About Jeff Kallman

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

Ladies and gentlemen, your Chicago Blight Sox

Posted on August 6, 2024 by Jeff Kallman

The Blight Sox, on the threshold of possessing the American League’s longest losing streak, depending upon what they can or can’t do with the Athletics, of all people, Tuesday night.

The number twenty-one has meanings profound (a winning hand at blackjack; the legal age of consent in most places), historical (a fabled New York restaurant and Prohibition-era speakeasy), and disgraceful alike. (The 1956-58 television game show that ignited the infamous quiz show scandal.) It was also the uniform number of 29 White Sox players over the team’s history.

As of Monday night number 21 became something more sinister. In Chicago, that is. The White Sox lost their 21st consecutive game. Somewhere in this favoured land, the sun is shining bright, the band is playing somewhere, but the White Sox are under a massive cloud with the threat of funeral marches sounding too clear.

The Athletics, of all people, dropped it upon the Blight Sox. The team so reduced by their ten-thumbed, brain-challenged owner that it was thought the A’s would bury themselves a live in what’s still their farewell season in Oakland beat the White Sox 5-1 in the A’s rambling wreck of a ballpark.

Once upon a time, the White Sox tied the game at one. The A’s said, don’t even think about it, scoring four more. And there was no joy back in Windville when the mighty Senzel (Nick, that is) struck out to end consecutive loss number 21.

This is the longest such streak of sorrow since the Orioles opened 1988 0-21; the 21 losses are an American League record now shared. The streak followed the 27-67 record the White Sox amassed from Opening Day through 5 July. They have only to lose three straight more to pass the 1961 Phillies and six straight more to pass the 1889 Louisville Colonels of the antique American Association. And, unlike those 1988 Orioles, these White Sox may have lost their sense of humour along the way.

Says White Sox manager Pedro Grifol, whose seat may resemble a stovetop burner, “Everybody knows what it is. It’s 21 in a row. It sucks. It’s not fun. It’s painful. It hurts. You name it. However you want to describe it.”

Said 1988 Orioles manager Frank Robinson, installed after Cal Ripken, Sr. skippered them to the first six straight losses, “Nobody like to be the joke of the league, but we accept it”—after showing a visiting reporter a button he kept in a desk drawer saying, “It’s been lovely, but I have to scream now.”

Says White Sox left fielder Corey Julks, who managed a highlight-reel catch to save a run, “Don’t dwell on the losses. Try to learn from them and get better each day.”

Said Hall of Fame shortstop Cal Ripken, to a reporter new on the Oriole beat when that 1988 streak hit the big Two-Oh, “Join the hostages.”

Said Grifol, “It’s not for lack of effort. Nobody wants to come out here and lose. We’ve just got to put a good game together and put this behind us.”

Said Robinson, “Nobody’s really gone off the deep end. All except one game, there’s been a real effort.”

Cal Ripken, Jr.; Morganna. the Kissing Bandit

When the ’88 Orioles needed a little extra mojo after losing two straight following the end of their epic losing streak, Morganna the Kissing Bandit planted one on Hall of Famer Cal Ripken, Jr.—and they battered the Rangers for her trouble.

Said former White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen to Athletic reporter Jon Greenberg, after Greenberg suggested White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf and general manage Chris Getz were waiting for Grifol to manage one more win before executing him, “That means Pedro is 100 games under .500 since he got the job. Hoo, hoo boy.”

Said Robinson, told of a radio personality who promised to stay on the air until those Orioles finally won a game, “We’re gonna kill the poor guy.”

Come 29 April 1988, Baltimore’s old and long-gone Memorial Stadium was sold out, the crowd broke out the ancient championship-aspiring chant “O-R-I-O-L-E-S” . . . and the Orioles won at last, 9-0. Their opponent then? A different collection of White Sox. Out of whose starting pitcher Black Jack McDowell they pried five runs (four earned), out of whose bullpen they banged four more, in a game featuring two Hall of Famers on each side, with the Oriole Hall of Famers—Ripken and Eddie Murray—each hitting home runs and the whole team pounding eleven hits to the White Sox’s four.

After two straight Oriole losses to follow, Morganna the Kissing Bandit showed up to plant a wet one upon Ripken . . . and they battered the Rangers, 9-4. Ripken hit one out that day, too. It wasn’t enough to salvage an Oriole season in which they played below .500 ball in each month. (Morganna wasn’t about to become a single team’s attitude adjustment mascot, either.) But it might have kept the sting of 0-21 cauterised awhile.

Now, the White Sox don’t have someone else to confront them trying to end a losing streak. This time, the White Sox have to try again. They’re not finding laughs, they’re hearing that their own Hall of Fame legend Frank Thomas is scolding them: “I don’t want to hear no more: ‘We’re trying.’ No more: ‘They’re working hard every day.’ No, it’s time to snap. It’s time to kick over the spread.”

