About Jeff Kallman

Member, Internet Baseball Writers Association of America and the Society for American Baseball Research.

“It looks like 1994 all over again”

Posted on June 8, 2020 by Jeff Kallman

Then-baseball commissioner Fay Vincent relaxes with then-San Francisco Giants manager Roger Craig. Today Vincent thinks MLB owners haven’t learned a thing from their unforced errors of the past.

The Los Angeles Dodgers left Dodgertown—their legendary Vero Beach, Florida spring training complex, which Branch Rickey began and Walter O’Malley completed—for fresh digs in Arizona after the 2008 season. Former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent and his wife built a home in Vero Beach six years earlier.

From that home today, Vincent is unamused by today’s coronavirus-abetted baseball furies. The commissioner who didn’t ask “how high” whenever the owners ordered “jump!” thinks today’s owners are looking for more trouble than even the 1994 strike those owners provoked eyes wide shut.

Today’s owners, pleading potential poverty with little enough evidence to support the plea, seem to prefer jamming an abbreviated 48- or 50-game 2020 season down the throats of the players who prefer and hope to play an 80- or 82-game season. This morning’s whispers indicate that the haggling could mean a season beginning not in July but in August, if at all.

Assuming the owners stay on the terms of a March agreement to pay the players pro-rated 2020 salaries, even Sesame Street‘s residents can tell you that normal times equal the owners thinking the good of the game is making money for them, but abnormal times equal the owners thinking the good of the game is . . . making or at least saving money for them.

Not so fast, warns the last commissioner not to cancel a World Series. (1989, rudely interrupted by the Loma Prieta earthquake shaking Candlestick Park into being nicknamed by one wag “Wiggly Field.”) “[I]f you shut the game down,” he told NJ.com columnist Bob Klapisch, “you’re going to war with the [Major League Baseball Players Association] and that union cannot be broken. It looks like it’s 1994 all over again. I don’t think anyone has learned their lesson.”

The players want the owners to live up to the agreement the two sides made in March. The owners want the players to live down to it. Vincent remembers what a lot of people forget: nobody pays their hard-earned money to go to the ballpark or watch the game on cable television because they’re anxious to see their team’s owner.

The names on the backs of jerseys in which Joe and Jane Fan step out on the town read Trout, Harper, Scherzer, Bellinger, Judge, Yelich, Altuve, and Bumgarner—not Moreno, Middleton, Lerner, Guggenheim, Steinbrenner, Attanasio, Crane, or Kendrick. (Unless it’s Howie Kendrick, 2019 World Series hero.)

“Over the last 25 years,” Vincent told Klapisch further, “there’s been this general myth that the players have done better than the owners. People think, ‘the union’s won because the players are making so much money.’ Well, the reality is the Yankees are worth $10 billion. If the Steinbrenner family sold the team today, the players wouldn’t get a nickel. The players don’t own YES, they don’t own SNY, they don’t own NESN. So tell me who is the winner and who is the loser?”

It cost George Steinbrenner and his original partners $10 million to buy the Yankees from CBS in 1973. Today the Yankees—with their singular if not always controversy-free history—are actually worth $4.6 billion. But still. “That team is one of the greatest investments in history,” Vincent said, “and [the Steinbrenner family] owns it all. The same is true for all the owners: after tax dollars and capital gains (tax) they’ve held onto every bit of equity.”

Vincent gets why the MLBPA and their executive director Tony Clark, himself a former longtime major league first baseman, trust the owners about as far as they can hit or throw them. It’s not that the owners necessarily learned to play nice beforehand, but the mid-1980s collusion of owners suppressing genuinely competitive free agent biddings probably did the most to re-convince the players that most of the owners were about as trustworthy as a politician.

The owners were finally mandated to pony up $280 million in damages for their trouble then. “They owners stole that money from the players,” Vincent said, and you could practically feel him snap as you read the quote. “Stole it. There’s no other verb. When you steal that much it’s a hard argument to deflate. It’s why the players have never trusted owners since then.”

Banishing George Steinbrenner from baseball over paying a street hustler to find dirt on Hall of Famer Dave Winfield made Vincent a hero in New York.

Vincent was thrust into his former office upon the death of A. Bartlett Giamatti, who barely got to serve a full year in office before—abetted, but not necessarily caused by the ferocious stress of the Pete Rose gambling investigation he’d been bequeathed—suffering a fatal heart attack at 51 eight days after he banished Rose.

When he showed himself a mediator instead of an owners’ errand boy or strong-arm to end the 1990 spring lockout, Vincent made few enough friends among those who thought he was there to do their bidding strictly. Like Giamatti, who didn’t live long enough to suggest whether he’d always behave as though the good of the game didn’t always equal making money for it, Vincent didn’t see himself as his bosses’ stooge.

A man who loves baseball as deeply as his predecessor did, but without Giamatti’s scholarly but accessible eloquence, Vincent visited as many ballparks as he could. He was present and rooting in Milwaukee on 31 July 1990, the night Hall of Famer Nolan Ryan earned credit for his 300th win, even accepting the chance to sit and chat with Ryan in the dugout.

White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf, arguably the number one pusher for the 1994 strike, was not amused. “Nolan Ryan’s a player,” Reinsdorf “reminded” Vincent. “You’re the commissioner of baseball. You can’t be in awe of a player, I don’t care who he is.”

