something nasty along with them.

Barely had the news sunk in about the Rubenstein-Arougheti group agreeing to buy the Orioles when bing!the team swung a trade for former Cy Young Award-winning Brewers pitcher Corbin Burnes for a shortstop on the cusp of Show readiness but with a few warning signs, a pitcher who might project as a useful reliever, and the 34th pick in the 2024 draft.

Further warning signs, though: Burnes has lost some hop on his signature sinkerball, his strikeout-to-walk ratio has dipped, and big boppers had a finer time with him last year than two years earlier. (2021: seven homers allowed. Last year: 22 homers allowed.) But he’s still Corbin Burnes and he’s still formidable enough. For a season to come at least. They hope.

Thus far the apparently glandular adulation thrown the new ownership group seems to be precisely what NBC Sports-turned-independent Craig Calcaterra calls it: “he’s not John Angelos, therefore he’s perfect, and if you suggest otherwise, blogger boy, you’re a hater.”

But Oriole Nation has been there/done that in the past, a little too often. The Angelos Era may be over, but then Mets fans threw champagne parties over the end of the Wilpon Era and the advent of Steve Cohen, too.

Cohen has been through more than a few growing pains thus far. Met fans whose patience rivals that of the piranha at mealtime (they are legion) think one bad inning equals grounds for summary executions—in April. Oriole fans may be far more patient, but the Angelos reign of error wore that patience to the thickness of a sheet of paper.

The Rubenstein-Arougheti (-Ripken) Group has quite a job ahead, assuming the rest of baseball’s owners approve their advent and their purchase deal. It’s not simple being viewed en masse (and perhaps prematurely) as saviours. Once upon a time America thought (really) that even Richard Nixon had to be an improvement over Lyndon Johnson. How did that work out?

Oriole fans may (underline that) be wise to consider what investigative journalism giant Sidney Zion used to advise: Trust your mother, but cut the cards.