The 1961 Phillies were managed by Gene Mauch, a man to whom kicking the postgame food spread over came as naturally as song to an oriole. Grifol doesn’t yet impress as a man ready to turn a table full of food and drink into a Jackson Pollock floor painting. Yet. But if the White Sox don’t escape Oakland with at least one win, don’t bet against the homecoming spread in Guaranteed Rate Park being served under armed guards.

Don’t look for Morganna to bring a little mojo. She’s been retired a quarter century and has no known intention of making a comeback. But upon whom would anyone suggest she plant one, if she did? Maybe upon Grifol, when he brings out the lineup card. If nothing else, it might loosen the manager up to the point where he can say, “It’s been lovely, but I have to scream now.”

A stupid anniversary

Posted on August 5, 2024 by Jeff Kallman

This is the way to remember Nolan Ryan—as a great pitcher, not the guy who got buried alive in a nasty brawl with the White Sox.

At the rate it turns up on social media discussions, and not merely on its anniversary, Hall of Fame pitcher Nolan Ryan is going to be remembered purely for the day he drilled Robin Ventura into charging the mound. As if nothing else he accomplished in a quarter-century plus pitching career mattered half as much as putting a temporarily brain-damaged third baseman in his “place.”

As if Ventura got the worst in a Ryan headlock that triggered a bench-clearing brawl between Ryan’s Rangers and Ventura’s White Sox in which Ryan got far worse than he inflicted upon Ventura. As if Ryan, in what proved his final season, was some sort of saint and Ventura some sort of bandit. As if there hadn’t been tension between the two teams for going on four full years.

It’s time to put the whole damn business to bed where it belongs. There were far more important things to think about to open this August. Things like Blake Snell’s no-hitter, Jack Flaherty’s Dodger debut, the sad end to yet another season from yet another injury to Hall of Famer-in-waiting Mike Trout. Things like the White Sox losing a twentieth straight game. Things like José Abreu hitting two bombs his first game back from his grandmother’s death and Freddie Freeman’s Guillain-Barre syndrome-afflicted little son home from the hospital.

But no. Who needs those when you can bring up the Ryan-Ventura brawl, a textbook exercise in celebrating false masculinity and baseball brain damage, on its anniversary, which is rendered meaningless anyway for how often it gets brought up all year long on one or another social media outlet?

Ryan was of the school of thought that taught the outer half of home plate was the pitcher’s exclusive property. You won’t find that anywhere in baseball’s written rules, of course. Generations of pitchers have been taught that; generations of hitters have been taught likewise. Well, now.

The Ryan-Ventura brawl was impregnated by a 1990 White Sox rookie named Craig Grebeck. He’d go on to make a useful career as a defense-first utility infielder. But in spring training 1990 he shocked a lot of people—probably including Ryan, probably including his own team—when he homered against the Rangers on a first pitch. He pumped his fists rounding the bases.

Come the regular season, Ryan faced Grebeck and surrendered one of (read carefully) the nineteen major league home runs Grebeck would ever hit in a twelve-season career. Again, Grebeck pumped his fists rounding the bases. Back on the bench, Ryan asked pitching coach Tom House about him.

Told that it was Grebeck, a not so tall player who looked then like a boy entering middle school, Ryan is said to have told then-Rangers pitching coach Tom House, according to Ryan biographer Rob Goldman, “Well, I’m gonna put some age on the little squirt. He’s swinging like he isn’t afraid of me.” The next time Grebeck faced him, Ryan hit him in the back with a pitch. “Grebeck was 0-for the rest of the year off him,” House remembered.

Fat lot of good that did The Express: Grebeck actually finished his career with a .273/.429/.545 slash line and a .974 OPS against the Hall of Famer. It wasn’t exactly a powerful one (three singles, two walks, three strikeouts, but four runs batted in, somehow), but Ryan didn’t exactly age Grebeck with the first of only two drills he’d hand Grebeck lifetime, either.

What it did, though, was begin some very tense times between Ryan’s Rangers and Grebeck’s White Sox. The White Sox’s batting coach, Walter Hriniak, was teaching his charges to cover that outer half of the plate. House insisted that was a root but Ventura himself said otherwise. “At the time in baseball the (strike) zone was low and away, and that was where pitchers were getting you out,”he said. “We weren’t the only team doing it. It was the kind of pitch that was getting called, so you just had to be able to go out and get it.”

What followed:

17 August 1990: Ryan hit Grebeck with one out in the third, Grebeck’s first plate appearance of the game. Two innings later, White Sox starter Greg Hibbard hit Rangers third baseman Steve Buechele with two outs. (The game went to extras and the Rangers won, 1-0, when Ruben Sierra walked it off with a line drive RBI single in the thirteenth.)