Thus said the man who commissioned statues of Hall of Famers Luis Aparicio, Harold Baines, Carlton Fisk, Nellie Fox, Frank Thomas, and Jim Thome around Comiskey Park—oops! Guaranteed Rate Field—not to mention those of Paul Konerko, Minnie Minoso, and Billy Pierce. Reinsdorf certainly seems somewhat awed by middle and corner infielders, a couple of designated hitters, at least one catcher, and at least one pitcher. (So where’s Hall of Famer Hoyt Wilhelm?)

When he banished Steinbrenner from baseball in 1990, after Steinbrenner was caught and exposed having paid a street hustler to dig up dirt on his future Hall of Fame outfielder Dave Winfield, Vincent lost the Yankees as an ally but won admirers in New York and elsewhere. The news broke while the Yankees hosted the Detroit Tigers at Yankee Stadium and provoked a slowly circulating standing ovation from beleaguered Yankee fans.

Vincent ran afoul of the owners for keeps in 1992. A cabal of smaller market owners led by Reinsdorf and then-Milwaukee Brewers owner Bud Selig (the cabal was known as the Great Lakes Gang), fed up with Vincent’s apparent disinclination to let them keep pleading poverty against those big beasts in the larger markets, knowing only too well that they weren’t as impoverished as they claimed, were only too ready to dump him and finally lined up the votes to do it.

He knew a few things they’d forgotten conveniently, including that it was their own fault player salaries inflated beyond sensible logic as the 1980s turned into the 1990s. Nobody put guns to anyone’s heads when, for example, San Francisco Giants general manager Al Rosen blew a hole in the market ceiling by signing a good but not great 33-year-old pitcher named Bud Black to four years at $2.2 million per, the kind of money paid usually to the Orel Hershisers of the time, not guys with ERAs approaching 4.00.

Vincent also didn’t help himself when he tried strong-arming three Yankee people including manager Buck Showalter out of baseball for going to bat on behalf of drug-troubled relief pitcher Steve Howe, whom Vincent allowed to return to the Show after six previous drug-related suspensions. The commissioner enraged many and caused headlines when he ordered the Yankee three to his New York office as Showalter was preparing to manage a game—with Showalter returning as the game was in progress.

Vincent resigned in 1992, after an 18-9 (one abstention) no-confidence vote by the owners. Except perhaps for his foolish bid to drive the Yankee three out of baseball over Howe (he fumed when one said he’d learned in the Marines that you don’t abandon the wounded), he was the commissioner who swung and missed at knockdown pitches. He remains the last commissioner who was neither an owner nor the handpicked successor to that eventually-former owner.

But if you ask as Klapisch did whether this year’s strife means no major league season and good luck selling a 2021 season, Vincent says . . . well, not so fast. “Even with what’s gone on it’s hard to really, truly damage this game,” Vincent said. “It always comes roaring back, especially if it’s been taken away for a long period of time. Fans end up missing it. Remember one thing. People do love baseball.”

He said in less tortured grammar what Sparky Anderson, Hall of Fame manager, once said by smooshing a pie in the face of the King’s English: “We try every way we can think of to kill this game, but for some reason nothing nobody does never hurts it.” Possibly until now.

Darkness gone for the former Dark Knight?

Posted on June 7, 2020 by Jeff Kallman

Little did Tom Verducci know that when he pegged Matt Harvey as the Dark Knight that another kind of darkness would compromise Harvey’s once-promising career.

Ten 7 Junes ago, the Kansas City Royals with the number four pick elected to draft a Cal State-Fullerton shortstop named Christian Colon instead of a University of North Carolina pitcher named Matt Harvey—because they thought they had enough pitching.* The New York Mets in the same draft picked two pitchers: Harvey, with the number eight pick overall, and a Stetson University kid named Jacob deGrom.

Five years after that draft, Harvey bulldozed his manager Terry Collins into letting him try to finish a World Series Game Five shutout that would have sent the set to a sixth game back in Kansas City.

“Would I take back getting to the World Series with those guys and the city of New York?” Harvey asks now, before answering. “There’s not a chance. I believe things happen the way they are supposed to. I got hurt and maybe I would have anyway. Getting to the World Series was worth it.”

Then Collins had to lift his gassed Dark Knight after a leadoff walk and an RBI double and bring in his closer Jeurys Familia, who already had a sick-looking Series resume thanks to those Mets’ porous infield gloves. Unfortunately, you can’t give the blown save to the defense under the save rule.

Two groundouts, then a terrible throw home to complete what should have been a simple game-ending double play, and Game Five went to extra innings. Where Colon, pinch hitting for Royals reliever Luke Hochebar, broke the two-all tie in the top of the twelfth, opening a five-run inning that won the Series for the Royals after the Mets couldn’t get a single baserunner past second in the bottom of the frame.

Today, deGrom—who waited until the ninth round before the Mets took him, too, ten years ago—is the National League’s back-to-back defending Cy Young Award winner. Arguably, he’s also the best pitcher in the game right this moment, among those not named Max Scherzer or Gerrit Cole.

Harvey, whom the Mets traded to the Cincinnati Reds in 2018, who signed as a free agent with the Los Angeles Angels for 2019, who was released after that experiment tanked, and who gave it another try in the Oakland Athletics system the rest of the season, now looks for a job. In the Korean Baseball Organisation.

MLB’s tug-of-war between the owners and the players over the financials in getting a coronavirus-delayed 2020 season in at all probably meant it was a very long shot for Harvey to catch on with another major league organisation for now. He doesn’t mind taking his chances otherwise.

“It’s been an interesting ride, a roller coaster,” Harvey tells the New York Post. “With where I am now, physically and how I’m feeling, I hope I get another shot.” Calling it “an interesting ride” may be an understatement. Which is saying something about a pitcher you could call many things other than understated.

“As soon as he signed, he came to New York. I saw this big, good-looking kid standing in our bullpen with a black suit, white shirt, very thin tie — very GQ-ish, as he always was,” the Mets’ then-pitching coach Dan Warthen tells the Post. “His hair was always perfect. Then you see the ball coming out of his hand and you say, ‘Oh, it won’t be long until he’s playing baseball up here.’ And he was cocky, oh Lord. He said, ‘Hey, I’ll be ready to pitch for you next year’.”

Harvey premiered for the Mets in late July 2012, against the Arizona Diamondbacks. He struck out ten in five and two-thirds innings while walking three and scattering three hits. “All of the reports I read,” says then-Mets manager Terry Collins, “didn’t talk about a 98 mph fastball. It was ’94-95, pretty good slider, working on changeup.’ All of a sudden, this guy is throwing 97-99 with a 92-mph slider. I said, ‘Holy cow!’ We were shocked by what we saw.”

“When he burst on the scene with a fury, it was fun, man,” then-Mets pitcher Dillon Gee—whose own career was sapped by injuries until he retired last year—tells the Post. “You had heard about him coming up. When he got here, he was like on a different level. You could tell he was a special talent.”

By the following season, Harvey was practically the talk of the town in New York baseball. When he ended June 2013 with a 2.00 ERA, Met fans has already begun greeting his starts with “Happy Harvey Day!” Harvey started that year’s All-Star Game—which was played in Citi Field, his home ballpark. The American League went on to win, 3-0, but Harvey’s three strikeouts in two innings electrified the joint.

Then Sports Illustrated put Harvey on the cover with the headline, “The Dark Knight of Gotham.” But the writer who delivered that cover story, Tom Verducci, would write five years later, after Harvey pitched (and, many said, partied) his way out of New York, “The truth is, for all the times he wound up in the tabloids other than the sports section, Harvey failed because his arm failed him.”

. . . His arm likely failed him because of how he threw a baseball. And when his arm failed him, he knew no other way. He couldn’t pitch without an A-plus fastball, he couldn’t embrace using a bullpen role as a way back, and he couldn’t believe in himself again.

. . . The Mets cut Harvey because his once-fearsome fastball became the almost exact definition of a mediocre fastball (MLB averages: 92.7 mph, 2,261 rpm). Because he couldn’t find another way to get hitters out, because he could not change his mechanics and because he could not buy into the bullpen, the Mets could not keep sending [him] out to the mound as a starter.

The decline in his stuff was obvious. And there was no way his fastball was coming back with the way he throws.

Especially not after blowing his elbow ligament into Tommy John surgery late in 2013 (which didn’t keep him from leading the Show with his 2.01 fielding-independent pitching rate or third in the National League with his 2.27 ERA), or incurring thoracic outlet syndrome, the surgery for which cuts somewhat invasively into the shoulder and the back, or trying too hard to come back too soon from both.

Be very afraid, Pittsburgh Pirates fans. Your struggling pitcher Chris Archer (though he did pitch decently after last year’s All-Star break) just underwent thoracic outlet syndrome surgery himself, who probably won’t return if and when major league baseball returns, and who may even find himself receiving a contract buyout before he can pitch 2021 and hit free agency after that season.

Like Harvey, alas, Archer’s post-surgery career prospects don’t look as promising as he himself formerly looked.

“I had TOS,” Gee says. “I know how much that sucks. It definitely changes you. You start trying to tinker with things. It’s not natural anymore. You start being robot-ish. You start not trying to hurt one area and totally hurt another area. Your whole body is out of whack.”

The limelight and the taste for night life among New York’s demimonde certainly didn’t help Harvey in the long run. “You could see the media and limelight kind of became part of what he wanted to do,” says Gee. “I’m sure that is super, super hard not to let that creep in, as popular as he got. I couldn’t imagine being bombarded as he was. He was the guy.”

Who’s to say, too, that Harvey didn’t sink into the demimonde because the slow realisation that his body began betraying the talent that got him there in the first place was too painful to bear? Dark Knights are supposed to be invincible, right?

Verducci believes Harvey’s mechanics both took him to the Show and eroded him soon enough. “Harvey pulls the ball far behind him—crossing the airspace over the rubber,” he wrote, “a strenuous maneuver that rarely leads to long careers.”

Harvey’s psyche also may have fallen out of whack in 2017, when that May Brazilian supermodel Adriana Lima, with whom he thought he had an enduring romance in the making, parted with him to leave a tony Manhattan afterparty with her former boyfriend, a New England Patriots football player.

Up to that point Harvey’s taste for the charms of supermodels was rivaled only by his taste for a ride whose value sometimes equaled that of a modest suburban home. But a few days later, Harvey missed a game claiming a migraine but possibly suffering a ferocious hangover, as the Post‘s Page Six had it. It got him a three-day suspension from the Mets.

Then Harvey suffered yet another injury, a stress fracture in his shoulder area, ending his 2017 and draining more off his fastball. The following season, in which he approached his first free agency, his continuing decline prompted then-Mets manager Mickey Callaway to think about moving him to the bullpen to rehorse, a move that tasted to Harvey rather the way Brussels sprouts taste to small children.

“We were trying to get him to use his curveball and changeup more, which he did in spring training — and he had a nice, four-pitch mix,” says then-Mets pitching coach Dave Eiland. “And then once the regular season started, he went back to his old habits, fastball and slider primarily. The command of it wasn’t quite there. If he missed a little bit, the outcome was going to be a little different than when he missed 97-99 with a 92-93 slider.”