6 September 1991: Ryan hit Ventura in the back on 1-2, also in Arlington, three innings and a ground out after Ventura doubled Hall of Famer Tim Raines home with nobody out in the top of the first and scored on Lance Johnson’s subsequent two-out single. It started a rough day for Ryan, who surrendered two more runs (both on third-inning sacrifice flies) en route an 11-6 White Sox win.

2 August 1993: This was two days before Ryan and Ventura’s rumble in the jungle: Rangers pitcher Roger Pavlik hit White Sox catcher Ron Karkovice with one out in the third. (Ventura posted a first-inning RBI single to open the scoring; Rangers left fielder Juan Gonzalez answered with a two-run homer in the bottom of the first. Subsequently, White Sox relievers Bobby Thigpen and Jason Bere each hit Rangers third baseman Dean Palmer, while Rangers shortstop Mario Díaz also took one from Thigpen.

Ventura and assorted White Sox teammates of the time insisted Ryan was throwing at hitters and often hitting them on a routine bases. Two days later, Ryan and Ventura went at it. Among the pleasured by Ventura charging Ryan was Sox pitcher Black Jack McDowell: “Ryan had been throwing at batters forever, and no one ever had the guts to do anything about it. Someone had to do it. He pulled that stuff wherever he goes.”

And this is the way to remember Robin Ventura—a great third baseman, not the guy who charged the mound indignantly when Ryan hit him with a 1993 pitch after a few seasons of White Sox-Ranger knockdown-and-plunk tensions.

“We had a lot of going back and forth that season,” says Ventura. “Guys were getting hit regularly, and it was just one of those things where something was going to eventually happen.” It probably involved other Rangers and White Sox pitchers, too.

Ryan was as notorious for his career-long wildness (he led his league six times and the entire Show three times in wild pitches, and averaged twelve per 162 games lifetime) as for his seven no-hitters, his 5,714 lifetime strikeouts, and his 2,795 walks. (They’re also number one on the Show hit parade.) He may have gotten away with throwing at hitters, but he was actually pretty stingy when it came to actually hitting them.

He retired averaging seven hit batsmen per 162 games. Seven. If he’d actually hit seven men a year for his entire career, it would give him 31 more drilled than he actually compiled (158). He actually had eleven seasons in which he hit five batters or fewer; hitting Ventura on that fine 4 August 1993 was the only hit batsman Ryan had in thirteen 1993 starts before he finally called it a career.

That doesn’t exactly sound like one of the most merciless drillers the game’s ever seen. Ryan only ever led his league in hit batsmen once (1982, when he was an Astro), and that’s one more than Hall of Famer Bob Gibson—too often the unjustified first name in, ahem, manly intimidation—ever did. Believe it, or not. Ryan is number sixteen at this writing on the all-time plunk parade. Gibson, you might care to note, is tied for 89th on the parade with (wait for it) 102. And he averaged (wait for it again!) . . . six per season.

“If you look at the replays, the ball wasn’t really that far inside,” House told Goldman.

It was just barely off the plate and it went off Ventura’s back. Robin was starting toward first base when he abruptly turns and charges the mound instead. And the closer he got to Nolan, the bigger he looked. If you watch it in stop action, you can see Ryan’s eyes were like a deer’s in a headlight. So everybody was surprised by what Nolan did next: Bam! Bam! Bam! Three punches right on Ventura’s noggin!

Actually it was about six. Now for the part everyone still gaping in awe over Ryan’s manly deliverance of a lesson to Ventura forgets: Both teams swarmed out of their dugouts, but the White Sox got to Ryan so swiftly that they drove him to the bottom of a pileup from which the White Sox’s Bo Jackson had to extricate Ryan before some serious damage was done to the veteran righthander.

“All I remember,” Ryan eventually told Goldman, “is that I couldn’t breathe. I thought I was going to black out and die, when all of a sudden I see two big arms tossing bodies off of me. It was Bo Jackson. He had come to my rescue, and I’m awful glad he did, because I was about to pass out. I called him that night and thanked him.” (The two were friendly rivals since then-Royal Jackson hit Ryan for a 1989 spring homer and his teammates hailed Ryan the next day—from the spot where Jackson’s bomb landed, as Ryan went through an exercise routine on the field.)

Ryan otherwise actually got the worst of it when all was said and done. Jackson extracted a man “visibly winded,” Goldman wrote. Ryan wasn’t the only one thankful for Jackson. “When Nolan didn’t come out of the pile, I got concerned,” said his wife, Ruth. “With his bad back, sore ribs, and other ailments, he could easily have suffered a career-ending injury.”

Somehow, Ryan remained in the game. Ventura was ejected for charging the mound. Of all people, his pinch runner was . . . Craig Grabeck. Ryan picked Grabeck off first before he threw a single pitch to the next batter, Steve Sax, who grounded out to end the inning.