When Harvey rejected the bullpen option, sometimes nastily, the Mets designated him for assignment, then dealt him to the Reds.

“I gave him the Dark Knight nickname, because I saw in Harvey someone who not only had the stuff to save the Mets in Gotham—they were in the middle of six straight losing seasons when Harvey arrived—but also the desire to play the role,” Verducci wrote. “He embraced not just being a staff ace but also a dominating personality.”

Learning to be just a young man may be almost as tough as re-learning how to pitch. Once upon a time Harvey was the most identifiable Met to the public but a somewhat alienating one inside his own team. Maybe riding the high life too hard distanced Harvey from people who might otherwise have felt for him, empathised, wanting to feel for him.

In Cincinnati and in Anaheim he was described as a changed young man, not exactly the type to just jump when the siren call of a tony party beckoned. If Gee and former Mets general manager Sandy Alderson are any examples, there’s empathy now, even if through hindsight’s eye.

“I liked Matt. I continue to like Matt,” Alderson tells the Post. “Sure, he had his reputation, but ultimately I thought as an individual, he was sort of a vulnerable person. Someone whose confidence was a little brittle. I remember in his postgame interviews, he came across as a real solid, humble, genuine guy. The things that we went through with him were not novel for me. It was part of the job. I didn’t resent it at all. I didn’t take it personally.”

Alderson isn’t the only one with a hindsight’s eye view of the Harvey dilemna. The former Dark Knight has one of his own. “There are a lot of things I’d do differently,” the 31-year-old Harvey now says, “but I don’t like to live with regret.”

There were just things I didn’t know at the time. Now, obviously, I’ve struggled the last few years. And what I know now is how much time and effort it takes to stay at the top of your game. I wouldn’t say my work ethic was bad whatsoever, but when you’re young, it’s not like you feel invincible, but when everything is going so well, you don’t know what it takes to stay on the field. It’s definitely more time consuming and takes more concentration.

Pitching respectably in Cincinnati got Harvey that shot in Anaheim that collapsed last year. The word now is that the video he’s produced of a pitching workout may impress someone in the KBO to give him a try. Eiland says he’s seen the video and it shows Harvey’s arm “looked like it was working well.” Warthen agrees: “This is the cleanest and easiest that I’ve seen him throw the baseball in a long time.”

Harvey also looks healthy. Shorn of his once-familiar beard, he looks as young as he was when the Royals bypassed him and the Mets snapped him up ten years ago. Almost as though he’d erased all those nights on the town and the flash he once embraced, except from inside his mind and soul where he can review them and remind himself how not to do it.

If Harvey can suggest that he knows better now what it takes to stay on the field or the mound, it’s an even more encouraging sign. It could also mean him trying to fend off the possibly inevitable one last time. It could also mean Harvey having to come to terms at last with the possibility that whatever else fell out of whack in his life before, his body’s betrayal was just too profound in the long run.

——

* Colon, the shortstop the Royals preferred to more pitching in the 2010 draft, remains the reserve-level player he’s been all his major league life. Before he was waived out of Kansas City, the Miami Marlins claimed and shortly farmed him out.

The Braves signed him but released him the following May, the Mets (of all people) signed him on a minor league deal but let him walk as a free agent, then the Cincinnati Reds signed him to a minor league deal, gave him a cup of coffee last September, and re-signed him on a minor league deal.

But he’ll always have Game Five of the 2015 World Series. With one swing in the top of the twelfth he drilled his way into permanent baseball lore. It’s more than a lot of journeymen get.

In the same 2010 draft, the Royals passed over another pair of stars-to-be: outfielder Bryce Harper and pitcher Chris Sale. Harper is now in the second year of a $330 million/thirteen-year contract. Sale was the last man standing—striking out the side in the Game Five ninth—when the Boston Red Sox won a 2018 World Series that may or may not be tainted by their replay-room sign-stealing cheating that season.

Dykstra pours gasoline on his own fire

Posted on June 4, 2020 by Jeff Kallman

According to Dykstra, ex-Met teammate Ron Darling and Mets owners Fred and Jeff Wilpon helped Darling fake thyroid cancer, and ex-Phillies teammate Dale Murphy has a “loser son” who took a rubber bullet in the eye during a peaceful protest about the George Floyd atrocity.

Nobody likes a sore loser. Lenny Dykstra seems determined, alas, to make the sorest of losers before him resemble Medal of Honour winners.

Maybe it was wishful thinking to expect Dykstra to go gently into that good, gray night after his defamation suit against his 1986 Mets teammate Ron Darling was thrown out by the New York State Supreme Court last week. He seems bent on going there scorched earth and half blind.

How else would you describe a man legally declared libel and defamation proof who declares Darling faked thyroid cancer (for which he underwent surgery last year), Mets owner Fred Wilpon and Wilpon’s son Jeff (their chief operating officer) were in on the fakery, and New York State Supreme Court justice Robert D. Kalish was bought and paid for to rule against his defamation suit toward Darling’s memoir 108 Stitches?

Kalish ruled, in essence, that Dykstra couldn’t be defamed as claimed by Darling’s memoir 108 Stitches considering the former outfielder’s past, to which he copped only too bluntly in his own memoir (House of Nails), having committed “fraud, embezzlement, grand theft, and lewd conduct and assault with a deadly weapon.”