The Rangers went on to win, 5-2. Ryan insists to this day that if Ventura had stopped shy of the mound rather than finish the pursuit and grab his jersey, “I wouldn’t have attacked him.” But he also felt embarrassed by the brawl. So much so that, Goldman recorded, when the Ryan family returned home from a postgame family dinner, Ryan declined when one of his sons—who’d videotaped the scrum—asked Dad if he wanted to see it again.

Ryan’s no, Goldman noted, was “firm.”

Said the Dallas Morning News headline the day after: Fight Gives Game a Big Black Eye.

Now, if rehashing that brawl isn’t to Nolan Ryan’s taste, it ought to be lacking likewise for the idiots who insist on reliving and re-viewing it on social media—and not just on its anniversary. I could be wrong, but it seems that social media outlets can’t last two weeks, and possibly less, without at least one jackass posting the video of the scrum.

Pitching to the inside part of the strike zone is part of the art, even if there’s no written rule saying the outer half of the plate is the pitcher’s exclusive property. You can delve as deep as you want and discover there were plenty of pitchers who lived so firmly on the inside that they, too, earned unfair reputations as headhunters.

Not everyone is as shameless as shameless as fellow Hall of Famer Early Wynn insisting he’d knock his grandmother down if she “dug in” against him. Well, guess what. Grandma’s Little Headhunter hit only 64 batters in a 23-season career and averaged only three per 162 games lifetime. He even had eleven seasons where he hit three batters or less.

Once upon a time, Bob Gibson signed an autograph for a fan who told him, in the earshot of baseball writer Joe Posnanski, “Oh, do I remember the way you pitched. I remember all those batters you hit. They were scared of you. The pitchers today, they couldn’t hold a candle to you.”

Gibson did want the edge every time he took the mound. He did look as ferocious as his reputation on the mound, though that may have been as much a byproduct of his nearsightedness as anything else he brought to the mound, including an innate and justifiable sense that a black pitcher in his time and place needed the edge just that much more. He did pitch inside as often as he thought he had to to keep batters off balance.

But when that fan departed with his autograph, Gibson turned to Posnanski and probably sounded wounded when he asked, “Is that all I did? Hit batters? Is that really all they remember?” (If it is, they didn’t see him pitch his way to the Hall of Fame.)

A few years ago, in another online forum, I was addressed directly by a fan who objected to my recording that, among other things, Gibson didn’t hit as many home run hitters after their bombs as people think they remember: He wasn’t just ‘brushing back’ batters—especially those who had hit a donga off him the time before. He was damn well trying to hit them.

Well, I was crazy enough to look it up. Here’s what I wrote then:

Thirty-six times in 528 major league games Bob Gibson surrendered at least one home run and hit at least one batter in the same game. He only ever hit one such bombardier the next time the man batted in the game; he hit three such bombardiers not the next time up but in later plate appearances in games in which they homered first; and he surrendered home runs after hitting batters with pitches in fourteen lifetime games.

For the record, the one batter Gibson hit in the next plate appearance following the homer was Hall of Famer Duke Snider. The three bombers he’d hit later in those games but not in their most immediate following plate appearances: Hall of Famer Willie Stargell plus longtime outfielders Willie Crawford and Ron Fairly.

Is that all I did? Hit batters? Is that really all they remember?

Is that all I did? Sock Robin Ventura six times in a headlock before I got buried alive in the bottom of a pileup in my last year in the bigs and I needed Bo Jackson to save my sorry behind?

Ryan is a Hall of Fame pitcher. Ventura had an excellent career that shakes him out as the number 22 third baseman ever to play the game. They both deserve far better than to be remembered first for a hit-by-pitch and brawl that lowered both men’s dignity a few levels. The fans who “celebrate” the brawl every week or two, never mind on its anniversary? They deserve to be condemned.

They’ll love Arozarena in Seattle . . .

Posted on July 28, 2024 by Jeff Kallman

Arozarena’s smile could light up any ballpark felled by a power outage.

Nobody likes to see teams send their most heroic postseason heroes onward. Sometimes that happens when the most recent of their postseason heroics are still in full rearview mirror view. That stings the deepest.

So maybe the Rays did their fans a favour by sending Randy Arozarena to the Mariners long after the postseason postings that made his name disappeared from rearview sight. But it’s a small favour. And, depending upon the net results of the haul they got in return, it might not even prove that much of a favour.

Once up as high as ten games atop the American League West, the Mariners have since gone 11-20 as the formerly-moribund Astros reheated enough to take the division lead by a full game. Losing a ten-game lead in a 24-game stretch was unprecedented. No team before them ever blew that fat a lead that soon.

Arozarena’s season began slumping until he re-heated before the trade, but he hasn’t factored in the Mariners fortunes just yet, even if they took a pair from the White Sox after making the deal. The Mariners have the patience of Job when it comes to waiting for his full emergence in their silks.