On Tuesday NJ.com writer Randy Miller published the net result of telephone conversations with Dykstra in the wake of the lawsuit dismissal. “Hearing and watching Lenny Dykstra rant and curse and slur his words during selfie Twitter videos is what it’s like talking to the former Mets and Phillies star over the phone.”

“Ron Darling lied about cancer, OK?” Dykstra tweeted with video Monday, after his Uber ride in southern California got “rammed into by a couple of hillbillies.” Knowing Dykstra’s penchant for describing people dissimilar to himself in racial and other slur terms, it’s not unreasonable to guess that “a couple of hillbillies” to him were just people in a pickup truck regardless of whence they hail.

Darling took a leave of absence from his job as a Mets broadcaster (on a team with Gary Cohen and with his former 86 Mets teammate Keith Hernandez) recuperating from his surgery. It would require copious dollars paid to a lot of people to enable a hoax like that, but Dykstra swore to Miller that he has “documents” to prove it. Documents not yet proffered.

“I got the proof. The Wilpons knew all about it, and they’re in on it,” Dykstra told Miller. “Never in a million [fornicating] years did they think Nails would get to the [fornicating] bottom of this, but I [fornicating]-eh did . . . I’m going to prove it when I do in an interview with an AP writer and expose them because I got documented proof. That means I can support what I say.”

He didn’t offer to share the documented proof with Miller. But while he was at it, Dykstra tweeted aloud that he thinks Darling and the Wilpons might have been behind the couple of hillbillies who rammed his Uber ride. Might.

Darling mis-remembered Dykstra hurling racial slurs toward Boston Red Sox pitcher Oil Can Boyd before leading off and homering against Boyd to open Game Three of the 1986 World Series. The worst the Mets’ bench jockeys hammered Boyd with, other than hollering, “C’mon, throw harder than that, you pussy,” was a schoolyard play on his nickname, “Shit Can,” after a former teammate advised them Boyd could be rattled by bench jockeying.

But Kalish cited enough existing further evidence of subsequent racial slurs, not to mention the sad revelations Darling cited and hammered that emanated from Dykstra’s spectacular enough business collapse, to determine Dykstra libel and defamation proof legally. Among numerous other sources, Kalish cited Dykstra’s own memoir.

It’s a terrible thing to ponder that a baseball player as admired as Dykstra was (and remains) for playing hard-nosed with occasional bull-headedness (fair disclosure: I was one of those admirers) collapsed under the weight of his own flaws to the point where his reputation couldn’t save him. Not every player finds life after baseball without potholes, pitfalls, or pratfalls. Dykstra’s happened to be deeper, wider, and more profound than many.

Tweeting and beating his gums as he has in the wake of the Kalish ruling won’t help Dykstra and may injure him further. “[I]t has been determined, as a matter of law, that Dykstra’s reputation is so utterly sullied that he is unable to be defamed,” observed NBC Sports’s Craig Calcaterra. “The same, however, would certainly not be found if Ron Darling, the Wilpons, the judge who dismissed Darling’s case, and/or Dale Murphy’s son wanted to sue him.”

Dale Murphy’s son?

Dykstra and Murphy were Phillies teammates briefly, during the sadder part of Murphy’s injury-abetted decline phase. Last Saturday evening, Murphy’s son took part in one of the more peaceful protests, in Denver, against George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police—and took a rubber bullet right next to his left eye.

An Atlanta Braves icon, whose reputation as a clean player and a clean man has never been challenged credibly, Murphy revealed his son’s injury on Twitter last Sunday night. “His story is not unique,” Murphy said in the tweet, which preceded another showing his son’s injury. “Countless others have also experienced this use of excessive police force while trying to have their voices heard.”

On Monday morning, Dykstra tweeted of his former teammate, “F*** him and his loser kid.” That afternoon, Dykstra went further: “No children of Lenny Dykstra have had issues with police resulting from being part of an Antifa mob. We Dykstras have proper respect for the men in blue.”

You don’t have to be part of an Antifa mob to know and believe that four Minneapolis police officers—particularly Derek Chauvin with his knee on Floyd’s neck, now facing charges upgraded from third-degree to second-degree murder, and his three partners now charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter—committed an atrocity that no decent human being would or should dismiss.

You don’t have to disrespect the men in blue to understand that rogue cops exist, commit crimes in their own right, commit atrocities for reasons racial and otherwise, and escape accountability through ways and means such as “qualified immunity.” And, that ordinary citizens have every right in these United States and on God’s green earth to object to and protest those crimes and atrocities.

You also don’t have to be either a craven, wingnut left or right agitator to understand that there have been only too many among us who seized upon the Floyd atrocity and the culpability of four Minneapolis police officers as an excuse to break entire neighbourhoods, if not cities, and the lives of those whose neighbourhoods they broke, regardless that the targets had nothing to do with committing that atrocity.

So them Dykstras have proper respect for the men in blue? This grandson (paternal) of a New York police officer (he retired the year I was born) would like to remind them that the crooked and corrupt among the men in blue stain their fellow officers profoundly enough. Grandpa Walter—one of the gentlest but firmest souls you’d ever wish to meet off duty—would have denounced such rogue cops and such free-lance looters and vandals with equal fury.

“[F]rom where I’m sitting,” Calcaterra writes, “[Darling, the Wilpons, Kalish, and the Murphys would] each have very good cases if they decided to go that route” of their own litigation against Dykstra’s remarks. From where I’m sitting, Calcaterra probably isn’t sitting alone.