They sent the Rays two prospects with upside enough if you consider the Rays’ ability to shape players, minor league outfielder Aidan Smith and pitcher Brody Hopkins. The Rays had better hope they can forge that pair into more than just replacement-level major leaguers. Arozarena was worth about a hundred times that much from the moment his 2020 coming-out party began.

Arozarena picked up one hit on Saturday but then went 2-for-4 with a run scored in Sunday’s 6-3 Mariners win. He beat an infield hit out in the first to score almost promptly on Cal Raleigh’s immediately-following home run, then he beat another infield hit out to load the bases with two out in the second only to be stranded there.

“He’s really loved by his teammates and fans,” said Mariners outfielder Luke Raley, himself an Arozarena teammate in Tampa Bay for two seasons, “and he’s going to be a fun addition for sure. He’s the low heart-beat kind of guy. He’s just made for the big moment. Late in the game, you need a big hit, you want Randy at the plate.”

Raley spoke after the Mariners demolished the bottom-crawling White Sox 10-0 Friday night. He even revealed Mariners president Jerry Dipoto consulted him on Arozarena before pulling the proverbial trigger on the deal. “I kind of gave him a three-, four-minute spiel about my thoughts and the things that [Arozarena] does,” Raley said. “You try to explain it, but it’s really hard—because until you see it, you don’t fully understand it. But he just is like a bright star.”

This is the effervescent who defected from Cuba in a rowboat and was first signed by the Cardinals. A year before that coming-out party, Arozarena made what some call a mistake and others call serious. When the Cardinals destroyed the Braves 13-1 in 2021 National League Division Series Game Five, manager Mike Schildt broke into a postgame rant that left himself and his team resembling sore winners:

They [the Braves] started some (excrement). We finished the (excrement. And that’s how we roll. No one (fornicates) with us ever. Now, I don’t give a (feces) who we play. We’re gonna (fornicate) them up. We’re gonna take it right to them the whole (fornicating) way. We’re gonna kick their (fornicating) ass.

Schildt’s rant went viral thanks to Arozarena capturing it on video and sending it there. Once the rejoinders went flying in earnest, he couldn’t wait to take the video offline. The only place the Cardinals went from there was to a four-game sweep out of that National League Championship Series by a team of Nationals whose manager was smart enough not to say they were going to [fornicate] the Astros up in the World Series—they simply did it, in seven thrilling games.

A cynic might suggest the Cardinals waiting to trade Arozarena to the Rays the following January was a matter of not wanting it to look as though they were teaching him a lesson about impudent videomaking. But their loss was the Rays’ gain, once baseball resumed after the long enough and weird enough pan-damn-ic shutdown. The Rays hit the expanded postseason running. Arozarena hit it exploding.

He hit ten home runs to smash Hall of Famer Derek Jeter’s record for a single postseason. He set a single-postseason record with 29 hits. He was named that American League Championship Series most valuable player. Perhaps fittingly, too, he slammed the exclamation point down upon one of the weirdest and wildest World Series game-ending walkoff hits in Game Four.

He pounded the plate nine times with his right palm to be sure he wasn’t imagining having scored the walkoff run to finish 2020 World Series Game Four’s insane finale. Compared to his grin, the Cheshire Cat was suffering depression.

Arozarena was on first in the ninth when pinch-hitter Brett Phillips singled Kevin Kiermaier home with the tying run. Except that Dodgers center fielder Chris Taylor coming in to field the ball had more eye on Kiermaier and the ball caromed off his glove to his left. Taylor scrambled to retrieve the ball and get it to his cutoff man Max Muncy.

Except that Muncy took the throw past first and wheeled to throw home, but the throw bounded off catcher Will Smith’s mitt at the split second Smith began wheeling for a tag on an oncoming Arozarena—who wasn’t within two nautical miles of the plate just yet. Arozarena tumblesaulted after tripping and stumble back toward third before righting himself when he saw Smith lacked the ball, diving home and pounding the plate with the palm of his right hand nine times.

The Rays would lose that Series, of course, but Arozarena went from there to become the 2021 American League Rookie of the Year, his rookie status unblemished by his late arrival down the 2020 stretch. He was likely the first ROY to win that award after making himself into a postseason breakout star. And few postseason breakout stars had Arozarena’s knack for making even opposing fans take to him.

He was made for the arena. A word that just so happens to be the final three syllables of his surname. But he’s also made of more endearingly human things. When he learned he’d been traded, Arozarena delivered a farewell to admire. He slipped into the stands and greeted, shook hands with, and thanked as many fans and stadium workers as he could before departing. No newspaper ad or billboard stuff for him.

Arozarena’s likely salary escalation plus the Rays’ apparent inability to make any AL East gains prompted the team to move him to Seattle and pitcher Zach Eflin to the Orioles. Closing the book on this season and looking toward next may make baseball sense for the Rays.