The financial not-so-merry-go-round goes round

Posted on June 4, 2020 by Jeff Kallman

2020-06-04 ManfredBaseballs Maybe Hall of Fame pitcher Tom Glavine was wrong when he said last month that, if major league baseball doesn’t return, the players are going to look bad no matter how right they might be. The deeper goes the impasse between the owners and the players, the more the owners resemble the people to whom the good of the game equals nothing but the bottom line.

The owners and the players agreed in March to play any shortened season with the players paid their signed-for 2020 salaries on a pro-rated basis—until the owners said not so fast. The owners tried for a 50-50 revenue split knowing it would cost a lot of players a lot more money than just playing under their pro-rated 2020 salaries—and the players said not so fast.

Now the players, as if they needed further evidence for the defense that yes, they’d rather be playing baseball, proposed a 114-game season. The owners, who first thought of an 82-game season, said, essentially . . . not so fast. They rejected that proposal almost out of hand, then decided that negotiating further meant nothing when they could find a way to impose a 50-game season and, by the way, the players were perfectly free to negotiate against themselves.

That’s the way Yahoo! Sports columnist Hannah Keyser phrased it, more or less. MLB “believes that language in that agreement around ‘economic feasibility’ of restarting a season allows them to negotiate a further pay cut for the players now it’s become clear that games will be played without fans, at least at first,” she writes. “The union disagrees with that interpretation, as well as the league’s assertion that owners will lose money on every regular season game.”

By comparison it’s been simpler for the owners and the players to agree on such details as playing this season with a universal designated hitter (and it should be kept when things become normal again in 2021), a one-time-only postseason expansion, and wringing out the fine details of proper health protocols.

Where they demur mostly is about money. The owners, who’ve rarely passed on a chance to try suppressing player pay in the past, are using the coronavirus-triggered season delay to try it now. The players, who know they have a March deal to play pro-rated, have the unmitigated gall to insist the owners live up to the deal to which they themselves agreed.

Oh, sure, the owners harrumph that they’ll still pay pro-rated 2020 salaries under a 50-game season. Don’t fool yourselves: it means the players earning less thanks to drastically slashed time on the job. Talk about a de facto salary cap.

It means, as Keyser writes, that commissioner Rob Manfred and the owners “would declare the negotiations a failure and effectively cut the hours of their employees who refused to agree to lower wages. All of which they seemingly can do, and it would be a success . . . ”

That is an almost embarrassingly trite and self-evident thing to say based on the behavior of Major League Baseball owners over the past few years. Of course they’re more concerned with minimizing costs than retaining top talent or paying minor league players a living wage. But it’s worth emphasizing that they just announced they’re also more concerned with savings than even hosting baseball games. They’re betraying more than the spirit of competitive balance with their cheapness now, they’re also depriving fans of the very product they’re trying to sell.

Speaking of paying minor league players living wages, it’s worth noting that major league players have embarrassed a few teams out of trying to cut their minor leaguers off. Without even throwing a single regular season pitch in the uniform, Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher David Price elected to hand each minor leaguer in the Dodger system $1,000 out of his own pocket.

When the world champion Washington Nationals thought about cutting their minor league players off at the pass, their players—as announced by relief pitcher Sean Doolittle last weekend—said not so fast, and prepared to pool their own monies to take care of those minor leaguers, prompting the organisation to keep their farm players on the payroll after all. Doolittle subsequently announced the Nats’ major leaguers would continue offering the team’s farm players financial help.

Remember: The major league players may not be impoverished, exactly, but the owners are impoverished far, far, less. When Chicago Cubs owner Tom Ricketts says it’s not like they can just move money around at will—given that the virus shutdown has wreaked losses at a “biblical” scale and MLB doesn’t exactly “make a lot of cash”— even his fellow owners know he’s talking through his chapeau.

For the seventeenth year in a row, 2019 saw MLB set a new revenue record. Forbes recorded it as $10.7 billion. “In accounting, revenues are calculated before factoring in expenses,” writes NBC Sports’s Bill Baer, “but unless the league has $10 billion in expenses, I cannot think of a way in which Ricketts’ statement can be true.”

Something else to ponder as well, if the owners aren’t going to the poorhouse and are trying to game the players yet again, and if the players are willing to extend financial helping hands to their teams’ minor leaguers: What about going the extra few miles and extending helping hands to 600+ short-career pre-1980 major leaguers who were frozen out when baseball’s pension plan was realigned that year to shorten up the time in MLB service required for a full MLB pension to vest?

Remember: The late players union director Marvin Miller said in due course that not revisiting and remodeling that realignment to include those pre-1980 short-career players was his biggest mistake and regret. The players in question do receive some monies from a deal worked out between former commissioner Bud Selig and the late players union director Michael Weiner—but they can’t pass that $625-per-quarter-of-MLB-service to their families when they pass on.

Today’s players union director Tony Clark has been (phrased politely) cool about the matter. The Major League Baseball Players Alumni Association has been likewise, unfortunately. Amplified especially since three of the players who’d been involved actively in the pension redress cause—former pitchers David Clyde and Gary Niebauer, and former first baseman/longtime coach Eddie Robinson—were squeezed off the association’s pension services committee.

Maybe today’s players, if they can be made further aware, might think of pitching in likewise for those short-career men who also supported their union in actions that helped pry open the door to free agency and tackle other pertinent issues involving major league players, and sacrificed considerable income despite earning less than princely salaries for assorted reasons.

Maybe. First, let’s find the right way to get a 2020 season played at all, about which the owners seem less concerned than about preserving whatever they think remains of their bottom lines. You don’t want to know what might emanate if the owners get away with imposing a too-short season for no better reason than to cut the players off at the financial pass.