“Tampa Bay has been hovering on the edge of the AL playoff picture for nearly the entire season, but a late-season surge wouldn’t have been out of the question,” says FanGraphs writer Jake Mailhot. “By moving Arozarena at this point in the season, the Rays have indicated that they’re more interested in ensuring they’re set up well for the future than in hoping for a long-shot playoff run over the next few months.”

But sending a franchise icon away—in a year that cost them their $182 million shortstop to administrative leave over an underage sex scandal in the Dominican Republic—stings even more. The Rays may lead the Show in frugality, but don’t think for a nanosecond that they entered 2024 intending to change Arozarena’s home address just yet.

They’re not the first to think they had to move such an icon, of course. But depending on what’s to come the rest of this season and most of next, Rays fans may yet come to see the Arozarena trade as comparable to that of the Mets trading Hall of Famer Tom Seaver to the Reds in 1977. Breaking hearts and backs and what was left of a franchise’s spirit alike.

“I loved every challenge of playing third base”

Posted on July 21, 2024 by Jeff Kallman

He hit home runs on one knee, he was a human highlight reel at third base. Welcome to Cooperstown!

Of all the stories that abounded this weekend about Adrián Beltré, on the threshold of his induction into the Hall of Fame, there’s one which may be forgotten except by Angel fans left (as almost usual) to ponder what might have been. It’s the story of the Angels pursuing Beltré as a free agent after he spent five often injury-plagued seasons in Seattle.

Essentially, Angels owner Arte Moreno wanted Beltré in the proverbial worst way possible, after the Dodgers who reared him were willing to let him escape to the Mariners in free agency—despite Beltré having just led the Show with 48 home runs in 2004—because then-owner Frank McCourt didn’t want to pay what the Mariners ultimately did.

Beltré went from the Mariners to the Red Sox on a one-year, prove-it kind of deal. When that lone Boston season ended in October 2010, Moreno kept Beltré in his sights. But nothing the Angels presented Beltré impressed him enough to sign with them. He opted to sign with the Rangers instead. Moreno was so unamused he ordered his then-general manager Tony Reagins to deal for Blue Jays outfielder/slugger Vernon Wells.

Well. The Angels learned the hard way (don’t they always?) that Wells was damaged goods. The fellow they sent the Jays to get him, bat-first catcher Mike Napoli, would join Beltré for a hard-earned trip to a World Series that would break their hearts, before moving on to help Cleveland to a pennant and the Red Sox to the 2018 World Series triumph.

Meanwhile, before leaving Seattle for a one-year, show-us deal with the Red Sox, Beltré by his own admission finally learned he could have a shipload of fun playing baseball without losing the focus, the discipline, or the outlying durability that were going to make him a Hall of Famer in the first place. With the Rangers, he finished his ascent into what Baseball-Reference calls the number four all-around third baseman ever and, concurrently, built and secured a reputation as a team-first Fun Guy.

Nail his 3,000th lifetime major league hit? Party time—for the whole team and then some. “After he got 3,000 hits he had a party,” says Rangers in-game reporter Emily Jones to The Athletic‘s Britt Ghiroli and Chad Jennings. “It was like our clubhouse moved to this place. Every clubbie. Every trainer. Every massage therapist. He was extremely inclusive.”

“He was the oldest guy on the field,” says his former Rangers teammate Elvis Andrus, “but acted like the youngest.”

Beltre’s fun-loving rep went hand in glove with being a veteran clubhouse leader to whom even his manager often deferred. “If he stared at you some kind of way,” says Ron Washington, now managing the Angels but then managing the Rangers, “you knew he meant business. A couple of times, I got off my perch to go get (on a player). He would stop me and say, ‘Let me get it, skip’.’

“I saw him chew veterans,” says one-time Rangers batting coach Dave Magadan, “like they were 19-year-old rookies.”

But he also never forgot teammates, even after he retired. Lots of players can make their teammates go with the flow during arduous seasons. Beltré made them friends. Even if he might chew them out one day, he’d re-cement the friendship side by asking, “You know why I did that, right?”

Former Rangers teammate Mitch Moreland remembers taking a group of later Athletics teammates to a Seattle restaurant to which Beltré had taken a host of Rangers once upon a time. “I called (Beltré) and I was like, ‘Hey, what was the guy’s name at Metropolitan? I’m going to take the boys there’.”

He goes, “Oh, I got you.” So, he called the guy up, set it up. I took the whole team over there, we ate, and I got ready to get the bill, and Adrián had picked it up. For the Oakland A’s. After he was retired.

What of the once-familiar running gag involving Beltré’s real distaste for having his head touched and teammates—usually spearheaded by Andrus—going to great lengths to touch it and get away with it? “I still do,” Andrus says. “He still doesn’t like it. That’s what I am going to try to do at Cooperstown . . . I need to touch his head. I need to touch his head while he’s talking!”