Dykstra’s race cards, clarified

Posted on June 2, 2020 by Jeff Kallman

Lenny Dykstra hitting his game-opening home run against Oil Can Boyd in Game Three of the 1986 World Series; fellow Mets legend Keith Hernandez is seen on deck.

The New York State Supreme Court may have ruled Lenny Dykstra libel-proof, in granting his 1986 Mets teammate Ron Darling’s request to dismiss Dykstra’s defamation lawsuit. But one question before the house post mortem remains—is or was Dykstra an actual racist?

Darling’s book 108 Stitches cited Dykstra having hollered racial epithets at Boston Red Sox pitcher Dennis (Oil Can) Boyd before leading off against Boyd to open Game Three of the 1986 World Series. Boyd himself doesn’t remember hearing them, though he also admits that hearing about them in due course disturbed him, especially since he’d played with and liked Dykstra when the pair were once in Japan.

The justice who ruled in Darling’s favour last Friday, Robert D. Kalish, cited several instances of Dykstra using racial insults in years following his baseball playing days and during the business activities that ultimately exploded in Dykstra’s face almost repeatedly.

Darling’s and Dykstra’s African-American Mets teammates, including pitcher Dwight Gooden, and outfielders Kevin Mitchell and Darryl Strawberry, don’t remember hearing Dykstra hammering Boyd racially before hammering a leadoff bomb in that game, either. But Darling, himself a former pitcher, didn’t limit his criticism of Dykstra to the World Series incident, and Kalish observed as much in writing his dismissal opinion.

Kalish didn’t rule singularly on the grounds that Dykstra was or is a demonstrable racist or at least leaned toward racial insults in an actual or alleged effort to rattle Oil Can Boyd or any opponent. (I should have made that point a lot more clear when writing about the ruling on Monday.)

What Kalish ruled was that Dykstra’s overall reputation collapsed so profoundly that libeling or defaming him is legally impossible. A man who delivers himself into that kind of clutch as Dykstra ultimately did deserves a certain degree of pity.

It’s likely, that Darling mis-remembered Dykstra awaiting his turn at bat to open Game Three. as you’ll see in due course. It’s also likely, that Dykstra was so reckless a young man that any thought of him using race to try rattling a black pitcher he was about to face, since he was a young man who’d do just about anything for an edge including living on and over it, made sad enough sense.

Dykstra’s complaint against Darling and 108 Stitches may have specified that the reference “forever branded [him] a racist,” as Kalish noted. But it didn’t necessarily limit itself to that question alone. On Monday, I cited what I was certain was the money quote that tripped Dykstra’s litigious trigger, which began with the racial epithet accusation but continued thus:

You know how there always seems to be a guy in every organization, in every walk of life, who gets away with murder –murder being a figurative term in this case? That was Lenny. He was a criminal in every sense, although during his playing days his crimes were mostly of an interpersonal nature. He treated people like shit, walked around like his shit didn’t stink and was generally a shitty human being –and, just maybe, the most confident, cocky player I would ever encounter. It was after he left the game, though, that his behavior took a truly criminal turn; he ended up being sentenced to house arrest on a bankruptcy fraud indictment, and he was also up on drug possession and grand-theft-auto charges, for which he received a three-year prison sentence. Not exactly the poster boy for America’s game, huh?

Kalish made a point of citing Dykstra’s entire calamitous post-baseball life even when alluding to or specifying race issues:

Based on the papers submitted on this motion, prior to the publication of the book, Dykstra was infamous for being, among other things, racist, misogynist, and anti-gay, as well as a sexual predator, a drug-abuser, a thief, and an embezzler. Further, Dykstra had a reputation—largely due to his autobiography—of being willing to do anything to benefit himself and his team, including using steroids and blackmailing umpires* . . . Considering this information, which was presumably known to the average reader of the book, this Court finds that, as a matter of law, the reference in the book has not exposed Dykstra to any further “public contempt, ridicule, aversion or disgrace,” or “evil opinion of him in the minds of right-thinking persons,” or “deprivation of friendly intercourse in society.

The roll of Dykstra’s racial bombs during his post-baseball business collapse remains troubling enough to have Dykstra branded as a racist long before Darling wrote his book:

In a 2009 GQ magazine article, Dykstra’s former employee Kevin Coughlin . . . wrote about his time working for Dykstra and asserted that Dykstra would use the terms “darkies” and “spearchuckers” to refer to African-American athletes featured in Dykstra’s magazine the Players Club . . . These claims were also reported by other media outlets such as ESPN.com, the New York Daily News,and the Philadelphia Inquirer . . . Moreover, in a 2013 book, Dykstra’s former magazine editor for the Players Club Christopher Frankie . . . detailed his account of working with Dykstra and asserted that Dykstra described Willie Mays as “his field n—-r,” Venus and Serena Williams as “baboons,” and Celtics coach Doc Rivers as a “spear-chucker.” In his book, Frankie tells the story of how Dykstra allegedly said that the staff at the Carlyle Hotel “had been offended when [Dykstra] loudly used the word ‘n—-r’ in the lobby and had booted him out” . . . Dykstra undisputedly has never brought a libel suit against Coughlin, Frankie, or other media outlets for such reporting . . .

The aforementioned Christopher Frankie account is Nailed: The Improbable Rise and Spectacular Fall of Lenny Dykstra. It’s sickening enough to learn Dykstra could call a Hall of Famer against whom every center fielder since is judged—who tangled with racism surprisingly and bitterly when trying to buy his first San Francisco home, and who tended lovingly to his Alzheimer’s-stricken second wife until her death seven years ago—his “field n—-r.”