He didn’t get anywhere close to that. Hall of Famer David Ortiz did, right smack at the podium.

But no matter. The third baseman who declined a grand farewell tour didn’t need any further validation for his place in the Hall of Fame. Those who do, however, should marry his 27.0 defensive wins above replacement level player (WAR) to his Real Batting Average (total bases + walks + intentional walks + sacrifice flies + hit by pitches, divided by total plate appearances) among Hall third basemen whose careers were in the post-World War II/post-integration/night-ball era:

HOF 3B	PA	TB	BB	IBB	SF	HBP	RBA
Mike Schmidt	10062	4404	1507	201	108	79	.626
Chipper Jones	10614	4755	1512	177	97	18	.618
Eddie Mathews	10100	4349	1444	142	58	26	.596
Scott Rolen	8518	3628	899	57	93	127	.564
George Brett	11625	5044	1096	229	120	33	.561
Ron Santo	9397	3779	1108	94	94	38	.544
Wade Boggs	10740	4064	1412	180	96	23	.538
Adrián Beltré	12130	5309	848	112	103	97	.533
Paul Molitor	12167	4854	1094	100	109	47	.510
Brooks Robinson	11782	4270	860	120	114	53	.458
HOF AVG							.555

He’s not higher there because a) he drew far less unintentional walks than most of the men on that list; and, b) that aforementioned durability led him to playing through injuries insanely enough to cause him a few so-so seasons that pulled his numbers down somewhat. But as a defensive third baseman he’s the second-most run-preventive player (+168) who ever worked that real estate . . . a mere 125 behind a guy named Robinson.

“I loved every challenge of playing third base,” said the first third baseman in Show history to nail 400+ home runs and 3000+ hits. “I was hooked. Those hot shots, slow ground balls, double plays, I couldn’t get enough of them.” Come Sunday, the Cooperstown gathering almost couldn’t get enough of Beltré, either.

ASG: As (almost) usual, show biz yields to baseball

Posted on July 17, 2024 by Jeff Kallman

Red Sox center fielder Jarren Duran hoists the clear bat awarded the All-Star Game’s Most Valuable Player. His tiebreaking two-run homer held up to give the AL the 5-3 win.

God help us all, everyone. The All-Star break began with a pre-Home Run Derby singing of “The Star Spangled Banner” Monday night (by country star Ingrid Andress) that made youth cringe and elders think wistful thoughts of Roseanne Barr. It ended with a tenth American League All-Star Game win in eleven seasons.

In between, of course, was much to ponder and much to dismiss as patent nonsense, which seems to be far more the norm than Chicago Tribune sports editor Arch Ward, who initiated the game in 1933, might have imagined.

Phillies third baseman Alec Bohm could be seen having to labour to keep from laughing (presumably, that he might not weep—or wish to commit manslaughter) when Andress tackled “The Star Spangled Banner” as though too well besotted. It turned out that appearance was everything: She copped the following day to being drunk and having enough issue with it to seek rehab and recovery.

Wish her well, but demand to know why nobody in baseball’s administration noticed she was drunk as she took the mike in the first place.

That was then: The Derby rules were, a participant had ten outs to hit as many homers as they could, the hitter with the most such bombs advanced, and that was that. So simple that, in fact, even Mark Belanger (human Electrolux at shortstop, but a spaghetti bat who hit three fewer homers in eighteen major league seasons than the late Hall of Famer Willie Mays hit in the first half of 1965) could have done it.

This is now: Round One—three minutes or forty batted balls, whichever came first, followed by an old-style three outs to hit as many bombs as possible. Round Two—the top four floggers moved to a bracket-like semifinal. Round Three—the two semifinal winners head to head. The net result: Teoscar Hernandez (Dodgers) defeating Bobby Witt, Jr. (Royals), who nearly forced a playoff with a ICBM-like blast stopped only by the left center field fence.

Some of us still wonder why we’re supposed to tolerate three-hour long Home Run Derbies but arise armed against two and a half hour-plus real baseball games. Or, why we had three-minute commercials aboard Fox’s All-Star Game telecast Tuesday before seeing supersonic relief pitchers blowing the side away in order in a minute and a half if that long.

Perhaps commissioner Rob Manfred might have an answer to that one. At least he has a sort-of answer to the question (posed by The Athletic‘s Tyler Kepner) of when the ever-more-hideous generic All-Star Game uniforms of the past several years will be disappeared in favour of returning the fine old tradition of All-Stars wearing their own uniforms and thus representing their teams.

“I am aware of the sentiment and I do know why people kind of like that tradition,” Commissioner Pepperwinkle told Kepner. “There will be conversations about that.” The proper two-word answer to that, of course, is, prove it. About knowing why people (more than kind of) like that tradition and holding serious conversations about it.