In the aforementioned GQ article (“You Think Your Job Sucks? Try Working for Lenny Dykstra”), Coughlin recalled taking a phone call from Dykstra about possible Players Club cover subjects, with Coughlin’s wife hearing the convo on speaker. Dykstra said, “Nobody can call me a racist—I put three darkies and a bitch on my first four covers.” When Coughlin replied, “What was that, Lenny,” Dykstra answered, “I said I put three spearchuckers on the cover!”

In Macho Row, William C. Kashatus’s splendid, candid, and often troublesome chronicle of the 1993 Phillies, for whom Dykstra was a critical element, Kashatus reviewed Dykstra’s issues with PEDs (actual or alleged), his marital collapse, and his “increasingly erratic” behaviour after his Players Club collapse and his divorce: “He used offensive terms when speaking about blacks, women, and homosexuals.” (Coughlin recorded that Dykstra dismissed a particular suggested Players Club page layout as “faggy”—even as the gay page designer was within earshot in the room.)

Kashatus also made a point of citing Dykstra’s 2016 memoir, House of Nails, including this passage: “While at times [my] brash, arrogant style served me well in the game of life, it was eventually instrumental in my undoing.” An undoing that finally made Dykstra libel-proof in the eyes of the New York State Supreme Court.

When Jeff Pearlman wrote The Bad Guys Won, his engaging and too-revelatory 2004 review of the 1986 Mets, he recalled Boyd’s pre-Game Three boast, “When I first looked at the Mets, I saw they had good power in the middle. But I feel I can master those guys.” Pearlman also exhumed that former Met Tom Paciorek, by then a Texas Rangers outfielder attending the Series as a commentator, chatted before the game with Mets Keith Hernandez (first baseman) and Wally Backman (second baseman) with a little extra counsel about facing the Red Sox’s slender righthander:

Paciorek knew Boyd well, and his advice was sound: “When you guys start the game, just keep screaming shit at Oil Can from the dugout, because he’s got rabbit ears,” Paciorek said. “He hears everything and it really gets him frustrated. He’ll start hanging shit, and then he’ll start looking at you. He’ll point at you when he strikes someone out. If that happens, you’ve got him.”

Hernandez didn’t have to be told twice. As soon as Boyd strolled to the mound to start his warmup pitches, the assault began. The players kneeled on towels lined up in front of the dugout’s top step, just to be as close as possible. “Hey, Shit Can! Is that all you’ve got!? C’mon, throw harder than that, you pussy! Hey, Shit Can! You’re nothing!”

In House of Nails, Dykstra remembered telling his wife, Terri, before the game, that he “was going to try to go yard with one of Oil Can’s garbage batting-practise fastballs in my first at-bat.” Boyd remembers leaving a slider out over the plate enough for Dykstra to send into the corner right field seats. Pearlman recorded the Mets’ bench jockeys hollering “Shit Can! Shit Can!” as Dykstra rounded the bases.

The Mets scored four in that first inning. Boyd pounded the mound’s rosin bag, paced around the mound, and glared toward the Mets dugout as the first-inning merry-go-round went ’round. The Mets went on to win the game, 7-1.

Dykstra wasn’t exactly the only wild, crazy, and reckless dude on the notorious 1986 Mets, whose clean contingent membership might be countable on one hand. The bad news further is that he is threatening a future day of reckoning for those Mets he swears done him dirty. (When you [fornicate] with Nails, you get the [fornicating] hammer, you hear me?)

The Mets may not have been innocent, and Dykstra may be trying to remake and remodel his life at last.** But Dykstra making a threat like that may yet prove pot calling out kettle. “Careless” may be the best way to describe Dykstra when all is said and done. Carelessness carries its own stains and inflicts them upon more than just the careless.

Ron Darling may have misremembered Dykstra pre-Game Three, but he didn’t write the overall script that made Dykstra legally libel-proof. And, very much to my regret, I’d forgotten Pearlman’s Game Three descriptions when sitting down to write on Monday.

At the very least, it appears that neither Dykstra nor any other Met played race cards trying to rattle Oil Can Boyd, unless you think a mere juvenile play on his nickname carries more sinister undertones. I owe it to Dykstra (and to you, gentle readers—all ten of you) to say that much, at least.

———————

* In House of Nails, Dykstra revealed he spent six figures to hire private investigators to dig into umpires’ lives and used embarrassing information thus exhumed to convince umpires to give him more favourable pitch calls at the plate. In 1992-93, as a Phillie, when he said he began using such expensively gathered intelligence, Dykstra saw a 6.5 point spike in his rate of bases on balls.

An analysis of whether Dykstra could have been held legally liable for such efforts and acts appears at FanGraphs, by Sheryl Ring.

** Dykstra told a story in House of Nails that I hope to God is true: When his youngest son turned eighteen, his baseball pension reverted to him under the terms of his divorce agreement. It amounted to $6,000 a month, money Dykstra certainly could have used considering his notorious business collapse.

Dykstra wrote that he thought about it hard, then called for and received legal documents to sign ordering the money to continue going to his former wife, Terri, for the rest of her life. “Why should she be penalised for my transgressions?” he wrote. “She did not contribute to my downfall . . . She’s a wonderful person who certainly did not deserve the fallout caused by my actions.”

If that’s true, it indicates that even Dykstra is not beyond redemption.

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