Well, take the proverbial pause for the proverbial cause. That very first All-Star Game featured the American League representatives wearing their own teams’ home uniforms with the National League wearing road threads, as modeled below by Hall of Fame catcher Gabby Hartnett:

Behold now this year’s threads for each league:

Yes, we have seen far worse for generic All-Star uniforms.

Except for each league’s colour scheme, is it really that radically different from the 1933 NL haberdashery? Now, this year’s threads would look far nicer if the American League jersey was done with red-on-white (the AL was the home team in Globe Life Field) and the National League was done with blue-on-gray (since the NL is the visiting team). And worn over either white (home) or gray (road) pants.

My normal position is to be all-in on returning to the practise of each league’s All-Stars wearing their own teams’ uniforms, representing their teams and fan bases, as their forebears did for so many decades. If Commissioner Pepperwinkle insists ultimately upon keeping generic league uniforms, this year’s style just might be the right way to go, switching the core white and gray each year depending upon which league is the All-Star host.

The wherefores of this year’s uniforms mattered less when the game got underway, and rookie NL starting pitcher Paul Skenes (Pirates) got to face Aaron Judge (Yankees) after all, thanks to Judge’s teammate Juan Soto wringing himself into a walk. The bad news: Judge forcing Soto at second with a grounder to third for the side.

AL manager Bruce Bochy (Rangers) was well aware of the marquee appeal of Skenes versus Judge while penciling Judge into his cleanup slot. But he sent three lefthanded swingers with impeccable on-base credentials up against the righthanded Pirate phenom to open, hoping precisely to get that marquee match without sacrificing his best chances to start winning the game.

Joe and Jane Fan insist, “This is just an exhibition, dammit!” Maybe they’re right. Maybe the metastasis of regular-season interleague play to a full-season thing has left the All-Star Game bereft of meaning, as opposed to such artifices as the period when postseason home field advantage went to the league who won the Game..

But maybe a Hall of Famer in waiting who’s won four World Series as a skipper knows, however the game’s been kicked around like a commissioner’s plaything for too damn long, that himself, his NL counterpart Torey Lovullo (Diamondbacks), and the players on both sides, actually do play this particular game as baseball, not show business.

Shohei Ohtani detonating a three-run homer in the third inning. “To be able to share a dugout with him was surreal.”—Pirates pitcher Paul Skenes. Ohtani is now the only player in Show history to earn a pitching win in one All-Star Game and a home run in another All-Star Game.

So Bochy got Joe and Jane Fan their marquee matchup the old fashioned way, and Skenes came out of it on top, but Bochy’s diligence left him the only manager in major league history to win a World Series and an All-Star Game in each league. And, the first since Hall of Famer Joe McCarthy to manage an All-Star Game at home the season after he won a World Series.

Putting baseball ahead of show biz has enriching payoffs, of which Commissioner Pepperwinkle seemed as unaware as both managers were reminded soon enough en route the American League’s 5-3 win Tuesday.

Lovullo got the first such reminder when Shohei Ohtani (Dodgers) faced Tanner Houck (Red Sox) in the top of the third with nobody out, two men on, and sent a 2-0 splitter a few rows back into the right center field seats. (The last Dodger to hit one out in All-Star competition? Hall of Famer Mike Piazza, 28 years earlier.) Bochy got his in the bottom of that inning, when Soto shot a two-run double to center and David Fry (Guardians) singled him home to tie the game at three after another Judge ground out.

Two innings later, Lovullo got the reminder that ended up counting for the game, when Jarren Duran (Red Sox) batted with two out and one on, took a strike from Hunter Greene (Reds), then caught hold of a Greene splitter and sent his own message into the same region of seats where Ohtani’s blast landed.

“It won’t hit me until I try to go to sleep tonight,” Duran told The Athletic postgame. “Who knows if I’ll be able to sleep tonight.”

A guy in his fourth Show season who entered this All-Star Game leading it with ten triples and the AL with 27 doubles, then detonated what proved the winning bomb Tuesday, deserves to sleep the sleep of the just. So does the rookie whose first two months in Show have made him a name and an arm to reckon with as it was, without giving him the additional gift of being an Ohtani teammate even for just one game—thus far.

“I tried to enjoy the three hours I had on a team with him,” Skenes said postgame, “because that’s probably only going to happen once a year. It was really cool to watch him do that, really cool to watch him go about his business and get to meet him and all that. You know, he’s—I don’t know of any hitters I’ve faced that’s better than him in my career. So, to be able to share a dugout with him was surreal.”

The only thing better for either would have been an NL win, of course. Nobody had to tell Skenes it was neither his nor Ohtani’s fault the NL came up two bucks short Tuesday.

Throneberry Fields Forever

. . . a calm review of baseball

Author Archives: Jeff Kallman